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It's not just growth-oriented new companies. The old ACME BigCorp.'s have exactly the same problems, but not because they disregard best practices because every
by iSnow 7y ago
It's not just growth-oriented new companies. The old ACME BigCorp.'s have exactly the same problems, but not because they disregard best practices because everyone is fixated on growth, but because inertia has crept in everywhere. Because everything is executed top-down and there's no back-channel. Because people care about their yearly bonuses and would rather not bring up uncomfortable truth to their superiors.
And most of all, because there are zero techies among managers. There's a complete mental disconnect between the tech-savvy among the grunts and even their direct reports, let alone more senior management.
Those companies then pay big money for external consultants to tell them how to fix issues; the consultants tell them the obvious solutions from their books (which may or may not overlap with what the grunts would have told them), and then those solutions are pushed down in the next restructuring.
Where I work, senior management has just discovered DevOps & Agile, and now everyone has been told to do DevOps, but without breaking up the top-down communication style. That's going to work just wonderfully.
- nicoburns 7y ago> senior management has just discovered DevOps & Agile, and now everyone has been told to do DevOps, but without breaking up the top-down communication style I'd argue that they haven't discovered Agile, although they might think they have. The whole point is to disrupt these traditional ways of working.
- closeparen 7y agoThe theme across agile implementations is control over what's taken on and accountability for what gets done at very high granularity. The whole thing about breaking up complex stories into subtasks is do not abstract away any details from me, I want to know everything. It's hard to imagine this being a less top down communication style. What are you comparing it to?
- nicoburns 7y agoI've worked in companies where breaking things down into subtasks was genuinely used as a tool to prevent the dev team from being overworked.
- bdavis__ 7y agosame here. the belief is that just using using CI/CD tools will make us efficient. nothing against CI/CD, but the organization has much larger problems.