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Story: “It would be career limiting..."

• stocknoob 4y ago
  Being able to do your work without having to deal with people who value career over client outcomes is one of the best reasons to pursue financial independence. For a creative person that type of environment is soul sucking.
• PaperOliver 4y ago
  This happens in a similar away at the small architecture company I work at. A client will pay for work, and then it will then become clear the work they have asked for is infeasible. However we are still contracted to do work. It benefits us to do this work and bill for it. I find it totally unethical to do any work after finding out that it will never result in a building, but my managers know that if we do the work we can bill for it. I think this story is the same, whereby the managers know the client will not benefit, but also that they will pay. A recent HN post spoke about how employees are either aligned with a company (profit) or the overall goals espoused by the company. These goals appeal to the client. This story is an example of the OP being aligned to the client but not the company, and essentially how our economy is not aligned with ethical practice.
• rdtwo 4y ago
  Probably wouldn’t have been career limiting since you quit anyway
  • karaterobot 4y ago
    For the managers. Admitting you got it wrong is [more] career limiting than proceeding with a doomed project and then (presumably) blaming other factors. Heck, you may even have gotten promoted in the intervening 2 years.
  • unethical_ban 4y ago
    There is a spectrum between full principled rebellion and complete acquiescence to a shit project. As the OP said, he was absolved. He (she?) couldn't stand the idea of incompetence or lack of communication/recognition of the fire in the room. Once the boss said "let it burn", their sanity was confirmed and they left the room.
• pmoriarty 4y ago
  I could never relate to people who care about their career, "success", getting ahead, or climbing the corporate ladder. For me virtually everything else in life has been more important, and careers/jobs were just a necessary evil because it's almost impossible to survive without money.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    I think I agree. The job is a means to an end. The only two times that I actually applied for a higher position is when I noticed a really, really bad candidate applied ( with a good chance of getting that position too ) and would effectively become my boss. I am not the manager type, but sometimes you have to bite the bullet and choose lesser evil.
  • unethical_ban 4y ago
    Some people thrive on their work and on problem solving. Not every employer is this malicious or incompetent. Given the necessity of work, I would rather enjoy my work and excel at it than sluff off.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      "Given the necessity of work, I would rather enjoy my work and excel at it than sluff off." True, but from my perspective the career oriented people don't actually care about that stuff or solving problems. In my mind, the people I would label as career oriented are usually pretentious assholes preoccupied by the "status" of someday being in the C suite and driving the most expensive BMW/Tesla. On the other side, you can have fun, perform well, and solve problems yet have a stagnant career. You would have to play the politics to leverage those into career advancement.
      • marcinzm 4y ago
        I'm not sure I'd label every staff+ engineer at FAANG as a pretentious assholes.
        • 4y ago
• abeppu 4y ago
  > we hadn’t even received all of the specifications from the customer that we would need to complete the project > And then one of them said “It would be career limiting if the client were to hear this.” > I’d met my responsibility to the company – and the company had threatened me as a result. The author interprets that they were threatened. But really, for whom would it be career limiting? Perhaps I'm being too charitable, but the manager could also be read to be making a statement of fact about the perception of their own performance. The author says there's already a project plan and a project manager, and the plan is clearly incomplete and the project manager was not aware for an extended period. Someone's career probably _should_ be limited. But the larger question is, did any of this matter? If the customer is not engaged enough to make clear what they want, is there perhaps an equal amount of dysfunction on the customer side? If they really wanted something delivered, wouldn't they be trying to deliver clear requirements as soon as possible? Or perhaps someone on the customer side is able to get promoted off of being the point person for a 2 year $60M contract before it finishes? Or someone is able to use the slowness and expense of the contracting firm to argue for building an in-house development team?
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    <<If the customer is not engaged enough to make clear what they want Tbh, I sometimes wonder if it is a question of engagement. I just finished a project. Major clusterfuck. And it is a part of a much bigger overhaul. Tons of people are involved and there is maybe one person hidden somewhere that understands how it all fits together ( but my real fear is that the project is so big that no one really knows what this monstrosity is supposed to do, how it is supposed to behave or even how it actually behaves ). People are engaged ( the ones doing the work anyway ), but there is just too many cooks and too many layers to information to be translated from English to English and from English to w/e contractors are from. <<Someone's career probably _should_ be limited. Probably, but based on my experience, there is near zero accountability in manager's circle. It is usually the sacrificial scape goat that gets all the blame and limited career opportunities.
  • karaterobot 4y ago
    As a contractor, I was definitely on some big projects where, from the perspective of an IC in the trenches, it didn't seem like anyone was in charge, or that the people in charge didn't care about it succeeding. In the two examples I'm thinking of, it's been that the client stakeholder has a lot of pull, but not a lot of experience. For example, the top Sales guy decides they want to run a little tech startup inside the company, but they've never actually launched software before. Or, someone in a load bearing role, like the head of product, knows they are out the door (usually moving up in a different, more glamorous organization) and doesn't really care to devote 60 hours a week to this dumb old company anymore.
• neilv 4y ago
  > Two years later, the client canceled the two-years-late project before it ever launched. They ate a $60M loss. Sounds like that might be half the problem: the firm with the contract had tens of millions of reasons (dollars) not to do honest product/project management. (The other half is that product/project management is hard.)
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    Not sure how to feel about this TBH. On one hand, yeah, it is clearly a pretty big screw-up on the part of the contracting company, to provide $60M without sufficient specifications as to exactly what they are trying to buy. On the other, accepting $60M without providing anything of value seems pretty unethical.
• smarks 4y ago
  At Sun Microsystems this notion was so common that there was a TLA for it: CLM = "career limiting move"
  • cbanek 4y ago
    Microsoft used this TLA as well.
  • giantg2 4y ago
    I don't think they have it at my company. Or maybe nobody was nice enough to tell me. That might explain being just a midlevel after 10 years and a masters...
    • wccrawford 4y ago
      If you're still being paid like a mid-level dev after 10 years, you owe it to yourself to look for a new job and get a massive pay raise. My original plan was to stay 3 years at my first company, and then change jobs for a raise. I ended up staying 5 because they gave me great raises for the first 3... And then screwed me on 2 years, at which point I knew I should have left at 3 after all. After that it gets murkier, but in general if you aren't seeing really nice pay raises every 3 years, you can get it by changing companies.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        I don't have the skills to change jobs and I have some home life restrictions too. At this point I'd rather just quiet quit.
    • wwilim 4y ago
      There are plenty of fish in the sea. Change jobs and see if that helps. It might remedy the burnout as well.
      • giantg2 4y ago
        I don't have the skills to change jobs and I have some home life restrictions too. At this point I'd rather just quiet quit.
• fuzzythinker 4y ago
  "200+ person project" being contracted. I can't imagine any successful big software (assuming) projects like this not done in-house. Anyone seen any?
  • NikolaNovak 4y ago
    It's on one side of the bell curve but still a reasonably common size in ERP space. Not all of those projects are successful, but not all of them are failures either. (FWIW, my 2 cents - ERP project can succeed or fail on many key levers, including the approach (are we taking it as the business-transformation project that it is, or trying to treat it as a simple IT project); having a suitable client champion and involved/engaged/competent client team; clear goals, priorities and business requirements; explicit responsibilities and deliverables; and of course the competence & experience of the implementation/system integrator - not just on the development side, but on the functional, business transformation, project management, and most important client relationship management side.)
  • giantg2 4y ago
    Oh yeah. The product I worked on in the past went this way. We had a mature product that I said we probably needed to rewrite and modernize to handle any additional increase in volume or integrations with other systems. I left the team due to mostly politics. A year later, half my old subdivision was laid off and the project went to a contractor. Funny enough, they're about 2 years behind schedule. At least they took my advice about modernizing...
• giantg2 4y ago
  Ah, that freeing feeling. I had that once. I was a new security champion for a team. The product had schema owner SQL injection vulnerabilities on every page we developed. I had a meeting with the department head and explained the whole situation and two remediation options. He chose the third option - do nothing. According to him we have a realtime DB backup. Has it ever been tested? No. Do you have procedures for it? No. How long will it take (15 minutes is the end of the world for this system to be down)? No idea. I walked out with a clear answer in my head and that free feeling. I left for another team. Not my problem.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    As long as you have it documented in an email ( issue plus proposed remediation ), you are good. You did your part. Sometimes it is best just to slowly walk away like you did.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      It sucks though since I sort of liked that work and had some respect of my peers. Now I just bounce from team to team every 18 months (lateral moves, no raise). I probably could have stayed there and gotten a promotion if I played the politics and kept my mouth shut. Now I'm just a lazy slacker because I've gotten shafted by the company a couple time. It's a great compliment for your peers to call you a senior or tech lead, but it only opens the door to the great insult of your managers keeping you from the actual roles.
  • saghm 4y ago
    I'm not sure what's more depressing, that they didn't think that someone exfiltrating the data was an issue as long as they didn't lose it, or the fact that even if customer data was stolen, they probably were correct that there wouldn't be any ramifications for the negligence.
    • giantg2 4y ago
      Oh, to be fair I should mention that it was an internal system. External threat actors were not a major concern. However, we had trading desk developers with access to the prd system and their own development space. The major concern in my mind is an absent minded copy/paste of a drop table, maybe a disgruntled employee.
• SevenNation 4y ago
  > Two years later, the client canceled the two-years-late project before it ever launched. They ate a $60M loss. You could say that the customer got exactly what they paid for. The customer lacked the ability pay in terms of specifications, so what they got was what $60M and a half-hearted attempt to articulate what they needed could buy. On the other hand, the customer never knows what they want. You could say that's the job of the software company - to slog through the mountain of feature requests disguised as specifications to arrive at a system that will actually solve the customer's real problem.
  • dropit_sphere 4y ago
    caveat emptor...
  • cestith 4y ago
    > You could say that's the job of the software company - to slog through the mountain of feature requests disguised as specifications to arrive at a system that will actually solve the customer's real problem. That's the role of a business analyst, product owner, customer liaison, sales engineer, or some similar role for sure. If you're running a large project without one of those as a dedicated full-time resource then it falls on the project manager. If the PM can't do that, they should delegate to some role like those, possibly a few of them for various vertical slices of the project.
• PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  If accurate, realistic project schedules are considered a "career limiting move" then obviously the company was never a good place to advance your career anyway. As evidenced in this anecdote, this mentality doesn't produce good results for those companies. Looking back at the places I've worked, I'm having a hard time thinking of any examples of people committing singular "career limiting moves". Most tech companies I've worked for have been extremely forgiving of anyone with tech talent, to the point that some people were given countless extra chances despite longstanding patterns of misbehavior or failure to deliver. The only true incidents I can think of that fit the "career limiting move" description either resulted in getting fired, or doing unnecessarily vindictive/petty things when disagreeing with management.
  • lmm 4y ago
    > If accurate, realistic project schedules are considered a "career limiting move" then obviously the company was never a good place to advance your career anyway. As evidenced in this anecdote, this mentality doesn't produce good results for those companies. Not good results how? They got their $60M and moved on to the next sucker.
• thih9 4y ago
  I'm seeing a cloudflare error; is the page down now? > Web server is returning an unknown error (Error code 520)
  • julienreszka 4y ago
    yes for me too
  • timy2shoes 4y ago
    The HN hug of death.
  • bargle0 4y ago
    Yep. It seems like it got hugged.
  • naet 4y ago
    I have it open and will paste it here since it's a text story. -- Story: “It would be career limiting..." Harry E. 2022-11-04 I spent about 18 months working on a doomed project. For a lot of that time, I thought I was the only one who realized it was doomed. It was a big, multi-year project. I was hired on as an individual contributor maybe 15 months before the project was to be delivered to the customer, and it took me awhile to get my bearings. But after a few months, it really seemed to me that (a) we were not moving along as fast as the project manager Gantt charts said we had to, (b) we were doing a lot of tasks that weren’t even on the Gantt charts, and (c) we hadn’t even received all of the specifications from the customer that we would need to complete the project. Bad estimates for the work we had, lots of work that hadn’t been estimated, and incomplete requirements – the project sure seemed doomed to me. Over time, I made more and more noise about this to an ever-growing number of people. A couple of other folks felt the same way and also made noise. About a year into my employment, management got tired of the noise, so they tried, as far as I can tell, to subvert us by giving us responsibility: they said OK, you trio of rabble-rousers are now an Architecture Board. You’re in charge of doing a technical review of the architecture, and in particular identifying work that’s missing from the official project plans. Report back in a few weeks. Nominally empowered, we set out to do just that. We pieced together what we knew about the architecture and the work plan from our individual roles in the rapidly-growing, nearly-200 person project, and then went and asked a lot of people a lot of questions. When we were done, we scheduled a meeting to deliver our final report. At the meeting were the overall program manager, three project managers, ten development managers, and a handful of other managers as well. It was to this crowd that we presented our results. What we told them was this: we had discovered a lot of work that wasn’t on the official project Gantt chart. A lot of work. In fact, we had discovered about an extra 9 months of work. Not, to be clear, 9 person months – we had found 9 calendar months of work for the 200+ person project. And that was assuming the client got us the rest of the specs in a timely manner and they didn’t contain any landmines. Once we had let that sink in with the managers, we further suggested that there was probably work we had not discovered. Finally, we made our primary recommendation, which was to slip the project 12 months to cover the newly-discovered work, and provide margin for any additional remaining work. It felt great to deliver this report. Finally, we would all be aligned on the doomedness of the current project plan. Finally we would adjust our delivery schedule to match reality. That gnawing sense of futility and impending failure that I’d been feeling for 15 months would finally, today, get addressed. Well, that’s what I thought. The managers absorbed our report in silence for a moment or two. And then one of them said “It would be career limiting if the client were to hear this.” And that was the end of that. When the shock wore off, I felt freed. The doomed nature of the project didn’t trouble me anymore. I’d met my responsibility to the company – and the company had threatened me as a result. I quit a few weeks later. Two years later, the client canceled the two-years-late project before it ever launched. They ate a $60M loss. Bet that manager’s still at the company, though.
• yieldcrv 4y ago
  You could have kept collecting your share of that $60M they were committed to burning You cared too much, bet you wont do that again
  • mring33621 4y ago
    Some of us have decided to embrace our idealism/personality flaws and continue forth, undaunted, regardless of occasional negative feedback from others.
• duxup 4y ago
  > (c) we hadn’t even received all of the specifications from the customer that we would need to complete the project. To me that smells of incompetence on both the customer and local company. At that point the project might be entirely unsalvageable.
• btilly 4y ago
  This story reminds me of https://despair.com/products/consulting https://despair.com/products/consulting. Also law 23 from https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html seems appropriate: The schedule you develop will seem like a complete work of fiction up until the time your customer fires you for not meeting it.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• donatj 4y ago
  > I spent about 18 months working on a doomed project. For a lot of that time, I thought I was the only one who realized it was doomed. I had a similar feeling about a project once. I thought "Boy is this stupid. No one in their right mind is going to pay for this. Why are we building this." Let me manager know my feelings. Stayed and built it. Thing is a huge success. One of our best selling products. Boy do I still feel dumb. Very humbling, honestly. Shows what little I actually know about what people want.
  • maptime 4y ago
    It sounds like you were working on the project without enough contact with users to understand the value of the thing you were building. That doesn't sound like it's your fault!
    • bombcar 4y ago
      The only people worse at knowing what the customer wants than management/sales is the customers themselves. It's really strange the first time you experience it.
      • maptime 4y ago
        Agree, never ask a user what they want But you can't go wrong with talking to users to understand the problems they are dealing with
        • bombcar 4y ago
          I've heard "The Mom Test" is a good book around that, but I've never read it. https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/dp/1492180742 https://www.amazon.com/Mom-Test-customers-business-everyone/...
          • srcreigh 4y ago
            It’s great. It strongly warns against ego pitching, aka talking about your fancy solution, which only prompts people to say “That’s great” so you go away. The whole book is basically how to get useful information by being curious about the potential customer, how to decode “That’s great” by asking for commitments/intros/money, and also a bit about how to know whether you’re talking to the right person in the first place.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• duped 4y ago
  I mean this story is cathartic, but I don't get what the "rabble rousers" expected to happen. You don't go into a meeting like that to present problems, but to present solutions. And a 12 month delay on a $60 million contract isn't a solution, it's another problem for the sales/client success people. And doing it in front of a group of management, no less - that's like firing a shot across the bow, declaring that the current PM team is incompetent. It doesn't matter if you're right, it matters how you communicate and strategize. This seems to be a skill that many people lack. This sounds like a conversation that should be had with a handful of managers who you can convince to your side, and concoct a plan to stage the product development and release such that it gets done and you don't cost a giant contract (and people's jobs). People talk shit about office politics, but sometimes you need to read the room...
  • pyrale 4y ago
    > And doing it in front of a group of management, no less - that's like firing a shot across the bow, declaring that the current PM team is incompetent. As it turns out, they were wrong. The project management was actually fraudulent.
    • hinkley 4y ago
      Always live below your means. Then you can walk out on people when they tell you who they really are. At least then you have a small chance that they will take the feedback for what it is, instead of learning to lie better. If you quit mysteriously six months later there's no feedback loop, even if you tell them what it is (same human psychology theory behind CI - only immediate feedback is properly internalized)
  • Seattle3503 4y ago
    Yeah, it seems like scope needed to be reduced in order to deliver an MVP on time.
    • pyrolistical 4y ago
      I wonder if we have conditioned clients to expect everything now. Are we harming our own customers by allowing them to make demands that in turn only harm themselves in the long run? Do we have too much of a revolving door for an organization to see this trend?
• pnw 4y ago
  That appears to be a marketing website, so it's not even clear if the story is true.
• angarg12 4y ago
  In my career I have two clear examples of projects that a) Got cancelled shortly before launching b) Took several people several months to complete (amounting to a number of people-years) and most importantly c) Would not have started if someone had asked the right questions early on I believe as engineers we can achieve big impact by preventing doomed projects from lifting off. That being said, it requires a certain support and company culture that aren't available everywhere.
• wnolens 4y ago
  This is the only justice I ever get as an IC/tech lead - to watch things crumble just as I expect. It's happened several times. It's happening right now in my team, in fact. It's so off the rails I don't have time to interview for a new job.
• lumost 4y ago
  There is also another way of looking at this doomed project. 1. A client didn't know what they wanted, had 60 million to spend on figuring it out, and hired a firm that would let them spend 60 million. 2. The firm was incentivized to provide a nice looking underestimate and then adapt as new work was discovered. 3. The firm continued getting paid as long as the client was happy. 4. The client did not want to be told that the project was a year late in advance. One unfortunate aspect of the customer is always right is that the customer may often be very wrong.
  • thih9 4y ago
    I see your point and I agree. At the same time I’d say this bigger picture is directly contributing to the secrecy and dishonesty within the firm. Not only the client is not aware what they actually want and are getting; it looks like the firm is not fully aware what they’re delivering either. I guess dealing with clients who are wrong may be a risky business.
    • 3pt14159 4y ago
      This type of thinking is how we get ants. Ants Lana. Ants. There are real humans in the loop here. They can easily put their foot down and find another job if they get fired. These are not people at the edge of feeding their families. These are people that buy 94 octane gas at the Sunoco fuel pump for their stupid sports car. If people don't make moral decisions in their day to day lives the world gets worse. It may not seem like the millions of dollars belong to anyone but they do. Pensioners or millionaires or even just normal folks that grasp their tiny share of the pool via their ESOP. When people just throw resources and good will under the bus in the name of career advancement they're visibly hurting the world. Each single dollar could have been spent on refugees, climate change, or war relief. I am very sick of this cavalier attitude by the tech elite.
      • thih9 4y ago
        You are right too. And yet, there are 2.87 million ants per person in the world [1], and people continue to choose short term personal goals. I guess in the end it’s about balance, i.e. being selfish won’t kill us as long as it’s not the only thing we (humans) do. But yeah, we have to keep that in mind. Or ants will be the only thing left. [1]: https://misfitanimals.com/ants/how-many-ants-are-there-in-the-world/ https://misfitanimals.com/ants/how-many-ants-are-there-in-th...
• andrewflnr 4y ago
  For all the very justifiable shit "Agile" gets, this is what the original "Agile manifesto" agile was supposed to prevent, right? Deliver something early, so you (customer and devs both) learn more quickly what's missing and what will never actually be needed.
  • ilaksh 4y ago
    In a way but also I think there are unfortunately a lot of consulting firms where the core business model is just to make sure they can keep billing the client for as long as possible. So they will prefer that the project or collection of projects are never really finished and will just keep increasing the scope with no real regard for business outcomes except contract extensions.
    • andrewflnr 4y ago
      See? Even clients benefit from early delivery! The consulting firm can't just bluff about their ability to deliver! I guess the reason I brought it up at all is that this seems like a very preventable tragedy if people grokked some pretty easy principles. Ah, maybe in a generation or two...
  • draw_down 4y ago
• jbverschoor 4y ago
  > 9 calendar months of work for the 200+ person Trim the fat
  • JJMcJ 4y ago
    In the old days, an IBM man-year was 500 guys trying to get done by lunchtime.
• fsckboy 4y ago
  $60 million project somebody's paying you to do? there's no way that this project doesn't have heavy requirements on their end too, and the trick to managing a project like this is to make sure that every time you meet the client that they have milestones/deliverables to present to your team also. They will be late, as you are, but now you got them to ask for deadline extensions.
• darepublic 4y ago
  Story of my career. Which gives some perspective to all the layoffs going on
• memorysluice 4y ago
  Oof. Had a similar experience on the other side quite a few years ago. I had recently started a job where my new employer had been working with a contractor on their "next gen" web application for 4 years and it was nowhere near production ready. To weeks into the new gig, I looked at my boss and expressed to him that it was a failed project and it needed to be canned. I got the "are you kidding me, we've already got millions tied up in this project." Fast forward, 2 years went by and it's still not production ready. I was then asked to take over the project to help save it. I politely declined, knowing my limitations, to which I got the "this is limiting your career" speech. Another year went by (7 years into the project) to which the contractor said they needed yet another year. After hearing that news, I took on a skunkworks project that basically reimplemented the core of the project. After I demoed it, the contractor was canned a month later. 9 months later, the fresh project went to production for the phase 1 release.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• silviot 4y ago
  Would it be legal (and, different question, do you think it would be ethical) in a case like this to quit and go to the client company proposing advice on how to negotiate to avoid the $60M loss? A role of advisor to let them know they need to get their shit together (and provide the required specs) and to guide themto ask for incremental delivery. As far as I can tell such a consultancy is easily worth $1M/year or more, given its potential effectiveness.
  • nonethewiser 4y ago
    Great question. Would be nice to get a return on such insight.
  • ycombobreaker 4y ago
    Seems like acting on privileged imformation for personal gain. I think that would be a very risky idea. OTOH advocating for the same role from within the company is probably a way to repair the project without pre-burning your bridges. You could still leverage those connections to switch companies (basically, show the client thar you want to formally represent them).
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• kazinator 4y ago
  Here is where the blogger loses me "Finally, we made our primary recommendation, which was to slip the project 12 months to cover the newly-discovered work, and provide margin for any additional remaining work." They should have tried to identify wasteful work that could be trimmed so as to deliver something to the customer. The managers were probably thinking, what, there is unplanned, untracked make-work going on in the project, and these guys just want it to be added to the schedule, and even look for more? > I’d met my responsibility to the company – and the company had threatened me as a result. That is not clear. The manager could have just been expressing the fact that if the confidential, internal problems from the meeting were to leak out to the customer, the customer might walk away. He could have been referring to his own career, or careers in general. However, if that manager was insinuating that unless staff are reminded not to, like a bunch of children, they are going to go to customers, or the public, and squawk about problems discussed in an internal meeting, then that was actually quite insulting, and betraying mistrust. Of course it will be career limiting to blab confidential info and lose customers, even under the best of circumstances. Doing that is being stupidly honest, because maybe solutions can be found to deliver, and save the deal; if you blab to the customers, then you could be flushing away the opportunity.
• trevor-e 4y ago
  I'm not a project management expert, but isn't this basically why Agile was created so that incremental/iterative progress can be more easily delivered? Like hearing this part is insane to me: > I was hired on as an individual contributor maybe 15 months before the project was to be delivered to the customer I can't imagine trying to deliver a project of this size all at once and so far into the future. I also find it hard to believe that individual parts couldn't be reprioritized to ship first, rather than the all-or-nothing take of "we need 9 more months".
• philip1209 4y ago
  I've been at companies like this, and learned from peers that you had to write "CYA" (cover yourself) documents. But, I also learned learned that these documents should never skip levels of middle management, so that intermediaries have time to bury or re-frame the news.
• nonethewiser 4y ago
  I love this website. Extremely simple with a clear an interesting focus. Great idea.
• heatmiser 4y ago
  Looking forward to reading more of these
• rodolphoarruda 4y ago
  > Bet that manager’s still at the company, though. I can imagine. I don't know about you, but I met a lot of managers throughout my career that were masters in saving their own asses. They could not keep their P/L up to date. They didn't have time for that, as they were working 24x7 to avoid the hot potato. Amazing! Pure art! Art of avoidance!
• RajT88 4y ago
  I don't think I've ever heard an anecdote about a "career limiting" statement being made which wasn't a red flag about the company culture. I think my personal favorite was someone - seriously - saying to a Sales guy that he shouldn't espouse his opinion that he didn't like Bourbon anywhere near the CEO, as that would be "career limiting". WHAT!
  • praptak 4y ago
    Of course it is a red flag! It's the corporate equivalent of drawing a knife in a bar fight.
• purpleblue 4y ago
  This EXACTLY happened to me at a somewhat well known software company. We were working on a project and I spoke out that the performance wasn't anywhere where it needed to be. I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work in a real situation. I proposed solutions, and the lead engineers rejected my ideas. My manager gave me a horrible performance review filled with lies. I went to HR and then all of my coworkers stepped up on the record and said what was written was wrong. He was forced to rewrite my entire performance review. I changed teams shortly after this and the project was canned 6 months later. Everyone who was wrong "failed upwards" which is usually how things go in Silicon Valley and everywhere else unfortunately.
• trap_goes_hot 4y ago
  I deal with C-level folks on a daily basis, and if you come to them with problems, its not always clear to them what you want them to do about it. They are not going to be intimately familiar with everything. It's only human nature. Better is to provide the information along with something like "Hey, and here's an idea that might help us not lose the contract. I'd like to be give a chance to implement it.". Senior management can't evaluate people on a technical basis, but they can and do remember people who stood up and took on a challenge.
• georgeecollins 4y ago
  When I was younger I thought I was smart when I would point out an organization's dysfunction. Now I think the smart thing is to figure out how to be effective in dysfunction, which is everywhere at some level.
  • praptak 4y ago
    Working in dysfunction wears me down. To me Dilbert is funny for the first 10 strips or so, then it becomes dull and depressing. My way is to try to get small victories against dysfunction. When I stop getting these, I start seeking for another dysfunction elsewhere.
• edw519 4y ago
  OK, you trio of rabble-rousers are now an Architecture Board. Fuck you. Pay me. (I was going to add a whole bunch of pithy wisdom after this, but I think this is always a good stopping point because nothing good for anyone comes from being grossly underpaid. What did you think would happen?)
• throwawaysleep 4y ago
  I’ve learned in my career to have no concern for the big picture as I will have another job before it is my problem. Let the building burn down. Let the fires burn. By the time the fire reaches where I sit, I’ll be gone.
• makach 4y ago
  Yeah, that was probably a setup for failure. It's not unlikely to think that management already knew what you found out before your report. they just used stalling tactics. In the end you did the right thing to leave the project. These projects are commonly referred to as "death march projects" [Yourdon, Edward] and you should learn to identify them before joining. I learned about CLMs early in my career: career limiting moves. It is something you need to avoid. Pick you battles and try to avoid imploding of frustration when things are becoming really bad. Just make sure you CYA and do basic stakeholder management to protect your reputation and skillset.
• mcv 4y ago
  I did not initially read it as a threat, but as a warning. That somehow the client would end the project manager's career, or something. How naive of me! Clearly the project manager knew full well they were just milking the client for an endless stream of money for a doomed project as long as they could just provide the client with some hope that it really was nearly finished. Of course that's the kind of behaviour that should be career-limiting, but clearly the industry has more than enough room for leeches like that. Because this is hardly the first time I've heard of a story like this; some companies really seem to exist primarily to live off these sort of projects.
• 999900000999 4y ago
  Looks to me like someone overstepped their bounds. Your job is to write code, not directly challenge senior management.
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  I read through to the end. Because that's what a thorough engineer does. But honestly, I guessed exactly how this story was going to end when they rattled off the long list of the different kinds of managers. Manager::engineer ratio has exactly the opposite effect as teacher::student ratio does.
• travisgriggs 4y ago
  "If no one's asking, they're probably not interested in hearing."
  • VLM 4y ago
    It is odd that the supposed victim in the story didn't seem to invest one penny into oversight of their $60M. My guess is a longer game was going on that OP never found out about.
• simne 4y ago
  My condolences to author. This is unfortunately typical case for smb (small business), but for hundreds devs (definitely, large business), this is something extremely anomaly. Looks like it is grown from small project, with small business level management not changed to appropriate when where need. But such projects are also opportunity for smart brave persons, who could make great career grow.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  I remember going to a training on project management where they told story about a project manager at a major research university who was told to estimate what it would cost to implement Peoplesoft and was let go when he told the truth about what it would cost. They brought in a "Yes Man" who came in with the lowball estimate that management wanted and figured they could bring the cost down further by stealing people's time from other people's projects. The project broke the $100M budget that was floated by the initial project manager and they only completed 1 out of 5 modules. Of course other IT projects across that university were screwed up and damage was done to the careers of many innocent people. The good news is that based on that screw-up and several others around the same time that Uni greatly improved its management practices.
  • DaiPlusPlus 4y ago
    Forgive my ignorance of "Enterprise" software, but what does "implementing Peoplesoft" involve, exactly? Isn't it like SAP where it's a base system with some predefined starter templates that you customize? And to "customize" means just adding custom fields and data-entry forms, and wire it all up to an ERP and something like Biztalk? How does that add-up to $100m?
    • vaidhy 4y ago
      By the time you come to a size where you would consider SAP or PeopleSoft, you are already a mid to large size company. You have developed internal process and workflows. You would have policies put in place that are crazy, contradicting each other and different across divisions, business lines and roles. You are trying to model all of this in a software that was not organically grown in your company. This is what implementation mean. The truth is that, you are better off throwing all your process away and just use the pre-built stuff from the ERP system and adjust it as you go along. But very few companies have the courage to accept that their process were fucked up in the first place.
      • PaulHoule 4y ago
        My understanding is that Peoplesoft worked out OK for most corporations but it went notoriously wrong in higher ed. Australia tried to roll it out over numerous universities in a huge project which went terribly wrong. I had my own personal Peoplesoft story which was that they cut n' pasted a Javascript random number generator I wrote into their home page before Javascript had a built in RNG and so my email was embedded in a comment in their page. It's one reason why my email got spammed so much in the 1990s (later on I found out my email was the most spammed at my Uni). Another amusing story is that David Duffield, founder of Peoplesoft, got pushed out of Peoplesoft when Oracle took it over and he founded Workday which turned out to be much more successful for higher ed institutions.
• _3u10 4y ago
  I got off the career limiting path and on to the fuck it ship it path.
• chaostheory 4y ago
  > Two years later, the client canceled the two-years-late project before it ever launched. They ate a $60M loss. This has to be a project for the government
  • lmm 4y ago
    Disagree; could be any large organisation - government, NGO or private company, it's all pretty much the same once you get too big to manage.
    • chaostheory 4y ago
      Yes, but they ate $60 million in a failed project. I don’t feel that a private entity would do the same thing
      • lmm 4y ago
        They absolutely do lol.
• smnrchrds 4y ago
  Sidenote: Kill Sticky bookmarklet does not work on this website. Is there an improved version that would work here?
• SftwrSvior81 4y ago
  > That gnawing sense of futility and impending failure that I’d been feeling for 15 months would finally, today, get addressed. Sounds like this guy just needed to feel heard. Therapy might have been easier but what do I know.
• geophile 4y ago
  I encountered a similar situation at a tiny startup. The VP of Engineering was hired by the board, against the founder's will, and he was a disaster. Our main metric was measured by a graph, showing foobars/second. Similar to the linked story, there were lots of off-schedule tasks, and the VP was focused on shallow features instead of fundamentals. One of those features was i18n, apparently because his girlfriend was the consultant on i18n. We kept missing deadline after deadline, and it was starting to become apparent, even to the board. The board sent the most technical board member to talk to us to see if the team and architecture were plausible, the founder unilaterally fired the VP, and hired the guy he wanted all along. Things turned around instantly, once the new VP focused on the right things. Five years later, company was sold and now, nine years later, the product still exists at the acquiring company.
• motohagiography 4y ago
  Understand what management means. It means to extract value. You can do work, or you can manage it, which means getting credit for keeping the ball in the air, and attritioning out anyone who doesn't. This is anathema to people who actually solve problems (like me), but it's for a very specific reason. When you are in kindergarten, there are kids who build forts, and kids who play musical chairs. The skills for each are mutually exclusive, where one requires co-operation, creativity, and shared vision, and the other requires an understanding of the dynamic between power and limited resources. If you mess with the fort building kid, you're probably going to get called dumb and shoved, and if you mess with the musical chairs playing kid, they will find a way to make sure you get cooties or find an authority to tell on you to. Nothing much really changes. Engineers build forts, middle managers play musical chairs, and if you show them them they are being dumb, they will edge you out in some variation of a purity game, because on a deep level they don't need a fort, they just need a chair when the music slows down, and for someone else to get cooties first. An enterprise project is either a zero sum credit and status game or an attrition game. In most large orgs, it's the latter. You don't win attrition games, you survive them, which means understanding when the music is slowing down, and keeping track of who is most likly to flame out and rage quit or get cooties, because if you can't see who it is, it's you. Personally, I like solving problems and unblocking engineers so they can build amazing forts, but you can't do that if you don't have a seat when the music stops, so you learn to balance the skills without antagonizing people who are over invested in one technique or the other. It's amazing when you can just make stuff people want and get paid for it, but as soon as you do that, there's going to be someone else there showing up to find it, inventing something to be unhappy about or promising it to someone else to extract more value from it for themselves, and you get drawn into the same games again. Being smart about it is recognizing the cycle for what it is and setting personal boundaries that allow you to navigate without becoming a target.
• dahwolf 4y ago
  I once worked on a project for a giant multinational, took 2 years, and was a complete catastrophe costing the company ~10M with zero value delivered. I'm sharing it because I learned a lot from it. It was an internal project, so not even a real customer, other than the massively overfunded HR department. We were to deliver a massive scope, an entire ecosystem of software/services to provide value for the 100K+ employees. There was zero actual demand for it. Data clearly showed that the 100K+ employees of this massive company only needed two things: leave management and payslips. And we were to add some 40 services to that, from a vast ecosystem of external vendors, homegrown crap, and integrating it all together. Every single piece of this new suite was specced up as if we needed NASA-level reliability. I was puzzled from the start as to why we're even doing this, but soon realized I was overthinking it. It's busy work. It's one of the twisted incentives in corporations: be frugal and efficient to get punished, spend like a maniac and get rewarded. This is how kingdoms get created and inflate. HR did not like to work with the internal IT department. Because they have an engineering mindset based on structure, whilst HR favors managing things Game of Thrones style. So to balance things out, not one but two external IT agencies were added to the mix, as "neutral" party between the internal departments. Mistrust from the get-go. We're talking an army of consultants costing 200$/hr, producing documents and agreements that are treated as nothing but opinion. Some two months into the project, they understood the grim outlook of this project and got into the mindset that every hour of busywork is still revenue. The customer, HR, acted like children, and that would be an insult to children. They would literally dream up the most outrageous requirements on the spot, just something they would personally like the system to have. Things that cost 100K to build and would save one person 5 minutes of work per week. Any critical, rational feedback was fully dismissed, even if delivered diplomatically. Do it too often and they'd form coalitions behind your back to sabotage any of your next moves. This was of course a political setup in the making to ultimately blame IT for "failing to deliver". As nothing actually got delivered for months, the inevitable came to be: let's launch a committee. I was on it. We spent our time producing meeting minutes of no consequence. Much needed hard decisions were unattainable as they required complicated coalition building that usually failed. Every head of every kingdom discussed things one-on-one, as if we're dealing with the mob. After a while, we used the committee basically as extended lunch, chit-chatting. It took 8 months to deliver a first demo. A demo to ourselves, mind you. No actual user was involved. A few dozen people filled the room to see a tiny bit of poorly implemented functionality that nobody asked for. The mass psychology of it continues to fascinate me. An entire room full of people all knowing this is a sad joke, but nobody speaks up. There's even a forced hint of positivity: great progress, guys. All of this kept going for nearly two years, after which the project was dissolved. About 25% of the scope was delivered. Our new solution for leave management and pay slips was worse than the old one, and everything else nobody uses. The 75% not delivered at all was fine as nobody wanted it anyway. Nobody got fired and nobody had to justify the massive spend or any outcomes. In fact, the spend guarantees that a similar budget is to be granted to HR next year. Not spending this much would be very career limiting indeed.
• jacobsenscott 4y ago
  Lol all the people in this thread - "if you reduce scope..." "if you presented a solution...". This is a 200 person multi-million dollar project, you can't turn the ship in less than 12 months. You've already hit the iceberg, you just haven't felt it yet. You have two choices here - keep your head down and collect your paycheck until the client cancels the project, or go out in a blaze of glory. The second choice is the right choice in our industry, where anyone with even middling skill can get a new job in a week.
• vaidhy 4y ago
  More than half of this thread sounds like we are all just sociopaths and the scary thing is that I see myself 10 years ago in the answers. I would like to correct 2 perceptions that I see as common threads: 1. It is management's job to find the solution. No.. it is the management job to make a decision. They would have their own opinions on how things ought to be and a good management would listen to everyone, consider possible alternatives and make a decision. A bad management would just make a decision. However, they cannot come up with solutions to everything. Why hire anyone else, if that were true? 2. Politics is bad. - I had this in my mind for a long time. Then read something in a scifi book that went like "You get politics when you have two people talk". Then I realized it is not politics that is bad.. We play politics all the time - posting this comment is politics. I am trying to convince you of something by appealing to logic and rhetoric. We tend to think politics is only when you lie and cheat and deceive people.. but that is just not true. The alternative to politics is to live in a world where might makes right. It is still true, but the concept of might is different.
• JasonFruit 4y ago
  The author should have jumped to the end immediately: follow the rats off the sinking ship. There's no winning on one of these projects, and if you find yourself in one, run away immediately. Knowing it was a doomed project and still accepting any sort of responsibility for it is dazzlingly naive; the ship will not make port, and you will all drown.
• davewritescode 4y ago
  This is just not a great way to go about things and this is exactly the problem Agile is supposed be solving. When you deliver value incrementally, it becomes painfully obvious to everyone where the gaps are and what's at risk of not being delivered. It also puts the onus on the customer to TELL you what they want instead of you having to guess. What a lot of young developers don't get is that you can't just solve every problem with deep analysis. Nobody gives a shit if you can find all the gaps in requirements because a day after you finish your analysis the requirements will change. There's requirements you need to define early. Who is using the system, expected availability, the different levels of access and the entities involved. Performance requirements, data security/tenancy requirements and some idea of how many users will be using the system concurrently are extremely important to understand up front. There are a ton of companies, particularly the ones that build custom software for public/private sector that are incredibly happy to have customers submit junk requirements and nickel and dime them on every single change request.
• VLM 4y ago
  I've seen "product driven management companies" do R+D the way OP saw things happening. There's no way to do true R+D with product driven budgeting. Perhaps "big corporate" has their own R+D and forbids divisions from doing R+D. Its really none of OPs business. The backlog is always two years because budgeting is done for two years and the goal posts will change continuously to keep the backlog long enough to keep the budget afloat. The goal posts always move continuously because R+D advances. If they close out and release 1.0 then the team and project have to shut down and transfer to the maint group. If you just keep the project eternally open then you don't have to re-create and open for bids and start entirely over to being version 2.0, you can just massage the requirements into 2.0 and keep going. The individual contributor layer might not be cutting edge R+D, OP probably wasn't using framework-of-the-month or language-of-the-month but at the business level it might have been interesting R+D, far away in logistics-land or something. A product driven company can bury paying for R+D this way if no one points it out, but if someone makes a formal report calling it out, that's a career limiting move so lets not look too close. The other thing I've seen blow up is the business changes faster than the coders can keep up. If you have small enough line of business revenues you can over invest into automation; to put it in terms HN can understand if you engineer a hyper-scalable startup and only ten customers show up, that's a lot of money down the drain. Even worse if they're ten HUGE enormous customers you can stay in business a long time even if the automation would never, ever pay off with only ten customers. Or logistics invented a strategy that is obsolete before the coders can code it. Some companies are really good at processing "build a bridge" Like a physical bridge cars drive over. Their internal systems will melt down conceptually at the idea of having a R+D dept with a permanent budget, even if it works and even if R+D makes a net profit. I had dealings with a place that, at a high level, made cranes, like industrial lifting cranes. They needed a R+D budget for R+D things but they only spoke business like a housing developer, you sign the contract, build the crane, find another contract. Smart companies that need to do R+D will find a way to do R+D even if they use really weird terminology to manage it. The way companies like this move from one R+D project to another is "whoopsie the eternal product development is over budget scrap and do something else". Now they're probably got an eternal "fake product" around actually doing R+D using AI algos in the cloud or something. Or they're doing bland IT support, just endless Python CRUD for an R+D experiment in doing JIT logistics in a post-covid chip shortage world where the R+D is not in IT but the R+D is outside IT in logistics or accounting or marketing or something. I can't guarantee this happened to OP but I've worked at places like that.
• yafbum 4y ago
  Who ate the $60m? The author's employer, or the client? If the client, which isn't it of the ordinary, then it shows exactly why it is career limiting to tell such truths to customers: company got paid regardless of project success. Actual short term success for a services company is not defined in terms of the achievement of any particular outcome for the customer, but in terms of amounts billed and paid. As a result, it is a career boosting strategy for managers in short-term minded organizations to underestimate work scope so that a bid can be made for less money / less time than competition. Then, once the contract is signed and work has begun, "realize" that it's going to take longer and ask the customer for more time/more money. The customer may not have a great choice at that point, given they're already halfway down some path, and especially if their requirements were vague enough going in that this can all be characterized as new scope. This dynamic isn't necessarily explicit or malicious. If people get promoted on the basis of contract wins (as opposed to on time, on budget delivery), for example, the incentives naturally reward overoptimistic managers. I don't have a ton of experience here but whatever experience I do have tells me this is widespread in the computer services industry, as it is notoriously widespread in construction. The parallels with construction indicate this may be a structural feature of markets with information asymmetry...
• sideproject 4y ago
  This is anecdotal, but I've also seen several projects in my ~20-year career that ended up no where. And reading through these stories (and there are countless stories of these doomed projects) one cannot help but wonder the amount of waste that we create. The original motivation of the whole Lean Startup was to reduce waste - not that Lean Startup model fits all the projects (and it shouldn't). Of course, it's impossible to know how a project will end up, but there must be a way for us as humanity to improve? I'm also looking at the number of projects that I have built that got nowhere, so I'm also part of the problem. And with these projects, I tend to shrug off and say "well, that was a good experience". But a "good experience" at $60M price-tag doesn't sound right.
• alkonaut 4y ago
  What does the quote refer to? Who would it be career limiting for? The bearer of bad news? The manager who delivered the quote?
• bernardonw 4y ago