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You are wrong. Management does have output test: financials. Every executive is measured on the impact he has on the P&L and KPIs. You can say those metrics are

You are wrong. Management does have output test: financials. Every executive is measured on the impact he has on the P&L and KPIs. You can say those metrics are flawed, and they can be, but the same most of the IT stuff I saw in my company is flawed (because it comes from commodity programmers). Of course, the suits are mostly unpleasant people that do not respect your work. However, being the programmer generally a smarter guy, he could try to understand what the world vision of the suits really is (mostly: more profits, less cost) and work around that. Have you ever asked yourself why such horrible pieces of software like sharepoint are so common in companies? Because who sells them understands the world vision of the business people and he can put that into a crappy product and make god damn money...

JoeAltmaier 15y ago
Hit it on the head. more profits, less cost. And the quality spiral that ends in "those stupid commodity programmers, why do they turn out this crap and take so long?" And the stupid commodity programmers shake their heads and turn their backs, because explaining "I said it took longer to do it right, and you chose fast and cheap every time, and now we are where I said we were going, but you made it my fault somehow" makes them sound petulant. Yes, believe it or not we ARE trying to work around cost and earnings, but you shoot us in the foot every time. Why? Because you are rewarded using financials. And they are recomputed on too short a cycle to reflect quality. Bottom-line is remote from most folks in a company. Executives may be accountable for P&L but not anybody below that. What does a middle manager do? They optimize for their cost and milestones-complete. Which drives them to maximize their budget and minimize their deliverables. Which, if you think at all about it, are exactly opposite to the company goals. Down below that, you have programmers. Who mostly care about the quality of what they do. But find their manager cares less than crap about that. So here we are. Right where your short-sighted financial goal-seeking puts us.

JoeAltmaier 15y ago

Hit it on the head. more profits, less cost. And the quality spiral that ends in "those stupid commodity programmers, why do they turn out this crap and take so long?" And the stupid commodity programmers shake their heads and turn their backs, because explaining "I said it took longer to do it right, and you chose fast and cheap every time, and now we are where I said we were going, but you made it my fault somehow" makes them sound petulant. Yes, believe it or not we ARE trying to work around cost and earnings, but you shoot us in the foot every time. Why? Because you are rewarded using financials. And they are recomputed on too short a cycle to reflect quality. Bottom-line is remote from most folks in a company. Executives may be accountable for P&L but not anybody below that. What does a middle manager do? They optimize for their cost and milestones-complete. Which drives them to maximize their budget and minimize their deliverables. Which, if you think at all about it, are exactly opposite to the company goals. Down below that, you have programmers. Who mostly care about the quality of what they do. But find their manager cares less than crap about that. So here we are. Right where your short-sighted financial goal-seeking puts us.