4 ms·

> So, um, who decides what belongs in production? Product Owner, or just management? On a side note: in "mature" markets a bricklayer nor an architect, nor co

by rvba 5y ago

> So, um, who decides what belongs in production? Product Owner, or just management? On a side note: in "mature" markets a bricklayer nor an architect, nor constructor can really build anything they want without anyone looking.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I'm confused why anyone would think this is about optics and not about performance. If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. As for mature markets - useless and/or broken buildings happen all the time. Sometimes this is because a starchitect is good at making buildings that look incredible but bad at making buildings that don't have problems. (Calatrava, Frank Lloyd Wright, many more.) Sometimes it's because the project is extractive and the goal is money at the expense of quality - or even usability. (Many housing estates and not a few McMansions.) Both of these are different to a tech co hiring the equivalent of a minor starchitect to Make A Thing Happen, but getting something non-performant and/or impossible to maintain. The difference is that unless it's a greenfield startup Thing is likely to be easy to define and its performance should be easy to measure objectively with simple metrics like uptime, throughput, and so on.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. Half of the companies would have died if they followed this -- including Twitter (which had to cron-restart Rails to get it to run for more than a day in its early years, Facebook, ...)
Jetrel 5y ago
They can look, but as you go up the scale of complexity, at a certain point, only the master tradesmen will have a clue whether the work is good or not. Any high-skill industry has huge amounts of problems with this — rarely outright fraud, but lots of problems with "confidence men" pitching mediocre solutions to problems, and conning their way into running the full lifecycle of contracts based on this. Generally they'll deliver something, but it's usually something pretty mediocre that only kind of does the job. The further a thing is from a company's core competency (and thus, the likelihood that the executives have subject-matter expertise), the more likely this problem is. People can raise objections all they want, but there's so much "poor faith" lying done in our world, that, as a boss, it's almost impossible to tell which things are libel, and which things are a desperate attempt to warn you something's wrong. Rigorous "professional bodies" like doctor's associations help immensely. These problems are at their worst in fields where things like that don't exist (such as software).

by rvba 5y ago

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

I'm confused why anyone would think this is about optics and not about performance. If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. As for mature markets - useless and/or broken buildings happen all the time. Sometimes this is because a starchitect is good at making buildings that look incredible but bad at making buildings that don't have problems. (Calatrava, Frank Lloyd Wright, many more.) Sometimes it's because the project is extractive and the goal is money at the expense of quality - or even usability. (Many housing estates and not a few McMansions.) Both of these are different to a tech co hiring the equivalent of a minor starchitect to Make A Thing Happen, but getting something non-performant and/or impossible to maintain. The difference is that unless it's a greenfield startup Thing is likely to be easy to define and its performance should be easy to measure objectively with simple metrics like uptime, throughput, and so on.

coldtea 5y ago
>If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. Half of the companies would have died if they followed this -- including Twitter (which had to cron-restart Rails to get it to run for more than a day in its early years, Facebook, ...)

Jetrel 5y ago

They can look, but as you go up the scale of complexity, at a certain point, only the master tradesmen will have a clue whether the work is good or not. Any high-skill industry has huge amounts of problems with this — rarely outright fraud, but lots of problems with "confidence men" pitching mediocre solutions to problems, and conning their way into running the full lifecycle of contracts based on this. Generally they'll deliver something, but it's usually something pretty mediocre that only kind of does the job. The further a thing is from a company's core competency (and thus, the likelihood that the executives have subject-matter expertise), the more likely this problem is. People can raise objections all they want, but there's so much "poor faith" lying done in our world, that, as a boss, it's almost impossible to tell which things are libel, and which things are a desperate attempt to warn you something's wrong. Rigorous "professional bodies" like doctor's associations help immensely. These problems are at their worst in fields where things like that don't exist (such as software).