4 ms·
I have been in a couple of orgs now where this was, in my view, a big problem because of ripple effects. Let's say you're on Team A. You're making a thing. You
by VyseofArcadia 4y ago
I have been in a couple of orgs now where this was, in my view, a big problem because of ripple effects.
Let's say you're on Team A. You're making a thing. You do a little research, and your thing has this gigantic dependency that you hadn't initially considered, but it's work that for whatever reason Team A can't do. You don't have the resources or there's politics or something. But you're in luck! You manager asked around, and it turns out Team B made a thing that solves that gigantic dependency. Yay!
So you have a meeting with Team B, and they are weirdly evasive about their thing. Whatever, they gave you what you needed, and you spend a sprint or two integrating their thing with your thing. Except it's just not working as advertised. It just isn't. So you grab some time with a Team B engineer, just the two of you, and they admit that their thing was never really finished. The deadline from upper management was unreasonable, so they got it good enough to be demoable, and then called it quits because the next unreasonable feature demand was already on deck. This of course enabled by the fact that none of the managers had enough depth to know what was bullshit. (Or maybe they had a vested interest to their managers to sell it anyway, and so on until at some point the management chain loses the ability to smell bullshit.)
Well, shit. At this point you're up the creek because your manager already made an unreasonable commitment based on the advertised capabilities of Team B's thing. What do you do? Well, you sort of half-implement what you can, make it demoable, let your boss sell it up. Just like Team B did when they discovered Team C's thing was half-implemented.
If you are thinking about a big software company that keeps putting out shit products, now you know why.
- endtime 4y agoI don't think this is why Google puts out mediocre products, FWIW. I think it's more that when something turns out after 6 months to be a bad idea, everyone's incentives are to spending another 12-18 months launching (or "landing") it so they can get promoted (and then change teams). Failing responsibly after 6 months isn't rewarded. (From what I'm told, Meta is better about this.)
- endtime 4y agoI'm surprised this comment for downvoted. I'd love to understand what about it people didn't like, if anyone feels like replying.
- VyseofArcadia 4y agoI freely admit Google was not the big company I was thinking of when I wrote my comment. I would be shocked, however, if all of the MANGA companies didn't at least to some degree suffer from what I described. I think to any company that organizes work around services is going to have problems with APIs that overpromise and underdeliver.
- jacobr1 4y agoIt doesn't even need to "not work." You can ship a V1/prototype/MVP product that does work with a small, focused team. But extending that product to support all the additional use cases, resolve feedback, address tech-debt/scale/performance, etc ... requires investment ... more investment probably than the initial version. But the version version is "done" - why invest more?
- VyseofArcadia 4y agoThat is a perfectly reasonable and understandable situation that I am not talking about. If Team B came to us and said, "here's what it does right now, we were only able to ship the MVP before we needed to prioritize other work", that's fine. That's wonderful. That is the kind of open and honest communication about platform capabilities that is necessary to do quality work. What I am talking about is when Team B says, "it slices! It dices! It removes tough stains, washes and dries your cloths, hell, it'll fold them!" Then when you start working with their amazing miracle product you find that it merely slices, well, no, actually, it really needs more of a sawing motion because they initially misunderstood the requirements and built it serrated and didn't have time to go back and fix it.
- dh2022 4y agoI wonder at what point this becomes full circle. I.e. team C depends on feature from team A which is half baked because of the initial dependency :)