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>To a business they see software/engineers as a expense. Anecdotally, this is one of the first things I try to gauge at a prospective employer. "Are their deve

>To a business they see software/engineers as a expense. Anecdotally, this is one of the first things I try to gauge at a prospective employer. "Are their development teams seen as cost centers, or profit centers?" If the company works with technology a lot and doesn't see technology as being particularly important to its bottom line, that's usually a bad sign. Also, discussions with C-levels tend to be pretty one-dimensional. It doesn't matter how much their infrastructure is falling apart, they'll still stonewall with something along the lines of, "our goal this quarter is new user acquisition - how does this improve those numbers?" And they won't accept, "users cannot sign up if everything is broken" as an answer.

hackits 9y ago
You're 100% right but also 100% wrong. Like I said before you're viewing it from the perspective of a developer but not from the perspective of a Business person. Instead of saying `Users cannot sing up if everything is broken` you need to see it from a Business perspective, and communicate it to them in the language they understand. For example, `From our quarterly earnings report we need to have 10,0000 new clients signed up by the end of the month to reach the goal. We have on average 2,000 sign-ups per day. On the 2nd, 3rd of last month two of the critical system's fell over, and this result in a estimated 4,000 failed client acquisitions. The estimate from our quarterly earnings each new customer bring's in a revenue of $300 net profit from each client for the quarter. As a result of the system crash our quarterly earnings will be down 1.2 Million.` Your job is to communicate clearly in the language they understand how it will achieve their goals. You're not the only department/manager who is requiring resources from the Business. As I stated before you're there to serve the business to achieve their goals.
- tfigment 9y ago
  The corollary here that it is perfectly acceptable for business users to not understand significant parts of their own business operations. In fact, everybody should work around your shortcomings in understanding that "technical" stuff. As the guy with the MBA, you are the most important person in the room and everybody else is there to serve you.
  - DamnYuppie 9y ago
    You are a team. Not everyone has the same background and experiences. You would be amazed at how many people in an organization have incredible knowledge of their business domain and little to no knowledge of IT systems, their costs, and benefits. As an IT leader it is your responsibility to help bridge that gap, and the language of business is business not tech jargon, so I would caution against dismissing it. Another way to think of it is as of user acquisition problem. You have to highlight the benefits in a way that is compelling to them. At the end of a day all progress/fiascos in a company comes down to consistent and effective communication.
- lotyrin 9y ago
  Still doesn't work. I've done clandestine work over weekends to speed up an application, then as part of shipping it also add a split test with half the audience having a delay similar to what was in place before I fixed the problem and brought that to the table with the "business" guys, and everyone nodded their head "wow" but every sprint after that was just full of new features.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    I hope you got the lesson. Please stop working over the week ends for free. You are devaluing yourself and you are devaluing all the developers who don't want to ruin their week end at work.
    - jjoonathan 9y ago
      Agreed, but don't take this as "don't work hard," merely as "don't donate time to your employer." There are far more worthy causes out there.
    - lotyrin 9y ago
      I obviously didn't bring to the demonstration that I had volunteered the time, it suited my point to make it seem like it was something easy I could do as an aside... Problem is, they don't care about $ either, they care about what makes them look good, what makes their boss look good, what the sales guys are bugging them about, and it's features and visual polish and never quality or performance. I had to break it down to one of them "Listen, we've seen that the site being faster gets us X% more conversions, if the site was down, or if the site was ugly X% of the time and cost us those conversions, you'd be breathing down my neck to fix it, why is this any different...?" reply after a few seconds of thought "You're right, but you'll never convince Leadership"
      - yetanother1980 9y ago
        > it suited my point to make it seem like it was something easy I could do as an aside... Thus fuelling the idea that this sort of thing will just be done as other work is happening with no time budgeted for it.
- flukus 9y ago
  So we just have to do their job as well as our job?
  - jimbokun 9y ago
    Making money for the company is every employee’s job.
    - flukus 9y ago
      So the janitor should analyse and quantify what difference he will make to the companies bottom line before he wipes those skidmarks off? Not everything is quantifiable like that. If I'm writing code and I take the time to make it 30% faster then it won't make a difference to our bottom line. If that's done everywhere then customers will like us more, be more likely to stay with us and be more likely to recommend us, but that can't be quantified in my day to day work.
      - webmaven 9y ago
        Probably the biggest change looming over our industry is coding to - and deployment on - platforms that definitely are instrumented to capture exactly how much value a developer is adding (or subtracting) from the bottom line with every commit (it's a natural outgrowth of Function As A Service architectures). It is already possible to more-or-less show how a code change (bug/fix, new feature, change in storage backend, etc.) directly affects your IAAS bill at the end of each month, and taking it a step further by tying in some instrumentation and formulas (of the sort often used to calculate the effectiveness of marketing funnels for optimization and A/B testing) to show the concomittant effect on revenue allows ROI to be calculated. So, I am pretty sure that Finance-Oriented Programming is going to be a thing not so many years from now, tied into the whole toolchain, and very few - not developers nor their managers - seem prepared for that sea-change (some Operations folks are probably a bit better off in terms of mindset and processes).
- oceanghost 9y ago
  The core conflict is this: The engineer is trying to optimize/normalize his free time by acknowledging quality issues, the management is trying to optimize their income by sweeping them under the rug. The engineer is ultimately liable for the problem. Quality is insured with his reputation and free time. The business guys almost always leave at 4:00pm and their bonuses are based on a metric not related to quality.
- jdmichal 9y ago
  Honestly, this is pretty straight-forward stuff, and I'm surprised you're getting any argument. If a technologist cannot explain how a proposed implementation is going to provide value to the business, that project is probably better off left alone. Prettier code and better tests don't provide value. But fewer customer-facing P1/P2 tickets provides value. That prettier code and better tests leads to fewer tickets is an implementation detail. Let's put it this way: Netflix has one of the most robust microservice architectures I know of. I promise you will find zero mention of it anywhere on their customer-facing pages. Because that is not the problem that Netflix solves for their customer; they solve a media library and streaming problem. The business is your customer. You need to understand their problems and how you're going to fix them. Everything else is an implementation detail.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
    >Honestly, this is pretty straight-forward stuff, and I'm surprised you're getting any argument. I'm not. Our industry is full of academics who've been told "this is the right way to do it, everything else is stupid" for the entirety of their education. They're academics, trained by other academics, ignoring the broader reality of why we do these things at all.
dreamfactored 9y ago
>"Are their development teams seen as cost centers, or profit centers?" It's not a matter of opinion, but what the term means. They are cost centers unless they are closing sales (or being billed for about 3x what they cost, which is still way less than sales people will generate, being closer to 10x+ cost). Best thing any employee can do is find out how their company actually makes money and understand how they align. Unfortunately, the highest business expense is salaries and one of the most important things for most businesses is remaining runway. So there is huge pressure to keep salaries down, particularly in cost centres, which aren't directly extending runway. If it's a service business it can get worse, as the money is typically made on billable hours - creating a perverse incentive to have cheaper and less efficient people to bill out rather than a 10xer (outside a senior business facing role). As long as they are capable and not so bad that they lose the client, it's often more efficient to have cheaper mediocre people from a business point of view.
- scrpn 9y ago
  How can a software developer fight against this salary limitation?
  - dreamfactored 9y ago
    Become a highly sought after specialist for a product offering (e.g. self-driving cars, blockchain, fintech), or get ownership (startup), or go customer facing (particularly if commission involved), or go into technical management on CTO route.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > one of the most important things for most businesses is remaining runway Remaining runway is a measure that only exist for companies in the red. For most business it doesn't even exist.
  - dreamfactored 9y ago
    How long you can continue operations if sales drops off a cliff is a very important number for every company I've worked at, from startups to big multinationals. Maybe it's less of a consideration for Amazon and Apple but I wouldn't even bet on it there.
jacquesm 9y ago
The better question to ask in my opinion is whether or not they activate their IP on the balance sheet. If they do there is a very good chance that they care about the quality. If they don't then there is a very good chance they treat software as something disposable.

hackits 9y ago

You're 100% right but also 100% wrong. Like I said before you're viewing it from the perspective of a developer but not from the perspective of a Business person. Instead of saying `Users cannot sing up if everything is broken` you need to see it from a Business perspective, and communicate it to them in the language they understand. For example, `From our quarterly earnings report we need to have 10,0000 new clients signed up by the end of the month to reach the goal. We have on average 2,000 sign-ups per day. On the 2nd, 3rd of last month two of the critical system's fell over, and this result in a estimated 4,000 failed client acquisitions. The estimate from our quarterly earnings each new customer bring's in a revenue of $300 net profit from each client for the quarter. As a result of the system crash our quarterly earnings will be down 1.2 Million.` Your job is to communicate clearly in the language they understand how it will achieve their goals. You're not the only department/manager who is requiring resources from the Business. As I stated before you're there to serve the business to achieve their goals.

tfigment 9y ago
The corollary here that it is perfectly acceptable for business users to not understand significant parts of their own business operations. In fact, everybody should work around your shortcomings in understanding that "technical" stuff. As the guy with the MBA, you are the most important person in the room and everybody else is there to serve you.
- DamnYuppie 9y ago
  You are a team. Not everyone has the same background and experiences. You would be amazed at how many people in an organization have incredible knowledge of their business domain and little to no knowledge of IT systems, their costs, and benefits. As an IT leader it is your responsibility to help bridge that gap, and the language of business is business not tech jargon, so I would caution against dismissing it. Another way to think of it is as of user acquisition problem. You have to highlight the benefits in a way that is compelling to them. At the end of a day all progress/fiascos in a company comes down to consistent and effective communication.
lotyrin 9y ago
Still doesn't work. I've done clandestine work over weekends to speed up an application, then as part of shipping it also add a split test with half the audience having a delay similar to what was in place before I fixed the problem and brought that to the table with the "business" guys, and everyone nodded their head "wow" but every sprint after that was just full of new features.
- user5994461 9y ago
  I hope you got the lesson. Please stop working over the week ends for free. You are devaluing yourself and you are devaluing all the developers who don't want to ruin their week end at work.
  - jjoonathan 9y ago
    Agreed, but don't take this as "don't work hard," merely as "don't donate time to your employer." There are far more worthy causes out there.
  - lotyrin 9y ago
    I obviously didn't bring to the demonstration that I had volunteered the time, it suited my point to make it seem like it was something easy I could do as an aside... Problem is, they don't care about $ either, they care about what makes them look good, what makes their boss look good, what the sales guys are bugging them about, and it's features and visual polish and never quality or performance. I had to break it down to one of them "Listen, we've seen that the site being faster gets us X% more conversions, if the site was down, or if the site was ugly X% of the time and cost us those conversions, you'd be breathing down my neck to fix it, why is this any different...?" reply after a few seconds of thought "You're right, but you'll never convince Leadership"
    - yetanother1980 9y ago
      > it suited my point to make it seem like it was something easy I could do as an aside... Thus fuelling the idea that this sort of thing will just be done as other work is happening with no time budgeted for it.
flukus 9y ago
So we just have to do their job as well as our job?
- jimbokun 9y ago
  Making money for the company is every employee’s job.
  - flukus 9y ago
    So the janitor should analyse and quantify what difference he will make to the companies bottom line before he wipes those skidmarks off? Not everything is quantifiable like that. If I'm writing code and I take the time to make it 30% faster then it won't make a difference to our bottom line. If that's done everywhere then customers will like us more, be more likely to stay with us and be more likely to recommend us, but that can't be quantified in my day to day work.
    - webmaven 9y ago
      Probably the biggest change looming over our industry is coding to - and deployment on - platforms that definitely are instrumented to capture exactly how much value a developer is adding (or subtracting) from the bottom line with every commit (it's a natural outgrowth of Function As A Service architectures). It is already possible to more-or-less show how a code change (bug/fix, new feature, change in storage backend, etc.) directly affects your IAAS bill at the end of each month, and taking it a step further by tying in some instrumentation and formulas (of the sort often used to calculate the effectiveness of marketing funnels for optimization and A/B testing) to show the concomittant effect on revenue allows ROI to be calculated. So, I am pretty sure that Finance-Oriented Programming is going to be a thing not so many years from now, tied into the whole toolchain, and very few - not developers nor their managers - seem prepared for that sea-change (some Operations folks are probably a bit better off in terms of mindset and processes).
oceanghost 9y ago
The core conflict is this: The engineer is trying to optimize/normalize his free time by acknowledging quality issues, the management is trying to optimize their income by sweeping them under the rug. The engineer is ultimately liable for the problem. Quality is insured with his reputation and free time. The business guys almost always leave at 4:00pm and their bonuses are based on a metric not related to quality.
jdmichal 9y ago
Honestly, this is pretty straight-forward stuff, and I'm surprised you're getting any argument. If a technologist cannot explain how a proposed implementation is going to provide value to the business, that project is probably better off left alone. Prettier code and better tests don't provide value. But fewer customer-facing P1/P2 tickets provides value. That prettier code and better tests leads to fewer tickets is an implementation detail. Let's put it this way: Netflix has one of the most robust microservice architectures I know of. I promise you will find zero mention of it anywhere on their customer-facing pages. Because that is not the problem that Netflix solves for their customer; they solve a media library and streaming problem. The business is your customer. You need to understand their problems and how you're going to fix them. Everything else is an implementation detail.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 9y ago
  >Honestly, this is pretty straight-forward stuff, and I'm surprised you're getting any argument. I'm not. Our industry is full of academics who've been told "this is the right way to do it, everything else is stupid" for the entirety of their education. They're academics, trained by other academics, ignoring the broader reality of why we do these things at all.

dreamfactored 9y ago

>"Are their development teams seen as cost centers, or profit centers?" It's not a matter of opinion, but what the term means. They are cost centers unless they are closing sales (or being billed for about 3x what they cost, which is still way less than sales people will generate, being closer to 10x+ cost). Best thing any employee can do is find out how their company actually makes money and understand how they align. Unfortunately, the highest business expense is salaries and one of the most important things for most businesses is remaining runway. So there is huge pressure to keep salaries down, particularly in cost centres, which aren't directly extending runway. If it's a service business it can get worse, as the money is typically made on billable hours - creating a perverse incentive to have cheaper and less efficient people to bill out rather than a 10xer (outside a senior business facing role). As long as they are capable and not so bad that they lose the client, it's often more efficient to have cheaper mediocre people from a business point of view.

scrpn 9y ago
How can a software developer fight against this salary limitation?
- dreamfactored 9y ago
  Become a highly sought after specialist for a product offering (e.g. self-driving cars, blockchain, fintech), or get ownership (startup), or go customer facing (particularly if commission involved), or go into technical management on CTO route.
marcosdumay 9y ago
> one of the most important things for most businesses is remaining runway Remaining runway is a measure that only exist for companies in the red. For most business it doesn't even exist.
- dreamfactored 9y ago
  How long you can continue operations if sales drops off a cliff is a very important number for every company I've worked at, from startups to big multinationals. Maybe it's less of a consideration for Amazon and Apple but I wouldn't even bet on it there.

jacquesm 9y ago

The better question to ask in my opinion is whether or not they activate their IP on the balance sheet. If they do there is a very good chance that they care about the quality. If they don't then there is a very good chance they treat software as something disposable.