4 ms·

I worked somewhere that had a lot of this sort of thing going on once. You cannot overestimate how hard it is to get anything done: politics and organisational

I worked somewhere that had a lot of this sort of thing going on once. You cannot overestimate how hard it is to get anything done: politics and organisational dysfunction, not to mention that you probably don’t have access to half of what you need to in order to fix any given problem and are even more unlikely to be able to get it, mean there are just huge scads of problems that, on the face of them, look relatively straightforward to solve but which, in practice, are organisationally impossible to solve.

whstl 2y ago
Yep. I don't work with data engineering, but from hearing war stories from them, this could perfectly describe the last four companies I worked at. :/ > you probably don’t have access to half of what you need to in order to fix any given problem and are even more unlikely to be able to get it I once sat down with a data engineer to try to fix a specific problem they had and that was 100% accurate. They were left to die by Ops and CISO.
Terr_ 2y ago
A framing/question I like to ask use is: "Look for a root problem that ought to be fixed through a change in policy, politics, or incentives, and the wasteful use of time/money is how the company tries to avoid or defer facing it." For example, Operations might demand that Engineering develops an increasingly-byzantine approvals process, to stop Sales from over-promising impossible or unprofitable projects.
deergomoo 2y ago
> you probably don’t have access to half of what you need to in order to fix any given problem I’ve found this to be one of my largest day-to-day problems even in a relatively functional organisation. Particularly when it involves something I can’t run on my own machine, like an AWS service. In a previous role I often found myself constructing elaborate hypotheses about what was going on inside systems I couldn’t see into. I’d then need to try to verify it with someone on another team, in another timezone, who had the access but not necessarily the development background. Which usually meant getting on a screen share and asking them to click various things I wasn’t allowed to. If I was wrong, back to the drawing board and start again.

whstl 2y ago

Yep. I don't work with data engineering, but from hearing war stories from them, this could perfectly describe the last four companies I worked at. :/ > you probably don’t have access to half of what you need to in order to fix any given problem and are even more unlikely to be able to get it I once sat down with a data engineer to try to fix a specific problem they had and that was 100% accurate. They were left to die by Ops and CISO.

Terr_ 2y ago

A framing/question I like to ask use is: "Look for a root problem that ought to be fixed through a change in policy, politics, or incentives, and the wasteful use of time/money is how the company tries to avoid or defer facing it." For example, Operations might demand that Engineering develops an increasingly-byzantine approvals process, to stop Sales from over-promising impossible or unprofitable projects.

deergomoo 2y ago

> you probably don’t have access to half of what you need to in order to fix any given problem I’ve found this to be one of my largest day-to-day problems even in a relatively functional organisation. Particularly when it involves something I can’t run on my own machine, like an AWS service. In a previous role I often found myself constructing elaborate hypotheses about what was going on inside systems I couldn’t see into. I’d then need to try to verify it with someone on another team, in another timezone, who had the access but not necessarily the development background. Which usually meant getting on a screen share and asking them to click various things I wasn’t allowed to. If I was wrong, back to the drawing board and start again.