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Who the fuck writes a fully costed business case on whether or not to spend a day setting up a CI server? I'm trying to get some fucking work done, not convinc

Who the fuck writes a fully costed business case on whether or not to spend a day setting up a CI server? I'm trying to get some fucking work done, not convince investors I need a series A.

abraae 9y ago
Yes. This sort of cost-benefit analysis also ignores some intangibles such as: "When we're interviewing people and they find out just how backwards our CI system is, the smart ones will laugh at us and work somewhere else and we'll be left with just the dumb ones."
- sobani 9y ago
  As @DougWebb said, immediate cost saved is the easiest way to sell CI, especially if the savings are large. He didn't say it was the only way. Nor that you can't add more arguments if cost savings alone isn't convincing enough.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    CI's cost savings will not be immediate, large or easy to measure. That's why creating this "sales process" to make them happen is such a toxic mistake. I worked somewhere once that forced me to spend political capital to make these kinds of things happen and it was a terrible waste. Nobody notices the disasters that don't happen and when somebody is 2x faster and develops code with fewer bugs, that tends to reflect well upon them even if they were building upon your work.
DougWebb 9y ago
Ah, I see the problem. You have no interest in understanding why your business makes the decisions it makes; you just expect them to give you permission to do whatever you say you want to do. You said: I've tried explaining why we need to set up a CI server. ... In almost all cases they nod and feign interest and understanding and their eyes glaze over. The reason you've failed to make a convincing case, I believe, is because you're talking in your language instead of theirs. Perhaps they've tried to explain to you, in their language, why they won't prioritize your CI server, and you nodded and feigned interest while your eyes glazed over. The quote I gave you expresses your request and justification for a CI server into terms the business needs: what problem does it solve, what does it cost, how does it affect on-going costs, what are the risks of doing it and not doing it, and what impact does it have on other activities if it is done and if it is not done. This is not a "fully costed business case" or "convincing investors you need a series A". If you've given any thought at all to why you want a CI server beyond "I want it" you should have no problem filling in the blanks in my quote. And if you haven't bothered to think that much about it, your business is doing the right thing by giving your requests a low priority, because they shouldn't give your ideas any more attention than you're giving them yourself.
- sanderjd 9y ago
  You're making good points, but there is a lot of truth to your parent's sense that making a business case for every little thing is deeply inefficient. The hard part is striking a good balance between one extreme of arrogant engineers who never think about the business case for the things they are working on and the other extreme of having technical decisions micromanaged by non-technical managers.
  - DougWebb 9y ago
    Yes, it can be deeply inefficient, but so is not getting approval to do necessary work. You have to start making progress somewhere, even if it's not as fast as you'd like it to be. If you're sucessful with this, you gain credibility and over time your recommendation will be sufficient to get approval for smaller tasks, and the business case will only need to be made for bigger tasks. If you're not sucessful with this approach, and can't get approval despite showing that it's in the business' best interests using the business' own criteria, then your business is too dysfunctional and toxic to fix. Time to move on.
    - sanderjd 9y ago
      > If you're sucessful with this, you gain credibility and over time your recommendation will be sufficient to get approval for smaller tasks, and the business case will only need to be made for bigger tasks. Maybe! Alternatively: if you give a mouse a cookie, it will want a glass of milk. It might be worthwhile to establish early on that the technical leadership needs to be trusted to make their own decisions about trivial things.
    - crdoconnor 9y ago
      >Yes, it can be deeply inefficient, but so is not getting approval to do necessary work. No, actually not needing approval to do necessary work is very efficient. >You have to start making progress somewhere, even if it's not as fast as you'd like it to be. If you're sucessful with this, you gain credibility and over time your recommendation will be sufficient to get approval for smaller tasks, and the business case will only need to be made for bigger tasks. There's no point in working to gain enough credibility to be able to do your own job effectively when you can simply leave and go and work somewhere else that doesn't expect you to prove to it that you can do your job after they've hired you. Even if you manage to prevent the company from shooting itself in the foot as far as you're concerned by "proving your worth", it'll probably only go and shoot itself in the foot somewhere else and that will also ultimately become your problem. In any case, this process tends to feed upon itself. Failures in delivery lead to a lack of distrust which leads to micromanagement which leads to failures in delivery. It's not that you can't escape that vicious cycle, it's that it typically has a terrible payoff matrix.
flukus 9y ago
> Who the fuck writes a fully costed business case on whether or not to spend a day setting up a CI server? A lesson I learned the hard way is that if the business doesn't care then neither should you, It's just not worth fighting uphill battles like this. The only way to measure what a business cares about (distinct from what they say they care about) is by looking at what they're willing to spend money on. If building software is annoying for you personally then you can automate much of it, maybe even setup a CI server on you're own machine.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >A lesson I learned the hard way is that if the business doesn't care then neither should you, It's just not worth fighting uphill battles like this. Absolutely. I used to work for a company where the battles were uphill and constant. I quit and now work for a company with no battles. One had bad financials and the other has very good financials. The first company did teach me how to deal with very extreme technical debt, though (they'd been digging their hole for a while), which actually is a useful thing to know. >If building software is annoying for you personally then you can automate much of it, maybe even setup a CI server on you're own machine. The solution is GTFO.
  - flukus 9y ago
    Agree completely, just note that you can only pull the GTFO card a couple of times in a row, then it hurts your ability to pay rent, no matter how true. It's a trap actually, sometimes it's the shit companies like this that are the only ones hiring.
eldavido 9y ago
The tone of this post is a little flippant, but ultimately, I have to agree. It comes down to how much trust the executive sponsors have in the face of the engineering org, and how the business views technology, as responsible professionals or children who have to be closely supervised and monitored. Nurturing that relationship is one of the most important jobs of an executive/C-level engineering manager.

Who the fuck writes a fully costed business case on whether or not to spend a day setting up a CI server? I'm trying to get some fucking work done, not convince investors I need a series A.

abraae 9y ago

Yes. This sort of cost-benefit analysis also ignores some intangibles such as: "When we're interviewing people and they find out just how backwards our CI system is, the smart ones will laugh at us and work somewhere else and we'll be left with just the dumb ones."

sobani 9y ago
As @DougWebb said, immediate cost saved is the easiest way to sell CI, especially if the savings are large. He didn't say it was the only way. Nor that you can't add more arguments if cost savings alone isn't convincing enough.
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  CI's cost savings will not be immediate, large or easy to measure. That's why creating this "sales process" to make them happen is such a toxic mistake. I worked somewhere once that forced me to spend political capital to make these kinds of things happen and it was a terrible waste. Nobody notices the disasters that don't happen and when somebody is 2x faster and develops code with fewer bugs, that tends to reflect well upon them even if they were building upon your work.

DougWebb 9y ago

Ah, I see the problem. You have no interest in understanding why your business makes the decisions it makes; you just expect them to give you permission to do whatever you say you want to do. You said: I've tried explaining why we need to set up a CI server. ... In almost all cases they nod and feign interest and understanding and their eyes glaze over. The reason you've failed to make a convincing case, I believe, is because you're talking in your language instead of theirs. Perhaps they've tried to explain to you, in their language, why they won't prioritize your CI server, and you nodded and feigned interest while your eyes glazed over. The quote I gave you expresses your request and justification for a CI server into terms the business needs: what problem does it solve, what does it cost, how does it affect on-going costs, what are the risks of doing it and not doing it, and what impact does it have on other activities if it is done and if it is not done. This is not a "fully costed business case" or "convincing investors you need a series A". If you've given any thought at all to why you want a CI server beyond "I want it" you should have no problem filling in the blanks in my quote. And if you haven't bothered to think that much about it, your business is doing the right thing by giving your requests a low priority, because they shouldn't give your ideas any more attention than you're giving them yourself.

sanderjd 9y ago
You're making good points, but there is a lot of truth to your parent's sense that making a business case for every little thing is deeply inefficient. The hard part is striking a good balance between one extreme of arrogant engineers who never think about the business case for the things they are working on and the other extreme of having technical decisions micromanaged by non-technical managers.
- DougWebb 9y ago
  Yes, it can be deeply inefficient, but so is not getting approval to do necessary work. You have to start making progress somewhere, even if it's not as fast as you'd like it to be. If you're sucessful with this, you gain credibility and over time your recommendation will be sufficient to get approval for smaller tasks, and the business case will only need to be made for bigger tasks. If you're not sucessful with this approach, and can't get approval despite showing that it's in the business' best interests using the business' own criteria, then your business is too dysfunctional and toxic to fix. Time to move on.
  - sanderjd 9y ago
    > If you're sucessful with this, you gain credibility and over time your recommendation will be sufficient to get approval for smaller tasks, and the business case will only need to be made for bigger tasks. Maybe! Alternatively: if you give a mouse a cookie, it will want a glass of milk. It might be worthwhile to establish early on that the technical leadership needs to be trusted to make their own decisions about trivial things.
  - crdoconnor 9y ago
    >Yes, it can be deeply inefficient, but so is not getting approval to do necessary work. No, actually not needing approval to do necessary work is very efficient. >You have to start making progress somewhere, even if it's not as fast as you'd like it to be. If you're sucessful with this, you gain credibility and over time your recommendation will be sufficient to get approval for smaller tasks, and the business case will only need to be made for bigger tasks. There's no point in working to gain enough credibility to be able to do your own job effectively when you can simply leave and go and work somewhere else that doesn't expect you to prove to it that you can do your job after they've hired you. Even if you manage to prevent the company from shooting itself in the foot as far as you're concerned by "proving your worth", it'll probably only go and shoot itself in the foot somewhere else and that will also ultimately become your problem. In any case, this process tends to feed upon itself. Failures in delivery lead to a lack of distrust which leads to micromanagement which leads to failures in delivery. It's not that you can't escape that vicious cycle, it's that it typically has a terrible payoff matrix.

flukus 9y ago

> Who the fuck writes a fully costed business case on whether or not to spend a day setting up a CI server? A lesson I learned the hard way is that if the business doesn't care then neither should you, It's just not worth fighting uphill battles like this. The only way to measure what a business cares about (distinct from what they say they care about) is by looking at what they're willing to spend money on. If building software is annoying for you personally then you can automate much of it, maybe even setup a CI server on you're own machine.

crdoconnor 9y ago
>A lesson I learned the hard way is that if the business doesn't care then neither should you, It's just not worth fighting uphill battles like this. Absolutely. I used to work for a company where the battles were uphill and constant. I quit and now work for a company with no battles. One had bad financials and the other has very good financials. The first company did teach me how to deal with very extreme technical debt, though (they'd been digging their hole for a while), which actually is a useful thing to know. >If building software is annoying for you personally then you can automate much of it, maybe even setup a CI server on you're own machine. The solution is GTFO.
- flukus 9y ago
  Agree completely, just note that you can only pull the GTFO card a couple of times in a row, then it hurts your ability to pay rent, no matter how true. It's a trap actually, sometimes it's the shit companies like this that are the only ones hiring.

eldavido 9y ago

The tone of this post is a little flippant, but ultimately, I have to agree. It comes down to how much trust the executive sponsors have in the face of the engineering org, and how the business views technology, as responsible professionals or children who have to be closely supervised and monitored. Nurturing that relationship is one of the most important jobs of an executive/C-level engineering manager.