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a delicate balance of avoiding work that will harm you and encouraging work that will help you Yes this swings both ways. I worked at a startup where every fea

by hnzix 9y ago

a delicate balance of avoiding work that will harm you and encouraging work that will help you Yes this swings both ways. I worked at a startup where every feature improvement was shouted down as a waste of opportunity cost. They found a decent local maxima but their growth stalled and they degraded into a consultingware company. The more ambitious devs bailed because there was no room for growth.

whack 9y ago
> I worked at a startup where every feature improvement was shouted down as a waste of opportunity cost. I'm curious - what were the devs doing with their time, if feature improvements were constantly being vetoed? Were they being kept busy with other tasks which you consider lower-priority, or were they just sitting idle?
- kakwa_ 9y ago
  Write code to have an impressive features list in the product, even if half of them have 3 bugs per line of code. It's not a strategy I approve, but it can be effective from a commercial stand-point, specially if the half that doesn't work is the half barely used in real life. It was specially true in the past, with on premise software where clients were in a kind of lock-down with the software provider. Today, as we move more and more towards SaaS, this approach is far more risky because your client could easily switch to another service provider.
- hnzix 9y ago
  >I'm curious - what were the devs doing with their time, if feature improvements were constantly being vetoed? Yeah it was a really weird culture, there was definitely some quiet time where I would propose a product improvement but still get no traction. Eg the product website was really embarrassingly 90s, they would let us A/B test customer deployments but not their own site. There also was a lot of repetitive content scraping tasks that should have been improved and resulted in excessive pager duty (hard to explain but think fragile regexes that parsed customer HTML). That was the last straw for me, I'll do pager duty but not every night just because the PHB is a fool. They mostly burned our time on trivial consultingware requests instead of improving the core product. I eventually started sneaking core enhancements in by padding out the customer work and just not telling anyone. This is the same PHB who threatened to fire me because I had to rush my partner to hospital with a concussion. Wonderful human being that.

by hnzix 9y ago

whack 9y ago

> I worked at a startup where every feature improvement was shouted down as a waste of opportunity cost. I'm curious - what were the devs doing with their time, if feature improvements were constantly being vetoed? Were they being kept busy with other tasks which you consider lower-priority, or were they just sitting idle?

kakwa_ 9y ago
Write code to have an impressive features list in the product, even if half of them have 3 bugs per line of code. It's not a strategy I approve, but it can be effective from a commercial stand-point, specially if the half that doesn't work is the half barely used in real life. It was specially true in the past, with on premise software where clients were in a kind of lock-down with the software provider. Today, as we move more and more towards SaaS, this approach is far more risky because your client could easily switch to another service provider.
hnzix 9y ago
>I'm curious - what were the devs doing with their time, if feature improvements were constantly being vetoed? Yeah it was a really weird culture, there was definitely some quiet time where I would propose a product improvement but still get no traction. Eg the product website was really embarrassingly 90s, they would let us A/B test customer deployments but not their own site. There also was a lot of repetitive content scraping tasks that should have been improved and resulted in excessive pager duty (hard to explain but think fragile regexes that parsed customer HTML). That was the last straw for me, I'll do pager duty but not every night just because the PHB is a fool. They mostly burned our time on trivial consultingware requests instead of improving the core product. I eventually started sneaking core enhancements in by padding out the customer work and just not telling anyone. This is the same PHB who threatened to fire me because I had to rush my partner to hospital with a concussion. Wonderful human being that.