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What is this mythical concept "Business Value" which floats around undefined, unquestioned, in the impassioned rebuttals to this post? If I can hire one person

What is this mythical concept "Business Value" which floats around undefined, unquestioned, in the impassioned rebuttals to this post? If I can hire one person instead of ten to finish software in one third the time, even if it needs significant tweaking by the end, is that not "valuable" to my business? Please define and expand your terms.

drdrek 4y ago
His Dilbert level insights about corporate life are very old... running a business is complex and gets less efficient with size, that is no great wisdom. Building a code project with one person is great but consider the following issues: 1) Making sure the software is built to specifications 2) What happens if he leaves? 3) What happens if another urgent project arrives 4) Who will do support? 5) Who writes documentation 6) What about integrations with other systems in the business 7) What about IT/DevOps and server maintenance? 8) What about communicating it to other people in the org? I'm sure we can find more. The generic use of term "Business Value" in this instance means that while development time is indeed a measure of efficiency it is only a small part the overall value that a company needs in a project. Just to make sure I'll state again, large corporations are indeed not very efficient, I do not argue that, but they are profitable.
dahart 4y ago
Business value is defined by the business in question, and what’s valuable to one business isn’t valuable to all businesses. The point is that the goal is a collective goal and not an individual goal. If you really can hire fewer people to get the job done, and the value you care about is lowering the costs of employing people, that certainly is valuable, and you should do it. Business Value is a term you learn to understand very quickly and deeply when you start a business and hire some opinionated programmers who complain loudly about having to talk to others and document what they work on, and proceed to have trouble meeting their deadlines, or create issues that others need to help fix. I’ve personally watched what happens with programmers who write code without talking to people enough, both individual programmers who seems prolific, and groups of programmers working on different parts of a larger system. When programmers refuse to stay involved in the discussion of what do to, they sometimes invent or imagine their own requirements, and they build things that don’t fit into what the business actually needs. This can be a colossal waste of time and money, even though all programmers involved were happy and felt like things were “efficient”. The problem with the article is that the author is arguing for personal efficiency, at the expense of group efficiency. It’s funny to write something about software companies being a joke and then argue that it’s annoying to work with other people. The software companies that are a joke are the ones no longer in business.

drdrek 4y ago

His Dilbert level insights about corporate life are very old... running a business is complex and gets less efficient with size, that is no great wisdom. Building a code project with one person is great but consider the following issues: 1) Making sure the software is built to specifications 2) What happens if he leaves? 3) What happens if another urgent project arrives 4) Who will do support? 5) Who writes documentation 6) What about integrations with other systems in the business 7) What about IT/DevOps and server maintenance? 8) What about communicating it to other people in the org? I'm sure we can find more. The generic use of term "Business Value" in this instance means that while development time is indeed a measure of efficiency it is only a small part the overall value that a company needs in a project. Just to make sure I'll state again, large corporations are indeed not very efficient, I do not argue that, but they are profitable.

dahart 4y ago

Business value is defined by the business in question, and what’s valuable to one business isn’t valuable to all businesses. The point is that the goal is a collective goal and not an individual goal. If you really can hire fewer people to get the job done, and the value you care about is lowering the costs of employing people, that certainly is valuable, and you should do it. Business Value is a term you learn to understand very quickly and deeply when you start a business and hire some opinionated programmers who complain loudly about having to talk to others and document what they work on, and proceed to have trouble meeting their deadlines, or create issues that others need to help fix. I’ve personally watched what happens with programmers who write code without talking to people enough, both individual programmers who seems prolific, and groups of programmers working on different parts of a larger system. When programmers refuse to stay involved in the discussion of what do to, they sometimes invent or imagine their own requirements, and they build things that don’t fit into what the business actually needs. This can be a colossal waste of time and money, even though all programmers involved were happy and felt like things were “efficient”. The problem with the article is that the author is arguing for personal efficiency, at the expense of group efficiency. It’s funny to write something about software companies being a joke and then argue that it’s annoying to work with other people. The software companies that are a joke are the ones no longer in business.