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I don't want to sound like the bad guy here who defends corporate, but I kind of feel like OP and a lot of comments are missing the point. Which is: large busin

I don't want to sound like the bad guy here who defends corporate, but I kind of feel like OP and a lot of comments are missing the point. Which is: large business organizations are complex social structures. You can't have a complex social structure without a lot of communication going on. Of course there are zounds of different ways to communicate with each other and if you (and your colleagues) feel like certain meetings are just a waste of time and have no benefit whatsoever, there is something wrong with the org's culture. I happen to manage approx 20 people in a ~500 person org. Everyone gets a chance to decide if they want to focus on becoming a social animal and growing in the org (which results in more meetings, more emails, more chats, etc.) or just concentrate on the technical stuff. The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company. However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings... Once being able to put all that into perspective, most of them don't complain about it anymore. So long story short - most of the time you can't have it both ways in a large(-ish) organization. You can either be the guy who digs a hole every day and someone tells him where. Or you can be the guy who decides where to dig the holes but only get to dig a more moderate amount of holes yourself.

ffwacom 4y ago
gsinclair 4y ago
*hole (Good comment, though ;)
- npacenop 4y ago
  thanks for noticing, fixed!
y4mi 4y ago
What you say is my experience as well, with one caveat: the large corporation is usually much less productive then the smallish team that actually able to "just do [thing]". It's just that it's impossible to scale that approach, so the larger the enterprise gets, the less you'll actually be shipping... As pretty much all of them seem to think it's easy to scale development teams, increasing their headcount and running productivity against a wall. A small team has barely any space for Juniors however, so I think it's very good that both approaches exist in the wild
- fxtentacle 4y ago
  Agree. My team is small, but everyone has 10+ years of experience. We can get a lot of research prototypes churned out quickly. But then for the deployment and maintenance, they hired a large army of cheap inexperienced junior developers.
Graffur 4y ago
Your argument is that some meetings are necessary to make decisions. That is not what the OP is tired of. He is tired of 'corporate bs'. Productive meetings are not 'corporate bs' so your comment is not relevant.
- sjducb 4y ago
  How do you define corporate bs Vs productive meetings?
  - Graffur 4y ago
    It's pretty easy to tell them apart. For example: a meeting where devs discuss and agree something and maybe make a principle going forward vs a meeting where nobody is empowered to make any decisions, there is dependency on people not in the meeting, nothing is decided, next action is to follow up with someone not in the meeting and to book in another meeting.
- npacenop 4y ago
  Not quite... my argument is that a lot of meetings are necessary to keep an organization ticking - decision making is just a part of it. If for anyone that feels like corporate bs (which is a perfectly valid standpoint!!!), well... these people aren't cut for a corporate life. What's the problem in that? If I don't like children I probably wouldn't try to become a kindergarten teacher, if I absolutely can't stand communication and politics, I shouldn't work in a corporate setting. And it's also perfectly OK to find this out about yourself only later in life, when you have gathered some (more) professional experience. What's not OK imho is labelling other people's version of work as "corporate bs".
  - randomdata 4y ago
    > If for anyone that feels like corporate bs (which is a perfectly valid standpoint!!!), well... these people aren't cut for a corporate life. If someone feels like a meeting is "corporate bs", that speaks to a failing of those hosting the meeting to properly communicate the intent of the meeting. If you are not able to effectively communicate with the people you work with, perhaps it is you who isn't cut out for corporate life? If you think you can treat a class of kindergarteners like it is a fourth year university course, teaching kindergarten likely isn't for you. Peter principle applies, I suppose.
jdrc 4y ago
> large business organizations are complex social structures. You can't have a complex social structure without a lot of communication going on. The question is if this is required. Personally i can't wait for AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives
- majewsky 4y ago
  > AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives All AIs that I've seen so far just optimize the reproduction of existing biases and/or serve to obfuscate policy decisions by ensuring that no person is left to blame. Are you stating a dream there, or did I miss a development towards practical AI systems that make decisions more transparent?
  - jdrc 4y ago
    NNs dont need to be transparent as long as the objectives are transparent
    - adamhp 4y ago
      And the training data right? How can you prevent exactly what the person you replied to is talking about. Situations where we ingrain the horrible nature of humankind because that's what we're training the AI on. Say you were building a credit score classifier NN. It's going to "learn" that African Americans have lower credit scores. Mostly because it's going to be trained on historic data, which is based on human input, and humans are inherently racist in some fashion or another. And societal constructs have prevented African Americans from economic advancement since... ever. You can't just have "transparent objectives" and let AI take the wheel.
      - jdrc 4y ago
        What you have now with organic matter AI is less transparent
        4y ago
jrs235 4y ago
>However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings... And if they decided to attend these meetings are they still expected to maintain the same "velocity/story points/etc."? Because if so then they will likely have to work outside of "office hours" to actually get the work done. Possibly why they decline and stop complaining... They realize they'll just get handed a bigger bag of BS.
- jrs235 4y ago
  And then they become disengaged. And then when they never get raises beyond 2-3% do you wonder why they jump ship and change companies too?
irvingprime 4y ago
Thanks for the satire. It's very good. Sounds almost as if you believe it!
yunohn 4y ago
> The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company This is the problem. Most managers are not aware of the real ground situation and rely on “visibility” presentations to judge worth.
beaugunderson 4y ago
never seen "zounds" used as a unit of measure like that but I can't pass up an opportunity to share the trivia that it's a contraction of "god's wounds"
kaskakokos 4y ago
You are right. It is what it is due to complex systems... The thing is that neither the holes diggger nor the holes manager find happiness doing this.

ffwacom 4y ago

gsinclair 4y ago

*hole (Good comment, though ;)

npacenop 4y ago
thanks for noticing, fixed!

y4mi 4y ago

What you say is my experience as well, with one caveat: the large corporation is usually much less productive then the smallish team that actually able to "just do [thing]". It's just that it's impossible to scale that approach, so the larger the enterprise gets, the less you'll actually be shipping... As pretty much all of them seem to think it's easy to scale development teams, increasing their headcount and running productivity against a wall. A small team has barely any space for Juniors however, so I think it's very good that both approaches exist in the wild

fxtentacle 4y ago
Agree. My team is small, but everyone has 10+ years of experience. We can get a lot of research prototypes churned out quickly. But then for the deployment and maintenance, they hired a large army of cheap inexperienced junior developers.

Graffur 4y ago

Your argument is that some meetings are necessary to make decisions. That is not what the OP is tired of. He is tired of 'corporate bs'. Productive meetings are not 'corporate bs' so your comment is not relevant.

sjducb 4y ago
How do you define corporate bs Vs productive meetings?
- Graffur 4y ago
  It's pretty easy to tell them apart. For example: a meeting where devs discuss and agree something and maybe make a principle going forward vs a meeting where nobody is empowered to make any decisions, there is dependency on people not in the meeting, nothing is decided, next action is to follow up with someone not in the meeting and to book in another meeting.
npacenop 4y ago
Not quite... my argument is that a lot of meetings are necessary to keep an organization ticking - decision making is just a part of it. If for anyone that feels like corporate bs (which is a perfectly valid standpoint!!!), well... these people aren't cut for a corporate life. What's the problem in that? If I don't like children I probably wouldn't try to become a kindergarten teacher, if I absolutely can't stand communication and politics, I shouldn't work in a corporate setting. And it's also perfectly OK to find this out about yourself only later in life, when you have gathered some (more) professional experience. What's not OK imho is labelling other people's version of work as "corporate bs".
- randomdata 4y ago
  > If for anyone that feels like corporate bs (which is a perfectly valid standpoint!!!), well... these people aren't cut for a corporate life. If someone feels like a meeting is "corporate bs", that speaks to a failing of those hosting the meeting to properly communicate the intent of the meeting. If you are not able to effectively communicate with the people you work with, perhaps it is you who isn't cut out for corporate life? If you think you can treat a class of kindergarteners like it is a fourth year university course, teaching kindergarten likely isn't for you. Peter principle applies, I suppose.

jdrc 4y ago

> large business organizations are complex social structures. You can't have a complex social structure without a lot of communication going on. The question is if this is required. Personally i can't wait for AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives

majewsky 4y ago
> AI managers who are optimizing transparent objectives All AIs that I've seen so far just optimize the reproduction of existing biases and/or serve to obfuscate policy decisions by ensuring that no person is left to blame. Are you stating a dream there, or did I miss a development towards practical AI systems that make decisions more transparent?
- jdrc 4y ago
  NNs dont need to be transparent as long as the objectives are transparent
  - adamhp 4y ago
    And the training data right? How can you prevent exactly what the person you replied to is talking about. Situations where we ingrain the horrible nature of humankind because that's what we're training the AI on. Say you were building a credit score classifier NN. It's going to "learn" that African Americans have lower credit scores. Mostly because it's going to be trained on historic data, which is based on human input, and humans are inherently racist in some fashion or another. And societal constructs have prevented African Americans from economic advancement since... ever. You can't just have "transparent objectives" and let AI take the wheel.
    - jdrc 4y ago
      What you have now with organic matter AI is less transparent
      - 4y ago

jrs235 4y ago

>However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings... And if they decided to attend these meetings are they still expected to maintain the same "velocity/story points/etc."? Because if so then they will likely have to work outside of "office hours" to actually get the work done. Possibly why they decline and stop complaining... They realize they'll just get handed a bigger bag of BS.

jrs235 4y ago
And then they become disengaged. And then when they never get raises beyond 2-3% do you wonder why they jump ship and change companies too?

irvingprime 4y ago

Thanks for the satire. It's very good. Sounds almost as if you believe it!

yunohn 4y ago

> The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company This is the problem. Most managers are not aware of the real ground situation and rely on “visibility” presentations to judge worth.

beaugunderson 4y ago

never seen "zounds" used as a unit of measure like that but I can't pass up an opportunity to share the trivia that it's a contraction of "god's wounds"

kaskakokos 4y ago

You are right. It is what it is due to complex systems... The thing is that neither the holes diggger nor the holes manager find happiness doing this.