Talking to friends in software orgs recently, I've been struck by commonalities across countries and sectors:
Executives are driving "efficiency," by which they mean maximizing time spent on direct value-creation activities.
BUT there's a tacit, industry-wide assumption that writing code is the only value-creating activity and that all coding generates value.
It's like everyone has prioritized instantaneous boat speed and abandoned navigation and maintenance.
Such a reckoning coming...
"It's like everyone has prioritized instantaneous boat speed and abandoned navigation and maintenance"
That is such a evocative and accurate way to describing that phenomena
@missmythreyi @elizayer this has been one of the challenges of a mindset change I've been working with for a while - that engineers can write as much code as they want, but end of the day if it doesn't solve a problem for a user, it's worthless.
This is a beautiful quote from someone we interviewed just last week and I've pinned it in our Slack channel.
@c0dec0dec0de I mean yes, there is this tension until there isn't. The need for solid engineering always reasserts itself via reality, and increasingly insistently.
I'd say that Boeing is the poster child of needing to re-assimilate business-and-engineering concerns....
Watching with interest how that plays out!
@elizayer @c0dec0dec0de there is a case to be made in IT consulting for refusing to work with publicly traded companies (in the UK we call these PLCs) - stock market - due to the myopic quarterly results habit.
Find instead customers that have a multi-year view.
🤷
@Avner @c0dec0dec0de I agree and feel the same way about nixing features and products too!
Simplicity, manageability... these things are so valuable.
@elizayer @c0dec0dec0de yes! It really bugs me, no pun intended, that things like stability and, as you say, manageability are rarely considered "features" by the product managers I've worked with.
Not that they don't sometimes acknowledge their importance, mind you, just that those are considered "engineering work" as opposed to "feature work."
@Avner @c0dec0dec0de Haha, I gave a conference talk a long time ago called "The most toxic concept in product management." What was the most toxic concept? You guessed it: "feature"!
I see the separation as highly problematic... but I also acknowledge that I'm a marginal voice, getting really out of step with that community. Sigh.
@elizayer @c0dec0dec0de I would love to see that!
It also doesn't help that engineering teams often operate from the same mindset.
@smeg I'm assuming that companies led like this will go out of business when the inevitable shocks hit.
I've been trying to gaze into the crystal ball to see how to be best positioned for that future, but given everything else going on in the world, the future is so damned cloudy 😞
@kevinriggle Getting out? Congratulations and.. may I ask what's next??
We'll definitely miss your voice in this particular swamp.
@dxzdb @Jargoonco Parent in the 1970s: "No honey, there's no future in finance now that there are computers"?
That is indeed sad.
:-( :-( :-( So sorry for your nephew. That must especially suck after probably being told his whole life what a sure thing a CS degree was.
Somehow it feels like a drawbridge is being pulled up... but maybe having these thinking skills will seem quaint to them in the future. Like COBOL to my generation. 🙃
@elizayer I know! It drives me absolutely mad.
But we can only hope the rates will reflect the size of the reckoning that we will be fixing 😁
@yvonnezlam Yes. For a long time I thought The Answer was re-rooting our activities in evaluation rather than production.
But after failing at that in enough different ways, I now despair that only thing that will change things is sufficient comeuppance.
@elizayer I don't know how visible my bsky posts are (they aren't private), but
https://bsky.app/profile/yvonnezlam.bsky.social/post/3lxkhp4igv22m
@elizayer
So the execs try to maximize the time spent on creating value.
Ok, fine.
But I haven't seen a single exec being busy creating any value.
@shadowdancer I think the exec's mindset is often that they act as the organism brain, the people at end of the value chain are the organism limbs, and everything in between is waste.
So telling people what to do is literally what they are for and value-creating. After all, what would the limbs even do without the brain controlling? Simply flail.
Yes, it's a caricature, but I also think it's worth trying to understand the mindset, if only to avoid its apparent seductions!
@elizayer the last manager I had before I left Google admitted in a 1-on-1 a meeting that he didn't have the technical skills or knowledge to contribute outside of managing people.
This is the fruit of long-term trends that involve not trusting technical staff. (It's a feedback loop because non-technical hires beget more non-technical hires.) Now your leaders are a lot of people whose elbows are knocking pieces off the table because they don't know what the game board looks like.
A close friend and relative of mine recently commented that it's crazy that I.T. departments are full of "managers" who really know almost nothing about the work they are "managing." In no other area (including his own) does anyone think that one can manage work and workers without having deep experience doing the work oneself.
I had to agree with him. We're quite "crazy" like that. 🙄
@elizayer I wrote an article about this a few days ago: https://dev.to/jaapio/ai-isnt-changing-developers-its-reminding-us-who-we-are-491o
If they only value software developers deliver is code. We could be replaced by code generators.
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