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I never worked at Dropbox, where Aditya was CTO, but companies like Databricks, Lyft, and Plaid all have code freezes for various quality-related reasons e.g. o

by omeze 4y ago

I never worked at Dropbox, where Aditya was CTO, but companies like Databricks, Lyft, and Plaid all have code freezes for various quality-related reasons e.g. outages, post-mortems, severe bugs. Are all of these company's CTOs dramatastic showboaters, or is this a lever worth pulling when times call for it? These companies were all unicorns, decacorns at times as well.

bradlys 4y ago
I've worked at decacorns that used code freezes... Usually they were last minute "oh fuck we took down the whole website 3 days in a row now and this has cost millions of dollars" kinda reactions. The reason they had to do code freezes is because all the other practices were such dog shit. (Mostly from a product and biz perspective) Eng was usually driven with a whip to meet insane deadlines - thus the instability and bad quality and outages... I wouldn't expect any different at many of these other companies. Whether they are worth $1b or $10b or $100b rarely has any correlation with quality of eng output.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Indeed! Honestly, I'd expect a moderate inverse correlation between valuation and code/practice quality. I suspect that's obviously true for large, successful companies. We've all heard stories about people at stable companies with terrible dev practices, because ultimately dev practices don't matter for companies with sufficiently strong market positions. Are some of them good even though they don't have to be? Sure. But plenty aren't. But I'd also think it's true for the whatevercorns. For raising that kind of money, big public drama is vital. Look at WeWork or Theranos. Great at dramatics, great at raising money. Technical competence for them was at best irrelevant to getting the next valuation bump. If the execs favor dramatic announcements over slow-and-steady gains, I expect that will influence how promotions happen and gradually trickle down to dev practices in a lot of places.
wpietri 4y ago
I can't say for sure about those particular cases. I'd have to have a lot more detail. But as I mention elsewhere, one of the best ways to rise through the ranks, especially at companies excited to be unicorns, is to do dramatic things, even if they aren't particularly effective. ~20 years ago, when eBay was a company that mattered a great deal, I did a contract there. I was on some mailing list for the eng org where promotions were announced. Every single one of them talked about some incredible act of heroism, usually involving staying all night multiple times to get something out. The reality was that their code base was pretty poor, and their bad development practices caused things to get worse over time. That required heroics just to do pretty mundane stuff. And in that rush to meet arbitrary deadlines with sufficient drama? Even more corners would be cut, making it even harder something to get done next time. In contrast, they could have taken quality and productivity seriously and build their practices around that, ending up with a smooth-running process and reasonable hours for everybody. But that was in nobody's interest, because as far as I could tell nobody at eBay got promoted for quiet competence. Drama was what mattered, and so their development practices were tuned for creating opportunities for drama.

by omeze 4y ago

bradlys 4y ago

I've worked at decacorns that used code freezes... Usually they were last minute "oh fuck we took down the whole website 3 days in a row now and this has cost millions of dollars" kinda reactions. The reason they had to do code freezes is because all the other practices were such dog shit. (Mostly from a product and biz perspective) Eng was usually driven with a whip to meet insane deadlines - thus the instability and bad quality and outages... I wouldn't expect any different at many of these other companies. Whether they are worth $1b or $10b or $100b rarely has any correlation with quality of eng output.

wpietri 4y ago
Indeed! Honestly, I'd expect a moderate inverse correlation between valuation and code/practice quality. I suspect that's obviously true for large, successful companies. We've all heard stories about people at stable companies with terrible dev practices, because ultimately dev practices don't matter for companies with sufficiently strong market positions. Are some of them good even though they don't have to be? Sure. But plenty aren't. But I'd also think it's true for the whatevercorns. For raising that kind of money, big public drama is vital. Look at WeWork or Theranos. Great at dramatics, great at raising money. Technical competence for them was at best irrelevant to getting the next valuation bump. If the execs favor dramatic announcements over slow-and-steady gains, I expect that will influence how promotions happen and gradually trickle down to dev practices in a lot of places.

wpietri 4y ago

I can't say for sure about those particular cases. I'd have to have a lot more detail. But as I mention elsewhere, one of the best ways to rise through the ranks, especially at companies excited to be unicorns, is to do dramatic things, even if they aren't particularly effective. ~20 years ago, when eBay was a company that mattered a great deal, I did a contract there. I was on some mailing list for the eng org where promotions were announced. Every single one of them talked about some incredible act of heroism, usually involving staying all night multiple times to get something out. The reality was that their code base was pretty poor, and their bad development practices caused things to get worse over time. That required heroics just to do pretty mundane stuff. And in that rush to meet arbitrary deadlines with sufficient drama? Even more corners would be cut, making it even harder something to get done next time. In contrast, they could have taken quality and productivity seriously and build their practices around that, ending up with a smooth-running process and reasonable hours for everybody. But that was in nobody's interest, because as far as I could tell nobody at eBay got promoted for quiet competence. Drama was what mattered, and so their development practices were tuned for creating opportunities for drama.