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I've always worked in a non-tech where our customers are internal. They have unfortunately read too many SRE/Phoenix Project/Big Tech Management Papers and so

I've always worked in a non-tech where our customers are internal. They have unfortunately read too many SRE/Phoenix Project/Big Tech Management Papers and so OKRs was one thing shoved down our throats. What I've found is that they've hired a slew of Product Mangers (tm) who mostly just sit in between devs & users, without coordinating cross team, actually writing specs/Jiras/roadmaps, etc. So each teams devs wrote their own OKRs, in ignorance of what users (who might be other tech teams) might actually want or what other teams OKRs are. For example, to use an analogy one team builds the foundation and decides their OKR is to use 15% less concrete next year. The other team builds frames and decides their OKR is to make the average building 15% taller next year. If any of them talked to actual final customers, they'd have found out the customers actually desire the buildings to be more robust to storm winds.

m463 2y ago
okr: reduce parts count me: Tesla,I want a car with turn signal and drive selector stalks!
- Schiendelman 2y ago
  Has the new UX bothered you when using it? I got used to it in a day and it seems fine.
  - m463 2y ago
    how has quickly reversing to get a parking spot in moving traffic worked for you?
    - steveBK123 2y ago
      You see, in the new economy you don't even needs stalks! I simply hit this Autopark button and then my car alternates between inching back & forth to sharply jerking the wheel every which way, and then lands itself in the spot. All while taking 3x longer than a competent human parallel parker and with heart stopping near-misses of hitting the surround parked cards. Oh and curbs your rims 20% of the time. Oh and as the human driver you are still responsible to monitor for passing pedestrians and bikers. If it crashes it's because you weren't monitoring it closely enough. And if you hit the brakes to stop it, you are a wimp who doesn't trust the car which totally would have gotten it right if you let it.
    - Schiendelman 2y ago
      Honestly it works just fine - I live in Seattle and parallel parking is daily for me. I have yet to hear complaints from someone who's had one for more than a week. You also didn't answer my question, which makes me think your complaints are secondhand.
frenchtoast8 2y ago
This is nearly my exact experience at work. I work on an internal tools team, so my users are other engineers at the company. Product teams have Product Managers and seem to put in a lot of effort into their OKRs, but for the internal tools team, we're in some limbo: still forced to write OKRs, but no parts of the process that are actually useful. We might have an OKR to upgrade Jenkins before an EOL date, but no introspection about whether the company at large would be better served by GitLab CI (as an example). Management only cares that we have defined KPIs like "Days remaining until Jenkins EOL date" and that they are improving. I still try to have the difficult conversations, but it's a constant battle with management as improving developer happiness by allowing them to use a better system isn't easily demonstrated on a dashboard. Also, like you said, teams write their OKRs in a vacuum without coordinating with other teams. So, one engineering team might have an OKR to fix some memory issue affecting their Jenkins pipelines, but they didn't communicate that with the internal tools team that operates Jenkins. It then became a struggle between the two managers, one saying "We need to fix this Jenkins issue or we'll fail our OKRs commitment" and the other saying "We already committed to different OKRs this quarter, we can't take on new work." The engineers are stuck between this battle trying to help each other in secret without management hearing about it.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  A lot of the lack of coordination devolves into cost center arbitrage as well. Often intentional. I once worked at a shop that outsourced their datacenter to such a low cost bidder, that simple RAID disk replacements would be delayed for weeks and in a couple cases caused complete loss of a RAID array due to cascading drive failures. Of course the datacenter guy got to point to his OKR for reducing operating costs. Meanwhile the "Big Data" team using their services was saddled with their losing days worth of highly paid engineers time as we chased tickets, dealt with data recovery, etc. I'm now sat in the "final customer" internal seat and seeing it from the outside. IT brought us their new years plan to decommission some stuff I use, when I prodded a bit, they admitted was basically a cost allocation problem. They were pushing the responsibility onto users like me, because they weren't good at allocating costs. No argument that it was more efficient or a good use of their customers time/resources. Simply that they hadn't gotten around to implementing metering so why not just stop offering the service entirely...
crispyambulance 2y ago
> Phoenix Project When that book came out, I actually COULD NOT BELIEVE that someone wrote A NOVEL about project management that was NOT some type of farce, comedy, or venomous satire. Not sure if this is my gen-x mindset playing tricks on me or what.
- robocat 2y ago
  patio11 makes some other suggestions for similarly good books: https://bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/fiction-about-finance/ https://bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/fiction-about-finance/

m463 2y ago

okr: reduce parts count me: Tesla,I want a car with turn signal and drive selector stalks!

Schiendelman 2y ago
Has the new UX bothered you when using it? I got used to it in a day and it seems fine.
- m463 2y ago
  how has quickly reversing to get a parking spot in moving traffic worked for you?
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    You see, in the new economy you don't even needs stalks! I simply hit this Autopark button and then my car alternates between inching back & forth to sharply jerking the wheel every which way, and then lands itself in the spot. All while taking 3x longer than a competent human parallel parker and with heart stopping near-misses of hitting the surround parked cards. Oh and curbs your rims 20% of the time. Oh and as the human driver you are still responsible to monitor for passing pedestrians and bikers. If it crashes it's because you weren't monitoring it closely enough. And if you hit the brakes to stop it, you are a wimp who doesn't trust the car which totally would have gotten it right if you let it.
  - Schiendelman 2y ago
    Honestly it works just fine - I live in Seattle and parallel parking is daily for me. I have yet to hear complaints from someone who's had one for more than a week. You also didn't answer my question, which makes me think your complaints are secondhand.

frenchtoast8 2y ago

This is nearly my exact experience at work. I work on an internal tools team, so my users are other engineers at the company. Product teams have Product Managers and seem to put in a lot of effort into their OKRs, but for the internal tools team, we're in some limbo: still forced to write OKRs, but no parts of the process that are actually useful. We might have an OKR to upgrade Jenkins before an EOL date, but no introspection about whether the company at large would be better served by GitLab CI (as an example). Management only cares that we have defined KPIs like "Days remaining until Jenkins EOL date" and that they are improving. I still try to have the difficult conversations, but it's a constant battle with management as improving developer happiness by allowing them to use a better system isn't easily demonstrated on a dashboard. Also, like you said, teams write their OKRs in a vacuum without coordinating with other teams. So, one engineering team might have an OKR to fix some memory issue affecting their Jenkins pipelines, but they didn't communicate that with the internal tools team that operates Jenkins. It then became a struggle between the two managers, one saying "We need to fix this Jenkins issue or we'll fail our OKRs commitment" and the other saying "We already committed to different OKRs this quarter, we can't take on new work." The engineers are stuck between this battle trying to help each other in secret without management hearing about it.

steveBK123 2y ago
A lot of the lack of coordination devolves into cost center arbitrage as well. Often intentional. I once worked at a shop that outsourced their datacenter to such a low cost bidder, that simple RAID disk replacements would be delayed for weeks and in a couple cases caused complete loss of a RAID array due to cascading drive failures. Of course the datacenter guy got to point to his OKR for reducing operating costs. Meanwhile the "Big Data" team using their services was saddled with their losing days worth of highly paid engineers time as we chased tickets, dealt with data recovery, etc. I'm now sat in the "final customer" internal seat and seeing it from the outside. IT brought us their new years plan to decommission some stuff I use, when I prodded a bit, they admitted was basically a cost allocation problem. They were pushing the responsibility onto users like me, because they weren't good at allocating costs. No argument that it was more efficient or a good use of their customers time/resources. Simply that they hadn't gotten around to implementing metering so why not just stop offering the service entirely...

crispyambulance 2y ago

> Phoenix Project When that book came out, I actually COULD NOT BELIEVE that someone wrote A NOVEL about project management that was NOT some type of farce, comedy, or venomous satire. Not sure if this is my gen-x mindset playing tricks on me or what.

robocat 2y ago
patio11 makes some other suggestions for similarly good books: https://bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/fiction-about-finance/ https://bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/fiction-about-finance/