5 ms·

That pretty well fits the typical mindset of the past decade. Nobody wants to take risks and build shit, everyone is instead looking for a noble excuse to get t

That pretty well fits the typical mindset of the past decade. Nobody wants to take risks and build shit, everyone is instead looking for a noble excuse to get their share of money and authority without actually doing any hard work.

nine_zeros 5y ago
Sounds like my current company. Devs have been complaining about how the tooling has become progressively worse but no one with a fat paycheck cares...so it doesn't get done...until something catches fire.
- coryrc 5y ago
  Does your company offer fat paychecks for improving internal tooling?
  - chmod775 5y ago
    Developers who make the lives of their peers at work easier are well-liked. The people who decide your paychecks typically don't understand what you're doing anyways, so I wouldn't worry about that.
  - bluGill 5y ago
    Sometimes. If you make a tool that has been in use for years - long enough that engineers who turned to management are now in senior management position remember using and liking it back int the day - then you can get a good paycheck to maintain it. Of course this assumes that the tool is still relevant 25 years from when you first created it. Note that this is about you creating and maintaining the tool, taking over someone else's tool might work, but is probably seen as a job for a junior developer. In some cases you can wait for things to get really bad and then be rewarded for saving the day. (I strong oppose this - a good engineer should see problems and fix them before they get that bad) You can spend 10% of your time maintaining tools so long as the other 90% has great value. Great value means you see the market need and develop the first prototype that demonstrates the idea works (then turn this over to a new team to make production worthy while you go on to invent something else). You can run numbers to prove that your tool makes a difference. (Some at Facebook can show hundreds of thousands of dollars saved as a result of their tools) There are probably others - but none are easy to get into.
  - alexjplant 5y ago
    Many don't because that type of work doesn't directly and obviously drive revenue, doesn't have slick customer-facing UX, and isn't on the radar of product or management. For every shop that actually has their act together there are two that fall into this trap; from what I gather consulting and contracting places in particular are quite prone to this line of thinking since the distinction between billable and non-billable work underscores this further and leads to especially perverse incentive structures.
    - dzhiurgis 5y ago
      Yet in so many consulting firms people are just twiddling their thumbs without any work.
  - nine_zeros 5y ago
    > Does your company offer fat paychecks for improving internal tooling? It does. But not to me. There are entire teams with millions of dollars of budget to improve tooling. But of course they only do what they like. And my management doesn't care enough to bring our complaints to them. Individual engineer complaints are ignored.
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I'm on a project with 3 developers and 5(!) project mismanagers. The developers have laptops with 8 GB of RAM, which has to swap 4 GB to disk if they simply open their IDE. When they type or click things, it's like a slide-show. I raised this with the PMs repeatedly as a significant project risk. Oh... we can't do anything about that they chorused. That's a different department, that's a different budget, etc, etc... Excuse after excuse. The PM salaries sum to about $1M per annum, but 3 laptops are just too hard for them to organise. Too hard. Can't be done. Just stop asking. Shh. We're busy.
  - onphonenow 5y ago
    As we see here, it's much easier to criticize then to build.
  - garyfirestorm 5y ago
    yeah i buy my own ram lol (for my work laptop) that 100$ will save me years of stress if anything remotely looks like slideshow when it isnt supposed to
  - john_moscow 5y ago
    Sounds like one of these companies that just got some investor money, hired friends of friends, and are enjoying the ride. There are exactly zero reasons to try and save the sinking ship. If you succeed, they will just hire more buddies over your head. If they fail, you will be scapegoated. I would say, be nice and polite, take your time learning whatever tech you need to get a better job, prepare for interviews, get an offer, shake hands and move on...
  - JPKab 5y ago
    Are you at a large corporation? A government agency? Just curious about what kind of project has more managers than developers. That's an amazing level of waste and incompetence to allow that to even happen.
    - jiggawatts 5y ago
      It’s a large org, but I’ve seen the same kind of attitude even at small companies. I once had to do development on a 640x480 resolution screen because those fancy large monitors are “too expensive”. That place had less than 30 staff.
JPKab 5y ago
Worked in defense in a previous life. Spent a lot of time in DC and northern Virginia. Take any amazing organization that does great things, give it a bunch of money, and have the revenue stream not get impacted by failure. You get rot. You get IBM 1960 vs IBM the 2010s - present horror show. You get Ford in 1920 vs Ford in 1980. And this isn't limited to the private sector. It's a feature of massive organizations where revenue is divorced from success. The US Federal Government is an utter horror show. It was once an amazingly capable collection of efficient, nimble organizations. It could hire rogues and mavericks when needed, and was able to fire the desk-riders too. It's now a rotted-out shell. Success happens in-spite of, and never because-of, the organizations themselves. I always invite people to go and work with one of the US Fed contractors or agencies. Go look at their job postings. Look at the energy levels of the team members. It's somewhere between a DMV and a mausoleum. Ask yourself if you honestly think they need more money or just far fewer, far higher paid staff with the same or even less budget. Then ask yourself if these organizations are capable of understanding, let alone governing, complex domains.
- dougmwne 5y ago
  Bingo. See also: many nonprofit organizations for the exact same reason. DC is a world unto itself.
- deeviant 5y ago
  When was the this golden age of US federal government efficiency?
  - thereare5lights 5y ago
    You probably meant this in jest, but a few projects come to mind such as the federal highways, the moon landing, the Manhattan project. I doubt we'd be able to do that today at at least the same efficiency.
    - john_moscow 5y ago
      Most of these projects were driven by competition with USSR. I.e., push for results under limited resources. With globalization we have eliminated it and are now left to rot, splinter and wait until the competition between the shards of the former empire sparks progress again. Except, there's also China with superior morale, superior education and superior efficiency, that might have better plans for the resources left behind a fallen empire...

nine_zeros 5y ago

Sounds like my current company. Devs have been complaining about how the tooling has become progressively worse but no one with a fat paycheck cares...so it doesn't get done...until something catches fire.

coryrc 5y ago
Does your company offer fat paychecks for improving internal tooling?
- chmod775 5y ago
  Developers who make the lives of their peers at work easier are well-liked. The people who decide your paychecks typically don't understand what you're doing anyways, so I wouldn't worry about that.
- bluGill 5y ago
  Sometimes. If you make a tool that has been in use for years - long enough that engineers who turned to management are now in senior management position remember using and liking it back int the day - then you can get a good paycheck to maintain it. Of course this assumes that the tool is still relevant 25 years from when you first created it. Note that this is about you creating and maintaining the tool, taking over someone else's tool might work, but is probably seen as a job for a junior developer. In some cases you can wait for things to get really bad and then be rewarded for saving the day. (I strong oppose this - a good engineer should see problems and fix them before they get that bad) You can spend 10% of your time maintaining tools so long as the other 90% has great value. Great value means you see the market need and develop the first prototype that demonstrates the idea works (then turn this over to a new team to make production worthy while you go on to invent something else). You can run numbers to prove that your tool makes a difference. (Some at Facebook can show hundreds of thousands of dollars saved as a result of their tools) There are probably others - but none are easy to get into.
- alexjplant 5y ago
  Many don't because that type of work doesn't directly and obviously drive revenue, doesn't have slick customer-facing UX, and isn't on the radar of product or management. For every shop that actually has their act together there are two that fall into this trap; from what I gather consulting and contracting places in particular are quite prone to this line of thinking since the distinction between billable and non-billable work underscores this further and leads to especially perverse incentive structures.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    Yet in so many consulting firms people are just twiddling their thumbs without any work.
- nine_zeros 5y ago
  > Does your company offer fat paychecks for improving internal tooling? It does. But not to me. There are entire teams with millions of dollars of budget to improve tooling. But of course they only do what they like. And my management doesn't care enough to bring our complaints to them. Individual engineer complaints are ignored.
jiggawatts 5y ago
I'm on a project with 3 developers and 5(!) project mismanagers. The developers have laptops with 8 GB of RAM, which has to swap 4 GB to disk if they simply open their IDE. When they type or click things, it's like a slide-show. I raised this with the PMs repeatedly as a significant project risk. Oh... we can't do anything about that they chorused. That's a different department, that's a different budget, etc, etc... Excuse after excuse. The PM salaries sum to about $1M per annum, but 3 laptops are just too hard for them to organise. Too hard. Can't be done. Just stop asking. Shh. We're busy.
- onphonenow 5y ago
  As we see here, it's much easier to criticize then to build.
- garyfirestorm 5y ago
  yeah i buy my own ram lol (for my work laptop) that 100$ will save me years of stress if anything remotely looks like slideshow when it isnt supposed to
- john_moscow 5y ago
  Sounds like one of these companies that just got some investor money, hired friends of friends, and are enjoying the ride. There are exactly zero reasons to try and save the sinking ship. If you succeed, they will just hire more buddies over your head. If they fail, you will be scapegoated. I would say, be nice and polite, take your time learning whatever tech you need to get a better job, prepare for interviews, get an offer, shake hands and move on...
- JPKab 5y ago
  Are you at a large corporation? A government agency? Just curious about what kind of project has more managers than developers. That's an amazing level of waste and incompetence to allow that to even happen.
  - jiggawatts 5y ago
    It’s a large org, but I’ve seen the same kind of attitude even at small companies. I once had to do development on a 640x480 resolution screen because those fancy large monitors are “too expensive”. That place had less than 30 staff.

JPKab 5y ago

Worked in defense in a previous life. Spent a lot of time in DC and northern Virginia. Take any amazing organization that does great things, give it a bunch of money, and have the revenue stream not get impacted by failure. You get rot. You get IBM 1960 vs IBM the 2010s - present horror show. You get Ford in 1920 vs Ford in 1980. And this isn't limited to the private sector. It's a feature of massive organizations where revenue is divorced from success. The US Federal Government is an utter horror show. It was once an amazingly capable collection of efficient, nimble organizations. It could hire rogues and mavericks when needed, and was able to fire the desk-riders too. It's now a rotted-out shell. Success happens in-spite of, and never because-of, the organizations themselves. I always invite people to go and work with one of the US Fed contractors or agencies. Go look at their job postings. Look at the energy levels of the team members. It's somewhere between a DMV and a mausoleum. Ask yourself if you honestly think they need more money or just far fewer, far higher paid staff with the same or even less budget. Then ask yourself if these organizations are capable of understanding, let alone governing, complex domains.

dougmwne 5y ago
Bingo. See also: many nonprofit organizations for the exact same reason. DC is a world unto itself.
deeviant 5y ago
When was the this golden age of US federal government efficiency?
- thereare5lights 5y ago
  You probably meant this in jest, but a few projects come to mind such as the federal highways, the moon landing, the Manhattan project. I doubt we'd be able to do that today at at least the same efficiency.
  - john_moscow 5y ago
    Most of these projects were driven by competition with USSR. I.e., push for results under limited resources. With globalization we have eliminated it and are now left to rot, splinter and wait until the competition between the shards of the former empire sparks progress again. Except, there's also China with superior morale, superior education and superior efficiency, that might have better plans for the resources left behind a fallen empire...