7 ms·

I work at $FANG, every one of our org's big projects go off the rails at the end of the project and there's always a mad rush at the end to push developers to s

• franktankbank 11mo ago
  > wouldn't allow publication until I removed any action items that would constrain management. Thats what we call blameless culture lol
• Sevii 11mo ago
  For how much power they have over team organization and processes, software middle management has nearly no accountability for outcomes.
  • MichaelZuo 11mo ago
    The real question is why would smart competent people continue working under management with blatant ulterior motives that negatively affect them? Why let their own credibility get dragged down for a second time, third time, fourth time, etc…? The first time is understandable but not afterwards.
    • pixelpoet 11mo ago
      Astronomical salaries probably has something to do with it.
      • MichaelZuo 11mo ago
        Yeah that could convince smart competent people to grind their teeth and take a second chance under the same management. But I don’t think a self respecting person would do that over and over.
        • lazide 11mo ago
          Depends on the paycheck. People will do crazy things for just $100. Including literally get fucked in the ass by a stranger. 7 figures? Ho boy. They’ll use way fancier words though for that.
          • deleted 11mo ago
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          • ordu 11mo ago
            There is an old Russian joke, that goes like this: A man approaches a girl and asks, "Would you sleep with me for $1 million?” She responds, “Yes, of course!” Excited, he then asks, “What about for $1?” She indignantly replies, “Who do you think I am?” To which he responds, “We already established who you are; now we’re just discussing the price.” I think it fits there. There is surprising amount of people believing that they have some Values, but just to a point when they were offered to sell them for a right price.
        • raincom 11mo ago
          When people live in multi million dollar homes, self-respect doesn't pay monthly mortgage.
          • mschuster91 11mo ago
            Joke is, most of these homes aren't worth anywhere close to their paper value. Cy Porter's home inspection videos... jeez. How these "builders" are still in business is mind-blowing to me (as a German). Here? Some of that shit he shows would lead to criminal charges for fraud.
  • AlotOfReading 11mo ago
    Is it middle management that has no accountability, or executive? Middle and line managers are nearly as targeted by layoff culling as ICs these days in FAANG. The broad processes they're passing down to ICs generally start with someone at director level or higher.
    • deleted 11mo ago
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    • nothatraman 11mo ago
      In my experience it is the constant shifting of goal posts due to execs chasing the next shiny thing, or demanding a feature that they saw somewhere, or heard from client (singular, not plural)
    • llbeansandrice 11mo ago
      I've seen plenty of incredible engineers let go because of "performance issues" that were just poor project management and goal posts that moved so fast waymo should study them to improve their self-driving capabilities. Shit rolls downhill and there's a lot more fuss when an engineer calls out risks, piss-poor planning, etc. than any actual introspection on why the risks weren't caught sooner or why the planning was piss-poor.
  • darth_avocado 11mo ago
    > For how much power they have over team organization and processes, software middle management has nearly no accountability for outcomes. Can we also address the fact that “software spend” is distributed disproportionately to management at all levels and people who actually write the software are nickel and dimed. You’d save billions in spend and boost productivity massively if the management is bare bones and is held accountable like the rest of the folks.
    • jjtheblunt 11mo ago
      that's how the inner sanctum engineering in Apple worked, just like you proposed, at least from 15 years ago to within the last 10 years. i could have been in a very lucky time window to have had that luxury, but it had been an Apple mandate to not have deep hierarchies at least in engineering.
      • uriegas 11mo ago
        Maybe is because of what Steve Jobs mentioned about talented programmers having more power than CEOs as they can easily switch jobs.
        • jjtheblunt 11mo ago
          perhaps that was involved, but one thing clearly purposeful was people were seriously filtered for particular skills and personality (apple fit it was called back then), which created groups where individuals had unique skills and collectively the group members would naturally want to collaborate. it worked great. (as an aside, this contrasts diametrically with Amazon, where i worked for a year for healthcare, not needing to because of Apple years' savings, but after a genomics startup i had joined ran out of funding, and wanting a new challenge; there skilled engineering types were presumed to be fungible assets for (not kidding) at least 7 layers of do-nothing bureaucrats making huge salaries...they could survive because sales on the amazon store extract something like the 30% royalty to amazon)
  • phantasmish 11mo ago
    If you think our ability to measure developer productivity is bad, look into what we can do to measure manager productivity. TL;DR your realistic options are snake oil that doesn’t work, or nothing. Keep that in mind next time anyone’s talking about managing through metrics & data or whatever bullshit. All that stuff’s kayfabe, companies mostly run on vibes outside a very-few things.
• ludicrousdispla 11mo ago
  I was a developer for a bioinformatics software startup in which the very essential 'data import' workflow wasn't defined until the release was in the 'testing' phase.
• SoftTalker 11mo ago
  Glad to hear that $FANG has similar incompetency as every other mid-tier software shop I've ever worked in. Your project progression sounds like any of them. Here I was thinking that $FANG's highly-paid developers and project management processes were actually better than average.
  • jvanderbot 11mo ago
    They can afford to try a lot, why try better?
  • zingar 11mo ago
    Same, I think this one post may have cured me of a life long (unrealized) obsession with working at FANG.
  • Aeolun 11mo ago
    Those processes take longer, and waste more money. At no point will I believe they don’t waste it in the first place.
• taeric 11mo ago
  Did they go off the rails at the end, or deadlines force acknowledging that the project is not where folks want it to be? That said, I think I would agree with your main concern, there. If they question is "why did the devs make it so that project management didn't work?" Seems silly not to acknowledge why/how project management should have seen the evidence earlier.
• fishmicrowaver 11mo ago
  Reminds me of the military. Senior leaders often have no real idea of what is happening on the ground because the information funneled upward doesn't fit into painting a rosy report. The middle officer ranks don't want to know the truth because it impacts their careers. How can executives even hope to lead their organizations this way?
  • esafak 11mo ago
    By not relying on direct reports for all their information.
  • ndiddy 11mo ago
    Well the US has lost every military conflict it's entered for the past 70 years. Since there's been no internal pressure to change methodology, maybe the US military doesn't view winning as necessary.
    • johnnyanmac 11mo ago
      Those past 70 years weren't about winning. It was about making sure the enemies lost more out of it. The US is large and relatively stable and hasn't had to face extended war on its soil since the Civil War 170 years ago. There's no true skin in the game for those who start these wars.
      • bergesenha 11mo ago
        Which is a good strategy, but do you think the afghans lost more than 2 trillion dollars?
      • hackandthink 11mo ago
        "The war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina" 170 years ago is 1855.
    • baud147258 11mo ago
      > Well the US has lost every military conflict it's entered for the past 70 years. Operation Just Cause? Desert Storm? And, depending on how you look at it, the US won the war in Afghanistan and Irak, but lost the peace afterwards.
• ajkjk 11mo ago
  Of course the reason it works this way is that it works. As much as we'd like accountability to happen on the basis of principle, it actually happens on the basis of practicality. Either the engineers organize their power and demand a new relationship with management, or projects start going so poorly that necessity demands a better working relationship, or nothing changes. There is no 'things get better out from wisdom alone' option; the people who benefit from improvements have to force the hand of the people who can implement them. I don't know if this looks like a union or something else but my guess is that in large part it's something else, for instance a sophisticated attempt at building a professional organization that can spread simple standards which organizations can clearly measure themselves against. I think the reasons this hasn't happened is (a) tech has moved too fast for anyone to actually be able to credibly say how things should be done for longer than a year or two, and (b) attempts at professional organizations borrowed too much from slower-moving physical engineering and so didn't adapt to (a). But I do think it can be done and would benefit the industry greatly (at the cost of slowing things down in the short term). It requires a very 'agile' sense of standards, though.. If standards mean imposing big constraints on development, nobody will pay attention to them.
  • malfist 11mo ago
    I agree wholeheartedly that collective action is how we stop balancing poor management on the backs of engineers, but good luck getting other engineers to see it that way. There's heaps of propaganda out there telling engineers that if they join a union their high salary will go away, even though unions have never been shown to reduce wages.
    • ajkjk 11mo ago
      My hunch is that software engineers are averse to unions because they correctly perceive that unions are a wide angle away from the type of professional organization that would be most beneficial to them. The industry is sufficiently different that the normal union model is just not very good and has a 'square leg round hole' feeling. For instance by and large the role of organizing to not to get more money but rather to reduce indignities... Wasted work, lack of forethought, bad management, arbitrary layoffs, etc. So it is much more about governing management with good practices than about keeping wages up; at least for now wages are generally high anyway. there are also reasons to dedend jobs/wages in the face of e.g. outsourcing... But it's almost like a separate problem. Maybe there needs to be both a union and a uncoupled professional standard or something?
• ashanoko 11mo ago
  [dead]
• lazyasciiart 11mo ago
  For one project I got so far as to include in the project proposal some outcomes that showed whether or not it was a success: quote from the PM “if it doesn’t do that then we should not have bothered building this”. They objected to even including something so obviously required in the plan. Waste of my bloody time. Project completed, taking twice as many devs for twice as long, great success, PM promoted. Doesn’t do that basic thing that was the entire point of it. Nobody has ever cared. Edit to explain why I care: there was a very nice third party utility/helper for our users. We built our own version because “only we can do amazing direct integration with the actual service, which will make it far more useful”. Now we have to support our worse in-house tool, but we never did any amazing direct integration and I guarantee we never will.
• game_the0ry 11mo ago
  ^ This. Not at FAANG, but I am too familiar with this. This is why software projects fail. We lowly developers always take the blame and management skates. The lack of accountability among decision makers is why things like the UK Post Office scandals happen. Heads need to be put on pikes. Start with John Roberts, Adam Crozier, Moya Greene, and Paula Vennells.
• Koshkin 11mo ago
  “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” ― Douglas Adams
• holtkam2 11mo ago
  Obviously you work at AMZN. This is the most Amazonish HN comment I’ve ever seen.
  • boisterousness 11mo ago
    FAANG cargo cults are all around. Too many CEOs and VCs imagine they can succeed like Bezos by the bold strategy of hiring ex-Amazon executives and imitating Amazon's culture and HR practices.
• austin-cheney 11mo ago
  Where I now work, in the government, all the devs are required to be part project managers. It’s a huge breath of fresh air. The devs are in all the customer meetings, assist in requirements gathering, and directly coach the customers as necessary to keep pushing the work towards completion. This came about because our work isn’t too diverse but the requirements are wildly diverse and many of the customers have no idea how to achieve the proper level of readiness. I do management in an enterprise API project for a large organization.
• munificent 11mo ago
  So much of the world, especially the world we see today around corporate leadership and national politics makes much more sense once you realize this fundamental law: People who desire infinite power only want it because it gives them the power to avoid consequences, not because they want both the power and the consequences. The people who believe that with great power comes great consequences are exactly the people who don't want great power because they don't want the weight of those consequences. The only people who see that bargain and think "sign me up!" are the ones who intend to drop the consequences on the floor.
• chanux 11mo ago
  Both happy and sad to know that the sh*t show is pretty much the same in FAANG as any regular corporate environment.
• t43562 11mo ago
  There are many pressures and this is all about a lack of transparent honesty about what the real priorities are. Getting the project done properly may be #1 priority but there's priority 0 and 0.1 and others which are unspoken because they don't sound good.