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> If nothing else, technologists often don't have much control over the budget versus business leaders. The business sets the budget and the requirements, but

> If nothing else, technologists often don't have much control over the budget versus business leaders. The business sets the budget and the requirements, but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people. There's definitely a lag between technical people getting interested in something and that thing getting big in enterprise, but there's still a correlation. Just as there's a inverse when everyone in tech hates a thing and a few years later businesses stop adopting it (see Oracle's slow decline, particularly for new customers).

jedberg 8y ago
> but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people. Have you ever worked at a large enterprise? That's almost never how it goes. An executive has a meal with a sales person, who says their technology will solve all of the executive's problems, then the executive signs up for a paid trial, and then tells the people that report to them that they are going to implement the thing. Some better enterprises will cut it off at that point after the technologists come back and say the trial didn't work out, but many enterprises will simply plow forward, either falling to the sunk cost fallacy, or because the executive's friend at another company told them it worked well at the other company.
- plorkyeran 8y ago
  Even in the companies where they do actually care how the trial works out it's usually just "did it work?" and not "is this a good idea?". Often the expensive enterprise product can be made to work with a great deal of effort, and that's good enough to go forward.
- bartimus 8y ago
  This is exactly the thing that frustrates me as an agile developer. The enterprise world is more about the position game than it is about the art of creating value. I'm obviously biased. But I think it's a toxic problem and was very much hoping new style businesses like Google are forcing big enterprises to reinvent themselves.
- SeanAppleby 8y ago
  I would bet that those businesses will tend to die at higher rates, whereas businesses who let technical people have input into technical decisions will survive at higher rates, reconstituting the market over time around companies that make better technical decisions. How quickly, I don't know, but it seems likely that that is not a winning long term strategy for technical decision making.
  - user5994461 8y ago
    That used to be the market for AWS. Entice tech startups to use AWS and reap huge benefits as they grow to larger companies and the occasional unicorn.

jedberg 8y ago

> but whose recommendations do you think they listen to when delivering that? Often it is in-house tech' people. Have you ever worked at a large enterprise? That's almost never how it goes. An executive has a meal with a sales person, who says their technology will solve all of the executive's problems, then the executive signs up for a paid trial, and then tells the people that report to them that they are going to implement the thing. Some better enterprises will cut it off at that point after the technologists come back and say the trial didn't work out, but many enterprises will simply plow forward, either falling to the sunk cost fallacy, or because the executive's friend at another company told them it worked well at the other company.

plorkyeran 8y ago
Even in the companies where they do actually care how the trial works out it's usually just "did it work?" and not "is this a good idea?". Often the expensive enterprise product can be made to work with a great deal of effort, and that's good enough to go forward.
bartimus 8y ago
This is exactly the thing that frustrates me as an agile developer. The enterprise world is more about the position game than it is about the art of creating value. I'm obviously biased. But I think it's a toxic problem and was very much hoping new style businesses like Google are forcing big enterprises to reinvent themselves.
SeanAppleby 8y ago
I would bet that those businesses will tend to die at higher rates, whereas businesses who let technical people have input into technical decisions will survive at higher rates, reconstituting the market over time around companies that make better technical decisions. How quickly, I don't know, but it seems likely that that is not a winning long term strategy for technical decision making.
- user5994461 8y ago
  That used to be the market for AWS. Entice tech startups to use AWS and reap huge benefits as they grow to larger companies and the occasional unicorn.