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Tech stopped being interesting to me when I realized that building a widget isn't hard, it's getting 30 people to build a widget that's hard. Yet the way those

Tech stopped being interesting to me when I realized that building a widget isn't hard, it's getting 30 people to build a widget that's hard. Yet the way those 30 people are organized is so shitty it's as if nobody had ever done it before. I've worked with so many truly incompetent and stupid teams and organizations, that have millions to billions of dollars. Sometimes I wonder if I've just hallucinated all the books and training I've taken that explain the basic business and industry concepts most people should know. And I wonder how it is an IC could seem to know how things should be working while seemingly nobody else does. Then I go back to my 1/30th of the widget and wait for lunch time.

gryn 4y ago
> basic business and industry concepts most people should know got a list of them for reference ?
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  Capital expenditure isn't a bad thing. Buying equipment before you need it is cheaper than scrambling to buy something when its urgent.
  - MrJohz 4y ago
    I'm not an economist, but I don't believe that's always true. Let's say I can buy replacement server at my own pace for £100, or in a panic when it's urgent for £200 (obviously made up numbers to make the maths easier for me). I can do the former at any time up until the server breaks, when I can only do the latter. If I invest that £100 instead in another part of the business, that returns £150 a year on average. After two years, that's already £225 - enough to pay for the crisis and still have made £25 profit. If I can get a third year without the server breaking, I'm closer to £140 profit, and after four years I can already afford to have two crises off the back of my initial £100 crisis-avoidance money. Obviously this is a very simple example, and there are lots of examples where this wouldn't work out. If my rate of return was only 10%, then it would take eight years before I'd have made back enough money to pay for the crisis situation. And sometimes gambles don't pay off and the crisis happens sooner than you expect, and other times people are just consistently bad at estimating these sorts of odds. But the point is that, even if it's cheaper to do something now then later, if you can find something more useful for that money to be doing right now, it might still be more profitable to take the expensive option. (That said, there's also obviously the human cost - if your team is constantly operating in crisis mode because everything's been used until the last possible moment, then it's unlikely to be an effective team for very long. But then that's kind of the point here: this is all a matter of tradeoffs, and trying to predict the future as best as possible with limited data.)
    - IanCal 4y ago
      You may also save money if it turns out you don't need that thing after all, and if you keep the cash on hand instead what you have is insurance - the ability to deal with a new problem you weren't expecting.
    - db48x 4y ago
      It is generally good to analyze a situation in those terms, but the frustration comes when spending a few hundred dollars would have saved hundreds of thousands. Alas, those few hundred would have come out of someone’s budget, and thus their bonus…
- c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
  - Obsess on solving your customer's problems. - Don't build product before talking to prospective customers. Don't build your products in a vacuum. - Pay your suppliers on time. - Take good notes. You'll need them later when a CEO is breathing down your neck about why his darling (yet useless) feature was removed. It's hard to remember context around decisions that were made X months/years down the road.
ozim 4y ago
I would not go for incompetent and stupid. But other than that solid point. Even without knowing the principles I would expect people to stop talking if they don’t have knowledge - but most annoying thing is when people don’t know and are trying to help genuinely and they are convinced they are contributing.
jeffreygoesto 4y ago
Then maybe step out of the comfort zone a bit and leave frontend for some embedded real world stuff? I see your point though. Software has grown so big and detached from the problem that people don't get proper feedback about what they delivered and that makes for a bad quality. In niches it can be better that is why I started that way.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Thervicarl 4y ago
> I've worked with so many truly incompetent and stupid teams and organizations And all of them have deemed you a suitable fit for their incompetent and stupid team or organization.
- atoav 4y ago
  Not to defend the poster here, but some of the stuff I have seen is truly to the point where you wonder if anybody of those people actually cares about getting things done at all. As someone who works as an educator at an art school where chaos is the rule, I must say if your company is less organized than a spontaneously formed group of twenty year old crazy-chaotic (and probably drunk) art students, you should probably just close down operations and change your career. And yes, I have seen such organizations, companies and "professionals".
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > you should probably just close down operations and change your career Why? It brings in boatloads of money.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      If you exclude VC money in the near future, bringing in those boatloads requires a minimum of actual competency so. Even VC funding requires that, just in different departments.
- ilyt 4y ago
  I mean, it's easy to get hired into team that's less competent than you as by definition you'd breeze any question they have on recruiting so it really shouldn't be surprising
pfix 4y ago
You had me at your first paragraph. But my conclusion was to try to get in the middle of things and figure out if organizing people is really that hard. Yes, it is. Not sure what you include in "books and training" but the actual hard stuff is the complexity inherent to each individual that you want to organize. Each one of them has moods, goals, desires and bad days. And the number of parameters is huge and they're all different for each individual. And it takes just one member of the group to be sufficiently aligned in another vector to make it all fall apart. And I am just talking about a team or small department. Figure this at state level and you get why politicians actually don't get anything done.
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
  > Yes, it is. Not really. It's a handful of common-sense techniques around communication, architecture, and getting out of people's way. There's 3-5 books that compress most of the necessary knowledge into straightforwardly readable form. Of course, most people haven't read them, let alone applied them. Instead, as an industry, we've converged on having engineering companies led by non-engineers, "scrum masters" galore, and desperate cargo-culting of OKRs instead of having real objectives and real key results. "Top" teams at FAANG companies are routinely having 1980s-style conversations about "staffing projects" while they reassure each other that they don't need to prioritize because "everything is important." (Ask me how I know...) It's all self-inflicted. I don't know about your extrapolation to broader politics, but back here in the office? The simple task of organizing 5, 10, 50, maybe even up to 100 people? That part is perfectly doable without making any major mistakes. We just don't want to do it. At minimum, though, I wish we'd stop sitting around and saying it's too hard. Here's Ben Horowitz, writing in 2011 (twelve years ago!) [1] about it: > If you manage a team of 10 people, it’s quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. If we as an industry could hold the bar higher on running companies/teams when they were this small size, personally I think a lot of things would naturally sort themselves out at the 1,000+ person size. Besides, change begins at home — even just improving the running of your local team would go a long way. Then, even if the executives are flailing around with their latest harebrained take on why they don't need to write rigorous OKRs because they need to run off on yet another vacation, at least your team is good. Leading a group of a dozen engineers is a perfectly straightforward and learnable skill. And it doesn't "take just one member... to make it all fall apart," because you can just fire that one member. I'm not claiming all this stuff is trivial, but I wish we'd stop making it sound like some sort of mind-blowing skill of living on the knife's edge and wielding secret, arcane leadership knowledge. (Sorry for the morning rant. I know you meant well, and you're also right to empathize with each person's individual needs. It's certainly a difficult job... it's just not impossibly difficult.) [1]: https://a16z.com/2011/03/31/whats-the-most-difficult-ceo-skill-managing-your-own-psychology/ https://a16z.com/2011/03/31/whats-the-most-difficult-ceo-ski... EDIT: I posted my personal list of 3-5 books below. I'd love to hear others' lists, too.
hef19898 4y ago
I feel you! Unfortunately, all those millions to billions allow those organizations to ignore reality far longer than they should be able to. Just recently I came to a realization, people and organisations exist in a competency / incompetency matrix. The competent orgs with incompetent people are your blue chips and "traditional" companies. They ship stuff, have customers, grow along with the overall market and economy and are abble to survive most non-existential threats and down-turns and even existential ones from time to time. All, or most, the competency is institutional, recorded in implicit knowledge held by people and various tools and processes. Unless those companies loose that knowledge for some reason, things are good. Competent orgs with competent people are incredible places, e.g. Amazon. They grow like crazy, rarely screw up and develop. They ship and have happy customers, they innovate. These places are hard to come by, harder to create and even harder to maintain. Then you have incompetent orgs with competent people. By definition start-ups, those only reach competency when they serve, sucessfully and not depending on outside funding, markets and customers for a while. Doing things right, those orgs can create orgabisational competency based on the people competency. And then there are incompetent orgs with incompetent people. Places were you think, as you said, you haluzionate all your training and experience. The only thing standing between a start-up (incompetent org and competent people) and such a nightmare is leadership. The thing that allows everyone to pretend to not be obe of those doomed places is endless cash. Sooner or later, those places come crushing down.
- agumonkey 4y ago
  And billions makes possible to buy big offices, and suits to appear way more competent than you are :) I shared room with people probably a bit less skilled at working than min wage clerks I worked with a few years ago. But they got a Java cert so they think spending hours in meeting is work, and efficient. We should have mandatory non IT work to make people see what it is to work lean and fast.
- penguinvondoom 4y ago
  IDK, from multiple accounts Amazon is an absolute burning garbage bin of a mess for everyone that works in it.
arkh 4y ago
Read or read again Mythical Man Month. Realize it has been written almost 50 years ago.
_glass 4y ago
lol, that's why I am doing my PhD in management. I figured this out early on. Humans are hard, the emerging social problems are hard.
steveBK123 4y ago
The larger the team I am on, the less happy I am. I moved from a 40 person team serving a few dozen clients in a multi-tenant setup, to essentially working for one of the clients directly as their only full time developer. I have probably written more code in the last 6 months than the preceding 5 years. It's not because I suddenly got smarter or I am some 10x engineer, it's because all the BS got out of the way. No agile, no jira, no backlog grooming, no story points, no standups, no sprints, no product owner, no stakeholder management, no churn. No "two masters" or principal-agent problems. Client/boss knows what they want, and so thats what I work on. It's clear whats important, so that's where I spend my time. He trusts my advice and feedback because he doesn't have 10 other senior engineers whispering conflicting BS in his ear. He is clear on how robust a solution they want, and if it's worth moving onto a new idea or wrapping up the current one. So, freed from all the other problems, I just build.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  I mean, I certainly enjoy that, but I find the challenge of trying to make a 200 people IT org do that a lot more… not necessarily interesting, but it’s something new to do. Just building by myself has an upper limit. To be fair, that upper limit is roughly 20% of what that whole 200 person org does, but still. I keep imagining what we could accomplish if we reached even 10% of the theoretical limit.
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Right, which is nice to be mindful of and to have career options. One path may get tiring after a few cycles, and you take the other path for a few.. rinse & repeat.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  A lot of Fred Brooks' _The Mythical Man-Month_ is about how larger teams are inherently harder to function well than smaller ones, and the larger the harder.
detourdog 4y ago
I find Tech extremely interesting but "Silicon Valley" really boring. The problem I see is that technology innovation got completely confused with finical instrument innovation. This happened in Silicon Valley. Now the whole world thinks Silicon Valley is the heart of technical innovation when in fact it is actually Wall Street Innovation. There is and was good technical innovation in Silicon Valley but I think the tech talent pool has been polluted.
ren_engineer 4y ago
>I've worked with so many truly incompetent and stupid teams and organizations, that have millions to billions of dollars it's motivational in some ways seeing how dysfunctional even successful companies are
- kibwen 4y ago
  Alternatively, it's demotivating to see how success has seemingly no correlation with functional ability. You can't help but feel like it's all a giant lottery where winners are determined at random.
YounesDz 4y ago
Don't get me wrong. But if you're smart why you don't have your own company or business? Making a successful business in a capitalism atmosphere is not that hard for smart people. The thing that makes me wonder is cases like yours. Smart and and yet they are working for dumb or evil people.
- throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
  Well, I'm smart, but very lazy, so in other words a programmer. We don't like to do work, and business seems like work. It just strikes me as odd that there's few people who are both smart and not lazy.
penguinvondoom 4y ago
And in big corporations it isn't very different. There used to be theory of management and of organisation, that somehow got lost along the way, with only vestiges popping up here and there in stuff like the Toyota model, the original ideas behind agile and stuff like team topologies...but almost everything is these ... cargo cult organisations, that just blindly implement whatever rituals this or that business consultant recommends and hope for the best ...

gryn 4y ago

> basic business and industry concepts most people should know got a list of them for reference ?

bobsmooth 4y ago
Capital expenditure isn't a bad thing. Buying equipment before you need it is cheaper than scrambling to buy something when its urgent.
- MrJohz 4y ago
  I'm not an economist, but I don't believe that's always true. Let's say I can buy replacement server at my own pace for £100, or in a panic when it's urgent for £200 (obviously made up numbers to make the maths easier for me). I can do the former at any time up until the server breaks, when I can only do the latter. If I invest that £100 instead in another part of the business, that returns £150 a year on average. After two years, that's already £225 - enough to pay for the crisis and still have made £25 profit. If I can get a third year without the server breaking, I'm closer to £140 profit, and after four years I can already afford to have two crises off the back of my initial £100 crisis-avoidance money. Obviously this is a very simple example, and there are lots of examples where this wouldn't work out. If my rate of return was only 10%, then it would take eight years before I'd have made back enough money to pay for the crisis situation. And sometimes gambles don't pay off and the crisis happens sooner than you expect, and other times people are just consistently bad at estimating these sorts of odds. But the point is that, even if it's cheaper to do something now then later, if you can find something more useful for that money to be doing right now, it might still be more profitable to take the expensive option. (That said, there's also obviously the human cost - if your team is constantly operating in crisis mode because everything's been used until the last possible moment, then it's unlikely to be an effective team for very long. But then that's kind of the point here: this is all a matter of tradeoffs, and trying to predict the future as best as possible with limited data.)
  - IanCal 4y ago
    You may also save money if it turns out you don't need that thing after all, and if you keep the cash on hand instead what you have is insurance - the ability to deal with a new problem you weren't expecting.
  - db48x 4y ago
    It is generally good to analyze a situation in those terms, but the frustration comes when spending a few hundred dollars would have saved hundreds of thousands. Alas, those few hundred would have come out of someone’s budget, and thus their bonus…
c_o_n_v_e_x 4y ago
- Obsess on solving your customer's problems. - Don't build product before talking to prospective customers. Don't build your products in a vacuum. - Pay your suppliers on time. - Take good notes. You'll need them later when a CEO is breathing down your neck about why his darling (yet useless) feature was removed. It's hard to remember context around decisions that were made X months/years down the road.

ozim 4y ago

I would not go for incompetent and stupid. But other than that solid point. Even without knowing the principles I would expect people to stop talking if they don’t have knowledge - but most annoying thing is when people don’t know and are trying to help genuinely and they are convinced they are contributing.

jeffreygoesto 4y ago

Then maybe step out of the comfort zone a bit and leave frontend for some embedded real world stuff? I see your point though. Software has grown so big and detached from the problem that people don't get proper feedback about what they delivered and that makes for a bad quality. In niches it can be better that is why I started that way.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Thervicarl 4y ago

> I've worked with so many truly incompetent and stupid teams and organizations And all of them have deemed you a suitable fit for their incompetent and stupid team or organization.

atoav 4y ago
Not to defend the poster here, but some of the stuff I have seen is truly to the point where you wonder if anybody of those people actually cares about getting things done at all. As someone who works as an educator at an art school where chaos is the rule, I must say if your company is less organized than a spontaneously formed group of twenty year old crazy-chaotic (and probably drunk) art students, you should probably just close down operations and change your career. And yes, I have seen such organizations, companies and "professionals".
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > you should probably just close down operations and change your career Why? It brings in boatloads of money.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    If you exclude VC money in the near future, bringing in those boatloads requires a minimum of actual competency so. Even VC funding requires that, just in different departments.
ilyt 4y ago
I mean, it's easy to get hired into team that's less competent than you as by definition you'd breeze any question they have on recruiting so it really shouldn't be surprising

pfix 4y ago

You had me at your first paragraph. But my conclusion was to try to get in the middle of things and figure out if organizing people is really that hard. Yes, it is. Not sure what you include in "books and training" but the actual hard stuff is the complexity inherent to each individual that you want to organize. Each one of them has moods, goals, desires and bad days. And the number of parameters is huge and they're all different for each individual. And it takes just one member of the group to be sufficiently aligned in another vector to make it all fall apart. And I am just talking about a team or small department. Figure this at state level and you get why politicians actually don't get anything done.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
> Yes, it is. Not really. It's a handful of common-sense techniques around communication, architecture, and getting out of people's way. There's 3-5 books that compress most of the necessary knowledge into straightforwardly readable form. Of course, most people haven't read them, let alone applied them. Instead, as an industry, we've converged on having engineering companies led by non-engineers, "scrum masters" galore, and desperate cargo-culting of OKRs instead of having real objectives and real key results. "Top" teams at FAANG companies are routinely having 1980s-style conversations about "staffing projects" while they reassure each other that they don't need to prioritize because "everything is important." (Ask me how I know...) It's all self-inflicted. I don't know about your extrapolation to broader politics, but back here in the office? The simple task of organizing 5, 10, 50, maybe even up to 100 people? That part is perfectly doable without making any major mistakes. We just don't want to do it. At minimum, though, I wish we'd stop sitting around and saying it's too hard. Here's Ben Horowitz, writing in 2011 (twelve years ago!) [1] about it: > If you manage a team of 10 people, it’s quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible. If we as an industry could hold the bar higher on running companies/teams when they were this small size, personally I think a lot of things would naturally sort themselves out at the 1,000+ person size. Besides, change begins at home — even just improving the running of your local team would go a long way. Then, even if the executives are flailing around with their latest harebrained take on why they don't need to write rigorous OKRs because they need to run off on yet another vacation, at least your team is good. Leading a group of a dozen engineers is a perfectly straightforward and learnable skill. And it doesn't "take just one member... to make it all fall apart," because you can just fire that one member. I'm not claiming all this stuff is trivial, but I wish we'd stop making it sound like some sort of mind-blowing skill of living on the knife's edge and wielding secret, arcane leadership knowledge. (Sorry for the morning rant. I know you meant well, and you're also right to empathize with each person's individual needs. It's certainly a difficult job... it's just not impossibly difficult.) [1]: https://a16z.com/2011/03/31/whats-the-most-difficult-ceo-skill-managing-your-own-psychology/ https://a16z.com/2011/03/31/whats-the-most-difficult-ceo-ski... EDIT: I posted my personal list of 3-5 books below. I'd love to hear others' lists, too.

hef19898 4y ago

I feel you! Unfortunately, all those millions to billions allow those organizations to ignore reality far longer than they should be able to. Just recently I came to a realization, people and organisations exist in a competency / incompetency matrix. The competent orgs with incompetent people are your blue chips and "traditional" companies. They ship stuff, have customers, grow along with the overall market and economy and are abble to survive most non-existential threats and down-turns and even existential ones from time to time. All, or most, the competency is institutional, recorded in implicit knowledge held by people and various tools and processes. Unless those companies loose that knowledge for some reason, things are good. Competent orgs with competent people are incredible places, e.g. Amazon. They grow like crazy, rarely screw up and develop. They ship and have happy customers, they innovate. These places are hard to come by, harder to create and even harder to maintain. Then you have incompetent orgs with competent people. By definition start-ups, those only reach competency when they serve, sucessfully and not depending on outside funding, markets and customers for a while. Doing things right, those orgs can create orgabisational competency based on the people competency. And then there are incompetent orgs with incompetent people. Places were you think, as you said, you haluzionate all your training and experience. The only thing standing between a start-up (incompetent org and competent people) and such a nightmare is leadership. The thing that allows everyone to pretend to not be obe of those doomed places is endless cash. Sooner or later, those places come crushing down.

agumonkey 4y ago
And billions makes possible to buy big offices, and suits to appear way more competent than you are :) I shared room with people probably a bit less skilled at working than min wage clerks I worked with a few years ago. But they got a Java cert so they think spending hours in meeting is work, and efficient. We should have mandatory non IT work to make people see what it is to work lean and fast.
penguinvondoom 4y ago
IDK, from multiple accounts Amazon is an absolute burning garbage bin of a mess for everyone that works in it.

arkh 4y ago

Read or read again Mythical Man Month. Realize it has been written almost 50 years ago.

_glass 4y ago

lol, that's why I am doing my PhD in management. I figured this out early on. Humans are hard, the emerging social problems are hard.

steveBK123 4y ago

The larger the team I am on, the less happy I am. I moved from a 40 person team serving a few dozen clients in a multi-tenant setup, to essentially working for one of the clients directly as their only full time developer. I have probably written more code in the last 6 months than the preceding 5 years. It's not because I suddenly got smarter or I am some 10x engineer, it's because all the BS got out of the way. No agile, no jira, no backlog grooming, no story points, no standups, no sprints, no product owner, no stakeholder management, no churn. No "two masters" or principal-agent problems. Client/boss knows what they want, and so thats what I work on. It's clear whats important, so that's where I spend my time. He trusts my advice and feedback because he doesn't have 10 other senior engineers whispering conflicting BS in his ear. He is clear on how robust a solution they want, and if it's worth moving onto a new idea or wrapping up the current one. So, freed from all the other problems, I just build.

Aeolun 4y ago
I mean, I certainly enjoy that, but I find the challenge of trying to make a 200 people IT org do that a lot more… not necessarily interesting, but it’s something new to do. Just building by myself has an upper limit. To be fair, that upper limit is roughly 20% of what that whole 200 person org does, but still. I keep imagining what we could accomplish if we reached even 10% of the theoretical limit.
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Right, which is nice to be mindful of and to have career options. One path may get tiring after a few cycles, and you take the other path for a few.. rinse & repeat.
jrochkind1 4y ago
A lot of Fred Brooks' _The Mythical Man-Month_ is about how larger teams are inherently harder to function well than smaller ones, and the larger the harder.

detourdog 4y ago

I find Tech extremely interesting but "Silicon Valley" really boring. The problem I see is that technology innovation got completely confused with finical instrument innovation. This happened in Silicon Valley. Now the whole world thinks Silicon Valley is the heart of technical innovation when in fact it is actually Wall Street Innovation. There is and was good technical innovation in Silicon Valley but I think the tech talent pool has been polluted.

ren_engineer 4y ago

>I've worked with so many truly incompetent and stupid teams and organizations, that have millions to billions of dollars it's motivational in some ways seeing how dysfunctional even successful companies are

kibwen 4y ago
Alternatively, it's demotivating to see how success has seemingly no correlation with functional ability. You can't help but feel like it's all a giant lottery where winners are determined at random.

YounesDz 4y ago

Don't get me wrong. But if you're smart why you don't have your own company or business? Making a successful business in a capitalism atmosphere is not that hard for smart people. The thing that makes me wonder is cases like yours. Smart and and yet they are working for dumb or evil people.

throwawaaarrgh 4y ago
Well, I'm smart, but very lazy, so in other words a programmer. We don't like to do work, and business seems like work. It just strikes me as odd that there's few people who are both smart and not lazy.

penguinvondoom 4y ago

And in big corporations it isn't very different. There used to be theory of management and of organisation, that somehow got lost along the way, with only vestiges popping up here and there in stuff like the Toyota model, the original ideas behind agile and stuff like team topologies...but almost everything is these ... cargo cult organisations, that just blindly implement whatever rituals this or that business consultant recommends and hope for the best ...