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I am a senior engineering manager for machine learning in a large ecommerce company. As an engineering manager, all of my stakeholders do not care or consider c

by mlthoughts2018 6y ago

I am a senior engineering manager for machine learning in a large ecommerce company. As an engineering manager, all of my stakeholders do not care or consider code quality or tech debt. Period. At all. I have to burn bridges, cash in hard won favors, and be generally super pedantic and unpopular any time I have to defend technical quality as a worthwhile goal. I have to give presentations, scour months worth of incident postmortem data and exhaustively lobby for every single millimeter of leeway to protect technical quality. It is universally viewed as the number one thing “getting in our way” and preventing us from having greater delivery speed or agility to experiment with new features. This article seems to describe a fantasy world where technical and product leaders care about code quality and are supportive of the efforts required to maintain it. I have never encountered any place of business where this is remotely true.

ambicapter 6y ago
> preventing us from having greater delivery speed or agility to experiment with new features. Seems like these people don't actually know what it is like to code (shocking, I know). The biggest factor preventing me from moving fast on the codebase I deal with at work is the non-existent design/poorly thought-out/non-ergonomic code base.
BurningFrog 6y ago
In a well factored organization, you shouldn't even have to mention you're spending time on technical quality. That should be an internal "encapsulated" concern of the engineering effort. Conversations with stakeholders should only deal with delivering features/user value.
- mlthoughts2018 6y ago
  What fantasy world does that organization exist in? For example, working at Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon is not in any way similar to that (and those are employers with some of the highest respect for technical quality).
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    I've worked at several such places. It helps to build trust with the rest of the company, so they don't demand to micromanage everything you do.
ylong 6y ago
If machine learning implies Python here, I am not surprised. In the Python world, generally one has to fight an uphill battle for correctness and quality. Those who do are often ousted. Most Python programmers have horrible attitudes towards software engineering.

ambicapter 6y ago

> preventing us from having greater delivery speed or agility to experiment with new features. Seems like these people don't actually know what it is like to code (shocking, I know). The biggest factor preventing me from moving fast on the codebase I deal with at work is the non-existent design/poorly thought-out/non-ergonomic code base.

BurningFrog 6y ago

In a well factored organization, you shouldn't even have to mention you're spending time on technical quality. That should be an internal "encapsulated" concern of the engineering effort. Conversations with stakeholders should only deal with delivering features/user value.

mlthoughts2018 6y ago
What fantasy world does that organization exist in? For example, working at Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon is not in any way similar to that (and those are employers with some of the highest respect for technical quality).
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  I've worked at several such places. It helps to build trust with the rest of the company, so they don't demand to micromanage everything you do.

ylong 6y ago

If machine learning implies Python here, I am not surprised. In the Python world, generally one has to fight an uphill battle for correctness and quality. Those who do are often ousted. Most Python programmers have horrible attitudes towards software engineering.