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I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple

I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Honestly, I don’t want to be. The reality was that the project really could have been done in a month by a couple of people. It got turned into an enterprise project with multiple unaligned teams with Gantt charts and milestones and everything. Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app. It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things they could’ve been doing instead.

jackblemming 9mo ago
You’re doing God’s work. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep building.
- kstrauser 9mo ago
  I couldn’t help it if I tried. It’s who I am.
keyle 9mo ago
I've been in a similar situation, with a laravel product quoted for over a million and I quoted 40K and did it all. That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.
- yieldcrv 9mo ago
  you got paid the $40k though?
  - keyle 9mo ago
    Nope.
- selcuka 9mo ago
  > That did not go down well Enterprise customers are more likely to use a product that they paid $1M over the same product that they "only" paid $40K.
  - kstrauser 9mo ago
    If it was a one-time contract and you get paid for it, what they do next is their problem, not yours.
  - keyle 9mo ago
    It was a case of pay $1M and take no responsibility vs. set a budget of 40K and own it internally. When salesforce leaks your customer's information, whoopsie! not our fault! it's salesforce! And yet they're far more likely to have the leak. BASICALLY.
    - bigfatkitten 9mo ago
      In fairness to Salesforce, it was the garbage third party apps in their ecosystem which got compromised and did the leaking, not Salesforce themselves.
selcuka 9mo ago
> No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.
- kstrauser 9mo ago
  Sometimes you can explain things and not be heard until you demonstrate them. Then they have to accept that you’re not just BSing, that your idea does have at least some merit. Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not. In this case, I’d also watched this all take shape over a couple of months. Being the new person, I assumed it was some necessarily complex beast that was beyond my scrappy experience and calling for Serious Engineering. Once I recognized it for what it was, I knocked out my weekend project shortly afterward because I couldn’t get it out of my head. As much as anything, I had the need to see if it really was as straightforward as I thought it could be. I didn’t sit on my idea for months while they toiled. I watched them toil for months before I understood the core of what they were making.
  - asa400 9mo ago
    > Sometimes you can explain things and not be heard until you demonstrate them. 1000%. In my experience this isn't even a "sometimes". It's the opposite. Explaining/arguing in the abstract why a significant directional change is needed has little persuasive power. If you can demo something, you actually have a fighting chance, even if it barely works. It can be a working product, it can be charts, it can be a semi-functional mockup, whatever, but you have to show _something_ that isn't just talking about it. I learned this the hard way after advocating for things and getting shot down too many times. > Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not. Couldn't agree more with this, also. I've seen an astonishing number of homemade job runner systems, homemade message queues, homemade databases, homemade web frameworks, homemade languages, etc. One can make the argument that this is how technical progress happens, and in some sense, that's true (we wouldn't have a lot of nice things if this never happened), but it's rare. Like, really rare. Most shops would be better served with e.g. Django, Postgres, and HTML, deployed on Heroku (or your Heroku-equivalent of choice) rather than spending hundreds of human-months building "an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of $COMMON_OFF_THE_SHELF_TECHNOLOGY". So, I completely agree with you.
yieldcrv 9mo ago
I'm not good at office politics, but I got better at not caring. Understanding what is erroneous stimuli, as an employee you don't have to respond especially if you aren't noticed. This is fairly easy for engineers, even lead engineers. Anywhere there is a buffer between you and other stakeholders. Occasionally though, I do get thrust into it, mostly during a company pivot about something I wasn't hired to do. All the personalities to manage, I 100% fumble, but still deliver.
nosianu 9mo ago
> Honestly, I don’t want to be. I don't get it. On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains. Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential. If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical. Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.
- lazide 9mo ago
  Some people like blowing things up, even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense at the time. Some people like building things, even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense at the time. Some people like meeting other people and making money, etc, etc. Know thyself.
- kstrauser 9mo ago
  What you’re saying is true. Yet, I can only willingly go along with so much terribleness before it hurts my soul. We only have so many days to do things we care about. The thought of throwing away 6 months of them for no defensible reason horrifies me, and I can’t, won’t, participate. Edit: for a compensating control, I pair with senior leadership I can directly ask about this things. “Hey CTO, is there a reason we’re doing this thing so ass-backward? No? Can I go fix it then? Thanks!” Or, “oh, because we’re stalling to avoid this horrible customer’s demand, and no one’s really going to be working on it as their day job? Sigh, alright, I’ll look the other way.” I let them be political so that I don’t have to be.
ruszki 9mo ago
And it’s possible that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I got a green light to do an integration in a week alone, which was planned for a team of 5 for half a year. We knew that it cannot be that much. So I delivered… It was never used. It was purely political. The integration didn’t happen because it was “half a year”, but because middle management didn’t like the idea of integration for political reasons.
fourside 9mo ago
> I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Over the years I’ve come to realize that what people call politics at times is just having interpersonal skills.
- raincole 9mo ago
  In this case, more like common sense.
- jimbokun 9mo ago
  I mean yeah what did you think politics meant?

jackblemming 9mo ago

You’re doing God’s work. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. Keep building.

kstrauser 9mo ago
I couldn’t help it if I tried. It’s who I am.

keyle 9mo ago

I've been in a similar situation, with a laravel product quoted for over a million and I quoted 40K and did it all. That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.

yieldcrv 9mo ago
you got paid the $40k though?
- keyle 9mo ago
  Nope.
selcuka 9mo ago
> That did not go down well Enterprise customers are more likely to use a product that they paid $1M over the same product that they "only" paid $40K.
- kstrauser 9mo ago
  If it was a one-time contract and you get paid for it, what they do next is their problem, not yours.
- keyle 9mo ago
  It was a case of pay $1M and take no responsibility vs. set a budget of 40K and own it internally. When salesforce leaks your customer's information, whoopsie! not our fault! it's salesforce! And yet they're far more likely to have the leak. BASICALLY.
  - bigfatkitten 9mo ago
    In fairness to Salesforce, it was the garbage third party apps in their ecosystem which got compromised and did the leaking, not Salesforce themselves.

selcuka 9mo ago

> No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.

kstrauser 9mo ago
Sometimes you can explain things and not be heard until you demonstrate them. Then they have to accept that you’re not just BSing, that your idea does have at least some merit. Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not. In this case, I’d also watched this all take shape over a couple of months. Being the new person, I assumed it was some necessarily complex beast that was beyond my scrappy experience and calling for Serious Engineering. Once I recognized it for what it was, I knocked out my weekend project shortly afterward because I couldn’t get it out of my head. As much as anything, I had the need to see if it really was as straightforward as I thought it could be. I didn’t sit on my idea for months while they toiled. I watched them toil for months before I understood the core of what they were making.
- asa400 9mo ago
  > Sometimes you can explain things and not be heard until you demonstrate them. 1000%. In my experience this isn't even a "sometimes". It's the opposite. Explaining/arguing in the abstract why a significant directional change is needed has little persuasive power. If you can demo something, you actually have a fighting chance, even if it barely works. It can be a working product, it can be charts, it can be a semi-functional mockup, whatever, but you have to show _something_ that isn't just talking about it. I learned this the hard way after advocating for things and getting shot down too many times. > Also, never underestimate an enterprise’s ability to convince itself that it’s too big and complex for off the shelf tools. Sometimes that’s the case. Very often it’s not. Couldn't agree more with this, also. I've seen an astonishing number of homemade job runner systems, homemade message queues, homemade databases, homemade web frameworks, homemade languages, etc. One can make the argument that this is how technical progress happens, and in some sense, that's true (we wouldn't have a lot of nice things if this never happened), but it's rare. Like, really rare. Most shops would be better served with e.g. Django, Postgres, and HTML, deployed on Heroku (or your Heroku-equivalent of choice) rather than spending hundreds of human-months building "an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of $COMMON_OFF_THE_SHELF_TECHNOLOGY". So, I completely agree with you.

yieldcrv 9mo ago

I'm not good at office politics, but I got better at not caring. Understanding what is erroneous stimuli, as an employee you don't have to respond especially if you aren't noticed. This is fairly easy for engineers, even lead engineers. Anywhere there is a buffer between you and other stakeholders. Occasionally though, I do get thrust into it, mostly during a company pivot about something I wasn't hired to do. All the personalities to manage, I 100% fumble, but still deliver.

nosianu 9mo ago

> Honestly, I don’t want to be. I don't get it. On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains. Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential. If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical. Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.

lazide 9mo ago
Some people like blowing things up, even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense at the time. Some people like building things, even if it doesn’t necessarily make sense at the time. Some people like meeting other people and making money, etc, etc. Know thyself.
kstrauser 9mo ago
What you’re saying is true. Yet, I can only willingly go along with so much terribleness before it hurts my soul. We only have so many days to do things we care about. The thought of throwing away 6 months of them for no defensible reason horrifies me, and I can’t, won’t, participate. Edit: for a compensating control, I pair with senior leadership I can directly ask about this things. “Hey CTO, is there a reason we’re doing this thing so ass-backward? No? Can I go fix it then? Thanks!” Or, “oh, because we’re stalling to avoid this horrible customer’s demand, and no one’s really going to be working on it as their day job? Sigh, alright, I’ll look the other way.” I let them be political so that I don’t have to be.

ruszki 9mo ago

And it’s possible that it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I got a green light to do an integration in a week alone, which was planned for a team of 5 for half a year. We knew that it cannot be that much. So I delivered… It was never used. It was purely political. The integration didn’t happen because it was “half a year”, but because middle management didn’t like the idea of integration for political reasons.

fourside 9mo ago

> I wasn’t politically savvy enough to do that. Over the years I’ve come to realize that what people call politics at times is just having interpersonal skills.

raincole 9mo ago
In this case, more like common sense.
jimbokun 9mo ago
I mean yeah what did you think politics meant?