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0 pointsscott_w4mo ago0 comments

> In most organizations the problem is lack of urgency rather than lack of developer hours.

I disagree: it's a business prioritisation issue (not necessarily a problem). Ultimately, a lot of the processes are there because the wider business (rightly) wants IT to work on the highest impact issues. A random process that 3 people suffer from probably isn't the highest impact for the business as a whole.

Also, because it's not high impact, it makes sense that an intern is co-opted to make life easier (also as a learning experience), however it also causes the issues OP highlighted.

The problem is solvable, I think, but it's not easily solvable!

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HeyLaughingBoy4mo ago

Yes, but often the "business priorities" get so screwed up that people's needs go unmet, and the business ends up wasting money as a result.

My best example was a conversation I had with one of the scientists at my job when she mentioned that she had people spending hours every day generating reports from data our instruments produced. I pointed out that with the code we had it would be simple to generate the reports automatically.

Her response that she had asked repeatedly for a developer to be assigned to the task, but she kept being pushed away because it was low priority.

I couldn't just change the codebase on my own (it was for a medical device), but it was easy enough to spend a lazy afternoon writing a tool to consume the output logs from the device and generate the reports that she needed. That's it: about 4 hours of work and produced something this person had asked for a year prior, and that people were already spending hours each day doing!

The people in charge of vetting requests never even bothered to ask a developer to estimate the task. They just heard that there was a work around, so it immediately became "low priority."

scott_wOP4mo ago

> That's it: about 4 hours of work and produced something this person had asked for a year prior, and that people were already spending hours each day doing!

This leads to the exact problem OP brings up: who fixes it if it breaks? If it becomes critical, now other priorities go unhandled as a person or team are dragged into resolution.

I’ll bring a couple more counter arguments:

- When I was running an internal enablement team, I reckon I had 12 months worth of work of these simple requests at any given point in time.

- Even that time saving might not be worth it, if it means those 4 hours could have been spent building something the company can sell (which for a SaaS product, is literally millions over its lifetime).

Just to be clear, I’m not saying you did the wrong thing at all. Hell, I’ve done this stuff myself. I’m just pointing out it’s not as easy as “just spend 4 hours on it and it’s done!” I’d go on but I think I’d just end up regurgitating the article.

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