4 ms·

Is it really invisible, or is it just not shown? I've seen plenty of environments where the technical debt stares you in the face wherever you look, but no rep

Is it really invisible, or is it just not shown? I've seen plenty of environments where the technical debt stares you in the face wherever you look, but no reports make it to decision makers (and the ones to make decisions are generally not the ones in the position to see all that debt). If you're in an org pretending everything is fine, that would probably apply to many more problem topics and not just technical debt.

cebert 3y ago
Does that boil down to organization culture and whether lower-level employees feel comfortable raising issues to leadership? I believe Boeing would be in a much better situation if it encouraged raising concerns instead of suppressing them.
- oneplane 3y ago
  I suppose it is often a combination of company culture, local culture and KPIs and then a bunch of smaller things. I'm not up to speed on the latest and greatest research, but last time I went into that rabbit hole it boiled down to hiding problems or moving them around so the KPIs look good (be it KPIs in the company, or in the case of publicly traded companies, the 'virtual' KPIs of news and press releases), and the degree to which hierarchy forces everything down. That directionality gets exponentially worse when you have a local culture of strong hierarchy, and a company culture of making leadership look good (or honour culture?). I've only seen that personally from a slight distance where it really looks like a kind of dictatorship where management comes up with an idea, and the subordinates have to make due with it, and only positive results may be shared or they get fired. The ideas are usually bad or really hard to execute so you see people use all available resources to present 'success' with not much left for the actual thing that needed doing.

4 ms·

Is it really invisible, or is it just not shown? I've seen plenty of environments where the technical debt stares you in the face wherever you look, but no rep

by oneplane 3y ago

cebert 3y ago
Does that boil down to organization culture and whether lower-level employees feel comfortable raising issues to leadership? I believe Boeing would be in a much better situation if it encouraged raising concerns instead of suppressing them.
- oneplane 3y ago
  I suppose it is often a combination of company culture, local culture and KPIs and then a bunch of smaller things. I'm not up to speed on the latest and greatest research, but last time I went into that rabbit hole it boiled down to hiding problems or moving them around so the KPIs look good (be it KPIs in the company, or in the case of publicly traded companies, the 'virtual' KPIs of news and press releases), and the degree to which hierarchy forces everything down. That directionality gets exponentially worse when you have a local culture of strong hierarchy, and a company culture of making leadership look good (or honour culture?). I've only seen that personally from a slight distance where it really looks like a kind of dictatorship where management comes up with an idea, and the subordinates have to make due with it, and only positive results may be shared or they get fired. The ideas are usually bad or really hard to execute so you see people use all available resources to present 'success' with not much left for the actual thing that needed doing.