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I wonder how all these absolutist methodologies really work when you take subjectivity and our general inability to measure anything reliably away? I say this b

I wonder how all these absolutist methodologies really work when you take subjectivity and our general inability to measure anything reliably away? I say this because we've tried all of them after someone read an article on a blog saying it'd solve all our problems. And we always have the same problems afterwards despite people promoting that it solved them. Sometimes even worse ones. The root cause in my company is we hire the lowest cost outsourcing outfit we can find, which hires inexperienced juniors and pretends they are senior and has a huge staff turnover because who the hell wants to work like that for more than 12 months. But of course changing the repo structure and process will compensate for that. My observation is that a good engineering team will self-organise a methodology that works. The methodology is unimportant compared to getting a good engineering team. I am fortunate that I work in a small niche pocket in the organisation that has good engineers and has resisted normalising with the process churn of the rest of the organisation. We run a "dark ages" team really. We were on SVN until 2020-ish, because, well it worked fine for us. Now we're on github on commandment but it is used like SVN. We have light feature branches. Master is always stable. Releases are tagged off master. At no point do we use any other github features not even PRs. CI is makefiles. Push to ECR/S3 by human. Deployment is makefiles. Comms is email because Slack is too distracting and demands immediacy. Issue tracking is a 17 year old JIRA project with a default workflow. We have the lowest defect rate, the lowest time to market and highest ROI per head in the entire org and we don't have or need a platform/sre/devops team supporting us. We are a disliked because we didn't do anything for over 10 years other than deliver software.

djfivyvusn 1y ago
Not well - Posted from my 45 minute long standup
- crinkly 1y ago
  My commiserations. We don't do standups. Drop 15 mins in whoever's calendar and use the phone works. Yes we're that backwards! Every alternate Friday lunch time we meet up in person though.
  - djfivyvusn 1y ago
    It's not that bad I typically get a lot done. Nobody can sign me up for meetings I need to participate in while I'm in standup.
halper 1y ago
In my (only 2 decades of) experience, almost all "processes" and "methodologies" exist to compensate for lack of skill, care and/or understanding. As you say, what/how you do may sound outdated to others but it works because you care about what you do. I think this applies to many "best practices" and "standards" as well. I could mention many examples of old systems/apps written by single/few deeply committed and skilled people were replaced by "better" and more "modern" alternatives that worked less well and that took a team of people to maintain. The latter used all the right tools, processes and practices but they were just not artists, for lack or a better word.

djfivyvusn 1y ago

Not well - Posted from my 45 minute long standup

crinkly 1y ago
My commiserations. We don't do standups. Drop 15 mins in whoever's calendar and use the phone works. Yes we're that backwards! Every alternate Friday lunch time we meet up in person though.
- djfivyvusn 1y ago
  It's not that bad I typically get a lot done. Nobody can sign me up for meetings I need to participate in while I'm in standup.

halper 1y ago

In my (only 2 decades of) experience, almost all "processes" and "methodologies" exist to compensate for lack of skill, care and/or understanding. As you say, what/how you do may sound outdated to others but it works because you care about what you do. I think this applies to many "best practices" and "standards" as well. I could mention many examples of old systems/apps written by single/few deeply committed and skilled people were replaced by "better" and more "modern" alternatives that worked less well and that took a team of people to maintain. The latter used all the right tools, processes and practices but they were just not artists, for lack or a better word.