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I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all. We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot

I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all. We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. If anyone has read Developer Hegemony, I'm fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. Though that does require us to think of ourselves as professionals not nerds who are too smart for business.

drbojingle 5y ago
Are you honestly telling me that developers know best? All that leverage and you just want to not listen to anyone? Honestly you'd get further not leveraging anything than doing that. I agree with your last paragraph and your first but that second is a doozy.
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gieksosz 5y ago
There are such partnerships, they are called dev agencies. Usually good for partners themselves, less so for rank and file employees.
- skywal_l 5y ago
  Exactly like any lawyer firm.
- WJW 5y ago
  That is exactly the problem with the "Dev Hegemony" book; it spends the first half of the book showing how the current system naturally evolves from very human flaws like ambition and pride, then tries to spend the second half of the book going "Yeah but what if we all start treating each other as equals (except non-programmer, they get to be non-owner employees only)". World peace would also be an easy problem to solve if you can get everyone to just get along, but without a practical way of getting there it's just a pipe dream.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    I mean I figure all I need to do is find one dev I get on well with to become a partner. In-fact someone floated it with me a few years ago and I was lukewarm because I didn't think I was ready (kind of regret it).
    - WJW 5y ago
      Starting an agency is the easiest part. Then after that comes the never ending grind to find and retain customers, who will never pay on time, refuse to budget time for frivolities like "testing" and "refactoring" and who will mercilessly shop out the work to as many of your competitors as they can find. Developer agencies have existed for decades and the reason that not everybody is rushing to work for them is because they are generally very poor place to work for compared to regular companies, even as a partner. They're often derogatorily called "body shops" for a reason.
      - LAC-Tech 5y ago
        As an independent contractor for the past two years, It hasn't been much of a grind finding and retaining customers. You have to put some work in, sure, but I don't feel it's particularly onerous. Never had to take someone out to dinner or cold call. People need software development skills and generally like it when you find them. As for never being paid on time - I think the most late it's ever been has been 2 weeks. Pretty annoying but not the biggest deal in the world.
        WJW 5y ago
        Maybe I misunderstand what you hope to get out of the partnership then? The Dev Hegemony book describes a situation where everyone (every dev at least) magically becomes an "opportunist" in the books terms, without going into what will happen to all the pragmatists and idealists. Nor does it have an answer for why the opportunist/idealist/pragmatist divide will not reappear inside the agency.
        5y ago
jeffreygoesto 5y ago
Maybe because programming in itself is not valued? Changing things with automation is, thus you need to have the right mix of domain knowledge and solution skills to be successful. As these often are not found in one person (exceptions confirm the rule of course ;-}), you need a number of people collaborating. Appreciation for the "other" side takes time and can only grow with mutual trust backed up by joint success. Only pretending to know the domain and micro-managing into the "other side" is real and not helpful, as you wrote. This applies to programmers as well, they often mouth about how they know what would be best for the company and in reality just don't know all the constraints and background on the business side. Let alone how much of a social game creating software for others really is.
edanm 5y ago
> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. I highly disagree with this. For some reason, many devs seem to think they are somehow better than everyone else, that they are the most important part of any team, that no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren't important. News flash - all of the above is none-sense. Developers are a profession that provides a specific skill, a highly valued one, but one that is a part of building things in most cases. There's nothing demeaning or wrong about devs having managers, whether or not they happen to also have been developers themselves. Some great software managers were never developers, and some great developers are horrible managers, just like in every other profession. > It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. Every skilled profession has people who are managed. Doctors, lawyers, they all have managers, and most of them interact with the public, who can override their expert opinions.
- chii 5y ago
  and yet i don't tell my plumbers to give me a standup for the day. I tell them what i wanted achieved, and i pay. it gets done. If there's a delay, i expect the plumber to tell me promptly, and i re-evaluate the work. Some programmers do get treated this way - consultants and such. But the majority is not - they are considered a cog in a machine.
  - edanm 5y ago
    Plumbers that you personally hire to your house are similar to software consultants. They're often more than "just" plumbers - they're small business owners, so they do a lot of things besides plumbing (e.g. marketing, business management, etc). Again, similar to software contractors. But take plumbers working construction on a 30-story building. They're usually part of a team, and work together with dozens if not hundreds of other professionals. Do you think they don't have meetings where they get together with the other teams, discuss problems, progress etc? I'm not defending stand-ups here, btw. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't. But if your measure of "developers are treated badly" is "developers are asked to be in a 10-minute meeting to talk about their work progress", I think you're missing the forest for the trees in terms of what are and aren't good working conditions.
dzikimarian 5y ago
Typically if you don't have development team, that really works directly with the customer (being mostly silent on random calls doesn't count) - without some kind of project manager, you'll end up with a lot of work done by dev team, which they falsely assume is necessary (unrealistic edge cases, premature optimization, misunderstood requirements). Most of the teams I worked with, found direct work with customer way worse than some internal alignment meetings. That being said, most effective teams I worked with(as dev and as supervisor), were managed by ex or active senior developers, who really put an effort into businesses side of the work, so they had full perspective of both sides. Problem is: * First and foremost - most developers are not interested in this type of work. * Not all are capable * Most of these who do that, internally still uses dailies, unless everyone in their team is on the same level (which is extremely rare due to point one).
- plutonorm 5y ago
  I'm interested and capable and yet there are no opportunities to transition. I tried for years to make it happen. People aren't interested in ex Devs for anything business, in mid sized UK companies. I've gone off to found a company instead.
potamic 5y ago
Well, the customers must have a say in the planning and the tradeoffs that are being made :) But what grinds my gears is when managers do not apply the same planning principles for their own tasks and deliverables.
throwaway22032 5y ago
YMMV. All of the companies I've worked for have been developer run besides one, which was basically in a permanent state of collapse as everyone left a few months in.
lelanthran 5y ago
> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development. I mentioned how stand-ups work briefly, and that it might not be a bad idea to adopt for (for example) an accounting department to keep things on task. The response was both extreme and universal: How the hell do you all accept being micromanaged to such a degree? Don't any of you have any dignity? Every single one of them (all professionals, like I said) were adamant that they would leave any position that managed them no better than a burger-flipper. No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress.
- ggm 5y ago
  > No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management. I think other professions may do the same.
  - Juliate 5y ago
    You do it daily when you're managing life/death-impacting operations (ER, hospitals, factories with team shifts). Software engineering/IT RUN and SUPPORT activities MAY fit there too, but that does not even mandate a daily review. BUILD activities definitely don't. And worse, teams mixing RUN and BUILD roles... definitely don't.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    > Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management. Maybe, but it is removed. From my recollection, doctors don't standup each day to report on what they have or have not done and their individual progress, they report on purely on problematic patients that could do with expertise from a different expert, and it's not a daily progress report. If software development followed that sort of practice, we'd have problematic issues added to a pool that gets discussed once a week. What we have is micro-management of each individual. Doctors most certainly aren't being micromanaged like that (well, not the one who I was socialising with, and not any of the others I've socialised with).
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hnbad 5y ago
> turn bosses into customers Congratulations, you just invented software consulting agencies. But jokes aside, what you want sounds a lot like developer anarchy (which in practical terms means replacing technical management with direct communication between all developers in a team) but there are two problems that are apparently easy to overlook with this approach: 1. Teams still exist in a company that is likely larger than just a single development team. You can use direct democracy to appoint representatives and delegate political power, but unless the entire company is a worker coop, there are limitations to the team's autonomy and there is ultimately a monopoly of violence at the top (i.e. the CEO can fire you, you can't fire the CEO) crushing down on you when a conflict can't be settled. 2. Companies still exist within capitalism and need to make a profit to be sustainable. The ugly truth about turning bosses into customers (i.e. going freelance or becoming an agency) is that customers are still your boss, there's just a chance you'll eventually have enough of them to be able to fire them and not kill your company. But to have any shot at getting there you'll need to rake in cash, not just to cover your expenses but also to build up a runway.
kalado 5y ago
This doesn't sound like a correct stand-up to me. My understanding and how we are actually doing it: You say what you did and plan on doing, no comment are made, it's just an FYI for everyone else. And/Or you have the chance to present a problem you are having and you arrange a "let's talk later" with someone who can help you. What you are describing sounds like a daily mini breakdown / refinement.
detaro 5y ago
> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. I mean, that's really doing it wrong. (yes, I know people call everything "standup" even if it as here has nothing to do with the idea of what its supposed to be, but still...) This is not universal in software.
hkt 5y ago
Amen - I tried I convince a group of people I'd been contracting with to set up a partnership model along these lines, specifically so we could carve out that kind of control. No such luck, people were happy because day rates in the UK were (and are) ludicrously high.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Why does the height of day rates affect it? (Honest question.)
  - q-base 5y ago
    Your willingness to try new ways is probably inverse proportional to your current wage.
    - OJFord 5y ago
      Ah, sure, fair enough. Thanks.
lm28469 5y ago
> non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. If these people weren't there half of the programmer population would be stuck in and endless refactoring loop. Programmers are tools, tools need people to use them
- JackMorgan 5y ago
  I don't care for the dehumanization in this comment. Sounds like the thinking that calls employees "resources" and considers them fungible cogs.
  - lm28469 5y ago
    There is no dehumanisation intended. Everyone has a place and a function. You don't let a car mechanic drive during the race, or a jet pilot do the maintenance of his plane, well same for a programmer, you don't let them make project/business related decisions, because it's neither their job nor their responsibility and most of them are inept at making decision out of their little world, that's why we have project managers, executives, &c. I've worked in companies in which programmers were gods and decided pretty much everything, I felt like I was back in uni projects, and that's not a compliment. Tech and codebases are virtually irrelevant in most companies compared to project management end business decisions.
    - mirchibajji 5y ago
      Your analogies are not helping your point :) Programmers are not the ones driving the plane or flying the car - they are the mechanics and engineers.
      - deleted 5y ago
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yobbo 5y ago
> we start operating like lawyers with partnerships One analogy is; lawyering is like singing a never-ending song, whereas software is like a self-playing piano. The lawyer is needed until the song is finished, which is partly up to himself. A software consultant delivers a self-playing piano and must come back, cap in hand, asking for more work to improve it. When software is working, it is assumed to be "finished" or "correct". Additional work is assumed to either fix bugs ("earlier mistakes"), or implement new features and improvements (which are optional and involves a sales process).
skhm 5y ago
That book really resonated with me; as in, it vibrated at exactly my resonant frequency and, like a wine glass, broke me. I couldn't enjoy professional programming in the same way once the veil had been lifted.
thenerdhead 5y ago
When your bonus is tied to making your incompetent boss happy, I’m sure you’d sit quietly through a horribly ran standup too. I don’t see what is preventing anyone from operating like that today. I do that and I know many others do that. Yes sometimes there is cat herding to be done, but boundaries are needed or else you become a doormat. Stand up for yourself, time is limited in our lives.
KoftaBob 5y ago
> It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. Physicians at hospitals know your pain, as their product manager equivalent is hospital administration micro managing how they can practice medicine.
tomohawk 5y ago
Just because you're standing up, and it's daily, doesn't mean your having a standup. You may just be part of a cargo cult. A standup is a communication meeting, where only those actually doing the work should be communicating. Other people should listen in and ask questions afterwards. There are plenty of other opportunities for project managers and others to have an impact. Impeding the team's communication, even if well meaning, is counterproductive. But, like most things, those who have power will always find a way to subvert available mechanisms to enhance their power, even when it costs more, takes longer, and pisses people off.
lewisjoe 5y ago
That is why working under a non-technical manager is a strong deal-breaker for me. Fortunately at Zoho where I work, the management culture is rooted with an engineering background. Even the CEO himself, works on hard problems like compilers and dev-friendly formal verification. I don't think I'll survive a single sprint under a non-technical decision maker.
api 5y ago
The last part is why. The general stereotype of developers on the biz or design side is that they are smart but incredibly narrowly focused and refuse to comprehend anything outside their domain.
Kharvok 5y ago
This heavily assumes that maximizing technical delivery at all times also maximizes value. That's just not the case outside of a component team or very large technology org structure.
nathias 5y ago
I have hopes that remote and DAOs will be the tools to do this.
gureddio 5y ago
I totally see your point of view. However in my experience, there is not enough developer competency for this to fully work. I can imagine lots of developers going off task if things worked in this way - there would be too much freedom, and with that temptation, to over engineer and re-engineer
sealthedeal 5y ago
One of the best standup habits we had was just posting quickly in a slack channel at a certain time saying, "no update", or "blocked", it was low touch. I have always thought that a standup is just a way of being micro managed. If an engineer is blocked, why would they not just figure out how to get unblocked? Isnt that their job?
- jghn 5y ago
  The part of standup identifying blockers is to figure out when someone doesn't realize their blocked and/or they're spinning their tires a bit. If someone is blocked they should reach out immediately. Instead, standups provide the team the ability to identify roadblocks the developer might not realize. Perhaps you're working on something and I've been down that path before, and know your solution won't work for reasons you're not aware of. I can tell you that now and save you several hours of banging your head against the wall.
  - blindmute 5y ago
    Has this ever actually happened though?
    - Tagbert 5y ago
      Frequently, especially with junior developers.
rixed 5y ago
Not only are devs micromanaged by any figure of authority with not much tech knowledge and sometime not even business knowledge and freshly landed from a different industry, if not from school, but devs are also happy to be, quite frankly, considered as mere children. Other skilled professions do not either communicate with memes, have slides and swings in the office (as seen in some Google offices), etc. If part of the geek culture is being infantile, that's no wonder that devs got told what to do. I don't know if the gamification of dev work went so far because of this, or if the causality goes the other way around.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  I've said it before that these "copy paste" and "stack overflow" memes reflect badly on us. People don't realise that others are forming real life opinions on these memes.
  - musingsole 5y ago
    > People don't realise that others are forming real life opinions on these memes. Maybe, but if any non-developer internalizes a worldview from those memes...that really just means they're blind to the usually worse offenses in other careers. While not perfect, measuring programmer productivity is infinitely easier than a long list of other job roles. At the top of that list is "middle manager". We take hits on the chin about elitism, sexism, whatever other low-point of human nature. Meanwhile, whoever is spewing the critique fails to notice that in practically any other role, the *-isms are worse and harder to prove.
- SteveMoody73 5y ago
  I've always worked in small companies and been responsible for getting the work done, as a solo developer in a lot of cases here was nobody to blame if things went wrong. In a larger company now but it's still a smaller place, have the same attitude to work even now. Maybe it's this environment has made me a more serious person than some of the other developers I know. Don't use memes in conversations with collegues and certainly have no interest in toys and games in the office. Would love to not be responsible and not treat work as a fun place but don't see how that's possible if you care about your job and the work that you produce.
blockwriter 5y ago
I feel like lawyers enjoy this relationship because they control how many lawyers are admitted to the bar.
thebigspacefuck 5y ago
Erik Meijer has a great talk addressing this https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ
5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
I recently turned down a promotion to "Lead" because I witnessed the dynamics between the previous leads and the Project Manager. A Lead pretty much has to bow his head to even Junior PM's. It's like you're there to solve problems, and your opinion is only needed in moments of crisis. Even then people only defer to you in a almost disdainful way.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
That's such an awesome idea and would do wonders for the dignity of this profession. I haven't read Developer Hegemony but I absolutely will now.
mattgreenrocks 5y ago
> I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all...We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. 100%. It is completely absurd to watch. This sort of subordinate attitude pulls us all down. I think the issue boils down to: * new devs are not going to rock the boat * lots of people see software dev as as way to be successful within existing corporate hierarchies * a lot of devs have very little experience of what life looks like with engineers at the helm There's also the thing of most people seem to need hierarchies to feel secure. I don't quite understand it but I'm probably just weird. Personally, I will succeed in partially decoupling time for money in my labor. It's just a matter of when.
- blaser-waffle 5y ago
  > There's also the thing of most people seem to need hierarchies to feel secure. I don't quite understand it but I'm probably just weird. Social organisms usually have some sort of ordering hierarchy. While most of the 'alpha' and 'sigma-grindset' nonsense is just that -- nonsense -- people are hierarchical animals. It also means you don't need to give a damn about stuff that's above or below your paygrade. You do your hours on X, and other teams can worry about Y. > a lot of devs have very little experience of what life looks like with engineers at the helm A lot of devs have very little experience in a lot of fields. The best programmers I've met started coding at 15, went to MIT, and have been in software their whole lives; they have no paradigm outside of what they've been exposed to during their college-intern-jr.dev phases. Most of em that I know haven't ever worked a job flipping burgers or washing cars, either. Makes it hard to break out of that mentality, and also means that a lot of very smart coders do piss-poor jobs managing & leading. Inevitably the shitty engineer-managers fail, and the business types are dragged back in.
- BlargMcLarg 5y ago
  >new devs are not going to rock the boat I've done this as a new dev. In the end a few new devs aren't going to change things against stubborn old talent and a large swat of new devs passively standing by, until the proof is there. But that's the exact problem: these systems are so large, you need people to be willing to risk extrapolating a PoC or be willing to invest until the proof is there right in front of their eyes. With how risk-averse most companies are, the odds of this happening are miniscule. Unless you wish to invest your own time, effort and risk (which I don't think should be the answer, despite how often it is given).
wellpast 5y ago
None of this will happen until there we have an objective metric for determining the tangible value provided by developer. So, so many devs are great at building interesting tech, refactoring to more interesting tech, and so on, but entirely missing the mark of optimizing actual, upstream value delivery. I'm sure other industries have their means of demonstrating that this or that practitioner can both deliver and deliver quality. We don't have this at all in the software industry. Furthermore the overly common team processes and team structures in use don't even allow for demonstrating this.
tarsinge 5y ago
The problem is programmers are relatively immature regarding business, and confuse hobby programming with professional programming. Lawyers might like reading laws, but they are hired for winning a case. Programmers will continue to need non programmers to tell them what to do until they truly accept that code is just a mean to an end and that they are really hired to add business value. The test is simple: are they more concerned about the tech or the core business of their customers and how they can help them. Being paid for their hobby was nice but that golden age is over.
- pydry 5y ago
  Lawyers arent just hired to win cases just as programmers arent just hired to "make things work". Theyre hired to advise, to negotiate contracts and ensure compliance with existing and upcoming laws. It has a lot in common with programming on a systemic level, I think.
- augusto-moura 5y ago
  I see software engineering more like architecture or civil engineering, even though you are skilled and have your own opinions you still need to hear your clients and have managers to take some decisions. I agree that the management relationship in the building sector is very different though, micro management is the worst
mooreds 5y ago
> we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. I've definitely seen a number of consulting companies follow this pattern. This is one successful business pattern, no reason why more devs can't do this. However, someone needs to be the sales person and moves away from programming. Does that happen in law offices as well? (I believe so, but that is mostly from reading, not first hand experience. See also https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rainmaker https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rainmaker )
k__ 5y ago
Non-developers are losig ground and they know it. So, they try to pidgeonhole devs into non-business directions and infantilize them with stuff like pingpong tables.
rossdavidh 5y ago
So, my guess is that non-developers seeing Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Brin & Page, and other developers start business that then rewrote large parts of how society functioned, without much caring about what non-developers thought of this, would disagree. Developers are already perceived by many as acting in a high-handed manner to reshape society without caring about the opinion of that society. More use of "leverage" is not what seems called for. Now if you're the dev stuck in a bad corporate hierarchy, sure, it looks very different. But programmers as a group have used their leverage plenty, just maybe not in the ways that would always be helpful to other members of their group.
wilde 5y ago
Your point on leverage feels true. I just wish we’d use it to finally move away from the Google model of interviewing. Rather than having people do useless exercises on whiteboards we could do a 30m “are you a jerk” interview and then let the first year of job performance speak for itself.
starwind 5y ago
This comment kicked off one of the most interesting internet threads I've read in my life
Tagbert 5y ago
As a non-programmer who has sometimes joined standups as a product owner this seems like the developers are not standing up for their viewpoints in the process. The team’s I have worked on, we have an agreement that some percentage of the time should be devoted to refactoring and similar technical tasks. there may be a specific designation or it may be just a rough approximation but we respect each other enough to have a conversation about it and come to an agreement. My role is to ensure that the overall project and deliverable is on track. I will ask questions to clarify statements made in standup. I expect questions coming to me about requirements, intent, and timing. If there are problems with external teams, I will do my best to work out that blocker. I don’t dictate how the devs do their work as long as they are able to deliver the features that were agreed on. If that is not going to happen, we can have a discussion about why and what adjustment needs to be made. If more refactoring needs to be done, we can have that conversation. Talk to me about the cost and benefits of the refactoring and the impact on deliverables. It may be worthwhile accepting a delay in deliverables now. It may also be that those particular deliverables are important enough that the refactoring may need to be deferred even if the ultimate cost is higher. Those kinds of trade-offs cannot be done only by one part of the team but need to be weighed by the whole team. This kind of open and respectful discussion is part of a well functioning team. If you are not getting that then raise this as a problem in retrospectives because it needs to be addressed.
eli_gottlieb 5y ago
>If anyone has read Developer Hegemony, I'm fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. Though that does require us to think of ourselves as professionals not nerds who are too smart for business. I own a copy of Democracy at Work and know there are a number of software and IT cooperatives out there...
johny115 5y ago
"I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all." Devs might have leverage. But in terms of actually contributing to the success of their company, the data seems to suggest otherwise, as far as their importance is involved. It used to be all about technical talent and product excellence. But dive deeper into reasons why tech companies fail today, and you will see all points to Marketing. Not really in sense of Advertising/Acquisition, but Marketing and Business Strategy as whole. Research, Positioning, Model, Pricing, etc.. Basically more than half startups fail because they are building wrong product for wrong market (Marketing). Less than 10% companies fail because of issues with the tech side. I am not saying devs are not important and that there aren't big differences in the quality and speed of their work, but wouldn't go as far as claiming some sort of god-like status when devs are not really where the future of the business is decided (unless it's some extremely unique technology involving product, most aren't). As Brian Balfour says, the game has changed, it's all about distribution now. That being said, I wouldn't tell a dev how should their do their job. I can only lead them in terms of what we should be working on, what part of product or what feature, but how exactly to code it? Well that's of course up to them. We don't really micromanage in our company. We just all sync on priorities and then trust each other to execute as per everyone's best judgment. But yeah, we're a tiny company. That in a sense could be an advice, go work for a startup. Corporate micromanagement is a choice. To be honest, in a larger organization, I would be probably micromanaged too, even as a non-dev, and I would fu*king hate it. Don't think devs are special in this. Not like managers understand Growth and Product work either.
eternityforest 5y ago
Would programmers actually get anything done without micromanagement? Programmers like the search for beauty and solving interesting problems. They like simplicity, understanding, and privacy. Users and business people like features that just work and don't care about code quality, and are perfectly happy with spyware business models. Managers would probably run things into the ground with tech debt if they had full control.... but there might be a fear programmers would turn every project into something like KiCad and Vim put together, written in Haskell,with core use case features handled by "A simple 10 line user script". Firefox's market share is probably a good example of what happens when developers make decisions(Except web devs and the like who seem to have different personalities). Developers are always going to feel like they are being puppeted by morons because most developers don't seem to like the actual work their doing and sometimes even wish the product they make didn't exist. I never see programmers saying things like "I fucking love the IoT! Check out this awesome new API Google invented! Let's replace every kerosene lamp in the world with LEDs". Instead I see them telling me I should use dd instead of Etcher because Etcher is 80MB. As moronic as managers can be, at least they somewhat see the value in what they build.

drbojingle 5y ago

Are you honestly telling me that developers know best? All that leverage and you just want to not listen to anyone? Honestly you'd get further not leveraging anything than doing that. I agree with your last paragraph and your first but that second is a doozy.

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gieksosz 5y ago

There are such partnerships, they are called dev agencies. Usually good for partners themselves, less so for rank and file employees.

skywal_l 5y ago
Exactly like any lawyer firm.
WJW 5y ago
That is exactly the problem with the "Dev Hegemony" book; it spends the first half of the book showing how the current system naturally evolves from very human flaws like ambition and pride, then tries to spend the second half of the book going "Yeah but what if we all start treating each other as equals (except non-programmer, they get to be non-owner employees only)". World peace would also be an easy problem to solve if you can get everyone to just get along, but without a practical way of getting there it's just a pipe dream.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I mean I figure all I need to do is find one dev I get on well with to become a partner. In-fact someone floated it with me a few years ago and I was lukewarm because I didn't think I was ready (kind of regret it).
  - WJW 5y ago
    Starting an agency is the easiest part. Then after that comes the never ending grind to find and retain customers, who will never pay on time, refuse to budget time for frivolities like "testing" and "refactoring" and who will mercilessly shop out the work to as many of your competitors as they can find. Developer agencies have existed for decades and the reason that not everybody is rushing to work for them is because they are generally very poor place to work for compared to regular companies, even as a partner. They're often derogatorily called "body shops" for a reason.
    - LAC-Tech 5y ago
      As an independent contractor for the past two years, It hasn't been much of a grind finding and retaining customers. You have to put some work in, sure, but I don't feel it's particularly onerous. Never had to take someone out to dinner or cold call. People need software development skills and generally like it when you find them. As for never being paid on time - I think the most late it's ever been has been 2 weeks. Pretty annoying but not the biggest deal in the world.
      - WJW 5y ago
        Maybe I misunderstand what you hope to get out of the partnership then? The Dev Hegemony book describes a situation where everyone (every dev at least) magically becomes an "opportunist" in the books terms, without going into what will happen to all the pragmatists and idealists. Nor does it have an answer for why the opportunist/idealist/pragmatist divide will not reappear inside the agency.
        5y ago

jeffreygoesto 5y ago

Maybe because programming in itself is not valued? Changing things with automation is, thus you need to have the right mix of domain knowledge and solution skills to be successful. As these often are not found in one person (exceptions confirm the rule of course ;-}), you need a number of people collaborating. Appreciation for the "other" side takes time and can only grow with mutual trust backed up by joint success. Only pretending to know the domain and micro-managing into the "other side" is real and not helpful, as you wrote. This applies to programmers as well, they often mouth about how they know what would be best for the company and in reality just don't know all the constraints and background on the business side. Let alone how much of a social game creating software for others really is.

edanm 5y ago

> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. I highly disagree with this. For some reason, many devs seem to think they are somehow better than everyone else, that they are the most important part of any team, that no on besides them can have any insight on timelines, or budget, on which features are or aren't important. News flash - all of the above is none-sense. Developers are a profession that provides a specific skill, a highly valued one, but one that is a part of building things in most cases. There's nothing demeaning or wrong about devs having managers, whether or not they happen to also have been developers themselves. Some great software managers were never developers, and some great developers are horrible managers, just like in every other profession. > It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. Every skilled profession has people who are managed. Doctors, lawyers, they all have managers, and most of them interact with the public, who can override their expert opinions.

chii 5y ago
and yet i don't tell my plumbers to give me a standup for the day. I tell them what i wanted achieved, and i pay. it gets done. If there's a delay, i expect the plumber to tell me promptly, and i re-evaluate the work. Some programmers do get treated this way - consultants and such. But the majority is not - they are considered a cog in a machine.
- edanm 5y ago
  Plumbers that you personally hire to your house are similar to software consultants. They're often more than "just" plumbers - they're small business owners, so they do a lot of things besides plumbing (e.g. marketing, business management, etc). Again, similar to software contractors. But take plumbers working construction on a 30-story building. They're usually part of a team, and work together with dozens if not hundreds of other professionals. Do you think they don't have meetings where they get together with the other teams, discuss problems, progress etc? I'm not defending stand-ups here, btw. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't. But if your measure of "developers are treated badly" is "developers are asked to be in a 10-minute meeting to talk about their work progress", I think you're missing the forest for the trees in terms of what are and aren't good working conditions.

dzikimarian 5y ago

Typically if you don't have development team, that really works directly with the customer (being mostly silent on random calls doesn't count) - without some kind of project manager, you'll end up with a lot of work done by dev team, which they falsely assume is necessary (unrealistic edge cases, premature optimization, misunderstood requirements). Most of the teams I worked with, found direct work with customer way worse than some internal alignment meetings. That being said, most effective teams I worked with(as dev and as supervisor), were managed by ex or active senior developers, who really put an effort into businesses side of the work, so they had full perspective of both sides. Problem is: * First and foremost - most developers are not interested in this type of work. * Not all are capable * Most of these who do that, internally still uses dailies, unless everyone in their team is on the same level (which is extremely rare due to point one).

plutonorm 5y ago
I'm interested and capable and yet there are no opportunities to transition. I tried for years to make it happen. People aren't interested in ex Devs for anything business, in mid sized UK companies. I've gone off to found a company instead.

potamic 5y ago

Well, the customers must have a say in the planning and the tradeoffs that are being made :) But what grinds my gears is when managers do not apply the same planning principles for their own tasks and deliverables.

throwaway22032 5y ago

YMMV. All of the companies I've worked for have been developer run besides one, which was basically in a permanent state of collapse as everyone left a few months in.

lelanthran 5y ago

> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. This is actually quite interesting as I was just talking to a few other professionals about this in a social setting. I was the only one in software development. I mentioned how stand-ups work briefly, and that it might not be a bad idea to adopt for (for example) an accounting department to keep things on task. The response was both extreme and universal: How the hell do you all accept being micromanaged to such a degree? Don't any of you have any dignity? Every single one of them (all professionals, like I said) were adamant that they would leave any position that managed them no better than a burger-flipper. No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress.

ggm 5y ago
> No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report *to their peers* on their progress Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management. I think other professions may do the same.
- Juliate 5y ago
  You do it daily when you're managing life/death-impacting operations (ER, hospitals, factories with team shifts). Software engineering/IT RUN and SUPPORT activities MAY fit there too, but that does not even mandate a daily review. BUILD activities definitely don't. And worse, teams mixing RUN and BUILD roles... definitely don't.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  > Doctors do something not far removed. It's really important to them to caucus on case management. Maybe, but it is removed. From my recollection, doctors don't standup each day to report on what they have or have not done and their individual progress, they report on purely on problematic patients that could do with expertise from a different expert, and it's not a daily progress report. If software development followed that sort of practice, we'd have problematic issues added to a pool that gets discussed once a week. What we have is micro-management of each individual. Doctors most certainly aren't being micromanaged like that (well, not the one who I was socialising with, and not any of the others I've socialised with).

deleted 5y ago

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hnbad 5y ago

> turn bosses into customers Congratulations, you just invented software consulting agencies. But jokes aside, what you want sounds a lot like developer anarchy (which in practical terms means replacing technical management with direct communication between all developers in a team) but there are two problems that are apparently easy to overlook with this approach: 1. Teams still exist in a company that is likely larger than just a single development team. You can use direct democracy to appoint representatives and delegate political power, but unless the entire company is a worker coop, there are limitations to the team's autonomy and there is ultimately a monopoly of violence at the top (i.e. the CEO can fire you, you can't fire the CEO) crushing down on you when a conflict can't be settled. 2. Companies still exist within capitalism and need to make a profit to be sustainable. The ugly truth about turning bosses into customers (i.e. going freelance or becoming an agency) is that customers are still your boss, there's just a chance you'll eventually have enough of them to be able to fire them and not kill your company. But to have any shot at getting there you'll need to rake in cash, not just to cover your expenses but also to build up a runway.

kalado 5y ago

This doesn't sound like a correct stand-up to me. My understanding and how we are actually doing it: You say what you did and plan on doing, no comment are made, it's just an FYI for everyone else. And/Or you have the chance to present a problem you are having and you arrange a "let's talk later" with someone who can help you. What you are describing sounds like a daily mini breakdown / refinement.

detaro 5y ago

> We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. I mean, that's really doing it wrong. (yes, I know people call everything "standup" even if it as here has nothing to do with the idea of what its supposed to be, but still...) This is not universal in software.

hkt 5y ago

Amen - I tried I convince a group of people I'd been contracting with to set up a partnership model along these lines, specifically so we could carve out that kind of control. No such luck, people were happy because day rates in the UK were (and are) ludicrously high.

OJFord 5y ago
Why does the height of day rates affect it? (Honest question.)
- q-base 5y ago
  Your willingness to try new ways is probably inverse proportional to your current wage.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Ah, sure, fair enough. Thanks.

lm28469 5y ago

> non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. If these people weren't there half of the programmer population would be stuck in and endless refactoring loop. Programmers are tools, tools need people to use them

JackMorgan 5y ago
I don't care for the dehumanization in this comment. Sounds like the thinking that calls employees "resources" and considers them fungible cogs.
- lm28469 5y ago
  There is no dehumanisation intended. Everyone has a place and a function. You don't let a car mechanic drive during the race, or a jet pilot do the maintenance of his plane, well same for a programmer, you don't let them make project/business related decisions, because it's neither their job nor their responsibility and most of them are inept at making decision out of their little world, that's why we have project managers, executives, &c. I've worked in companies in which programmers were gods and decided pretty much everything, I felt like I was back in uni projects, and that's not a compliment. Tech and codebases are virtually irrelevant in most companies compared to project management end business decisions.
  - mirchibajji 5y ago
    Your analogies are not helping your point :) Programmers are not the ones driving the plane or flying the car - they are the mechanics and engineers.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]

yobbo 5y ago

> we start operating like lawyers with partnerships One analogy is; lawyering is like singing a never-ending song, whereas software is like a self-playing piano. The lawyer is needed until the song is finished, which is partly up to himself. A software consultant delivers a self-playing piano and must come back, cap in hand, asking for more work to improve it. When software is working, it is assumed to be "finished" or "correct". Additional work is assumed to either fix bugs ("earlier mistakes"), or implement new features and improvements (which are optional and involves a sales process).

skhm 5y ago

That book really resonated with me; as in, it vibrated at exactly my resonant frequency and, like a wine glass, broke me. I couldn't enjoy professional programming in the same way once the veil had been lifted.

thenerdhead 5y ago

When your bonus is tied to making your incompetent boss happy, I’m sure you’d sit quietly through a horribly ran standup too. I don’t see what is preventing anyone from operating like that today. I do that and I know many others do that. Yes sometimes there is cat herding to be done, but boundaries are needed or else you become a doormat. Stand up for yourself, time is limited in our lives.

KoftaBob 5y ago

> It's nuts to me that a skilled profession - that not many can do - lets themselves get micro-managed like this. Physicians at hospitals know your pain, as their product manager equivalent is hospital administration micro managing how they can practice medicine.

tomohawk 5y ago

Just because you're standing up, and it's daily, doesn't mean your having a standup. You may just be part of a cargo cult. A standup is a communication meeting, where only those actually doing the work should be communicating. Other people should listen in and ask questions afterwards. There are plenty of other opportunities for project managers and others to have an impact. Impeding the team's communication, even if well meaning, is counterproductive. But, like most things, those who have power will always find a way to subvert available mechanisms to enhance their power, even when it costs more, takes longer, and pisses people off.

lewisjoe 5y ago

That is why working under a non-technical manager is a strong deal-breaker for me. Fortunately at Zoho where I work, the management culture is rooted with an engineering background. Even the CEO himself, works on hard problems like compilers and dev-friendly formal verification. I don't think I'll survive a single sprint under a non-technical decision maker.

api 5y ago

The last part is why. The general stereotype of developers on the biz or design side is that they are smart but incredibly narrowly focused and refuse to comprehend anything outside their domain.

Kharvok 5y ago

This heavily assumes that maximizing technical delivery at all times also maximizes value. That's just not the case outside of a component team or very large technology org structure.

nathias 5y ago

I have hopes that remote and DAOs will be the tools to do this.

gureddio 5y ago

I totally see your point of view. However in my experience, there is not enough developer competency for this to fully work. I can imagine lots of developers going off task if things worked in this way - there would be too much freedom, and with that temptation, to over engineer and re-engineer

sealthedeal 5y ago

One of the best standup habits we had was just posting quickly in a slack channel at a certain time saying, "no update", or "blocked", it was low touch. I have always thought that a standup is just a way of being micro managed. If an engineer is blocked, why would they not just figure out how to get unblocked? Isnt that their job?

jghn 5y ago
The part of standup identifying blockers is to figure out when someone doesn't realize their blocked and/or they're spinning their tires a bit. If someone is blocked they should reach out immediately. Instead, standups provide the team the ability to identify roadblocks the developer might not realize. Perhaps you're working on something and I've been down that path before, and know your solution won't work for reasons you're not aware of. I can tell you that now and save you several hours of banging your head against the wall.
- blindmute 5y ago
  Has this ever actually happened though?
  - Tagbert 5y ago
    Frequently, especially with junior developers.

rixed 5y ago

Not only are devs micromanaged by any figure of authority with not much tech knowledge and sometime not even business knowledge and freshly landed from a different industry, if not from school, but devs are also happy to be, quite frankly, considered as mere children. Other skilled professions do not either communicate with memes, have slides and swings in the office (as seen in some Google offices), etc. If part of the geek culture is being infantile, that's no wonder that devs got told what to do. I don't know if the gamification of dev work went so far because of this, or if the causality goes the other way around.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
I've said it before that these "copy paste" and "stack overflow" memes reflect badly on us. People don't realise that others are forming real life opinions on these memes.
- musingsole 5y ago
  > People don't realise that others are forming real life opinions on these memes. Maybe, but if any non-developer internalizes a worldview from those memes...that really just means they're blind to the usually worse offenses in other careers. While not perfect, measuring programmer productivity is infinitely easier than a long list of other job roles. At the top of that list is "middle manager". We take hits on the chin about elitism, sexism, whatever other low-point of human nature. Meanwhile, whoever is spewing the critique fails to notice that in practically any other role, the *-isms are worse and harder to prove.
SteveMoody73 5y ago
I've always worked in small companies and been responsible for getting the work done, as a solo developer in a lot of cases here was nobody to blame if things went wrong. In a larger company now but it's still a smaller place, have the same attitude to work even now. Maybe it's this environment has made me a more serious person than some of the other developers I know. Don't use memes in conversations with collegues and certainly have no interest in toys and games in the office. Would love to not be responsible and not treat work as a fun place but don't see how that's possible if you care about your job and the work that you produce.

blockwriter 5y ago

I feel like lawyers enjoy this relationship because they control how many lawyers are admitted to the bar.

thebigspacefuck 5y ago

Erik Meijer has a great talk addressing this https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ https://youtu.be/2u0sNRO-QKQ

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago

I recently turned down a promotion to "Lead" because I witnessed the dynamics between the previous leads and the Project Manager. A Lead pretty much has to bow his head to even Junior PM's. It's like you're there to solve problems, and your opinion is only needed in moments of crisis. Even then people only defer to you in a almost disdainful way.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

That's such an awesome idea and would do wonders for the dignity of this profession. I haven't read Developer Hegemony but I absolutely will now.

mattgreenrocks 5y ago

> I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all...We're still attending stand-ups every day with non programmers telling us when we can and cannot refactor. 100%. It is completely absurd to watch. This sort of subordinate attitude pulls us all down. I think the issue boils down to: * new devs are not going to rock the boat * lots of people see software dev as as way to be successful within existing corporate hierarchies * a lot of devs have very little experience of what life looks like with engineers at the helm There's also the thing of most people seem to need hierarchies to feel secure. I don't quite understand it but I'm probably just weird. Personally, I will succeed in partially decoupling time for money in my labor. It's just a matter of when.

blaser-waffle 5y ago
> There's also the thing of most people seem to need hierarchies to feel secure. I don't quite understand it but I'm probably just weird. Social organisms usually have some sort of ordering hierarchy. While most of the 'alpha' and 'sigma-grindset' nonsense is just that -- nonsense -- people are hierarchical animals. It also means you don't need to give a damn about stuff that's above or below your paygrade. You do your hours on X, and other teams can worry about Y. > a lot of devs have very little experience of what life looks like with engineers at the helm A lot of devs have very little experience in a lot of fields. The best programmers I've met started coding at 15, went to MIT, and have been in software their whole lives; they have no paradigm outside of what they've been exposed to during their college-intern-jr.dev phases. Most of em that I know haven't ever worked a job flipping burgers or washing cars, either. Makes it hard to break out of that mentality, and also means that a lot of very smart coders do piss-poor jobs managing & leading. Inevitably the shitty engineer-managers fail, and the business types are dragged back in.
BlargMcLarg 5y ago
>new devs are not going to rock the boat I've done this as a new dev. In the end a few new devs aren't going to change things against stubborn old talent and a large swat of new devs passively standing by, until the proof is there. But that's the exact problem: these systems are so large, you need people to be willing to risk extrapolating a PoC or be willing to invest until the proof is there right in front of their eyes. With how risk-averse most companies are, the odds of this happening are miniscule. Unless you wish to invest your own time, effort and risk (which I don't think should be the answer, despite how often it is given).

wellpast 5y ago

None of this will happen until there we have an objective metric for determining the tangible value provided by developer. So, so many devs are great at building interesting tech, refactoring to more interesting tech, and so on, but entirely missing the mark of optimizing actual, upstream value delivery. I'm sure other industries have their means of demonstrating that this or that practitioner can both deliver and deliver quality. We don't have this at all in the software industry. Furthermore the overly common team processes and team structures in use don't even allow for demonstrating this.

tarsinge 5y ago

The problem is programmers are relatively immature regarding business, and confuse hobby programming with professional programming. Lawyers might like reading laws, but they are hired for winning a case. Programmers will continue to need non programmers to tell them what to do until they truly accept that code is just a mean to an end and that they are really hired to add business value. The test is simple: are they more concerned about the tech or the core business of their customers and how they can help them. Being paid for their hobby was nice but that golden age is over.

pydry 5y ago
Lawyers arent just hired to win cases just as programmers arent just hired to "make things work". Theyre hired to advise, to negotiate contracts and ensure compliance with existing and upcoming laws. It has a lot in common with programming on a systemic level, I think.
augusto-moura 5y ago
I see software engineering more like architecture or civil engineering, even though you are skilled and have your own opinions you still need to hear your clients and have managers to take some decisions. I agree that the management relationship in the building sector is very different though, micro management is the worst

mooreds 5y ago

> we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. I've definitely seen a number of consulting companies follow this pattern. This is one successful business pattern, no reason why more devs can't do this. However, someone needs to be the sales person and moves away from programming. Does that happen in law offices as well? (I believe so, but that is mostly from reading, not first hand experience. See also https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rainmaker https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rainmaker )

k__ 5y ago

Non-developers are losig ground and they know it. So, they try to pidgeonhole devs into non-business directions and infantilize them with stuff like pingpong tables.

rossdavidh 5y ago

So, my guess is that non-developers seeing Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Brin & Page, and other developers start business that then rewrote large parts of how society functioned, without much caring about what non-developers thought of this, would disagree. Developers are already perceived by many as acting in a high-handed manner to reshape society without caring about the opinion of that society. More use of "leverage" is not what seems called for. Now if you're the dev stuck in a bad corporate hierarchy, sure, it looks very different. But programmers as a group have used their leverage plenty, just maybe not in the ways that would always be helpful to other members of their group.

wilde 5y ago

Your point on leverage feels true. I just wish we’d use it to finally move away from the Google model of interviewing. Rather than having people do useless exercises on whiteboards we could do a 30m “are you a jerk” interview and then let the first year of job performance speak for itself.

starwind 5y ago

This comment kicked off one of the most interesting internet threads I've read in my life

Tagbert 5y ago

As a non-programmer who has sometimes joined standups as a product owner this seems like the developers are not standing up for their viewpoints in the process. The team’s I have worked on, we have an agreement that some percentage of the time should be devoted to refactoring and similar technical tasks. there may be a specific designation or it may be just a rough approximation but we respect each other enough to have a conversation about it and come to an agreement. My role is to ensure that the overall project and deliverable is on track. I will ask questions to clarify statements made in standup. I expect questions coming to me about requirements, intent, and timing. If there are problems with external teams, I will do my best to work out that blocker. I don’t dictate how the devs do their work as long as they are able to deliver the features that were agreed on. If that is not going to happen, we can have a discussion about why and what adjustment needs to be made. If more refactoring needs to be done, we can have that conversation. Talk to me about the cost and benefits of the refactoring and the impact on deliverables. It may be worthwhile accepting a delay in deliverables now. It may also be that those particular deliverables are important enough that the refactoring may need to be deferred even if the ultimate cost is higher. Those kinds of trade-offs cannot be done only by one part of the team but need to be weighed by the whole team. This kind of open and respectful discussion is part of a well functioning team. If you are not getting that then raise this as a problem in retrospectives because it needs to be addressed.

eli_gottlieb 5y ago

>If anyone has read Developer Hegemony, I'm fully on board with that general premise - we start operating like lawyers with partnerships, and turn bosses into customers. Though that does require us to think of ourselves as professionals not nerds who are too smart for business. I own a copy of Democracy at Work and know there are a number of software and IT cooperatives out there...

johny115 5y ago

"I feel like we have so much leverage and don't use it at all." Devs might have leverage. But in terms of actually contributing to the success of their company, the data seems to suggest otherwise, as far as their importance is involved. It used to be all about technical talent and product excellence. But dive deeper into reasons why tech companies fail today, and you will see all points to Marketing. Not really in sense of Advertising/Acquisition, but Marketing and Business Strategy as whole. Research, Positioning, Model, Pricing, etc.. Basically more than half startups fail because they are building wrong product for wrong market (Marketing). Less than 10% companies fail because of issues with the tech side. I am not saying devs are not important and that there aren't big differences in the quality and speed of their work, but wouldn't go as far as claiming some sort of god-like status when devs are not really where the future of the business is decided (unless it's some extremely unique technology involving product, most aren't). As Brian Balfour says, the game has changed, it's all about distribution now. That being said, I wouldn't tell a dev how should their do their job. I can only lead them in terms of what we should be working on, what part of product or what feature, but how exactly to code it? Well that's of course up to them. We don't really micromanage in our company. We just all sync on priorities and then trust each other to execute as per everyone's best judgment. But yeah, we're a tiny company. That in a sense could be an advice, go work for a startup. Corporate micromanagement is a choice. To be honest, in a larger organization, I would be probably micromanaged too, even as a non-dev, and I would fu*king hate it. Don't think devs are special in this. Not like managers understand Growth and Product work either.

eternityforest 5y ago

Would programmers actually get anything done without micromanagement? Programmers like the search for beauty and solving interesting problems. They like simplicity, understanding, and privacy. Users and business people like features that just work and don't care about code quality, and are perfectly happy with spyware business models. Managers would probably run things into the ground with tech debt if they had full control.... but there might be a fear programmers would turn every project into something like KiCad and Vim put together, written in Haskell,with core use case features handled by "A simple 10 line user script". Firefox's market share is probably a good example of what happens when developers make decisions(Except web devs and the like who seem to have different personalities). Developers are always going to feel like they are being puppeted by morons because most developers don't seem to like the actual work their doing and sometimes even wish the product they make didn't exist. I never see programmers saying things like "I fucking love the IoT! Check out this awesome new API Google invented! Let's replace every kerosene lamp in the world with LEDs". Instead I see them telling me I should use dd instead of Etcher because Etcher is 80MB. As moronic as managers can be, at least they somewhat see the value in what they build.