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My 2 cents, 10 years ago there was a huge focus on structuring engineering teams in ways that made it so that individual engineers did not matter. There were a

by lumost 4y ago

My 2 cents, 10 years ago there was a huge focus on structuring engineering teams in ways that made it so that individual engineers did not matter. There were also tons of dependencies between teams as you would have "Systems Engineers", "Devops Engineers", "DBAs", "Data Scientists" etc. etc. Web work was also relatively new, and few leaders actually had a handle on how much time things would take. Functional splits lead to teams making poor assumptions on other team's efforts, and agile produced cancerously bad software cultures. My experience in 2023 is that few teams maintain any agile concepts outside of daily stand-ups/weekly syncs. Teams are generally functionally integrated, and have a more or less date oriented culture depending on how annual goals are set and how you make commitments to customers. Cloud computing, improved test infrastructure/expectations, CI/CD, and maturity have dramatically changed development culture industry wide. Is this an a-typical experience? I can't think of the last time I saw a project with a date that the engineer hadn't set.

switchbak 4y ago
I agree with the gist of what you said above, but: Web work was new 10 years ago?? What am I missing here? I've been doing almost exclusively web work for 20 years now. Few leaders still have any kind of handle on how long things will take. Nor engineers or PMs, etc. And agile produced cancerous bad software culture? Clearly you have way different experiences than I do. Unless by agile you mean top down corporate scrummerfall bullshit, then yes. I find generally complexity is increasing, tooling is a bit better. Culture is backsliding to 90s bullshit, and the upper level situation hasn't evolved in any way. Over all I'm pretty disappointed by the state of the industry and the "worse is better" tendencies except in a few outlier areas. But maybe that's how these things go.
- lumost 4y ago
  > Web work was new 10 years ago?? What am I missing here? I've been doing almost exclusively web work for 20 years now. New in relative terms 10 years ago, the vast majority of leadership teams came from non-web software. Alternately, if they came from web software - they were going from writing landing pages to complex SaaS products. I rarely encounter people in leadership who haven't spent the majority of their career building web services/software which runs on the web at this point. > And agile produced cancerous bad software culture? Aye - My experience with agile teams was that the sprint structure took precedence over the customers, business stakeholders, and product. Engineers either got burned out because estimates came in low - or crap was shipped to hit the sprint deadline. Ironically if something new came up, rather than handling the new thing in an agile way - customers would get berated for not filling in acceptance criteria, or not putting enough detail in the acceptance criteria, or not sacrificing under the full moon in the acceptance criteria etc. I spent the last 8 years avoiding agile shops, and I am pleased to see that there are fewer of them every year. I vastly prefer treating software engineers like any other professional engineering discipline where you assign a project to an engineer, let the engineer scope and design the project, then execute on the project.
  - switchbak 4y ago
    That sounds pretty awful, I can certainly relate to the sprint deadlines bit. In fact that sounds straight up dysfunctional. I've certainly worked in a few agile (to varying degrees) that functioned far better than that. To me they've been the only places that we're halfway decent. They were outnumbered by places that either paid lip service to Agile (universally using SCRUM), or applied it in some backwards bizarre way. I think this is where that bad rep comes from. It's a shame, I've personally worked with an onsite customer that was a C level exec, and we cut out reams of red tape, got stuff done, and delighted them. Maybe the real vision of it is just to hard to achieve given political realities and the shitty nature of the modern corporation.

by lumost 4y ago

switchbak 4y ago

I agree with the gist of what you said above, but: Web work was new 10 years ago?? What am I missing here? I've been doing almost exclusively web work for 20 years now. Few leaders still have any kind of handle on how long things will take. Nor engineers or PMs, etc. And agile produced cancerous bad software culture? Clearly you have way different experiences than I do. Unless by agile you mean top down corporate scrummerfall bullshit, then yes. I find generally complexity is increasing, tooling is a bit better. Culture is backsliding to 90s bullshit, and the upper level situation hasn't evolved in any way. Over all I'm pretty disappointed by the state of the industry and the "worse is better" tendencies except in a few outlier areas. But maybe that's how these things go.

lumost 4y ago
> Web work was new 10 years ago?? What am I missing here? I've been doing almost exclusively web work for 20 years now. New in relative terms 10 years ago, the vast majority of leadership teams came from non-web software. Alternately, if they came from web software - they were going from writing landing pages to complex SaaS products. I rarely encounter people in leadership who haven't spent the majority of their career building web services/software which runs on the web at this point. > And agile produced cancerous bad software culture? Aye - My experience with agile teams was that the sprint structure took precedence over the customers, business stakeholders, and product. Engineers either got burned out because estimates came in low - or crap was shipped to hit the sprint deadline. Ironically if something new came up, rather than handling the new thing in an agile way - customers would get berated for not filling in acceptance criteria, or not putting enough detail in the acceptance criteria, or not sacrificing under the full moon in the acceptance criteria etc. I spent the last 8 years avoiding agile shops, and I am pleased to see that there are fewer of them every year. I vastly prefer treating software engineers like any other professional engineering discipline where you assign a project to an engineer, let the engineer scope and design the project, then execute on the project.
- switchbak 4y ago
  That sounds pretty awful, I can certainly relate to the sprint deadlines bit. In fact that sounds straight up dysfunctional. I've certainly worked in a few agile (to varying degrees) that functioned far better than that. To me they've been the only places that we're halfway decent. They were outnumbered by places that either paid lip service to Agile (universally using SCRUM), or applied it in some backwards bizarre way. I think this is where that bad rep comes from. It's a shame, I've personally worked with an onsite customer that was a C level exec, and we cut out reams of red tape, got stuff done, and delighted them. Maybe the real vision of it is just to hard to achieve given political realities and the shitty nature of the modern corporation.