Comment by cebert
Comment by cebert a day ago
I’m shocked that a company would share how amazingly bad their layer management had become. This may be a great internal blog, but I wouldn’t share it publicly.
Comment by cebert a day ago
I’m shocked that a company would share how amazingly bad their layer management had become. This may be a great internal blog, but I wouldn’t share it publicly.
Yeah: I can usually tell from public information when a company has problems like this, and that makes me disinclined to want to work for them. Seeing how they deal with those problems, though? … Well, in this case, it shows that the company doesn't know how to deal with these problems properly, and thinks ChatGPT is appropriate for write-ups, so I still might not want to work there – but I might bother interviewing there, just to check how deep these problems go. (If they're just a case of "they didn't know better, but they're happy to learn", then I might actually take the job offer: an environment where others are willing to learn without fear of losing face is an environment where I can learn without worrying about that either.)
This sounds like a case of "We are in growth mode and will accept any garbage the customer will throw at us" without calculating the tech debt costs.
As someone who is currently there, it's very frustrating place.
Oh just wait till it’s time for your company to stop the ‘growth mode’ shenanigans and get serious about acceptable levels of tech debt and feature bloat. It’s where we are.
You can’t just flip a switch. There is no “Hey, that was fun, but it’s time to start designing these things with a purpose and vision”. Beyond the totally unreasonable expectations that have been set by Product and C-level- you still have the mountain of tech debt that is coming due and changes slow to a crawl or outages skyrocket or both. Plus, hiring has been based on ‘getting things done’, so you have this group of people who are actually really skilled in hacking things together and getting it out the door. It’s tough and calls for an entire culture shift. How do you stop being a reactionary startup and become vision-based and purposeful organization?
This is the job of tech leadership IMO. People respond to incentive changes. If these items are properly prioritized on the roadmap, and credit and recognition follows tech debt remediation efforts to a similar degree as feature delivery, the work can be done.
But this requires strong tech leadership who can interface well with the C Suite and get buy-in for delaying in feature delivery. In the absence of this buy-in, you pretty much need to control the narrative and create a rogue skunkworks initiative to wrap these improvements _into_ the feature delivery.
Many companies don't have strong tech leadership though, and will perpetually churn VPs and Directors, forever chasing A Change without addressing the culture and incentive system that created that culture.
From what I understood they provide a kind of shared platform where anyone can run things, and it was one of their clients/users performing the commits.
So they don't set reasonable expectations with the customers and accept any and all garbage. As Ops person, this is a path to Ops hell as customers throw more and more garbage at you and toil dealing with customer problems becomes unbearable.
This is a case of Product Team not working with customers, finding out what is reasonable and allowing system to set reasonable limits.
I would give them some leeway, sometimes you have to learn the hard way. But I was also kind of surprised didn't mention contacting the client anywhere.
It's like a car repair company sharing how they dramatically improved ride comfort, speed and fuel usage by using air to fill tyres rather than concrete.
After asking chatgpt for suggestions and trying them all.
Transparency breeds trust.
Sure, it frightens away the short-sighted or particularly excitable people, but anyone who understands how unrealistic perfection is will be comforted by such transparency. Exposing the warts not only sets expectations, but it also assures people that things will (likely) not be just swept under the rug in a company culture of denialism and obfuscation.
On the other hand, I'm impressed that a company is owning up to the problem. Is it a dumb problem to have? Definitely. Are they the only ones to have it? Almost certainly not.
People are going to use the tools at their disposal, and they aren't all going to learn their tools at a high level. Think of every insane misuse of Excel you've ever heard of, for instance.
IT has the choice in this case to mitigate, or limit the access to the tools. Choosing mitigation prevents the growth of shadow IT and helps ensure that IT remains a trusted partner and not an obstacle to be worked around. This reflects well on the company, especially if they then go and provide better training to their users as well.