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The problem you had was that you were trying to convince management to act in the best interest of the company rather than their own best interest. They would m

The problem you had was that you were trying to convince management to act in the best interest of the company rather than their own best interest. They would much rather be in charge of a $100k a month project instead of a $1k a month project. Also the big solution required a bunch of engineers working full time which puts them higher up the ladder compared to your 1 engineer working part time solution. You were saving the company money but hurting their resumes.

brango 9y ago
Yes. Don't forget "CV-first" development is a thing.
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  The sad thing is that resume driven development seems to be one of the best strategies for developers these days.
  - 8ytecoder 9y ago
    Anecdote: At the startup (now acquired) that I work for, we simplified the architecture so much that we spend under $3k a month in infra for tens of millions in revenues a year while having 99.9% availability for 5+ years now. I don't have any big name tech to add to my resume. The fact that we ran a e-commerce site with a low budget and few engineers was never recognized by recruiters. They called me based on my experience with "distributed systems" 8 years ago. All recruiters (well, most of them at least) can look for is keywords. On the other hand, we also had difficulties hiring "good" engineers. People chose either a company with a brand name recognition or one that's working on "exciting" technology. As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost. As leaders, we fail to put our companies first. This is an industry wide problem. If past trends of other major industries are any indicator, the whole "meritocracy" of tech industry will disappear within the next decade.
    - guelo 9y ago
      > As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost The company has zero loyalty to you and will screw you over if it makes business sense to do so. There is absolutely no reason to put the company above your career interests.
      - ralmeida 9y ago
        This only holds if you believe that deliberately making decisions that will cost the company more than they should is in your career interests. As said in this topic - it's true that in some places, resume-driven development pays off for the developers. It's not the same everywhere and to me it looks more like a symptom of a dysfunctional structure than par for the course in business. This means it is in your career interests to increase company revenue and/or reduce costs, because this will make you more attractive to many companies (the ones we would likely want to work on) when you move on.
        8ytecoder 9y ago
        Exactly. It's in my best interest to make sure the business is doing well and I don't do things that jeopardize that. And no, it doesn't have to come at the cost of taking a hit to my career either. This is not a fine line balance I'm talking about - doing things with the main goal of boosting my career will sooner or later ruin it.
        maxxxxx 9y ago
        I am not sure how much it is in the interest of a developer to help the business to increase revenue or reduce cost. It's certainly good to come from a successful company but if you haven't worked on the latest cool tech you still don't look good. Even if that decision was 100% the right thing to do. That's just my personal impression but I believe you have better chances coming from an unsuccessful company with all the right buzzwords than from a successful company with old tech. You will quickly be labelled as "dinosaur". The real winner is to use cool stuff AND come from a successful/known company.
- hinkley 9y ago
  As a lead dev, I recognize that if I want the early- or mid-career guys to stick around and keep working on this boring project, I have to throw them a bone from time to time. Not everything should build their resume, but some of it has to. It's one of my arguments for buy over build.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    What about the senior folks? Do they not need any bones because they're given challenging projects routinely, or because they're content doing a job for a check because they've got the spouse, house and kids to deal with?
mattjaynes 9y ago
Great point. Ultimately, you need to create a situation where they will also be winning career-wise. I recently wrote about this. The TLDR is that 20% time is a great investment and can ultimately save the company a ton of time and money. It gives the engineers some playtime in order to build their CV's and "get their wiggles out". Ultimately, if done right it can protect your production systems from a lot of madness. https://hvops.com/articles/how-to-keep-passion-from-hugging-your-systems-to-death/ https://hvops.com/articles/how-to-keep-passion-from-hugging-...
- bsg75 9y ago
  > Ultimately, you need to create a situation where they will also be winning career-wise. The message could be that the goal is about the destination not the journey.
komali2 9y ago
Sounds like a good time to go over their head. Depending on the size of the company, straight to someone that deals with money - CFO? Dick move but so is rejecting an objectively better solution to save one's own middle management ass.
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  This is terrible advice. A C-level will see you as a rogue engineer. He will trust his managerial layers over a peon. I know this as I spent far too long being that rogue, peon engineer, screaming into the void. I just didn't get it. It's not about the tech used, and it never has been. It's about being enterprisey. The grandparent is correct. This is 100% a political problem. We have a bad habit of discounting such problems in tech. We shouldn't do that anymore. Life is much better when you cooperate, instead of fighting an uphill battle. Compact, reasonable solutions are the domain of startups. Bloating the engineering layer beyond any reasonable limit is an inherent cost of growing the company, and we shouldn't try to counteract that. We must operate within the framework we're given. The political concerns extend beyond the company's own internals. They must appear enterprisey if they expect to be treated enterprisey. Today, enterprises have "data science" departments and blow $100k/mo on useless crap. If they're not doing that, it's a liability for the whole company, not just from the petty territorial perspective of one individual. It doesn't matter that it's possible to accomplish the same thing with one one-hundredth of the monthly expense. The enterprise signaling is worth the cost.
  - jimbokun 9y ago
    What is the concrete ROI on being "enterprisey"? Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple are definitely not enterprisey, and I don't think it has hurt their profits. I think they tend to be pretty frugal, overall, when spending their own money on hardware and infrastructure. And I bet if the "enterprisey" company ever tries to compete with a company like Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple, they will be destroyed in that market.
    - cookiecaper 9y ago
osrec 9y ago
Reminds me of almost every technology project I've seen in finance! It's all about building complex empires, rather than simple, functional solutions. Sometimes, it's also just about using up the assigned technology budget so that it's not scaled down the following year!
- ythn 9y ago
  Seems like you could spin up a side project business that has a simple solution to their problem but charges enough to soak up their whole budget. Everybody is happy!
  - cookiecaper 9y ago
    Have to provide enough bits and twiddles to allow the dept head to hire his favorite people and you're right. This is basically what Tableau et al have done. There are enough buttons that you can have a few "Tableau guys", and you don't have to hire custom grapher guys.
- rhizome 9y ago
  Funny, I had a phone screen today and in the midst of asking about how I saw my future and what I wanted to work in, the recruiter was tiptoeing around a situation where someone at the company had suggested React or something and the devs had pushed back (successfully) on the basis that the site didn't need it. I got the feeling he was trying not to step on my dreams of being a cutting-edge JS frontend trailblazer, but it is really a point in the company's favor (to me) that they were able to resist the urge. Basically, they are looking for web developers but it seems like they have to filter out all the frontend ninja rockstars.
  - Rapzid 9y ago
    Why didn't they "need" it? How do they decide what they "need"? This sounds like typical anti-change pushback, which I have learned can actually be a good thing. However, this anecdote is severely lacking in insight; much like most people's support of, or opposition to, change. Further, like the widespread belief that sentences shouldn't start with conjunctions; much less conjunctive adverbs.
vlunkr 9y ago
I'm sad about how right you probably are.
treebeard901 9y ago
> You were saving the company money but hurting their resumes. To take it a step further, Management has to own up to their original failure and try to explain to their bosses how they could spend so much time and money unnecessarily. Another psychological problem here is the perception by people who do not understand the technology that the higher priced solution is better because it costs more.
- hinkley 9y ago
  You have the machine that goes 'ping'! You're very lucky. This is the most expensive piece of equipment in the hospital. - Monty Python, Meaning of Life
- mowenz 9y ago
  And a step further: a 100k project had commissions, meetings, expenses all associated with a 100k project. If people are cheating enough to waste 100k on useless crap expect them to cheat some of that for themselves. That means hotel rooms, airline tickets, meals, etc and all, and any commission the sales guy shares with you for making it happen. And it does happen...
conjectures 9y ago
I would love to agree with you but there is another interpretation: they are clueless. Suppose management in a firm uncritically contracted the big data revolution meme. Then they believe they are in the position of a city mayor trying to build a bridge and some wiseacre comes along and says they can do it in an afternoon with two pieces of string and a stick of gum. The problem is that the analogy doesn't hold, but they don't know that.
vivekd 9y ago
Add to that, if anything goes wrong, they would have a much easier time cya-ing and convincing their superiors they did all they can do to prevent it if they build a large, complex solution than if they just went to the quickest, simplest one. In fact justifying anything going wrong at all is much easier with large, complex undertakings than small, simple ones. Plus people jump on fads, big data is trendy right now and when you read and hear about something a lot your mind tends to go to it first.
1290cc 9y ago
This. If you've ever heard the story about the 1 man engineer with the better, faster cheaper solution that competed with IBM (slower, thousands of $$$ more) for business? IBM won every time because the buyers wanted to be associated with big impressive projects(and have IBM on their resume). This is actually a sales pricing tactic that every engineer should learn so that they dont price themselves out of the market - by being too cheap.

brango 9y ago

Yes. Don't forget "CV-first" development is a thing.

maxxxxx 9y ago
The sad thing is that resume driven development seems to be one of the best strategies for developers these days.
- 8ytecoder 9y ago
  Anecdote: At the startup (now acquired) that I work for, we simplified the architecture so much that we spend under $3k a month in infra for tens of millions in revenues a year while having 99.9% availability for 5+ years now. I don't have any big name tech to add to my resume. The fact that we ran a e-commerce site with a low budget and few engineers was never recognized by recruiters. They called me based on my experience with "distributed systems" 8 years ago. All recruiters (well, most of them at least) can look for is keywords. On the other hand, we also had difficulties hiring "good" engineers. People chose either a company with a brand name recognition or one that's working on "exciting" technology. As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost. As leaders, we fail to put our companies first. This is an industry wide problem. If past trends of other major industries are any indicator, the whole "meritocracy" of tech industry will disappear within the next decade.
  - guelo 9y ago
    > As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost The company has zero loyalty to you and will screw you over if it makes business sense to do so. There is absolutely no reason to put the company above your career interests.
    - ralmeida 9y ago
      This only holds if you believe that deliberately making decisions that will cost the company more than they should is in your career interests. As said in this topic - it's true that in some places, resume-driven development pays off for the developers. It's not the same everywhere and to me it looks more like a symptom of a dysfunctional structure than par for the course in business. This means it is in your career interests to increase company revenue and/or reduce costs, because this will make you more attractive to many companies (the ones we would likely want to work on) when you move on.
      - 8ytecoder 9y ago
        Exactly. It's in my best interest to make sure the business is doing well and I don't do things that jeopardize that. And no, it doesn't have to come at the cost of taking a hit to my career either. This is not a fine line balance I'm talking about - doing things with the main goal of boosting my career will sooner or later ruin it.
      - maxxxxx 9y ago
        I am not sure how much it is in the interest of a developer to help the business to increase revenue or reduce cost. It's certainly good to come from a successful company but if you haven't worked on the latest cool tech you still don't look good. Even if that decision was 100% the right thing to do. That's just my personal impression but I believe you have better chances coming from an unsuccessful company with all the right buzzwords than from a successful company with old tech. You will quickly be labelled as "dinosaur". The real winner is to use cool stuff AND come from a successful/known company.
hinkley 9y ago
As a lead dev, I recognize that if I want the early- or mid-career guys to stick around and keep working on this boring project, I have to throw them a bone from time to time. Not everything should build their resume, but some of it has to. It's one of my arguments for buy over build.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  What about the senior folks? Do they not need any bones because they're given challenging projects routinely, or because they're content doing a job for a check because they've got the spouse, house and kids to deal with?

mattjaynes 9y ago

Great point. Ultimately, you need to create a situation where they will also be winning career-wise. I recently wrote about this. The TLDR is that 20% time is a great investment and can ultimately save the company a ton of time and money. It gives the engineers some playtime in order to build their CV's and "get their wiggles out". Ultimately, if done right it can protect your production systems from a lot of madness. https://hvops.com/articles/how-to-keep-passion-from-hugging-your-systems-to-death/ https://hvops.com/articles/how-to-keep-passion-from-hugging-...

bsg75 9y ago
> Ultimately, you need to create a situation where they will also be winning career-wise. The message could be that the goal is about the destination not the journey.

komali2 9y ago

Sounds like a good time to go over their head. Depending on the size of the company, straight to someone that deals with money - CFO? Dick move but so is rejecting an objectively better solution to save one's own middle management ass.

cookiecaper 9y ago
This is terrible advice. A C-level will see you as a rogue engineer. He will trust his managerial layers over a peon. I know this as I spent far too long being that rogue, peon engineer, screaming into the void. I just didn't get it. It's not about the tech used, and it never has been. It's about being enterprisey. The grandparent is correct. This is 100% a political problem. We have a bad habit of discounting such problems in tech. We shouldn't do that anymore. Life is much better when you cooperate, instead of fighting an uphill battle. Compact, reasonable solutions are the domain of startups. Bloating the engineering layer beyond any reasonable limit is an inherent cost of growing the company, and we shouldn't try to counteract that. We must operate within the framework we're given. The political concerns extend beyond the company's own internals. They must appear enterprisey if they expect to be treated enterprisey. Today, enterprises have "data science" departments and blow $100k/mo on useless crap. If they're not doing that, it's a liability for the whole company, not just from the petty territorial perspective of one individual. It doesn't matter that it's possible to accomplish the same thing with one one-hundredth of the monthly expense. The enterprise signaling is worth the cost.
- jimbokun 9y ago
  What is the concrete ROI on being "enterprisey"? Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple are definitely not enterprisey, and I don't think it has hurt their profits. I think they tend to be pretty frugal, overall, when spending their own money on hardware and infrastructure. And I bet if the "enterprisey" company ever tries to compete with a company like Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple, they will be destroyed in that market.
  - cookiecaper 9y ago

osrec 9y ago

Reminds me of almost every technology project I've seen in finance! It's all about building complex empires, rather than simple, functional solutions. Sometimes, it's also just about using up the assigned technology budget so that it's not scaled down the following year!

ythn 9y ago
Seems like you could spin up a side project business that has a simple solution to their problem but charges enough to soak up their whole budget. Everybody is happy!
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Have to provide enough bits and twiddles to allow the dept head to hire his favorite people and you're right. This is basically what Tableau et al have done. There are enough buttons that you can have a few "Tableau guys", and you don't have to hire custom grapher guys.
rhizome 9y ago
Funny, I had a phone screen today and in the midst of asking about how I saw my future and what I wanted to work in, the recruiter was tiptoeing around a situation where someone at the company had suggested React or something and the devs had pushed back (successfully) on the basis that the site didn't need it. I got the feeling he was trying not to step on my dreams of being a cutting-edge JS frontend trailblazer, but it is really a point in the company's favor (to me) that they were able to resist the urge. Basically, they are looking for web developers but it seems like they have to filter out all the frontend ninja rockstars.
- Rapzid 9y ago
  Why didn't they "need" it? How do they decide what they "need"? This sounds like typical anti-change pushback, which I have learned can actually be a good thing. However, this anecdote is severely lacking in insight; much like most people's support of, or opposition to, change. Further, like the widespread belief that sentences shouldn't start with conjunctions; much less conjunctive adverbs.

vlunkr 9y ago

I'm sad about how right you probably are.

treebeard901 9y ago

> You were saving the company money but hurting their resumes. To take it a step further, Management has to own up to their original failure and try to explain to their bosses how they could spend so much time and money unnecessarily. Another psychological problem here is the perception by people who do not understand the technology that the higher priced solution is better because it costs more.

hinkley 9y ago
You have the machine that goes 'ping'! You're very lucky. This is the most expensive piece of equipment in the hospital. - Monty Python, Meaning of Life
mowenz 9y ago
And a step further: a 100k project had commissions, meetings, expenses all associated with a 100k project. If people are cheating enough to waste 100k on useless crap expect them to cheat some of that for themselves. That means hotel rooms, airline tickets, meals, etc and all, and any commission the sales guy shares with you for making it happen. And it does happen...

conjectures 9y ago

I would love to agree with you but there is another interpretation: they are clueless. Suppose management in a firm uncritically contracted the big data revolution meme. Then they believe they are in the position of a city mayor trying to build a bridge and some wiseacre comes along and says they can do it in an afternoon with two pieces of string and a stick of gum. The problem is that the analogy doesn't hold, but they don't know that.

vivekd 9y ago

Add to that, if anything goes wrong, they would have a much easier time cya-ing and convincing their superiors they did all they can do to prevent it if they build a large, complex solution than if they just went to the quickest, simplest one. In fact justifying anything going wrong at all is much easier with large, complex undertakings than small, simple ones. Plus people jump on fads, big data is trendy right now and when you read and hear about something a lot your mind tends to go to it first.

1290cc 9y ago

This. If you've ever heard the story about the 1 man engineer with the better, faster cheaper solution that competed with IBM (slower, thousands of $$$ more) for business? IBM won every time because the buyers wanted to be associated with big impressive projects(and have IBM on their resume). This is actually a sales pricing tactic that every engineer should learn so that they dont price themselves out of the market - by being too cheap.