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> This shows that the developers have absolutely no control, say, or ownership over their work. Developer here. What role would you see developers playing? Th

> This shows that the developers have absolutely no control, say, or ownership over their work. Developer here. What role would you see developers playing? This is more strategic than technical, so I wouldn't expect much developer input at this stage. If management asked and the developers didn't like it, people would say "why the opinion charade?". So the only options are don't partner or get a strong (whatever that means) majority vote from the developers before doing anything. Both seem like bad options to me.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago
Let me try (it's a long one) Software is a new form of literacy. Literacy makes all the difference - you don't hire illiterates to run companies, they might be clever, politically astute, but the decisions they make will be wrong from the important perspective of "does this make sense in a literate world". Imagine you were hiring people for a trading company in the 16th Century. If the top people could not read or write, would you expect that trading company to perform as well as a competitor that had hired its board, its execs, as those who were able to red and write. Who expected to read the ships manifest? Companies that ignore the developers are companies that are ignoring what literate people think is sensible. Now sometimes that will be the "right" thing to do, but increasingly *when illiterates and literates clash over policy, the literate side is more likely to be the right one to take" Just my 2 cents
- MegaButts 7y ago
  I honestly don't understand the point you're trying to make. As far as I can tell you are saying that people that can code are fundamentally superior to everyone else, to the point where everyone else is useless not only to corporations but society?
  - Nullabillity 7y ago
    It's helpful to understand the fundamentals of the area you're making strategic decisions about. Even better if you're the one who has to deal with the aftermath, so that you have some incentive to learn for the next time. The typical C-level dictatorship provides neither of those (besides just being a plain miserable environment to work in).
    - dageshi 7y ago
      I think the C-Level dictatorship know the relative strength & weaknesses of their company. Sony isn't good at online services and its infrastructure relative to other companies like Microsoft and Google. It took them a decade to allow users to actually change their user names on PSN because they were effectively using the username as a unique primary key and associating all game save data against locally and remotely. How are they going to make a Google Stadia style service that requires custom hardware units in data centers around the world with the lowest possible latency to the end user? And how are they going to do it quickly? I guarantee Microsoft has a competitor to stadia ready to go, they have the data centers, they have the development expertise and they've been pushing xbox apps onto every platform that will take them. If Microsoft will give them a good long term rate on the custom azure instances that the xbox team will be using to host the games then that's probably a whole lot better than Sony trying to roll their own.
      - gambiting 7y ago
        >>How are they going to make a Google Stadia style service that requires custom hardware units in data centers around the world with the lowest possible latency to the end user? And how are they going to do it quickly? I mean....they already do, so in that sense they are ahead of Stadia. Playstation Now is a real service that exists and which you can use already, and which required custom hardware in datacentres around the world. Now we can argue whether it's as good as Stadia promises to be, but that's purely theoretical at this point - one product is an actual commercial thing you can get, the other one exists in beta stages.
  - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
    Just let's assume the basic tenet is correct - software is a new form of literacy [#]. No I do not believe that people who are functionally or totally illiterate today are useless or should be discriminated against. But the value that an illiterate person in normal circumstances can deliver is dramatically reduced compared to the same person but literate. And I am simply transferring the same intuition about this to software. If "Google SRE is what you get when you ask a developer to design an ops team" then what do you get when you ask a developer to design a whole corporation. Or a government ministry? People who can code are not fundamentally superior to everyone else as you say, but they offer different ways to organise as much as people who 300 years ago were literate were not fundamentally superior to the rest of us, but offered different ways to organise. So here is my simplest idea - as pretty much everything is being eaten by software, then project management should flow entirely from code. How is Project X doing? Ask the codebase. [#] Bicycles of the mind if you wish. But something important is happening - its beyond telegraphs or telephones in enabling communication between humans.
    - ARandomerDude 7y ago
      Literacy is the ability to read and write regardless of the domain (science, history, poetry, religion, software, whatever). Software is, ultimately, a set of logical instructions. Other people who understand those instructions are literate in that domain. You seem to be taking a single application of literacy (software) to be the entire scope of literacy writ large. It isn't clear to me why you think that, especially when no programming language is capable of "encoding" the range of human thought that, say, English is. Please respond in the programming language of your choice.
      - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
        You seem to be saying that software is one "silo" of literacy, like the jargon one needs to understand film criticism or the politics of the hundred years' war. I don't think that's fair. Software if anything is a means of modelling and transmission of that model - being able to create and manipulate models is what we try to do with language and written word - but the compiler we are targeting is on other people's heads. so it's a bit hit and miss - we spend a lot of effort making us all share the same compilers, from schools to legal judgements. but with software the compiler is simpler and so the models can be more transparent and that Inthinknis the big difference. No I cannot express my model in english as well as I can in any program- I am not trying to express the whole range of human thought in software - but what we can do is and will be so valuable I can only compare it to the shift in value we got from mass literacy
- mft_ 7y ago
  It's just about different job roles. Do you consult with the admin staff to check they're okay with your code? In large businesses (in particular) you have to have delineation of roles - everything can't be democratic. Just as (I assume) you expect your seniors to trust you to code competently, so you should trust other people to handle strategy competently. You might not like the end choice… but that’s usually because via not having been in the discussion, you lack key information as to why the other smart people in your company came to that end choice. (One thing I have learnt: everybody wants to be involved in strategy, because it’s fun, and because they think they can. I see this in my own industry all the time. People should have the discipline to stick to the scope of their role.)
  - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
    Late reply I know but ... just replace the words "company strategy" in your last paragraph with "everybody wants to be involved with "electing parliament" ... stick to the scope of their role. One of the things that came with increased literacy was increased middle class and increasing widening of the suffrage.

lifeisstillgood 7y ago

Let me try (it's a long one) Software is a new form of literacy. Literacy makes all the difference - you don't hire illiterates to run companies, they might be clever, politically astute, but the decisions they make will be wrong from the important perspective of "does this make sense in a literate world". Imagine you were hiring people for a trading company in the 16th Century. If the top people could not read or write, would you expect that trading company to perform as well as a competitor that had hired its board, its execs, as those who were able to red and write. Who expected to read the ships manifest? Companies that ignore the developers are companies that are ignoring what literate people think is sensible. Now sometimes that will be the "right" thing to do, but increasingly *when illiterates and literates clash over policy, the literate side is more likely to be the right one to take" Just my 2 cents

MegaButts 7y ago
I honestly don't understand the point you're trying to make. As far as I can tell you are saying that people that can code are fundamentally superior to everyone else, to the point where everyone else is useless not only to corporations but society?
- Nullabillity 7y ago
  It's helpful to understand the fundamentals of the area you're making strategic decisions about. Even better if you're the one who has to deal with the aftermath, so that you have some incentive to learn for the next time. The typical C-level dictatorship provides neither of those (besides just being a plain miserable environment to work in).
  - dageshi 7y ago
    I think the C-Level dictatorship know the relative strength & weaknesses of their company. Sony isn't good at online services and its infrastructure relative to other companies like Microsoft and Google. It took them a decade to allow users to actually change their user names on PSN because they were effectively using the username as a unique primary key and associating all game save data against locally and remotely. How are they going to make a Google Stadia style service that requires custom hardware units in data centers around the world with the lowest possible latency to the end user? And how are they going to do it quickly? I guarantee Microsoft has a competitor to stadia ready to go, they have the data centers, they have the development expertise and they've been pushing xbox apps onto every platform that will take them. If Microsoft will give them a good long term rate on the custom azure instances that the xbox team will be using to host the games then that's probably a whole lot better than Sony trying to roll their own.
    - gambiting 7y ago
      >>How are they going to make a Google Stadia style service that requires custom hardware units in data centers around the world with the lowest possible latency to the end user? And how are they going to do it quickly? I mean....they already do, so in that sense they are ahead of Stadia. Playstation Now is a real service that exists and which you can use already, and which required custom hardware in datacentres around the world. Now we can argue whether it's as good as Stadia promises to be, but that's purely theoretical at this point - one product is an actual commercial thing you can get, the other one exists in beta stages.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  Just let's assume the basic tenet is correct - software is a new form of literacy [#]. No I do not believe that people who are functionally or totally illiterate today are useless or should be discriminated against. But the value that an illiterate person in normal circumstances can deliver is dramatically reduced compared to the same person but literate. And I am simply transferring the same intuition about this to software. If "Google SRE is what you get when you ask a developer to design an ops team" then what do you get when you ask a developer to design a whole corporation. Or a government ministry? People who can code are not fundamentally superior to everyone else as you say, but they offer different ways to organise as much as people who 300 years ago were literate were not fundamentally superior to the rest of us, but offered different ways to organise. So here is my simplest idea - as pretty much everything is being eaten by software, then project management should flow entirely from code. How is Project X doing? Ask the codebase. [#] Bicycles of the mind if you wish. But something important is happening - its beyond telegraphs or telephones in enabling communication between humans.
  - ARandomerDude 7y ago
    Literacy is the ability to read and write regardless of the domain (science, history, poetry, religion, software, whatever). Software is, ultimately, a set of logical instructions. Other people who understand those instructions are literate in that domain. You seem to be taking a single application of literacy (software) to be the entire scope of literacy writ large. It isn't clear to me why you think that, especially when no programming language is capable of "encoding" the range of human thought that, say, English is. Please respond in the programming language of your choice.
    - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
      You seem to be saying that software is one "silo" of literacy, like the jargon one needs to understand film criticism or the politics of the hundred years' war. I don't think that's fair. Software if anything is a means of modelling and transmission of that model - being able to create and manipulate models is what we try to do with language and written word - but the compiler we are targeting is on other people's heads. so it's a bit hit and miss - we spend a lot of effort making us all share the same compilers, from schools to legal judgements. but with software the compiler is simpler and so the models can be more transparent and that Inthinknis the big difference. No I cannot express my model in english as well as I can in any program- I am not trying to express the whole range of human thought in software - but what we can do is and will be so valuable I can only compare it to the shift in value we got from mass literacy
mft_ 7y ago
It's just about different job roles. Do you consult with the admin staff to check they're okay with your code? In large businesses (in particular) you have to have delineation of roles - everything can't be democratic. Just as (I assume) you expect your seniors to trust you to code competently, so you should trust other people to handle strategy competently. You might not like the end choice… but that’s usually because via not having been in the discussion, you lack key information as to why the other smart people in your company came to that end choice. (One thing I have learnt: everybody wants to be involved in strategy, because it’s fun, and because they think they can. I see this in my own industry all the time. People should have the discipline to stick to the scope of their role.)
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  Late reply I know but ... just replace the words "company strategy" in your last paragraph with "everybody wants to be involved with "electing parliament" ... stick to the scope of their role. One of the things that came with increased literacy was increased middle class and increasing widening of the suffrage.