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Working for a company building heavy hardware, I see the following happen time and time again: * Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing. Result: E

by lb1lf 9y ago

Working for a company building heavy hardware, I see the following happen time and time again: * Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing. Result: Every time the new organization has settled somewhat and people know who to interact with to make things flow smoothly, everything is upended and back to square one. * Trying to make our products buzzword compliant without understanding the consequences - we've on occasion been instructed to incorporate technologies which are hardly fit for purpose simply because 'everyone else is doing it' (Where 'everyone' is the companies featured in whatever magazine the CEO leafed through on his latest flight. Yes, I exaggerate a bit for effect.) * Misguided cost savings; most of what hardware we use, we buy in small quantities - say, a few hundred items a year, maximum. Yet purchasing are constantly measured on whether they are able to source an 'equivalent' product at a lower price. Hence, we may find ourselves with a $20,000 unit being replaced by a $19,995 one - order quantity, 5/year - and spend $10,000 on engineering hours to update templates, redo interfaces &c. * Assuming a man is a man is a man and that anyone is easily and quickly replaceable (except management, of course) - and not taking the time and productivity loss associated with training new colleagues into account. Edit: An E-mail just landed in my inbox reminding me of another: * Trying to quantify anything and everything, one focuses on the metrics which are easy to measure, rather than the ones which matter. As a result, the organization adapts and focuses on the metrics being measured, not the ones which matter - with foreseeable consequences for productivity.

k__ 9y ago
Haha, we had the buzzword compliance too. Once a sales junior came to me and said "this year I will make our product be the center of the Big Data hype" like it was some meaningful concept, besides having much data...
arethuza 9y ago
"Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing" These things often to be the observable consequence of political battles between executives. From what I've observed there are always clear winners and losers in these battles (although it may take a while to work out who lost and who won). From the perspective of the execs who were for the re-orgs and who come out on top these reorganizations are positive things even if they are bad for the company as a whole - typically they don't care about the company as a whole only for what they can get out if it. Edit: A colleague once said that the behaviour of executives became far easier to understand and predict once you found out their individual bonus calculations were done (which, of course, we weren't supposed to know).
tome 9y ago
> a man "a person"?
- lb1lf 9y ago
  >> a man > "a person"? -Definitely a person; however, the gender balance in my immediate surroundings is -ahem- slightly skewed and I all too easily fall into the trap of calling any person a man. (Judging from the time clock (whose logs are openly available on the intranet, presumably through oversight rather than by design), there are currently 217 people working in the hall I currently sit in. Of those, one appear to be female.)
- 11235813213455 9y ago
  the 'mankind'
- dominotw 9y ago
  oh no, not this stuff again.
snarf21 9y ago
My two biggest ones are on this list. * Software is not an assembly line. It is part science part art. We are not interchangeable. You can't take an embedded engineer and hope for good luck on a Node.js project. * Constant reorganization. I worked at a major internet company in the late 90s, early 00s and they literally reorganized every two years. It was usually under the guise of helping communication and fostering growth but it simply just toggled from a vertical project based organization to a flat and wide matrix organization. Such a waste of time, energy, and resources.
- Danihan 9y ago
  > It is part science part art. I always try to explain this. Yes there are best practices, but there is also a ton of creativity that goes into good software dev.
fbonetti 9y ago
Misguided cost savings is the worst when it comes from engineers. Software developers love to optimize, so if they can save $500 - $1,000 a month buy rolling their own service instead of paying for an existing one, they'll do it, completely ignoring the fact that their time costs money.
- throwasehasdwi 9y ago
  Eh, most developers I know are lazy and won't even measure the performance of the thing they're building if it's "good enough". I can't remember the last time any of us fired up a profiler. Optimization is generally hard and un-fun. On the other hand, developers love to build shiny new stuff more than they like using things that are already there. The "Optimize" part you're talking about is more "reinvent the wheel" in my experience. Figuring out how to use X new library isn't fun. Building this cool thing that does the same thing but better is a lot of fun! That's why things get overengineered and built for "scale", which is probably mostly what you'r referring to. Instead of taking something off the shelf that would work fine some developers are compelled to build something that can handle the entire traffic of the internet. They don't achieve this by optimizing what's there, they do it by building an enormously complex system for no reason :)
  - fbonetti 9y ago
    > They don't achieve this by optimizing what's there, they do it by building an enormously complex system for no reason :) This aspect of the industry drives me absolutely insane. I've seen this at every single company I've worked at. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Am I the only developer that sees tech as merely a tool? I don't want to build a massively complex system that scales to infinity and does everything for everyone. I don't want to build everything from scratch. I want to build dead simple, boring software that accomplishes a goal and is easy to maintain, so that I can go home and not worry about it.
dahart 9y ago
> Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing This definitely happens every time a manager or executive is replaced or hired. And it's easy to see why it happens despite the damage it causes. Executive turnover might not be the cause in your case, but if it is, the good news is you can see it coming.
- lb1lf 9y ago
  Speaking of seeing it coming, since my employer became part of $MultiNationalEngineeringCo, one of the most popular acronyms around the watering hole has been BOHICA. (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again for those lucky enough to work for a smaller company...)

by lb1lf 9y ago

k__ 9y ago

Haha, we had the buzzword compliance too. Once a sales junior came to me and said "this year I will make our product be the center of the Big Data hype" like it was some meaningful concept, besides having much data...

arethuza 9y ago

"Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing" These things often to be the observable consequence of political battles between executives. From what I've observed there are always clear winners and losers in these battles (although it may take a while to work out who lost and who won). From the perspective of the execs who were for the re-orgs and who come out on top these reorganizations are positive things even if they are bad for the company as a whole - typically they don't care about the company as a whole only for what they can get out if it. Edit: A colleague once said that the behaviour of executives became far easier to understand and predict once you found out their individual bonus calculations were done (which, of course, we weren't supposed to know).

tome 9y ago

> a man "a person"?

lb1lf 9y ago
>> a man > "a person"? -Definitely a person; however, the gender balance in my immediate surroundings is -ahem- slightly skewed and I all too easily fall into the trap of calling any person a man. (Judging from the time clock (whose logs are openly available on the intranet, presumably through oversight rather than by design), there are currently 217 people working in the hall I currently sit in. Of those, one appear to be female.)
11235813213455 9y ago
the 'mankind'
dominotw 9y ago
oh no, not this stuff again.

snarf21 9y ago

My two biggest ones are on this list. * Software is not an assembly line. It is part science part art. We are not interchangeable. You can't take an embedded engineer and hope for good luck on a Node.js project. * Constant reorganization. I worked at a major internet company in the late 90s, early 00s and they literally reorganized every two years. It was usually under the guise of helping communication and fostering growth but it simply just toggled from a vertical project based organization to a flat and wide matrix organization. Such a waste of time, energy, and resources.

Danihan 9y ago
> It is part science part art. I always try to explain this. Yes there are best practices, but there is also a ton of creativity that goes into good software dev.

fbonetti 9y ago

Misguided cost savings is the worst when it comes from engineers. Software developers love to optimize, so if they can save $500 - $1,000 a month buy rolling their own service instead of paying for an existing one, they'll do it, completely ignoring the fact that their time costs money.

throwasehasdwi 9y ago
Eh, most developers I know are lazy and won't even measure the performance of the thing they're building if it's "good enough". I can't remember the last time any of us fired up a profiler. Optimization is generally hard and un-fun. On the other hand, developers love to build shiny new stuff more than they like using things that are already there. The "Optimize" part you're talking about is more "reinvent the wheel" in my experience. Figuring out how to use X new library isn't fun. Building this cool thing that does the same thing but better is a lot of fun! That's why things get overengineered and built for "scale", which is probably mostly what you'r referring to. Instead of taking something off the shelf that would work fine some developers are compelled to build something that can handle the entire traffic of the internet. They don't achieve this by optimizing what's there, they do it by building an enormously complex system for no reason :)
- fbonetti 9y ago
  > They don't achieve this by optimizing what's there, they do it by building an enormously complex system for no reason :) This aspect of the industry drives me absolutely insane. I've seen this at every single company I've worked at. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Am I the only developer that sees tech as merely a tool? I don't want to build a massively complex system that scales to infinity and does everything for everyone. I don't want to build everything from scratch. I want to build dead simple, boring software that accomplishes a goal and is easy to maintain, so that I can go home and not worry about it.

dahart 9y ago

> Reorganizing seemingly for the sake of reorganizing This definitely happens every time a manager or executive is replaced or hired. And it's easy to see why it happens despite the damage it causes. Executive turnover might not be the cause in your case, but if it is, the good news is you can see it coming.

lb1lf 9y ago
Speaking of seeing it coming, since my employer became part of $MultiNationalEngineeringCo, one of the most popular acronyms around the watering hole has been BOHICA. (Bend Over, Here It Comes Again for those lucky enough to work for a smaller company...)