8 ms·

> In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller.

> In the last years you often have some manager where you basically have to justify every thing you do and always a huge pile of work that never gets smaller. So you just hurry through your tasks. This has been my exact experience. Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. If anything ever takes longer than the estimate that was invariably just pulled out of someones ass (because it's impossible to accurately estimate development unless you're already ~75% of the way through doing it, and even then it's a crapshoot) you need to justify that in a morning standup too. The end result of all of this is every project getting bogged down by being stuck on the first version of whatever architecture was thought up right at the beginning and there being piles of tech debt that never gets fixed because nobody who actually understands what needs to be done has the political capital to get past the aforementioned justification filter.

marginalia_nu 2y ago
It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done. Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything. Eats resources like crazy to uphold.
- pjot 2y ago
  This compounds with each _team_ modeling the work in jira/excel too!
- squiggleblaz 2y ago
  Yes but metrics! How can the CEO look like they know what's happening without understanding anything if they don't have everyone producing numbers?
- spudlyo 2y ago
  Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira. It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...
  - alephnerd 2y ago
    Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative. Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size. In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress. Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data. Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.
    - g8oz 2y ago
      This explanation is not incompatible with calling the whole business a "theater".
      - alephnerd 2y ago
        How is it theater? When customers give you money, they expect a date. When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives. When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance. Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis? That's the alternative. Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract. If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.
        azemetre 2y ago
        None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.
stouset 2y ago
Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued. One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned. One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.
- api 2y ago
  The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.... The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything. I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
  - zusammen 2y ago
    [dead]
  - djmips 2y ago
    Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.
- the_snooze 2y ago
  It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
    It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?
zusammen 2y ago
Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it. The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
  - bumby 2y ago
    Why do you think that is? I’m wondering if the shared sacrifice of WW2 has something to do with it.
    - bitwize 2y ago
      That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done.
      - jcranmer 2y ago
        > The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers.

marginalia_nu 2y ago

It's fascinating that you end up sort of doing the work twice, you build an excel (or jira) model of the work work along with the actual work to be done. Often this extends to the entire organization, where you have like this parallel dimension of spreadsheets and planning existing on top of everything. Eats resources like crazy to uphold.

pjot 2y ago
This compounds with each _team_ modeling the work in jira/excel too!
squiggleblaz 2y ago
Yes but metrics! How can the CEO look like they know what's happening without understanding anything if they don't have everyone producing numbers?
spudlyo 2y ago
Jira is already almost like "productivity theater" where engineers chart the work for the benefit of managers, and managers of managers only. Many programmers already really resent having to deal with it. Soon it will be a total farce, as engineers using MCP Jira servers have LLMs chart the "work" and manage the tickets for them, as managers do the same in reverse, instructing LLMs to summarize the work being done in Jira. It'll be nothing but LLMs talking to other LLMs under the guise of organizational productivity in which the only one deriving any value from this effort is the companies charging for the input and output tokens. Except, they are likely operating at a loss...
- alephnerd 2y ago
  Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative. Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size. In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress. Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data. Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.
  - g8oz 2y ago
    This explanation is not incompatible with calling the whole business a "theater".
    - alephnerd 2y ago
      How is it theater? When customers give you money, they expect a date. When investors give you money, they want to see whether or not you are investing in the right initiatives. When you open a company, the IRS, SEC, and other regulators expect some amount of financial compliance. Do you want me to come to you and give you an ultimatum to give me an exact date, calculate amortization, and defend existing investments, and if any of those slips you are the fired? And do that with all the hundreds and thousands of initiatives on a daily basis? That's the alternative. Welcome to the industry - you're paid to make purchasers happy, not you. Purchasers don't care if you DuckDB or OracleDB - they care if the product they paid for will be delivered on time and meet the needs stipulated in their contract. If you want to be happy and only deal with engineering problems, you sadly have to deal with the poopshow that JIRA is.
      - azemetre 2y ago
        None of this sounds necessary for the human race. Maybe David Graeber was right.

stouset 2y ago

Also this push to measure everything means that anything that can’t be measured isn’t valued. One of your teammates consistently helps unblock everyone on the team when they get stuck? They aren’t closing as many tickets as others so they get overlooked on promotions or canned. One of your teammates takes a bit longer to complete work, but it’s always rock solid and produces fewer outages? Totally invisible. Plus they don’t get to look like a hero when they save the company from the consequences of their own shoddy work.

api 2y ago
The phenomenon being discussed here is a type of overfitting: https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.html https://sohl-dickstein.github.io/2022/11/06/strong-Goodhart.... The last 50 years or so of managerial practice has been a recipe for overfitting with a brutal emphasis on measuring, optimizing, and stack ranking everything. I think an argument can be made that this is an age of overfitting everywhere.
- zusammen 2y ago
  [dead]
- djmips 2y ago
  Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.
the_snooze 2y ago
It's even got a name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?

zusammen 2y ago

Absolutely everything is tracked as a work item with estimates. Anything you think should be done needs to be justified and tracked the same way. My grandpa once said something that seemed ridiculous but makes a lot of sense: that every workplace should have a “heavy” who steals a new worker’s lunch on the first day, just to see if he asserts himself. Why? Not to haze or bully but to filter out the non-fighters so that when management wants to impose quotas or tracking, they remember that they’d be enforcing this on a whole team of fighters… and suddenly they realize that squeezing the workers isn’t worth it. The reason 1950s workplaces were more humane is that any boss who tried to impose this shit on workers would have first been laughed at, and then if he tried to actually enforce it by firing people, it would’ve been a 6:00 in the parking lot kinda thing.

Spooky23 2y ago
That generation had it more together as citizens, and they held on to power for a long time. Postwar all of the institutions in the US grew quickly, and the WW2 generation moved up quickly as a result. The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.
- bumby 2y ago
  Why do you think that is? I’m wondering if the shared sacrifice of WW2 has something to do with it.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    That's half of it. The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. So the war also taught lessons on a societal level about organization and cooperation, and the postwar economic boom provided the means to get great things done.
    - jcranmer 2y ago
      > The other half is, WWII turned the United States from a relative backwater to a military and industrial superpower. The US was the leading industrial power from around 1880 or 1890, and it became the leading military power in the 1910s (by dint of entering WWI so late that it didn't exhaust its manpower fighting it). It may have been a cultural backwater as late as WWI, but its economic status would have been fairly undisputed. And by WWII, the only question anyone would have seriously asked is if the US or the UK held the throne as greatest of the great powers.