12 ms·

Teams like this attract a certain type of person, and it's not a builder. In order to justify your own existence, you have to invent blockers to place in front

Teams like this attract a certain type of person, and it's not a builder. In order to justify your own existence, you have to invent blockers to place in front of people who are actually trying to build things.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
thatoneguytoo 4y ago
Exactly. This is the right explanation.
UncleMeat 4y ago
This is also true for security teams and privacy teams and accessibility teams. Yet they are extremely important.
- bentcorner 4y ago
  Same with QA. Msft rolled QA and dev into a single role and (IMO) it was a detriment to the dev cycle. It's difficult to switch builder and blocker hats.
  - cpeterso 4y ago
    Does Microsoft no longer have STEs and SDETs?
    - ThrowawayB7 4y ago
      IIRC, the STE role was eliminated in 2006 or so. In 2014, for most divisions, the SDET role was rolled into the function of SDEs, reportedly resulting in drastic attrition of the converted SDETs. The exception was the operating systems division, which was reported to have laid off all of its SDETs at that time.
  - tpmx 4y ago
    We used to have a large QA silo at a previous job. They did exactly that. We broke that down that by moving the QA engineers into the respective product teams - and kept them, there. Turns out many kinds of businesses/product teams (including Microsoft's Windows team, I'd say, from personal user experience) need dedicated QA people because many worthwhile tests can't really be automated well enough with a reasonable effort, or if they can, it's something that often breaks and needs regular maintenance. I suspect that in the Windows case they simply stopped testing those troublesome cases.
    - opportune 4y ago
      Agreed. QA is really helpful for anything UX/UIrelated (where the alternative is often experimentation, which really is only good for changing already existing things, and not necessarily ideal for new things). Or if something is so big, complex, and crusty like Windows, where it’d be a Sisyphean task to go back and add automated testing everywhere it could theoretically be useful, it’s a lot better as a stopgap than idealistically declaring you don’t need QA since in theory you could automate things (if you were willing to spend 2000 person-years on it).
      - tpmx 4y ago
        In case you're confused about the downvote(s): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730380
  - munificent 4y ago
    QA is an interesting one because many companies don't separate QA from development and it works pretty well. I think the main reason you can pull this off is because you can "do QA" by writing automated tests, so it still fits into the "builder" style of work that engineers prefer. If you asked engineers to do a large amount of manual testing, they would either (a) tell you they were and then secretly automate it, (b) simply not do it, or (c) quit.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Good security and privacy teams do a lot of work to establish good practices and build frameworks and platforms for others to build upon. The bad security teams just show up and expect to say criticize everything and stop other teams without providing workable alternatives. The problem with having a team with a vague charter (“responsible innovation”) with unclear scope (e.g. not just security or just privacy) is that it’s really hard for them to feel like they’re building foundations for others to build upon. It’s too easy for them to fall back to roles where they see themselves as the gatekeepers and therefore backseat drivers of other teams. It becomes a back door for people to insert themselves into power structures because nobody is entirely sure where their charter begins and where it ends.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Of course. But good security teams also say "no you can't do that even though it would be the fastest path to market." And looking at a team that says "no" and saying "ugh these people aren't builder they are just getting in the way" is a great way to end up with a company that is irresponsible towards their users. We can talk about whether this particular team is effective. We can talk about unclear scope (though, IMO, the scope here is no less clear than "privacy"). But the complaint that teams that put barriers in front of other teams are always bad is insufficient at best and downright dangerous at worst.
    - strix_varius 4y ago
      > But the complaint that teams that put barriers in front of other teams are always bad is insufficient at best and downright dangerous at worst. Nobody made that complaint. Please don't misrepresent my statement, which was specifically, "to justify your own existence, you have to put blockers in front of people who are actually trying to build things." Good security teams build & they help others build as well. They build secure-by-default platforms, secure common libraries, and guidelines for others to follow with confidence. Working with a good security team means you're confident your product will get to market faster because, at launch time, you know you'll be green-lit since you followed the org's security best practices. That kind of team doesn't have to invent blockers in order to justify its own existence.
- lefstathiou 4y ago
  IMO, security and accessibility are more objective ends than "responsible innovation" which can be plagued by bias and personal agendas.
- Ensorceled 4y ago
  I think these are all examples of teams that can have concrete goals: accessibility teams can be enforcing a standard or regulation (like WCAG), privacy teams can be auditing for compliance to GDPR or COPPA, security teams can be monitoring for security updates, pen-testing, and auditing for compliance to standards like PCI DSS. "Responsible Innovation" is kind of nebulous and I would expect it to be problematic unless given clear rules of engagement and supplied with a strong leader. That said, somebody needs to be responsible for dealing with the endless stream of products that are deeply flawed out of the box: builtin racism, builtin stalking/harassment tools, "0-day" doxing of existing users ...
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Consider privacy. I'd wager that most people on HN would prefer it if major social media and advertising companies were doing more than waiting for legislation and implementing the bare minimum. "Privacy" in the aggregate is vague rather than concrete. Similarly, you could imagine a team who is responsible for addressing actual policy concerns around things like amplifying sectarian violence and also having a broader and more vague mission around "harm".
    - Ensorceled 4y ago
      I think most privacy teams are responsible for compliance to legislation and, hence, have clearly defined, concrete goals. Are you disagreeing?
      - detaro 4y ago
        One would hope the goal of a privacy team would be to work to improve and maintain privacy, even if they are not strictly legally compelled to do so in the specific case.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        No. I am saying that privacy teams often go beyond that and that this "beyond" is in the vague and ill defined territory.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
  Very much disagree. Good security teams, good privacy teams and good accessibility teams should understand that their highest priority should always still be to ship product. Their job should just be to make sure that the product that ships is secure, ensures privacy and is accessible. The difference between these things and something like a "Responsible Innovation Team" is that the goals of the latter are often poorly defined and amorphous. What does "Responsible Innovation" really even mean? But contrast that with, for example, security goals, which are primarily "don't get breached". Security folks, privacy folks and accessibility folks should all have a very well-defined job to do. For the other "PR-focused" teams, they usually have to make work up to justify their jobs. Note that, obviously, it's also possible to have bad security people, for example, who only see their job as to throw up roadblocks and demand that your security checklist is ever-growing. I'd even say these are the majority of "security" people. But the good security people who are able to integrate themselves successfully into your product development processes are worth their weight in gold.
  - unicornhose 4y ago
    It seems that you could also see the responsible innovation team in the same light -- 'the product that ships should be innovating in a responsible way'. Also IME none of these things are binaries -- a product could be more or less secure, privacy-respecting, and accessible, just as it could be seeking to innovate more or less responsibly. Different aspects of security, privacy, accessibility, and responsible innovation will be important at different times, depending on what's happening in the world. The jobs are never as well-defined as you'd imagine.
LewisVerstappen 4y ago
- marricks 4y ago
  Gotta love mocking people who were just fired.
  - spamizbad 4y ago
    Pretty much any time a major tech company announces layoffs the peanut gallery shows up talking about how everyone getting cut is lazy/dead weight. In reality it's far more likely they had the misfortune of being assigned to teams that weren't core to the business' operation or driving revenue or some Exec/VP lost a political battle and their department got the axe.
    - hinkley 4y ago
      We are very hypocritical that way. You can get upvotes for being glad you were laid off, you can get upvotes for saying the people who got laid off were bad people anyway.
    - drewbeck 4y ago
      It’s a classic post hoc rationalization that happens when folks are fully committed to loving business and bosses over actual people’s well-being. It’s gross.
      - wpietri 4y ago
        For sure. To be fair, organizations select for people who love the business and its leaders over people who are willing to point out when the emperor has no clothes. Sort of the same way that in subcultures where abuse is common, the people who remain are selected for those who will support abusers and blame the abused. So I get how it happens, and why people like to victim-blame as a way of making themselves feel better about their choices. But it's still thoroughly gross.
  - 4y ago
marricks 4y ago
Yep, blockers like: - should we do this? - who do we hurt by doing this? - oh god people are hurting why are we still doing this?
- nh23423fefe 4y ago
  inventing harms to prevent like arsonist firefighters.
  - slantedview 4y ago
    And here I thought it was a given that everyone understood the harm of social media, for example, to children and teenagers.
    - danrocks 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#:~:text=Logical%20fallacy,-In%20their%202002&text=Ethicist%20Jack%20Marshall%20described%20%22Think,succeeds%20in%20preventing%20rational%20debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#:~:text=....
      - kemotep 4y ago
        We have verifiable evidence of Facebook as a platform being used to instigate genocide[0] among other issues. Dismissing a concern that a platform could be used for harm against children as fallacious reasoning is a fallacy fallacy if you have no additional points to add to the discussion as to why you feel that is relevant. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934
        noptd 4y ago
        I'm no fan of Facebook but I have a hard time understanding why Facebook is singled out for this. If what FB did is illegal, then they can be charged for their crimes. However if we're critizing from purely a moral standpoint, how is this any different than claiming that cell phone carriers should be preventing this type of thing over phone calls or texts? For the record, I don't find that to be a convincing argument either but it's the inconsistency of perspective that irks me.
CivBase 4y ago
Sometimes that's what you need. EDIT: I don't know about these specific people or whether the blockers they put in place are justified. However, I've definitely worked with developers who obviously prefer to just write code until something works with little regard to the reliability, efficiency, security, or maintainability of their output. I spent almost all of my time cleaning up messes rather than getting to build anything new myself. It's a terrible experience.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > regard to the reliability, efficiency, security, or maintainability Yeah, that's not what this team was responsible for, though. That's what an enterprise architecture team ought to be responsible for, but rarely are.
scifibestfi 4y ago
They are bullshit jobs for the overproduced elite who demand high status. Now they are going to find out these are only viable in the bull market.
- ceres 4y ago
  >overproduced elite How many elite should there be?
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > How many elite should there be? The number we have today minus those unemployed minus those on responsible innovation teams. (Using the broad definition of elites, which captures pretty much everyone who went to college.)
  - scifibestfi 4y ago
    Roughly speaking, the amount that can be absorbed into the power structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
  - danrocks 4y ago
    Enough to staff all Starbucks outlets in the country. /s
- klyrs 4y ago
  Are you saying that the "builders" at facebook are salt-of-the earth plebeians? That has not been my experience.
mertd 4y ago
I don't know what this team is or did. However, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park, if everyone is preoccupied with building things, who will be the one that stops and thinks whether they should?
agentdrtran 4y ago
'blockers' like "have moderation staff speak the language of the country you operate in"? feature velocity is not an inherent good
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  'Move fast and incite genocide' https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-sue-facebook-myanmar-genocide-us-uk-legal-action-social-media-violence https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
  - thegrimmest 4y ago
    Yep, Facebook incited genocide - not the actual people who made the posts - Facebook. Lay the blame at the feet of the perpetrators, not the makers of the tools they used. This is like blaming Mercedes for the holocaust because they made Hitler's car(s).
    - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      I'm really confused by this because there are most certainly cases where companies are responsible not to provide goods or services to war criminals or terrorists, by law. So it's already established that yes, you can blame the makers of the tools that perpetrators used.
      - thegrimmest 4y ago
        I wouldn't conflate the offloading of policing functions on to private corporations with the assignment of moral responsibility.
    - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
      As it works out, I would say it’s more in the vein of blaming IBM for their culpability in the Holocaust, not Mercedes, although clearly Meta’s role was nowhere near as awful as IBM’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
benjaminwootton 4y ago
The idea is that those blockers or objections are valid. Something is going wrong if they continually raise issues which do not meet the organisations goals. That said, it does sound like a strange function to allocate to a specific team.
groby_b 4y ago
Good god, as if "builder" was the only type of person that has value. Most "builders" are, if not constrained, like cancer cells. Unlimited consumption & growth without a counterbalance. In order to justify their own existence, they need to continue to churn out things without concern of what they consume, what use their product has. Maybe, just maybe, there's value in having different kinds of personalities - unchecked by itself, pretty much every tendency is ruinous.
- jason-phillips 4y ago
  People who produce things are cancer. Got it. Also, false dichotomy there saying a "responsible innovation" team is needed to limit the building of products with no use; that's a solved problem. We have markets for that.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    Thomas Midgley Jr. was an impressively prolific builder. Navigators are just as important as drivers. You need both, not either in exclusion.
  - unicornhose 4y ago
    The people who choose to build things (it's not a binary quality, everyone can build, some are better) are not taking moral responsibility for the things they are building. It is hurting society. What is to be done? That is the issue at the heart of this headline.
duxup 4y ago
At a previous job I joked that groups like that would place to attract / corral employees that should be cut during the next round of layoffs. In theory these teams could do some good things, in reality it attracts or creates horrible people with INCREDIBLE efficiency / creates a cycle of endless meetings / recommendations... and it is endless because it is in their best interest to have an endless amount of "work" and inject themselves in a way that costs them nothing, and everyone else a great deal. I figured these teams were the easiest place to find people who provide nothing at all / get in the way of folks doing things and almost always they don't accomplish their goals anyhow. They wouldn't even know if they did accomplish their goals anyway as these groups tend to center everything on their actions / the goal is them doing things endlessly. Somehow word got back to them about the joke, they blamed the wrong person for the joke, tried to raise a hubbub with HR (to their credit HR told them to pound sand). And then they got all laid off ...
- MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
  takes notes
- worker767424 4y ago
  Probably best not to tell HR that there's a joke going around that your team should be laid off. Wouldn't want to give them any ideas.
- gnramires 4y ago
  But you need somehow oversight right? (specially for something as critical as social networks used by billions) I'm a believer in some sort of cross-validation and quantification. The ethical impact of a technology should be quantified, and addressed if significantly negative (or promoted/incentivized if positive!) -- you can quantify number of users impacted, give various arguments, soft measures and estimates. Then, you can have other teams validate those estimates. After all said and done, you can again evaluate an intervention (on both ethical terms, and on the productivity and profitability of your company), and see if it was good or not. If a team is repeatedly giving bad advice, I think you can then address that (retraining, lay off, etc.?). Ethics is not impossible to do :) I believe a certain generalization of this is needed for the entire society[1], to externally address good/bad technologies. A good example I cite all the time is Open source contributions. We still haven't found a good mechanism to pay OSS, despite the immense value it brings to society (openness itself has a value that direct sale couldn't capture). I'm a big believer in distributed evaluation and cross-evaluation: if we had distributed entities to evaluate impact of various ventures (for efficiency, properly categorized and subdivided into science, technology, social costs/benefits, environmental costs/benefits, etc.) we could apply the same logic to make society more adaptive, distributed, and less focused only on the single goal of profit. (I plan to elaborate this further, I think we are going to need to "patch" our current system in some sensible and careful ways to get a really good 3rd millennium!) [1] Previously sketched this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28833230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28833230
evr1isnxprt 4y ago
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Nothing in the comment you’re replying to mentioned software engineers. They claim people building things are unlikely to spend time in “responsible innovation” teams. That’s true if one’s building rockets, medicines or cat GIF sorters.
  - evr1isnxprt 4y ago
- speakfreely 4y ago
  > But building the software is not hard. This reminds me of 400lb men who can't walk up the stairs without getting winded yelling "are you kidding me???" at the TV when they see NFL quarterbacks throw a bad pass.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  It's weird that you assume "builder" means "programmer." At a healthy software company, most roles are builder roles: - designer - product manager - marketer - sales - customer success Each of these roles delivers something additive. They make the product easier or nicer to use, make it address the market better, or even just make people aware that it exists. Marketers build complex promotional structures to gain users. Salespeople put together actual accounts paying actual money so the product can continue to improve. Customer success helps people use the product, and a good CS team filters high-signal feedback back to the product & engineering orgs. People in all of these roles (and more) are building the product. If their roles were cut, the product would be worse: uglier, slower, less useful, less used, less purchased, and less successful. However, there are roles that attract folks who don't want to build. It's smart to get rid of them.
  - evr1isnxprt 4y ago
    You can try to sell me on it emotionally but it isn’t going to happen. Economic trade is just something humans do. Babbling about it in rambling fluffy semantics is not what gives rise to economic activity. A lot of these builders should build themselves into fuller better rounded people than office workers who memorized an emotional caricature they use to extract attention from others. HR, marketing, etc exist to insulate financiers, give off an air of building big ideas, but it’s layers of indirection so the financier can avoid real work. The majority don’t have to import your relative emotional context anymore than they have to import a preachers religion. That’s what’s going down with the economy; the majority are tired of the over hyped coddled office worker. This is just the start of the barnacle shedding. Source? Data models forecasting economic “plot lines” I collate with others to inform investment choices, not a bunch of high emotion semantic gibberish intended to sell me on a relative perspective. SEs and otherwise, too many are addicted to an emotional confidence game that is sapping agency in other contexts. This is low hanging fruit being shed, but ML will come for content creators and SEs sooner than most expect; it’s all electron state in machines. Generating data/code as a job will be automated; that is a stated goal of many powers that be in tech. I’m not the only one who sees it; in a 2 year old interview Gabe Newell was calling ML content creation an extinction level event that’s right around the corner. More and more “builders” of hype and ephemera are going to be receiving the wake up call as the months and years progress. Building layers of indirection as a career is not long for this world. But more simply; “software builders” is not language I see as constrained to SE. Like you said it takes a village to build a software business. I think you inferred a bit much.
cletus 4y ago
100% this. It's very much in the spirit of "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". There's no better way for someone to justify their existence than creating problems but appearing to solve problems for other people. Compliance, security, etc. These things are usually necessary but it does attract a certain kind of person who seems predisposed to empire building through obstacle creation. You see the same thing with people who become moderators. I saw this years ago on Stack Overflow. You see it on Wikipedia. You see it on reddit. You have to be constantly vigilant that these people don't get out of hand. These people end up treating the process as the goal rather than the means to an end. I remember when the moderators starting closing SO topics as "not constructive". There were a ton of questions like "should I do X or Y?" and the mods decided one day to start closing these became there was no definitive answer. You can list the advantages and disadvantages of each option and list the factors to consider. That can be incredibly value. Can this descend into a flamewar? Absolutely. But just kill the flamewars and the people who start them. No point throwing out the baby with the bath water.
- btilly 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... comes to mind as another good example of this dynamic. For another, the ever expanding administrative overhead of colleges is a large contributor to driving tuition increases. See https://stanfordreview.org/read-my-lips-no-new-administrators/ https://stanfordreview.org/read-my-lips-no-new-administrator... for an idea of how bad the problem is getting.
- Floegipoky 4y ago
  > I remember when the moderators starting closing SO topics as "not constructive". I don't think that was a decision made by the mods, I think that's policy created by SO. I really like that it's so focused, clearly defines what is on and off topic, and strictly enforces that policy. You're right, such discussion can be very valuable, but if these policies didn't exist or weren't enforced, I don't think the site would be nearly as useful. Doesn't mean that the people with closed questions are bad, or the conversation can't be had in chat or a different site. > Can this descend into a flamewar? Absolutely. But just kill the flamewars and the people who start them. Meanwhile the strong contributors get tired of dealing with (even more) toxicity and move on, the signal:noise ratio drops, and it turns into just another (ostensibly) programming-focused forum. Not to mention that the more time mods spend dealing with toxic behavior, the less time they have for work that improves the content of the site.
opmelogy 4y ago
Sometimes putting blockers in front of people is absolutely what's needed. It's a common tactic for compliance and security - both of which can completely tank your company if not handled correctly. I suspect it's especially true if there are people with the skills to build who claim they are the only ones that are "actually trying to build things." Likely they don't have the right level of understanding of what needs to be built.
thomassmith65 4y ago
If the goal is to stay in business long term, thoughtless 'building' isn't worth much. Steve Jobs: "focus is about saying no" Mark Zuckerberg: "move fast and breaks things" Facebook is the world's least-trusted, most-reviled brand. They earned it by building garbage.
- Kamq 4y ago
  > They earned it by building garbage. No one (aside from engineers) cares about what facebook built. Facebook had scandal after scandal and on top of it, everyone's grandparents signed up so teenagers couldn't post all of the screwed up stuff they were doing anymore. Posting there turned into a mix of corporate scrutiny (especially prospective employers) mixed with the old forwards from grandma emails you used to get in the late 90s/early 2000s. That's why facebook is dying.
  - thomassmith65 4y ago
    I see most of FB's "scandals" (eg: dark patterns, illegal ad-buying filters, API over-sharing with third parties) and flaws (re: "teenagers couldn't post" without pinging grandpa) as the result of garbage product design. At a glance, our comments appear to differ substantively. At closer inspection, the only disagreement we have is what to include in the 'building garbage' bucket. In case I misused language, I can rephrase my original point: FB is in a bad place today not because FB was ever slow to build, but because what FB did build was too often bad for users (for that matter: bad for humanity).
    - Kamq 4y ago
      I'm going to have to disagree. They built an amazing product... for a world that had only teenagers on social media. This was the truth for quite a while, and was true of the world they created their product in. They just never really updated their product to account for the new reality. Sure, they changed the algorithm a ton and re-tweaked the UI, but the algorithm and the UI weren't the product. The experience people had on the site was the product. They're sort of like IBM's mainframe division. Mainframes are kind of cool if you ever get to tinker around with their hardware, and they're impressive engineering marvels (so are facebooks systems). But the world has changed since IBM was on top, and they don't fit what most people need anymore.
sangnoir 4y ago
> Teams like this attract a certain type of person, and it's not a builder. Ditto for financial audit teams and so-called "IT security": all they do is block, I've never had anyone in either function build something or help me work faster, just additional processes and bureaucracy that slows down real work. edit: I thought my sarcasm would be apparent, but Poe's law strikes again.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  I haven't worked much with financial teams, but the security teams I've worked with have absolutely helped build our products. They put practices & systems in place that made a golden path to getting software green-lit for production.
- eropple 4y ago
  "Fast" is not the only descriptor that should be applied to work where a financial audit might be involved. "Correct" probably has a few things to say. "Legal," too.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  Same with QA. Fire those guys!
  - strix_varius 4y ago
    This, but non-ironically.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > financial audit teams and so-called "IT security" They do fill a role that actually needs to be filled, though.
- browningstreet 4y ago
  I'm in a highly regulated industry segment and work in an information security related function. You've made my day.
mind-blight 4y ago
I strongly disagree. I worked at an analytics company that had and needed a privacy ethics department. They were great. It was a mix of lawyers, philosophers (degree in the subject), and former developers. They consistently thought about the nuances of baking privacy into a product in a way that I didn't have the background or time for. Every time I worked with them, they helped me build a better product by helping me tweak the specs in a way that had minimal impact on our users (unless they were a bad actor) and strongly increased privacy protections. It was like having a specialized PM in the room
- m-ee 4y ago
  I don’t remember the source but there was a linked article here a while ago about how to effectively manage “blockers” like this. The example given was a med device company where the engineers hated the regulatory department who always told them no. Manager decided to actually increase engagement and bring on one person from the reg side to their meetings. At some point a person said “well we’d love to do this but no way would the FDA allow us to do it.” The regulatory employee basically said “do you even know the regulations? There’s a very easy pathway to doing exactly that.” My boss once did a similar thing with the quality department. Suddenly we sailed through our DFMEAs. Some people do live to block others, but some are trying to do an important job. Engagement usually pays more than just whinging.
- strix_varius 4y ago
  > Every time I worked with them, they helped me build a better product by helping me tweak the specs in a way that had minimal impact on our users (unless they were a bad actor) and strongly increased privacy protections. It was like having a specialized PM in the room It sounds like they were focused on building product too, then, which is not at all what this is about.
- mariojv 4y ago
  What did the philosophers do on a day to day basis? I am curious, sounds like an interesting role.
  - 4y ago
mikotodomo 4y ago
What?? The internet is extremely toxic. If you don't have supervision while building your app, it will attract the most horrifying people like this one time someone almost convinced me that the age of consent should be abolished but I just realized they were abusing my naivety and gaslighting me. We need platforms developed lawfully and keep making sure users are liable to prevent that.
dgs_sgd 4y ago
Well put. Intentions can start off genuine, where the non builder truly believes the processes and barriers they set up improve building (and early on it's usually true), but it easily morphs into a tool for maintaining power and influence regardless of the value add.
__derek__ 4y ago
IME, they don't have the authority to invent/implement blockers. Instead, they attend/hold conferences, give talks, and write documents that nobody acts on. In theory, it's a good way for a company to advertise/lobby to the think-tank set. Clearly that hasn't played out for FB, hence disbanding the team.
jarjoura 4y ago
This is always a vicious cycle that starts with good intent but spirals into an oppressive regime. 1) It's starts after the product launch post-mortem 2) Team creates a process to improve avoiding future mistakes 3) Process innocently includes ability to hard block any product changes without someone or some group's approval 4) Politics emerges behind the scenes from those with social capital to get around the hard blocks 5) New process to make things "more fair" by adding more hard blocking rules, usually resulting in lots of pointless meetings and paperwork to justify new process and show upper management that things are working as intended 6) More politics as teams start hiring for people who are able to get around the heavy process by being "good at the game" 7) New team is formed around the process because it's now a full time job 8) People good at politics join this new team and everyone else is pulled into pointless meetings and handed paperwork 9) Rinse and repeat The problem I've always observed is that these systems are put in place with the best intent to offer guidance so that company, employees and consumers can all benefit by building the right best thing. However, the systems are given blocking abilities that after time do more damage than good. You'd think, if something were not blocking no one would listen, and maybe you're right. I definitely have no idea how teams can avoid this spiral trap, however, I don't think it's a bad thing to sunset process like this after a while. Just like Google is willing to throw away products on a whim, we should be willing to throw away process teams on a whim.
archagon 4y ago
Maybe if the builders stopped building shitty things, we wouldn’t need teams like this.
i_like_apis 4y ago
I didn’t expect to see such a concise and spot-on statement in these comments. Thank you.
IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
The elephant in the room just broke thru the door....

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

thatoneguytoo 4y ago

Exactly. This is the right explanation.

UncleMeat 4y ago

This is also true for security teams and privacy teams and accessibility teams. Yet they are extremely important.

bentcorner 4y ago
Same with QA. Msft rolled QA and dev into a single role and (IMO) it was a detriment to the dev cycle. It's difficult to switch builder and blocker hats.
- cpeterso 4y ago
  Does Microsoft no longer have STEs and SDETs?
  - ThrowawayB7 4y ago
    IIRC, the STE role was eliminated in 2006 or so. In 2014, for most divisions, the SDET role was rolled into the function of SDEs, reportedly resulting in drastic attrition of the converted SDETs. The exception was the operating systems division, which was reported to have laid off all of its SDETs at that time.
- tpmx 4y ago
  We used to have a large QA silo at a previous job. They did exactly that. We broke that down that by moving the QA engineers into the respective product teams - and kept them, there. Turns out many kinds of businesses/product teams (including Microsoft's Windows team, I'd say, from personal user experience) need dedicated QA people because many worthwhile tests can't really be automated well enough with a reasonable effort, or if they can, it's something that often breaks and needs regular maintenance. I suspect that in the Windows case they simply stopped testing those troublesome cases.
  - opportune 4y ago
    Agreed. QA is really helpful for anything UX/UIrelated (where the alternative is often experimentation, which really is only good for changing already existing things, and not necessarily ideal for new things). Or if something is so big, complex, and crusty like Windows, where it’d be a Sisyphean task to go back and add automated testing everywhere it could theoretically be useful, it’s a lot better as a stopgap than idealistically declaring you don’t need QA since in theory you could automate things (if you were willing to spend 2000 person-years on it).
    - tpmx 4y ago
      In case you're confused about the downvote(s): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730380 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32730380
- munificent 4y ago
  QA is an interesting one because many companies don't separate QA from development and it works pretty well. I think the main reason you can pull this off is because you can "do QA" by writing automated tests, so it still fits into the "builder" style of work that engineers prefer. If you asked engineers to do a large amount of manual testing, they would either (a) tell you they were and then secretly automate it, (b) simply not do it, or (c) quit.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
Good security and privacy teams do a lot of work to establish good practices and build frameworks and platforms for others to build upon. The bad security teams just show up and expect to say criticize everything and stop other teams without providing workable alternatives. The problem with having a team with a vague charter (“responsible innovation”) with unclear scope (e.g. not just security or just privacy) is that it’s really hard for them to feel like they’re building foundations for others to build upon. It’s too easy for them to fall back to roles where they see themselves as the gatekeepers and therefore backseat drivers of other teams. It becomes a back door for people to insert themselves into power structures because nobody is entirely sure where their charter begins and where it ends.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Of course. But good security teams also say "no you can't do that even though it would be the fastest path to market." And looking at a team that says "no" and saying "ugh these people aren't builder they are just getting in the way" is a great way to end up with a company that is irresponsible towards their users. We can talk about whether this particular team is effective. We can talk about unclear scope (though, IMO, the scope here is no less clear than "privacy"). But the complaint that teams that put barriers in front of other teams are always bad is insufficient at best and downright dangerous at worst.
  - strix_varius 4y ago
    > But the complaint that teams that put barriers in front of other teams are always bad is insufficient at best and downright dangerous at worst. Nobody made that complaint. Please don't misrepresent my statement, which was specifically, "to justify your own existence, you have to put blockers in front of people who are actually trying to build things." Good security teams build & they help others build as well. They build secure-by-default platforms, secure common libraries, and guidelines for others to follow with confidence. Working with a good security team means you're confident your product will get to market faster because, at launch time, you know you'll be green-lit since you followed the org's security best practices. That kind of team doesn't have to invent blockers in order to justify its own existence.
lefstathiou 4y ago
IMO, security and accessibility are more objective ends than "responsible innovation" which can be plagued by bias and personal agendas.
Ensorceled 4y ago
I think these are all examples of teams that can have concrete goals: accessibility teams can be enforcing a standard or regulation (like WCAG), privacy teams can be auditing for compliance to GDPR or COPPA, security teams can be monitoring for security updates, pen-testing, and auditing for compliance to standards like PCI DSS. "Responsible Innovation" is kind of nebulous and I would expect it to be problematic unless given clear rules of engagement and supplied with a strong leader. That said, somebody needs to be responsible for dealing with the endless stream of products that are deeply flawed out of the box: builtin racism, builtin stalking/harassment tools, "0-day" doxing of existing users ...
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  Consider privacy. I'd wager that most people on HN would prefer it if major social media and advertising companies were doing more than waiting for legislation and implementing the bare minimum. "Privacy" in the aggregate is vague rather than concrete. Similarly, you could imagine a team who is responsible for addressing actual policy concerns around things like amplifying sectarian violence and also having a broader and more vague mission around "harm".
  - Ensorceled 4y ago
    I think most privacy teams are responsible for compliance to legislation and, hence, have clearly defined, concrete goals. Are you disagreeing?
    - detaro 4y ago
      One would hope the goal of a privacy team would be to work to improve and maintain privacy, even if they are not strictly legally compelled to do so in the specific case.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      No. I am saying that privacy teams often go beyond that and that this "beyond" is in the vague and ill defined territory.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
Very much disagree. Good security teams, good privacy teams and good accessibility teams should understand that their highest priority should always still be to ship product. Their job should just be to make sure that the product that ships is secure, ensures privacy and is accessible. The difference between these things and something like a "Responsible Innovation Team" is that the goals of the latter are often poorly defined and amorphous. What does "Responsible Innovation" really even mean? But contrast that with, for example, security goals, which are primarily "don't get breached". Security folks, privacy folks and accessibility folks should all have a very well-defined job to do. For the other "PR-focused" teams, they usually have to make work up to justify their jobs. Note that, obviously, it's also possible to have bad security people, for example, who only see their job as to throw up roadblocks and demand that your security checklist is ever-growing. I'd even say these are the majority of "security" people. But the good security people who are able to integrate themselves successfully into your product development processes are worth their weight in gold.
- unicornhose 4y ago
  It seems that you could also see the responsible innovation team in the same light -- 'the product that ships should be innovating in a responsible way'. Also IME none of these things are binaries -- a product could be more or less secure, privacy-respecting, and accessible, just as it could be seeking to innovate more or less responsibly. Different aspects of security, privacy, accessibility, and responsible innovation will be important at different times, depending on what's happening in the world. The jobs are never as well-defined as you'd imagine.

LewisVerstappen 4y ago

marricks 4y ago
Gotta love mocking people who were just fired.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Pretty much any time a major tech company announces layoffs the peanut gallery shows up talking about how everyone getting cut is lazy/dead weight. In reality it's far more likely they had the misfortune of being assigned to teams that weren't core to the business' operation or driving revenue or some Exec/VP lost a political battle and their department got the axe.
  - hinkley 4y ago
    We are very hypocritical that way. You can get upvotes for being glad you were laid off, you can get upvotes for saying the people who got laid off were bad people anyway.
  - drewbeck 4y ago
    It’s a classic post hoc rationalization that happens when folks are fully committed to loving business and bosses over actual people’s well-being. It’s gross.
    - wpietri 4y ago
      For sure. To be fair, organizations select for people who love the business and its leaders over people who are willing to point out when the emperor has no clothes. Sort of the same way that in subcultures where abuse is common, the people who remain are selected for those who will support abusers and blame the abused. So I get how it happens, and why people like to victim-blame as a way of making themselves feel better about their choices. But it's still thoroughly gross.
- 4y ago

marricks 4y ago

Yep, blockers like: - should we do this? - who do we hurt by doing this? - oh god people are hurting why are we still doing this?

nh23423fefe 4y ago
inventing harms to prevent like arsonist firefighters.
- slantedview 4y ago
  And here I thought it was a given that everyone understood the harm of social media, for example, to children and teenagers.
  - danrocks 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#:~:text=Logical%20fallacy,-In%20their%202002&text=Ethicist%20Jack%20Marshall%20described%20%22Think,succeeds%20in%20preventing%20rational%20debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_of_the_children#:~:text=....
    - kemotep 4y ago
      We have verifiable evidence of Facebook as a platform being used to instigate genocide[0] among other issues. Dismissing a concern that a platform could be used for harm against children as fallacious reasoning is a fallacy fallacy if you have no additional points to add to the discussion as to why you feel that is relevant. [0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46105934
      - noptd 4y ago
        I'm no fan of Facebook but I have a hard time understanding why Facebook is singled out for this. If what FB did is illegal, then they can be charged for their crimes. However if we're critizing from purely a moral standpoint, how is this any different than claiming that cell phone carriers should be preventing this type of thing over phone calls or texts? For the record, I don't find that to be a convincing argument either but it's the inconsistency of perspective that irks me.

CivBase 4y ago

Sometimes that's what you need. EDIT: I don't know about these specific people or whether the blockers they put in place are justified. However, I've definitely worked with developers who obviously prefer to just write code until something works with little regard to the reliability, efficiency, security, or maintainability of their output. I spent almost all of my time cleaning up messes rather than getting to build anything new myself. It's a terrible experience.

commandlinefan 4y ago
> regard to the reliability, efficiency, security, or maintainability Yeah, that's not what this team was responsible for, though. That's what an enterprise architecture team ought to be responsible for, but rarely are.

scifibestfi 4y ago

They are bullshit jobs for the overproduced elite who demand high status. Now they are going to find out these are only viable in the bull market.

ceres 4y ago
>overproduced elite How many elite should there be?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > How many elite should there be? The number we have today minus those unemployed minus those on responsible innovation teams. (Using the broad definition of elites, which captures pretty much everyone who went to college.)
- scifibestfi 4y ago
  Roughly speaking, the amount that can be absorbed into the power structure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
- danrocks 4y ago
  Enough to staff all Starbucks outlets in the country. /s
klyrs 4y ago
Are you saying that the "builders" at facebook are salt-of-the earth plebeians? That has not been my experience.

mertd 4y ago

I don't know what this team is or did. However, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park, if everyone is preoccupied with building things, who will be the one that stops and thinks whether they should?

agentdrtran 4y ago

'blockers' like "have moderation staff speak the language of the country you operate in"? feature velocity is not an inherent good

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
'Move fast and incite genocide' https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-sue-facebook-myanmar-genocide-us-uk-legal-action-social-media-violence https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/06/rohingya-...
- thegrimmest 4y ago
  Yep, Facebook incited genocide - not the actual people who made the posts - Facebook. Lay the blame at the feet of the perpetrators, not the makers of the tools they used. This is like blaming Mercedes for the holocaust because they made Hitler's car(s).
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    I'm really confused by this because there are most certainly cases where companies are responsible not to provide goods or services to war criminals or terrorists, by law. So it's already established that yes, you can blame the makers of the tools that perpetrators used.
    - thegrimmest 4y ago
      I wouldn't conflate the offloading of policing functions on to private corporations with the assignment of moral responsibility.
  - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    As it works out, I would say it’s more in the vein of blaming IBM for their culpability in the Holocaust, not Mercedes, although clearly Meta’s role was nowhere near as awful as IBM’s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

benjaminwootton 4y ago

The idea is that those blockers or objections are valid. Something is going wrong if they continually raise issues which do not meet the organisations goals. That said, it does sound like a strange function to allocate to a specific team.

groby_b 4y ago

Good god, as if "builder" was the only type of person that has value. Most "builders" are, if not constrained, like cancer cells. Unlimited consumption & growth without a counterbalance. In order to justify their own existence, they need to continue to churn out things without concern of what they consume, what use their product has. Maybe, just maybe, there's value in having different kinds of personalities - unchecked by itself, pretty much every tendency is ruinous.

jason-phillips 4y ago
People who produce things are cancer. Got it. Also, false dichotomy there saying a "responsible innovation" team is needed to limit the building of products with no use; that's a solved problem. We have markets for that.
- klyrs 4y ago
  Thomas Midgley Jr. was an impressively prolific builder. Navigators are just as important as drivers. You need both, not either in exclusion.
- unicornhose 4y ago
  The people who choose to build things (it's not a binary quality, everyone can build, some are better) are not taking moral responsibility for the things they are building. It is hurting society. What is to be done? That is the issue at the heart of this headline.

duxup 4y ago

At a previous job I joked that groups like that would place to attract / corral employees that should be cut during the next round of layoffs. In theory these teams could do some good things, in reality it attracts or creates horrible people with INCREDIBLE efficiency / creates a cycle of endless meetings / recommendations... and it is endless because it is in their best interest to have an endless amount of "work" and inject themselves in a way that costs them nothing, and everyone else a great deal. I figured these teams were the easiest place to find people who provide nothing at all / get in the way of folks doing things and almost always they don't accomplish their goals anyhow. They wouldn't even know if they did accomplish their goals anyway as these groups tend to center everything on their actions / the goal is them doing things endlessly. Somehow word got back to them about the joke, they blamed the wrong person for the joke, tried to raise a hubbub with HR (to their credit HR told them to pound sand). And then they got all laid off ...

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
takes notes
worker767424 4y ago
Probably best not to tell HR that there's a joke going around that your team should be laid off. Wouldn't want to give them any ideas.
gnramires 4y ago
But you need somehow oversight right? (specially for something as critical as social networks used by billions) I'm a believer in some sort of cross-validation and quantification. The ethical impact of a technology should be quantified, and addressed if significantly negative (or promoted/incentivized if positive!) -- you can quantify number of users impacted, give various arguments, soft measures and estimates. Then, you can have other teams validate those estimates. After all said and done, you can again evaluate an intervention (on both ethical terms, and on the productivity and profitability of your company), and see if it was good or not. If a team is repeatedly giving bad advice, I think you can then address that (retraining, lay off, etc.?). Ethics is not impossible to do :) I believe a certain generalization of this is needed for the entire society[1], to externally address good/bad technologies. A good example I cite all the time is Open source contributions. We still haven't found a good mechanism to pay OSS, despite the immense value it brings to society (openness itself has a value that direct sale couldn't capture). I'm a big believer in distributed evaluation and cross-evaluation: if we had distributed entities to evaluate impact of various ventures (for efficiency, properly categorized and subdivided into science, technology, social costs/benefits, environmental costs/benefits, etc.) we could apply the same logic to make society more adaptive, distributed, and less focused only on the single goal of profit. (I plan to elaborate this further, I think we are going to need to "patch" our current system in some sensible and careful ways to get a really good 3rd millennium!) [1] Previously sketched this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28833230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28833230

evr1isnxprt 4y ago

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
Nothing in the comment you’re replying to mentioned software engineers. They claim people building things are unlikely to spend time in “responsible innovation” teams. That’s true if one’s building rockets, medicines or cat GIF sorters.
- evr1isnxprt 4y ago
speakfreely 4y ago
> But building the software is not hard. This reminds me of 400lb men who can't walk up the stairs without getting winded yelling "are you kidding me???" at the TV when they see NFL quarterbacks throw a bad pass.
strix_varius 4y ago
It's weird that you assume "builder" means "programmer." At a healthy software company, most roles are builder roles: - designer - product manager - marketer - sales - customer success Each of these roles delivers something additive. They make the product easier or nicer to use, make it address the market better, or even just make people aware that it exists. Marketers build complex promotional structures to gain users. Salespeople put together actual accounts paying actual money so the product can continue to improve. Customer success helps people use the product, and a good CS team filters high-signal feedback back to the product & engineering orgs. People in all of these roles (and more) are building the product. If their roles were cut, the product would be worse: uglier, slower, less useful, less used, less purchased, and less successful. However, there are roles that attract folks who don't want to build. It's smart to get rid of them.
- evr1isnxprt 4y ago
  You can try to sell me on it emotionally but it isn’t going to happen. Economic trade is just something humans do. Babbling about it in rambling fluffy semantics is not what gives rise to economic activity. A lot of these builders should build themselves into fuller better rounded people than office workers who memorized an emotional caricature they use to extract attention from others. HR, marketing, etc exist to insulate financiers, give off an air of building big ideas, but it’s layers of indirection so the financier can avoid real work. The majority don’t have to import your relative emotional context anymore than they have to import a preachers religion. That’s what’s going down with the economy; the majority are tired of the over hyped coddled office worker. This is just the start of the barnacle shedding. Source? Data models forecasting economic “plot lines” I collate with others to inform investment choices, not a bunch of high emotion semantic gibberish intended to sell me on a relative perspective. SEs and otherwise, too many are addicted to an emotional confidence game that is sapping agency in other contexts. This is low hanging fruit being shed, but ML will come for content creators and SEs sooner than most expect; it’s all electron state in machines. Generating data/code as a job will be automated; that is a stated goal of many powers that be in tech. I’m not the only one who sees it; in a 2 year old interview Gabe Newell was calling ML content creation an extinction level event that’s right around the corner. More and more “builders” of hype and ephemera are going to be receiving the wake up call as the months and years progress. Building layers of indirection as a career is not long for this world. But more simply; “software builders” is not language I see as constrained to SE. Like you said it takes a village to build a software business. I think you inferred a bit much.

cletus 4y ago

100% this. It's very much in the spirit of "the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy". There's no better way for someone to justify their existence than creating problems but appearing to solve problems for other people. Compliance, security, etc. These things are usually necessary but it does attract a certain kind of person who seems predisposed to empire building through obstacle creation. You see the same thing with people who become moderators. I saw this years ago on Stack Overflow. You see it on Wikipedia. You see it on reddit. You have to be constantly vigilant that these people don't get out of hand. These people end up treating the process as the goal rather than the means to an end. I remember when the moderators starting closing SO topics as "not constructive". There were a ton of questions like "should I do X or Y?" and the mods decided one day to start closing these became there was no definitive answer. You can list the advantages and disadvantages of each option and list the factors to consider. That can be incredibly value. Can this descend into a flamewar? Absolutely. But just kill the flamewars and the people who start them. No point throwing out the baby with the bath water.

btilly 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/Wikipedia_has_C... comes to mind as another good example of this dynamic. For another, the ever expanding administrative overhead of colleges is a large contributor to driving tuition increases. See https://stanfordreview.org/read-my-lips-no-new-administrators/ https://stanfordreview.org/read-my-lips-no-new-administrator... for an idea of how bad the problem is getting.
Floegipoky 4y ago
> I remember when the moderators starting closing SO topics as "not constructive". I don't think that was a decision made by the mods, I think that's policy created by SO. I really like that it's so focused, clearly defines what is on and off topic, and strictly enforces that policy. You're right, such discussion can be very valuable, but if these policies didn't exist or weren't enforced, I don't think the site would be nearly as useful. Doesn't mean that the people with closed questions are bad, or the conversation can't be had in chat or a different site. > Can this descend into a flamewar? Absolutely. But just kill the flamewars and the people who start them. Meanwhile the strong contributors get tired of dealing with (even more) toxicity and move on, the signal:noise ratio drops, and it turns into just another (ostensibly) programming-focused forum. Not to mention that the more time mods spend dealing with toxic behavior, the less time they have for work that improves the content of the site.

opmelogy 4y ago

Sometimes putting blockers in front of people is absolutely what's needed. It's a common tactic for compliance and security - both of which can completely tank your company if not handled correctly. I suspect it's especially true if there are people with the skills to build who claim they are the only ones that are "actually trying to build things." Likely they don't have the right level of understanding of what needs to be built.

thomassmith65 4y ago

If the goal is to stay in business long term, thoughtless 'building' isn't worth much. Steve Jobs: "focus is about saying no" Mark Zuckerberg: "move fast and breaks things" Facebook is the world's least-trusted, most-reviled brand. They earned it by building garbage.

Kamq 4y ago
> They earned it by building garbage. No one (aside from engineers) cares about what facebook built. Facebook had scandal after scandal and on top of it, everyone's grandparents signed up so teenagers couldn't post all of the screwed up stuff they were doing anymore. Posting there turned into a mix of corporate scrutiny (especially prospective employers) mixed with the old forwards from grandma emails you used to get in the late 90s/early 2000s. That's why facebook is dying.
- thomassmith65 4y ago
  I see most of FB's "scandals" (eg: dark patterns, illegal ad-buying filters, API over-sharing with third parties) and flaws (re: "teenagers couldn't post" without pinging grandpa) as the result of garbage product design. At a glance, our comments appear to differ substantively. At closer inspection, the only disagreement we have is what to include in the 'building garbage' bucket. In case I misused language, I can rephrase my original point: FB is in a bad place today not because FB was ever slow to build, but because what FB did build was too often bad for users (for that matter: bad for humanity).
  - Kamq 4y ago
    I'm going to have to disagree. They built an amazing product... for a world that had only teenagers on social media. This was the truth for quite a while, and was true of the world they created their product in. They just never really updated their product to account for the new reality. Sure, they changed the algorithm a ton and re-tweaked the UI, but the algorithm and the UI weren't the product. The experience people had on the site was the product. They're sort of like IBM's mainframe division. Mainframes are kind of cool if you ever get to tinker around with their hardware, and they're impressive engineering marvels (so are facebooks systems). But the world has changed since IBM was on top, and they don't fit what most people need anymore.

sangnoir 4y ago

> Teams like this attract a certain type of person, and it's not a builder. Ditto for financial audit teams and so-called "IT security": all they do is block, I've never had anyone in either function build something or help me work faster, just additional processes and bureaucracy that slows down real work. edit: I thought my sarcasm would be apparent, but Poe's law strikes again.

strix_varius 4y ago
I haven't worked much with financial teams, but the security teams I've worked with have absolutely helped build our products. They put practices & systems in place that made a golden path to getting software green-lit for production.
eropple 4y ago
"Fast" is not the only descriptor that should be applied to work where a financial audit might be involved. "Correct" probably has a few things to say. "Legal," too.
aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Same with QA. Fire those guys!
- strix_varius 4y ago
  This, but non-ironically.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> financial audit teams and so-called "IT security" They do fill a role that actually needs to be filled, though.
browningstreet 4y ago
I'm in a highly regulated industry segment and work in an information security related function. You've made my day.

mind-blight 4y ago

I strongly disagree. I worked at an analytics company that had and needed a privacy ethics department. They were great. It was a mix of lawyers, philosophers (degree in the subject), and former developers. They consistently thought about the nuances of baking privacy into a product in a way that I didn't have the background or time for. Every time I worked with them, they helped me build a better product by helping me tweak the specs in a way that had minimal impact on our users (unless they were a bad actor) and strongly increased privacy protections. It was like having a specialized PM in the room

m-ee 4y ago
I don’t remember the source but there was a linked article here a while ago about how to effectively manage “blockers” like this. The example given was a med device company where the engineers hated the regulatory department who always told them no. Manager decided to actually increase engagement and bring on one person from the reg side to their meetings. At some point a person said “well we’d love to do this but no way would the FDA allow us to do it.” The regulatory employee basically said “do you even know the regulations? There’s a very easy pathway to doing exactly that.” My boss once did a similar thing with the quality department. Suddenly we sailed through our DFMEAs. Some people do live to block others, but some are trying to do an important job. Engagement usually pays more than just whinging.
strix_varius 4y ago
> Every time I worked with them, they helped me build a better product by helping me tweak the specs in a way that had minimal impact on our users (unless they were a bad actor) and strongly increased privacy protections. It was like having a specialized PM in the room It sounds like they were focused on building product too, then, which is not at all what this is about.
mariojv 4y ago
What did the philosophers do on a day to day basis? I am curious, sounds like an interesting role.
- 4y ago

mikotodomo 4y ago

What?? The internet is extremely toxic. If you don't have supervision while building your app, it will attract the most horrifying people like this one time someone almost convinced me that the age of consent should be abolished but I just realized they were abusing my naivety and gaslighting me. We need platforms developed lawfully and keep making sure users are liable to prevent that.

dgs_sgd 4y ago

Well put. Intentions can start off genuine, where the non builder truly believes the processes and barriers they set up improve building (and early on it's usually true), but it easily morphs into a tool for maintaining power and influence regardless of the value add.

__derek__ 4y ago

IME, they don't have the authority to invent/implement blockers. Instead, they attend/hold conferences, give talks, and write documents that nobody acts on. In theory, it's a good way for a company to advertise/lobby to the think-tank set. Clearly that hasn't played out for FB, hence disbanding the team.

jarjoura 4y ago

This is always a vicious cycle that starts with good intent but spirals into an oppressive regime. 1) It's starts after the product launch post-mortem 2) Team creates a process to improve avoiding future mistakes 3) Process innocently includes ability to hard block any product changes without someone or some group's approval 4) Politics emerges behind the scenes from those with social capital to get around the hard blocks 5) New process to make things "more fair" by adding more hard blocking rules, usually resulting in lots of pointless meetings and paperwork to justify new process and show upper management that things are working as intended 6) More politics as teams start hiring for people who are able to get around the heavy process by being "good at the game" 7) New team is formed around the process because it's now a full time job 8) People good at politics join this new team and everyone else is pulled into pointless meetings and handed paperwork 9) Rinse and repeat The problem I've always observed is that these systems are put in place with the best intent to offer guidance so that company, employees and consumers can all benefit by building the right best thing. However, the systems are given blocking abilities that after time do more damage than good. You'd think, if something were not blocking no one would listen, and maybe you're right. I definitely have no idea how teams can avoid this spiral trap, however, I don't think it's a bad thing to sunset process like this after a while. Just like Google is willing to throw away products on a whim, we should be willing to throw away process teams on a whim.

archagon 4y ago

Maybe if the builders stopped building shitty things, we wouldn’t need teams like this.

i_like_apis 4y ago

I didn’t expect to see such a concise and spot-on statement in these comments. Thank you.

IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago

The elephant in the room just broke thru the door....