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> Uber engineers used many bogus reasons to implement NIH projects In my experience this is one of the most toxic diseases an engineering org can catch. It of
by yashap 7y ago
> Uber engineers used many bogus reasons to implement NIH projects
In my experience this is one of the most toxic diseases an engineering org can catch. It often comes from smart, technically capable engineers who are more concerned with impressing their peers than growing the company. They come up with a BS reason to re-implement some rock solid 3rd party tech, spend ages doing it, only to leave the company as it starts to comes crumbling down. At that point other engineers have to put in massive effort to rip out their buggy timesink, and replace it with the open source library/database/protocol/whatever that was the obvious choice from the start.
If people like this exist in your org, you either need to convince them of the error of their ways, or let them go. The damage they cause when left unchecked is just too great.
- john_moscow 7y ago>It often comes from smart, technically capable engineers who are more concerned with impressing their peers than growing the company. Well, if the company's business is connecting drivers with riders, there isn't much engineering involved in growing the company. Pricing, handling investors, PR/advertising and working with municipal governments does affect your growth. The exact details on how you store the destination's GPS coordinates in the database don't really matter. A good product manager who understands usability and can communicate their ideas to the management can add some value, but having a 20% lower price than the competitors do will make 90% of the users ignore any usability hiccups. Hiring thousands of engineers to maintain a process that only needs a handful is perfectly reasonable, since the investors don't understand tech and generally like the head count. So this is critical for raising VC capital needed to subsidize the rides, that in turns gives great growth numbers. A typical developer doesn't understand these mechanics. And even if they did, the only alternative to delivering useless unneeded results would be to resign, except good luck finding a competitively paying non-bullshit job in the current market.
- golemiprague 7y agoThat's not true, companies like instagram for example didn't have many developers when they got sold for billions. The investors don't want their money wasted, they want the growth even when not profitable but they are not stupid and if a company can achieve this growth with few developers they will be more than happy to support it.
- yashap 7y agoThis doesn’t match my experience at all. Every tech company that I or my close friends have worked for has huge backlogs of features they want to implement, and huge amounts of tech debt they’d like to eliminate. They have to prioritize ruthlessly to select a small number of projects that they actually have the resources to complete. Reimplementing rock solid 3rd party tech just takes away from this, AND introduces huge maintenance burdens.
- john_moscow 7y agoOut of curiosity, is there anything in common about the structure of those companies? Small bootstrapped businesses? Mid-size profitable enterprise? VC-backed startups? Large publicly traded companies?
- yashap 7y agoMostly VC backed ex-startups (now 10+ yrs old, 100s to 1000s of employees). Though I’ve also got a few friends at a bootstrapped company that never took VC money (~15 years old, but still small, ~30 employees), as well as a number of friends at Amazon (working on different RDS teams). All have had the same experience re: there being more feature work and tech debt elimination than they have the resources to complete.