3 ms·
Sometimes it's not even about the short game of capitalism. I've seen multiple times undesired meaningless features being highly-prioritized without rhyme or re
by whstl 4y ago
Sometimes it's not even about the short game of capitalism. I've seen multiple times undesired meaningless features being highly-prioritized without rhyme or reason because of hunches from some PO, because it was politically good internally for some product manager, or because the designer decided to do some redesign, and no higher-up wanted to intervene and check how important it was. When I saw that happening and I was "the higher up", I had to burn a lot of political capital to get the message from the team across. Modern software development is highly dysfunctional but we somehow refuse to tackle it.
- JohnBooty 4y agoModern software development is highly dysfunctional but we somehow refuse to tackle it. And it's just unreasonably difficult. Climbing mountains is hard, but not unreasonably hard. We don't intentionally cut people's safety lines and roll boulders down the f'ing mountain at them while they're trying to climb. We don't make them carry bowling balls in their backpacks. Sure, it's pretty rare to hear from anybody that their particular field runs smoothly. But our field. Man oh man. We know what tech debt is, and we know how it affects the time+effort required to achieve a certain velocity. And yet we spend more time shooting ourselves in the feet than doing anything else. Quite honestly I feel that the problem has become massively worse in the last decade, with everybody cargo-culting the highly complex architectures of FAANG companies when in reality much simpler alternatives would be an order of magnitude better.