Seriously so far the good parts of Team Topologies are the parts they have taken from other peoples work.

I suddenly remembered the Agile Coach I pissed off a few years ago that angrily told me he had actually been a dev for two years fifteen years ago!

Omg these people are ridiculously condescending

Help. Why do folks love this book?

Please. It is a mashup of 10 other pieces of original work.

If only the mashup made sense. But it doesn’t.

Fuck it. I will refuse to listen to anyone saying “team cognitive load” to my face.

I posit that this book is result of a bunch of folks who are personally struggling to understand how anything is ever built by anyone.

I’m sure they TALKED WITH THEIR USERS ☠️ fuck that monolith behavior.

You should break them up right now. This is the death of software.

Ok, they are ripping off everyone, but they don’t even understand the stuff they ripped off.

“Here is someone else saying you shouldn’t introduce bottle necks. WELL ACTUALLY, that means PEOPLE SHOULDN’T TALK WITH EACH OTHER”

I can’t. Sometimes they stumble into something I agree with and then five seconds later “ah, yes, someone else’s idea”

They are not even internally consistent because they’re ripping off everyone else: you should have stable long running teams, but you should definitely split up the teams because of this fucking number someone else made up which is unfortunately completely different than this other number someone else came up with which you should definitely also use. Except it is an order of magnitude bigger. So. Do that. Right? Get it?? COGNITIVE LOAD!!!

Ok. That’s it. If you say Hot Desking is Good Actually… no.

This book is made for cherry picking quotes to support whatever you want. Just make sure no one else can be bothered to read it.

I think maybe there isn’t a single thought that anyone has ever written about in tech that they haven’t taken into this book. But the only times they make logical sense is when they’re literally quoting other people’s text.

Seriously. I am going to become a software process Luddite after reading this. “Google big, Google scale, Google smart” “You not smart” “Make silos and don’t talk to anyone” “make API call to George, but not too often!”

Dear lord they have now said that Netflix-Spotify-Nokia-Ericsson-Google-dhh-Amazon (and basically everyone else) do stuff and you should do stuff too. But don’t bother the pretty little heads of your cognitively struggling/overloaded teams of some size between 5 and 50 or something.

Breakdown silos by breaking up your long running teams! And… break up the team building database software because that’s basic stuff probably.

We are not allowed to use the words Software Engineering before we stop reading these books.

I will never be allowed to work with any Agile Coach ever

I need to make a T-shirt with this
https://social.vivaldi.net/@Patricia/112491591208560983

This is completely true and also the most devastating burn: this book would’ve been an order of magnitude better if it was written by a large language model.

This is basically just re-making the most dysfunctional orgs pre-DevOps but now with CLOUD! And Ops goes under 5 different names because the ideas have been taken from at least 5 other places. And for goodness sake: don’t talk, but also talk serendipitously while hot desking! And do stuff like Amazon and Google and Nokia and Spotify and… all of the orgs that have ever written about whatever they do.

Why do I ever get imposter syndrome? I probably talked to people like a fucking monolith

I know why this couldn’t have been a blogpost: it doesn’t make sense and you can’t hide that in a blog post, people might actually read it all.

I’m gonna try one of these talks… maybe they’re… something
https://mastodon.cloud/@grymt/112491761784898442

I feel bad. I’m sure these folks are perfectly nice people. I probably shouldn’t be allowed to read. But then it would only be fair that no one was ever allowed to quote these books at me.

Ok, it’s been ages since I read about “the Spotify model” but iirc they have written later about changes they made because some stuff didn’t work, but most importantly I seem to remember that a central part was to try stuff and continue with stuff that works for you and drop stuff that don’t? Am I totally misremembering this? Any Spotify people out there?

Oh no the talk doesn’t seem to be better

Ok, I need to know, is it me? Am I just really bad at understanding? What the hell is he talking about? Explain it to me like I’m five in 5 sentences. Please.
https://youtu.be/lj71GcOnIW8?si=hb6TUrdKn38MSMBd

I feel like the kid in “The Emperor's New Clothes” … am I completely disconnected from reality here?

I’m either having some kind of cognitive break or this is just a org-agile-tech-wordsoup

Seriously. Please. Watch the video. Am I nuts?

I have concluded. This book is complete BS. It is badly written and incoherent, which is a feature because you can basically say that whatever folks say about it is a result of them Not Getting It. But if you shake it a lot it shows to me a set of people who have absolutely no idea how to make anything at all. They have made some pretty diagrams and convinced themselves that whatever they are saying is insightful. But it is shallow, incoherent, condescending, riddled with misinterpretation of other people’s thoughts and maybe worst of all, the crime if you will, is that they are not only extremely wrong but they don’t even show us the curtesy of being brief about it. I apologize to them, to myself too to be honest and to all of us because history has shown we will have to live through this because we absolutely love cargo cults in this industry. We will choose a pretty diagram over a conversation with another human being every day of the week.

@Patricia set of people might seem to indicate more than the two authors (aside: their experience is summarized on LinkedIn), so I’ll volunteer this much: i was given the privilege of writing the foreword. So many tech book forewords are written by men, and men who have much more industry recognition than i have. Matthew and Manuel had noticed and paid attention to things i had written in informal, low-key personal outlets (blog, twitter, ..). They heard and included me. Me!!