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I worked at a company that tried to do this - Willis Towers Watson. It went pretty badly for a number of reasons: * The internal software was built up over a n
by pytester 7y ago
I worked at a company that tried to do this - Willis Towers Watson. It went pretty badly for a number of reasons:
* The internal software was built up over a number of years as a series of hacks that rarely if ever got unwound. The people running the business were blind to the necessity of this and a lot of the engineers were not motivated to fix it because they were experts on the rabbit hole and were angling for job security.
* The internal software's infrastructure aged badly and we were stuck in a perpetual upgrade hell. This was again because the people running the business did not really understand the accretion of technical debt. Their abilities centered more around, say, pricing insurance and regulatory issues.
* They didn't know how to hire engineers and they instituted corporate processes that ensured that the engineers were both pissed off and unable to properly do their work and they were in a geographical area where it was hard to hire. Good engineers largely left, bad engineers stayed behind and continued building rabbit holes.
* They outsourced critical functions to cheap overseas labor and got crap as a result.
* Their response to slowed development and deadlines was to throw more engineers at the problem.
* They're also the only client I've had to sue for nonpayment of an invoice.
- mbostleman 7y agoIn other words, Big Ball of Mud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_ball_of_mud
- 1-6 7y agoYup, and backdoor galore!
- pytester 7y agoNot just that though. Also the existence of a somewhat toxic work environment which functioned sufficiently where all they needed was cheaper, less skilled, easy to hire employees doing more rote kinds of work but which hampered both creativity and getting shit done and meant employees with other options simply left.
- redleader9345 7y agoTemplate zombies, as coined by Mark Schwartz in the book "A seat at the table". Managers who think that they can turn everything into a template, and then hire monkeys to take those templates and fill in the blanks.
- noobiemcfoob 7y agoEveryone knows the manager is the most valuable person in the room. They have the ideas. The rest of us are just implementing their vision. So easy. /s
- mbostleman 7y agoRight. This approach becomes evident when a manager refers to developers as "resources".
- jackcosgrove 7y agoThe term is "amateurization", and it can lead to efficiencies since the lesser skilled labor pool is larger.
- roymurdock 7y agoYou'd be surprised how many companies operate with this biz model today. I call em zombie companies. management just sucks out the profit while they slowly crumble. Sad for all involved. Spinning out internal CRUD from a zombie co. is a whole nother ball game though
- locoman88 7y agoSad missuse of the once highly regarded engineer term
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoNow imagine that you're buying software from a third party that's still doing all that, but you can't fix any of it because you don't own any of it, and you can't switch to another vendor because all your processes for the past half decade have been tied to this product.
- taurath 7y agoI feel like this is overblown in this day and age, and certainly doesn’t justify the insane cost of having a dev team to be building you custom software that is anywhere near competent. You can do 99.5% of what most non-technology businesses do via a combo of SaaS services. Those keep getting better over time. It’s cheaper to hire a large team of coders/consultants for a few months to migrate you than to pay the same said team in perpetuity.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago> You can do 99.5% of what most non-technology businesses do via a combo of SaaS services. What is is with tech people and pulling numbers out of thin air to justify their simplified straw man of users?
- taurath 7y ago"just about everything" is the point, don't obsess over the number. Payroll, payments, IT, finance, sales, HR, benefits, inventory management, etc. are all available by subscription. Many of those used to require a team of developers in-house. Its easier than ever to run a business on these, and its FAR cheaper than building out software yourself.
- ghaff 7y agoWell, there is a big difference between 99.5% (i.e. essentially everything) and 60% or whatever. You rattled off a bunch of functions most of which are both quite complex and pretty standardized across large business. I agree that pretty much any large organization writing their own email or payroll system in this day and age is probably certifiably insane. But even large "non-tech" companies have fairly significant custom needs even if it's just integrations and customizations of SaaS. Just because you're using Salesforce doesn't mean you just point everyone in the company at your Salesforce instance and call it a day.
- NikolaNovak 7y agoLet me ask an unpopular question: in which sense did it "go badly"? You indicated a large amount of technical debt and issues, which the techie in me 101% empathizes with and shares your pain. You also indicated morale and hiring practices issue, which the person in me empathises with. What you didn't indicate however was the business outcomes: Were there unhappy clients that left? Did the costs rise? Business fold? Everything you mentioned, unfortunately, is also the case for some wildly profitable/successful businesses.... :-<
- pytester 7y agoThey had one large customer lined up. I didn't really follow what happened with them after I left but I don't think that customer was particularly happy and calls with this customer were fraught and somewhat terrifying. It certainly wasn't the case that this project was wildly profitable. Not sure if it will ever make money at all in fact. I have worked for profitable businesses who have behaved like this too and it's usually the case that they have some kind of inbuilt unfair advantage (legal, governmental, monopoly/size/clout, etc.) that compensated for sucking at tech.
- ozim 7y ago...Their abilities centered more around, say, pricing insurance and regulatory issues... You have to know how to price software, know how it is built and know what are challenges. It is just like I would want to open restaurant right now. I have enough money to do it, but I am going to be ripped by suppliers, chefs, staff. Bad devs just sucking out salaries over time is one thing. Then you get silly project managers who want to prioritize FCKN EVERYTHING and don't understand project and don't care, just want their features in. Maybe even conflicting feature requests from multiple customers.
- crumpets 7y agoSounds like costs rose if they threw more engineers at the problem.
- ryanmarsh 7y agoThis was again because the people running the business did not really understand the accretion of technical debt. I don’t have any additional context besides my consulting experience but I’m willing to bet several engineers did their best to make everyone aware of the technical debt and were ignored.
- dredmorbius 7y agothe business did not really understand the accretion of technical debt And WTW are a risk-management firm. The failure to recognise technology as risk to be managed seems particularly perverse.
- pytester 7y agoThe irony was everywhere. I wasn't paid because of a bug in their HR IT system. They also sell HR IT systems.