At the same time, productivity is reduced, actual communication diminished, gatekeepers slow everything and everyone down, fiefdoms form with their territorial turf wars, naked emperors run amok fanned by yes-men. On average three people out of a hundred are doing something actually useful, while the company slowly loses its grip on whatever niche monopoly has allowed it to so grotesquely exist thus far.
Everyone else is gradually PTSD'd into a corpo version of Homo Sovieticus, filling out time sheets and RTO attendance records while duly marching towards V17 in the most recent two-year plan, aligned with the corporate values writ large on the HR site's main banner.
All companies start small. Only the absolute best survive, so there is tremendous survivorship bias for the remaining companies to comprise of fabulous people.
Naturally, when the company starts growing, it is insanely hard to be able to keep on recruiting only such fabulous people. If nothing else, it would slow the growth, snd as such is usually not prioritized.
That’s when the regression to the mean starts. Then, you start needing more process and more bureaucracy so that the middling people have any chance of keeping up.
Unfortunately, there is no deus ex machina at the end of this path, like in TFA.
My experience of very large companies is there is an official way stuff get's done, which is different from how stuff actually get's done - which is through peer networks.
it's like... we go like gangbusters in our lives doing the things that positively need to be done.
Then when we get a moment to breathe... we do the things we want to do more than the things we need to do.
Things work better with a slight sense of urgency, but less than full-on burnout (although fighting along up to burnout is probably pretty ruthlessly efficient)
Someone who was supposed to be advocating for their team (maybe the author's boss) wasn't, or was being out-advocated by others, and that led to breakdowns. As a manager, I keep a lot of KPIs and do a lot of postmortems (lean), because you need to be able to counter the gut feeling of "development should be faster."
Someone two, three levels above us in the org chart.
I've been in an organisation that was actively winding down the research side of R&D. Lots of chemists and physicists let go, or at least not replaced. Projects that had gone nowhere for years canned; people with no output for years canned. More focus on product roadmaps. What's really weird is that every step seemed pretty reasonable, but the overall capability was much less in the end. It's really tricky.
I believe having different people running 'competing' groups that report to the board instead of a tall narrow org chart with clear choke points may not fix the problem entirely, but it would slow down the cycle. Worst case you disband one of the orgs and create a new group to replace it, run by someone from one of the more efficient divisions, or new blood from outside.
Often I see this happen, and the result is the company loses out somehow. I think maybe metrics for “output” are wrong in many cases, and you’ve just canned someone who had a useful or even critical role you didn’t know about. A lot of people who are important to company operations are invisible!
On the other hand, if your management decide to cut R, and just buy in the innovation at the right time to develop it - if you don't have any internal R people trying to do the same sort of things you will find it really difficult to make the right acquisitions at the right time.
So you need both - and treading that line is really tricky.
I also think that having people with an R mindset is important - people who are interested in pushing the envelop, doing things better etc.
Having people like that in the organisation means you are less likely to be blindsided by a shift in technology that could kill the company.
The most fun I'd say I've had was recognizing something ineffective and making (software) tools for it. Now that I think about it one of the first programs I made on my Atari 400 as a kid was Room, which let me move/rotate my to-scale bedroom furniture outlines around to see what layouts were possible and may be good to actually move the furniture.
It’s definitely something I’d like to work on while not losing the practicality of not being caught in research hell like some peers have in the past. Their end products ended up late and no better than my third iteration of the same thing.
There’s a balance I’m still fighting to find.
The one thing I can think of that was like research was really enjoyable.
I should think about how to get more of this in my career. Even making personal projects isn't exactly "research".
I think what is satisfying about this is the fact that your day to day is largely self directed and open ended. It’s not the type of thing that lends itself to backlogs and well defined tickets, and typical productivity methodologies like whole/scrum tend to fall flat in teams like this for this reason. You just sort of dive deep on a problem, put together prototypes, figure out how to quantify their utility, and keep trying new things. There also tends to be less pressure on deadlines because of the lack of top down.
In labor market conflict situations it is called an Italian strike?
Do work exactly as specified, not including all the little things needed to actually make work happen. All the glue work needed to make an organization function just doesn't sometimes!
This is an unfortunate issue with most of modern society. It's often compared to communism, yet how many capitalist bosses really want you to do much other than implement their "vision?"
> When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist. - Hélder Câmara
Of course everyone wants to get more for free, that is why do many complaints that people are lazy and don't do any extra work which can benefit their employer.
not really relevant, but anyone know where mad ned is at these days? haven't seen any new posts of his in a while, and i enjoyed a bunch of them.
I only came here because my in box is blowing up due to the traffic hacker news is driving to my site, and so then I see that this article is like #3 today. Not bad considering I don't really remember writing it!
I don't know how things must be going wrong that you decide to sabotage / avoid collaboration like that
Entirely a problem of deep nested trees in corporate hierarchies that is so easily alleviated with better incentive structures.
Oh, also, when will we get version control support? It's 2023 an no chip design SW has this.
They worked on the technical bits that they liked, created a terrible UX that sounds user-hostile, and then shocked-pikachu discovered that their jobs got cut in half.
The decision to whisk UX duties to a team miles away was moronic, of course. But that was a reaction to the bad acts this team did - to their customers, to the business, and to themselves.
Why do we expect that skilled SEs are also skilled UX designers? As everything, design requires training. The problem seemed to be such people trained in design were missing from the R&D team, which sounds like management's fault rather than the engineers' in the first place. Then, the management, while correctly identified the lack of design skills, instead of strengthening their R&D team with that missing talent, they put designers in a different group, creating a different set of issues within the company. Seems a case for an overall bad management in my eyes.
But everyone needs some of both - the most purely technical engineer still needs the personal judgment to hit dates that matter, show up when others need them, and avoid overinvesting in purely play activities.
In this case, better managers would help but honestly any experienced engineer would know that constant customer complaints mean that something is going to change.
> But a larger part of it was that people in the development team were just showing up to work, and not much else. I had a friend once at Digital who gave me this unforgettable advice, right after we were bought by Compaq:
> “When captured by the enemy, it is best to display model prisoner behavior.”
> And that was exactly what had happened here. It wasn’t that people were deliberately trying to sabotage progress, they were showing up to work and doing their jobs as instructed. But nothing more.
