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> Developers have no real power or seat at the table. They are not peers engaged in a common creative enterprise — they are hired, replaceable machinery, no dif
by smallerfish 2y ago
> Developers have no real power or seat at the table. They are not peers engaged in a common creative enterprise — they are hired, replaceable machinery, no different than the computers and monitors they use all day.
This is correct. Scrum (and all of the other PM rituals) exist because the people controlling the money need to attach budgets to projects in order to figure out whether they're worth doing or not (or more loosely to teams, to figure out if they're profitable or not). Once a project has a budget, then it needs to be tracked.
It's enormously frustrating to be on the other side of the table, and to have a recalcitrant development team missing estimate after estimate, sometimes by orders of magnitude. Either it's your money that's slowly being incinerated, or you have to go back to investors and tell them that you decided to spend on X, and X is only 1/3rd as far along as the tech lead told you it would be.
But it's also frustrating to be on the developer's side of the table. We're not generally included in the business strategy meetings, because we don't generally have MBAs. (Also because we're expensive, and having us sit in "irrelevant" meetings, especially when we're "behind" anyway, seems like a poor use of resources.) As a result, we're two steps removed from the decisions that matter - and not in the room when we could potentially have suggested a better approach to solving the original problem.
Personally I'm done with the corporate software world - I'm riding the fractional/freelance bus until retirement. But, I wonder if these kinds of dysfunctional dynamics could be fixed with multidisciplinary teams. E.g. imagine a team of several devs, a couple mbas, and a few sales people, responsible as a group for the team's financial position in the company. Strange bedfellows, maybe, but if each person's success depended on everybody else in the team hitting their goals, the communication patterns could end up being quite different.
- Traubenfuchs 2y agoHow did you get started with freelancing? The old "startup" I am working for is dying and I need to plan my next move…
- smallerfish 2y agoUpwork to start - set rates high enough and you'll find a steady stream of reasonable positions coming through. It's a bit of a slog until you build a reputation. Eventually word of mouth and your network kicks in.
- peebeebee 2y agoMultidisciplinary teams wont work either because inevitably power and politics come into play. I’ve seen it happen every so many times.
- ivan_gammel 2y agoNah, they can work and they do work. It’s a people problem that can be solved.
- ivan_gammel 2y ago> E.g. imagine a team of several devs, a couple mbas, and a few sales people A modern product engineering team is like that. Decent product manager (as a substitute for MBA), UX designers, researchers, devs, QA, some relevant business stakeholders and north star metric to align the work with it.
- fooqux 2y ago> It's enormously frustrating to be on the other side of the table, and to have a recalcitrant development team missing estimate after estimate, sometimes by orders of magnitude. I know this is just my anecdotal experience versus yours, but every time this has been the case for me in my life, it's due to dates being told to the developers instead of the other way around. Sometimes it's blatant "we need to hit this date because of the market / end of quarter" and sometimes it's passive aggressive such as "management didn't feel your date matched expectations, try again" and it gets sent back for another estimate which will now be biased. I've also been on both sides of the table, and I'm glad I was a developer first and had those experiences. I already knew that humans can't estimate large things accurately, and that was one of the great takeaways from scrum: do smaller batches and estimate those to get more accurate numbers.
- Tomte 2y ago> Sometimes it's blatant "we need to hit this date because of the market / end of quarter" You know what‘s blatant? "Deadline is MM-DD, and it’s non-negotiable, because that‘s the birthday of the boss‘s deceased husband". Been there, suffered that. All important projects had that deadline, year after year, when they were so unlucky to have their projected end dates somewhere around that part of the year.
- ivan_gammel 2y agoI worked on a project once, where the date was written in the law (financial compliance). Sometimes we have to accept and deal with the deadlines and the problem becomes the problem of quality and scope. In such situations you just throw away some of the best practices and just ships whatever works. Business is often totally fine with imperfections.
- jokethrowaway 2y ago>E.g. imagine a team of several devs, a couple mbas, and a few sales people, responsible as a group for the team's financial position in the company. Strange bedfellows, maybe, but if each person's success depended on everybody else in the team hitting their goals, the communication patterns could end up being quite different. You described a small business! If society and school system weren't trying to hard to turn everyone in mindless employees (MAX(salary) so everyone ends up in a few huge corps), we would see more small enterprises: the economy and people' lives would be much better.