4 ms·

Got news for you. It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement. I

by dartos 2y ago

Got news for you. It’s not the devs who are bloating development costs. It’s the layers of management making hour long meetings to discuss button placement. It’s the hours of retros, design meetings, and skip-levels designed to remove any personal investment or sense of ownership from everything. Since so few individuals are trusted with real decision making power, you need a lot more people to achieve some kind of consensus/buy-in so that you can ship anything. The devs are at the extreme bottom of this totem poll. It’s like blaming construction workers for houses being expensive. And, ofc, that goes without mentioning the multimillion yearly bonuses for C-suite, but we can just forget about that and blame the lowest ranking corporate employees (devs) Source: I worked at a large tech firm for many years and saw this over and over again.

ozim 2y ago
Second that, scrum teams having 3 business analysts, scrum master, product owner, ops/it, ux designer, 2 testers, 4 developers is basically how it goes. Blaming developers in such scenarios is silly.
ttoinou 2y ago
I agree with your point but at the same time developers do need to be managed and they don’t want to manage themselves
- dartos 2y ago
  I’m not saying just leave everyone to their own devices, but some individuals should be able to have ownership and make decisions without layers and layers of process. Ofc decisions can have consequences, but that’s what the high pay should be for. It’s not a black and white issue and I don’t think you need to present it like one.
  - ttoinou 2y ago
    A more risky job should be compensated more ? It'd be the opposite, if it's risky then the variance of the income should be greater (success = more income) I don't want to present the problem as black and white but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time on more important things for them
    - dartos 2y ago
      > A more risky job should be compensated more? Yea, duh. The more your decisions affect the company, the more you’re compensated. It’s why C-suite commands the biggest salaries. It’s another reason why orgs are so low trust.
      - ttoinou 2y ago
        Risk = variance = you should make less or make more depending on outcome. You want the cake (freedom, more impact) and eat it too (guaranteed higher salary)
        dartos 2y ago
        You have it all wrong. People are not equations. Let’s define risk in this discussion. Risk is the relative impact your decisions have on the org at large. If you make the wrong choice as the CEO, you can tank the company. If someone’s job involves risk, and you pay them peanuts, they’ll either go to a job that doesn’t involve that much risk or make decisions that are always maximally safe, regardless of potential upside, usually at the cost of company growth. You want your staff to feel comfortable taking risks so that the company can grow, because a stagnant company will die. So you pay your positions more when they have more risk.
        ttoinou 2y ago
        I never use numbers and exact equations to think about business, economics and politics. You have the wrong guy. You want more money in a predictable way, go incentivize the employees the correct way. In the meantime, workers are also responsible for the layers of “useless” managements
steveBK123 2y ago
Right every step of every dev task is ticketed, scheduled and measures within a millimeter of its life in many orgs. The people working the tickets aren't to blame when it all goes wrong in the big picture. I've worked at shops with agile coaches, consultants, product teams, multiple management layers, etc all attending agile planning/retro/blab sessions. They always had really strong opinions on the minutae of each footstep (tickets/sprint), but couldn't speak to where the path was to take us. Essentially zero quarterly let alone annual planning. A lot of management these days is the equivalent of driving and saying "I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light", repeated every 2 weeks.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  > I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light Surprisingly, this type of iteration can actually work; but the caveat is that the people behind the wheel, and reading the maps, need to be very good, and also, experienced enough to make sound decisions. If mediocre (or inexperienced) people try it, it’s a disaster. From what I can see, the entire tech industry has been institutionalizing mediocrity, so this type of approach is not really available.
  - steveBK123 2y ago
    Right If you’re copying this approach from someone who copied it, after hiring an agile coach and reading the phoenix project, you are likely definitionally mediocre. Also it’s not a one size fits all solution even for the competent. Requires a more direct interface and two way dialogue with users than most devs actually face.
  - dartos 2y ago
    It doesn’t sound like the type of iteration matters at all. If your leadership is good and competent, they can drive the company any way they feel and have it work. The most productive I’ve been in my career was when my PO put all tasks that needed to be done in a Google sheet and the whole dev team spent a week just picking tasks off the list. It ended with us shipping our app on time. No planning, no grooming, no nothing. It was a high trust, high ownership team. I miss those days.
oblio 2y ago
Heh, and there's at least one FAANG where it's not even the layers of management. They've just removed a huge amount of manager discretion and initiative through multiple top-down dictates that are pretty much killing any low level desire to really innovate and try risky initiatives. IBM, but with same level product market fit as IBM had for its mainframes, but in this case for markets 100x more important for the global economy. It's just sad.
austin-cheney 2y ago
It’s the devs too. Do you really need an army of developers to build a web app or put text onto screen? No, a small team can easily handle that much faster and at higher quality without all the framework bullshit. You also have to consider that developers are not sales people. They are a cost center.
- dartos 2y ago
  > you really need an army of developers to build a web app or put text onto screen? No, a small team can easily handle that much faster and at higher quality without all the framework bullshit … devs don’t hire the teams… management does… Most devs I worked with prefer smaller teams.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
slackernews9 2y ago
Got news for you, too: it's both. It's the useless management, it's the "developers" who send me screenshots of stack traces while they cry and soil themselves because they have no clue what they're doing.
abtinf 2y ago
> because the business side is also a big grift with the exact same problem all the way up to the founders recursively It’s like you stopped reading the comment halfway through.

by dartos 2y ago

ozim 2y ago

Second that, scrum teams having 3 business analysts, scrum master, product owner, ops/it, ux designer, 2 testers, 4 developers is basically how it goes. Blaming developers in such scenarios is silly.

ttoinou 2y ago

I agree with your point but at the same time developers do need to be managed and they don’t want to manage themselves

dartos 2y ago
I’m not saying just leave everyone to their own devices, but some individuals should be able to have ownership and make decisions without layers and layers of process. Ofc decisions can have consequences, but that’s what the high pay should be for. It’s not a black and white issue and I don’t think you need to present it like one.
- ttoinou 2y ago
  A more risky job should be compensated more ? It'd be the opposite, if it's risky then the variance of the income should be greater (success = more income) I don't want to present the problem as black and white but merely express a simple idea : developers DO want to be managed to simplify their lives and focus their time on more important things for them
  - dartos 2y ago
    > A more risky job should be compensated more? Yea, duh. The more your decisions affect the company, the more you’re compensated. It’s why C-suite commands the biggest salaries. It’s another reason why orgs are so low trust.
    - ttoinou 2y ago
      Risk = variance = you should make less or make more depending on outcome. You want the cake (freedom, more impact) and eat it too (guaranteed higher salary)
      - dartos 2y ago
        You have it all wrong. People are not equations. Let’s define risk in this discussion. Risk is the relative impact your decisions have on the org at large. If you make the wrong choice as the CEO, you can tank the company. If someone’s job involves risk, and you pay them peanuts, they’ll either go to a job that doesn’t involve that much risk or make decisions that are always maximally safe, regardless of potential upside, usually at the cost of company growth. You want your staff to feel comfortable taking risks so that the company can grow, because a stagnant company will die. So you pay your positions more when they have more risk.
        ttoinou 2y ago
        I never use numbers and exact equations to think about business, economics and politics. You have the wrong guy. You want more money in a predictable way, go incentivize the employees the correct way. In the meantime, workers are also responsible for the layers of “useless” managements

steveBK123 2y ago

Right every step of every dev task is ticketed, scheduled and measures within a millimeter of its life in many orgs. The people working the tickets aren't to blame when it all goes wrong in the big picture. I've worked at shops with agile coaches, consultants, product teams, multiple management layers, etc all attending agile planning/retro/blab sessions. They always had really strong opinions on the minutae of each footstep (tickets/sprint), but couldn't speak to where the path was to take us. Essentially zero quarterly let alone annual planning. A lot of management these days is the equivalent of driving and saying "I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light", repeated every 2 weeks.

ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
> I'll decide where I'm going when I get to the next stop light Surprisingly, this type of iteration can actually work; but the caveat is that the people behind the wheel, and reading the maps, need to be very good, and also, experienced enough to make sound decisions. If mediocre (or inexperienced) people try it, it’s a disaster. From what I can see, the entire tech industry has been institutionalizing mediocrity, so this type of approach is not really available.
- steveBK123 2y ago
  Right If you’re copying this approach from someone who copied it, after hiring an agile coach and reading the phoenix project, you are likely definitionally mediocre. Also it’s not a one size fits all solution even for the competent. Requires a more direct interface and two way dialogue with users than most devs actually face.
- dartos 2y ago
  It doesn’t sound like the type of iteration matters at all. If your leadership is good and competent, they can drive the company any way they feel and have it work. The most productive I’ve been in my career was when my PO put all tasks that needed to be done in a Google sheet and the whole dev team spent a week just picking tasks off the list. It ended with us shipping our app on time. No planning, no grooming, no nothing. It was a high trust, high ownership team. I miss those days.

oblio 2y ago

Heh, and there's at least one FAANG where it's not even the layers of management. They've just removed a huge amount of manager discretion and initiative through multiple top-down dictates that are pretty much killing any low level desire to really innovate and try risky initiatives. IBM, but with same level product market fit as IBM had for its mainframes, but in this case for markets 100x more important for the global economy. It's just sad.

austin-cheney 2y ago

It’s the devs too. Do you really need an army of developers to build a web app or put text onto screen? No, a small team can easily handle that much faster and at higher quality without all the framework bullshit. You also have to consider that developers are not sales people. They are a cost center.

dartos 2y ago
> you really need an army of developers to build a web app or put text onto screen? No, a small team can easily handle that much faster and at higher quality without all the framework bullshit … devs don’t hire the teams… management does… Most devs I worked with prefer smaller teams.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

slackernews9 2y ago

Got news for you, too: it's both. It's the useless management, it's the "developers" who send me screenshots of stack traces while they cry and soil themselves because they have no clue what they're doing.

abtinf 2y ago

> because the business side is also a big grift with the exact same problem all the way up to the founders recursively It’s like you stopped reading the comment halfway through.