so state transitions had to be added and gates put in place.
it's always joy to work with teams of adults who can self-regulate. but when it's not what you have...
as small example: i had 2 developers telling to vp of engineering that they not going to implement some functionality because they don't see the need in it. For record, this functionality was needed
PS. i described in more details below
Sounds like the VP of engineering needed to get his head out of his ass and listen to the people who actually knew a god damn thing about what was going on.
I went to guy next room, his estimation was 1 week of coding and 1 week of unit/testing/integration/documentation. He ended up been the one who did it
the bottom line that they just didn't want to work. on different occasion same two developers during review of requirements literally said "but to implement this functionality we would have to write a code/work".
Just for a context, this was company where company had gifts for 20 and 25 years anniversary of employment. And this is company that makes software for living. (Not the blue company.)
PS. Just for a more complete picture, that company had "agile methodology department" that had developed internally sprint/ticket tracking system and wiki. those systems weren't linked so you couldn't cross reference things. Project that I was hired to do was given exception from many policies so I decided to get jira/confluence, which despite been universally despised here were light years ahead of what company had. In process I failed to get approvals from it, information security, agile and some other departments. At the end (after 3 months) general manger personally approved it and took personal responsibility for any breaches.
yet, 1 year later I got visit from internal audit who weren't happy that I spent money on system that duplicates functionality of existing system.
PPS. the really funny part, i interviewed with google and was asked to tell how i had organizational challenge or something and how I managed to overcome it. I told this story (about buying jira) and after doing it was asked if i could do something different. I answered that given organizational structure it was the only way to approach. Interviewers verdict was that I am not humble enough because I can't admit that something could be done differently. Hence i am not googley enough and therefor "strong no hire"
If you are correct about those devs, you failed because the correct way forward is to fire them. So you fucked up.
If you are incorrect and those devs know what's up, then you are the incompetent one.
I see now way you can come out of this story looking good.
If you inflict all that process on any good engineers in your company because of the bad engineers, you'll probably chase them off and be left with only the bad engineers who need all that process to keep them in line.
And what is weird is that processes like those can get justified by the fact that they produce objective measures to terminate bad employees if the violate the process, but in reality its the bad ones that are going to hang around and put up with it passive aggressively.
also, given company structure it was very hard to terminate anybody. so we were stuck with who we got. and we got for this project "the best and the brightest"
not in usa
PS. amusingly enough their direct manager didn't see this kind of management as part of his job
In my experience, if there's a problem with the engineers then all of the process in the world won't fix it.
