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This is an even bigger problem putside of our profession. Organisations do everything in their power to reduce the agency of employees and the general public th

by nicbou 2y ago

This is an even bigger problem putside of our profession. Organisations do everything in their power to reduce the agency of employees and the general public through process. A company would rather spend 20 hours verifying a purchase than allow an unnecessary purchase every now and then. German culture in particular seems to favour this to an extreme.

braza 2y ago
I like the German workplace (to white collar job) for several reasons but this one is one that drives me away. We used to have an issue of deployments breaking in production, and one of the reasons was that we did not have some kind of smoke test in the post deployment (in our case we only had a rolling update as a strategy). The rational solution was only create that post-deployment step. The solution that our German managers demanded: cut access to deployment for the entire team, “on-call” to check the deployments, and a deployment spreadsheet to track it.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  Good lord, are all those non-tech managers the reason Europe can't seem to build viable tech companies?
  - nicbou 2y ago
    In my experience it’s a cultural problem in Germany. Everything has to be done methodically, even if the method adds a disproportionate amount of friction. Often, the purported benefits are not even there. The thoroughness is full of holes, the diligence never done, the follow-ups never happening. It leads to situations where you need a certificate from your landlord that you take to the certified locksmith that your landlord contracted and show a piece of ID to order a key double that arrives 3 business days later at a cost of 60€. A smart German knows that there’s a locksmith in the basement of a nearby shopping mall that will gladly duplicate any key without a fuss, but even then the price is inflated by the authorised locksmiths. I document German bureaucracy for immigrants. Everything is like this. Every time I think “it can’t really be this ridiculous, I’m being uncharitable”, a colleague has a story that confirms that the truth is even more absurd. It’s funny until you realise the cost it has for society at large. All the wasted labour, all the bottlenecks, and little to show for it.
    - chrsig 2y ago
      The other end of the spectrum has snakeoil salesmen grifting from town to town. It's a hard equilibrium to blance.
sverhagen 2y ago
I've worked in highly autonomous and empowered teams that still root cause-analyzed every incident to death. The rationale being that if you'd get PagerDuty-ied in the middle of the night, it better be worth losing your sleep over. And it was great. I've also worked in slow, bureaucratic environments. They're not the same. Turning the magic dial (up) towards "more care" apparently doesn't move you along the same axis towards bureaucracy per se.

by nicbou 2y ago

braza 2y ago

I like the German workplace (to white collar job) for several reasons but this one is one that drives me away. We used to have an issue of deployments breaking in production, and one of the reasons was that we did not have some kind of smoke test in the post deployment (in our case we only had a rolling update as a strategy). The rational solution was only create that post-deployment step. The solution that our German managers demanded: cut access to deployment for the entire team, “on-call” to check the deployments, and a deployment spreadsheet to track it.

intelVISA 2y ago
Good lord, are all those non-tech managers the reason Europe can't seem to build viable tech companies?
- nicbou 2y ago
  In my experience it’s a cultural problem in Germany. Everything has to be done methodically, even if the method adds a disproportionate amount of friction. Often, the purported benefits are not even there. The thoroughness is full of holes, the diligence never done, the follow-ups never happening. It leads to situations where you need a certificate from your landlord that you take to the certified locksmith that your landlord contracted and show a piece of ID to order a key double that arrives 3 business days later at a cost of 60€. A smart German knows that there’s a locksmith in the basement of a nearby shopping mall that will gladly duplicate any key without a fuss, but even then the price is inflated by the authorised locksmiths. I document German bureaucracy for immigrants. Everything is like this. Every time I think “it can’t really be this ridiculous, I’m being uncharitable”, a colleague has a story that confirms that the truth is even more absurd. It’s funny until you realise the cost it has for society at large. All the wasted labour, all the bottlenecks, and little to show for it.
  - chrsig 2y ago
    The other end of the spectrum has snakeoil salesmen grifting from town to town. It's a hard equilibrium to blance.

sverhagen 2y ago

I've worked in highly autonomous and empowered teams that still root cause-analyzed every incident to death. The rationale being that if you'd get PagerDuty-ied in the middle of the night, it better be worth losing your sleep over. And it was great. I've also worked in slow, bureaucratic environments. They're not the same. Turning the magic dial (up) towards "more care" apparently doesn't move you along the same axis towards bureaucracy per se.