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What ive learned in my career is that all companies are operating on a knife's edge. I have accepted offers at some very prestigious companies where I assume th
by jacurtis 3y ago
What ive learned in my career is that all companies are operating on a knife's edge. I have accepted offers at some very prestigious companies where I assume that "surely this company will be organized and have good systems in place". Then, after I start I realize every company is operating on chaos, barely putting one foot in front of the other.
They put on a good front for the public investor meetings, but behind the scenes I have decided that every company is just running one day at a time.
- ghaff 3y agoI know a pretty senior person who went to Apple and they boomeranged after about 6 months. At scale, there's a high level of chaos just about everywhere.
- rqtwteye 3y ago" Then, after I start I realize every company is operating on chaos, barely putting one foot in front of the other." So true. I have been involved in some projects where we had to figure out how certain processes. Every time it turned out that things are run on a mix of SAP, printed Excel sheets and some E-mails. Somehow it all (mostly) works out but nobody really knows how the company works.
- agumonkey 3y agoI believe this describe most of the industry. Conferences about high performance teams and practices are wet dreams. If I'm wrong then I want to meet these teams.
- monero-xmr 3y agoI work at a very high performance company that I co-founded. But we are less than 150 people and ~50% have been with us for 10 to 20 years as loyal employees we have brought through a few firms. I think small, lucrative, focused companies can enjoy work-life balance and strong employee and customer loyalty. You need a niche that is big enough to support a 90th percentile team, but small and esoteric enough to avoid attention of giant firms. It is a delicate balance. I think the German Mittelstand model is similar, except translate this to software.
- rtz121 3y agoI work in a "Mittelstand" company and we are definitely operating mostly on chaos.
- monero-xmr 3y agoWell to be honest most companies of any size are operating on chaos. But the person I was replying to "wanted to meet [the high performing] teams" so I gave an example of mine, where I feel things are fairly well-oiled. But this is a unique situation, that is actually the result of 20 years of building. We even raised VC but they have accepted whatever it is they have invested in, which won't be 1000x ROI.
- agumonkey 3y agoThanks, there's so many questions coming to mind: - how did you find your team mates - how do you plan the work (fully self organized ? xp ? agile ? another method ?) - how do you resolve human issues (intra or inter teams frictions, loss of motivation) - do you assess per employee performance or not ? (have you ever run into a situation where someone was faking, or faking too much, but nobody checked ? or is you group tight enough so that any such case will be detected and fixed rapidly) - do you have allocated time for team performance improvements ? remove friction, adjust processes - do you allow creative attempts (if someone thinks he could chase a new idea for a day or two) also, i didn't ask, how do you define high performance ? i have my own definition in a way: ability to understand most parts of your system in a few minutes with high confidence, ability to try new ideas, ability to split work between people for parallelism so that integrating is nearly guaranteed and lastly people who can generate new ideas multiple times per day
- Nursie 3y agoThe only one I've seen otherwise was one of the big banks. They were pretty well organised. They had relatively low productivity expectations for developers because they had nailed eveything down in terms of network security and legal compliance, but they accounted for that and expected it. It may come from them having no shortage of funds, I suppose, and as a result no shortage of staff, skills and time to throw at things.
- kitd 3y agoI worked at an oil major which was fairly well organized, but I think much of that was down to the nature of the business which is both highly integrated and highly regulated.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 3y agoThat's kind of re-assuring, it means nobody has some secret huge advantage over their competitors. (Well it's not re-assuring for me riding in a Boeing plane.) I guess it's some combo of the Efficient Market Hypothesis and "Every complex system is always running in a broken state" (https://how.complexsystems.fail/#5 https://how.complexsystems.fail/#5)
- jxramos 3y agoGreat excerpt > …are usually predicated on naïve notions of system performance
- benreesman 3y agoMost companies I’ve worked for in 20 years doing this were a mess in one way or another, but also generally delivered an acceptable if inconsistent outcome. I’ve had a few brief spells at companies in their “golden days”, where it just sings. Every once in a while there’s plenty of budget because the product market fit is hand-in-glove, and the first people set an aggressive but achievable bar for quality, and a mentoring culture emerged, and leadership still knew their trade. That’s a quarter of my career at best, but it’s the stuff you remember.
- hondo77 3y agoYeah, I was at a company when we were on top of the world. For a few years we could do no wrong but even when we hit our peak, behind the scenes it was chaos (and we assumed "the other guys" actually knew what they were doing while we were just winging it). How we were able to achieve so much during so much craziness is still amazing to me. It didn't last very long, of course, but at least I got to experience something like that--most people don't.
- rcbdev 3y agoWhat made IBM worse to me than the rest of the industry was the crazy crunch/burnout culture both in my project and utilization-wise. Also the absolute insanity of putting fresh out of college juniors on major aspects of multi-million euro projects. They also seem to have zero organizational understanding of modern requirements engineering even though they talk a big buzzword game with "Design Thinking". Suffice it to say, I didn't stay long.
- Nursie 3y ago> crazy crunch/burnout culture both in my project and utilization-wise Kinda the opposite of some of my experiences in big blue - in some of the software sides of things, productivity expectations were so low as to be really kinda funny. You could (and people did) coast along producing not very much for years at a time. Which is probably why entire business areas just got shitcanned every so often. One office in particular operated more like an old-fashioned university campus. There was a yearly release cadence, with 3-5 months of that dedicated purely to merging together the work that the teams had produced over the past 7-9.
- rcbdev 3y agoIBM Technology people seemed like that, yeah. I'm talking about IBM Consulting, where most (if not all) hiring seems to be happening recently.
- jxramos 3y agoI second this. When you think about it it’s a fallacy of the ideal to assume some non-trivial assemblage of humans would be able to be in perfect harmony with each other. That fiction of perfect execution of godlike companies is really a youthful impression when all your exposure is slick marketing campaigns, Hollywood movie representations and other artifacts that a company generates that enter the public square. When you see how the sausage is made it’s a shock to all who get to see behind the veneer. Once you get over it you’re a lot more forgiving for anything that doesn’t meet one’s unsubstantiated expectations because as they say life is hard.
- jgilias 3y agoI’ve come to the same conclusion. But not just about companies, but everything. Talk to someone in the military, or government agencies, or working on large infrastructure projects. It’s the same story everywhere - chaos. And it’s generally not because of malice, being dumb, or lack of trying. I think as a civilization we’re much more like ants than a troop of smart chimps. In that our civilization is a kind of a proverbial emergent anthill. And most likely the relative individual understanding of our respective anthills doesn’t differ too much between ants and us. And it’s kind of freeing. You just move your proverbial bit of earth that you’re just compelled to put somewhere else, and don’t stress the rest. Emergence will take care of it.
- KineticLensman 3y ago> But not just about companies, but everything For me, it's a good argument against conspiracy theories. There's no way there could be secretive organisations running for years and controlling the world without screwing up in stupid and obvious ways.
- jgilias 3y agoYeah. I think anyone who has had experience with school/kindergarten parents chats trying to organize _anything_ would find the idea of shadowy organizations running the world laughable.
- lootsauce 3y agoTo the contrary does it not imply any well organized group should have an easier time of accomplishing their aims while the rest are mired in the chaos?
- esrauch 3y agoThe claim is that there are literally no observable organizations running without chaos, so are we to believe the only one to achieve it is nefarious instead of just regular profiteering? I like the meta conspiracy theory that the only organizations running without chaos are covert ones though.
- orzig 3y agoSurely it’s a matter of degree through? I was at a company with a recently acquired-in product line and the amount of chaos on release day each month was notably higher. I would have described the original product’s development process as awkward but way less bad than the new one.
- justsomehnguy 3y ago> Then, after I start I realize every company is operating on chaos, barely putting one foot in front of the other. I've seen and been in enough situations where a quite moderate changes could had improved QoL of the company people and conseq. the company itself. How many times I was paid for that? Zero. Add to that 'yes, we see it would be better for us, but [bullshit reason]'.
- heresie-dabord 3y ago> every company is just running one day at a time And every day, one decision at a time, it is the quality, skills, and integrity of the people that make an organisation's culture, capabililty, and sustainability. An organisation without a culture that attracts talent and maintains integrity in its decisions is nothing but a licence to burn money squatting in a building.
- rbanffy 3y agoEven in a segment as rigorously regulated as aerospace, Boeing ended up with planes that fly into the ground and lose doors while flying. The horrors we see in any corporate-grade software-intensive company where development is a cost would drive H. P. Lovecraft to madness.
- shever73 3y agoI call this the "shiny window effect". 30 years ago, when I started my first business from a converted garage, I used to think about all of the chaos I had to deal with. I'd look at the big companies with their shiny, mirror glass windows and think "when we're that size, we'll have it all figured out". Then we started working for these large companies. We were supplying IT solutions to try help them deal with their chaos. I realised then that the only difference between them and us was the shiny windows and the scale of their chaos. I apply this on a human level too. There's not one of us that has it all figured out, despite outward appearances.
- jmclnx 3y ago>What ive learned in my career is that all companies are operating on a knife's edge I guess you never worked for a Large Drug Company. I have a relative working for one (low-level employee) and pretty much on the way home, you pick up your bag of money bonus leaving every day :) The benefits are 100x better that anything I have ever had in tech. Plus everyone gets stock bonuses and money bonuses when a new product is successful. And working from home, sure, why not.