So far every instance of moon-eyed 'transform the world' rhetoric coming out of these projects boil down to "we're going to make capitalists a lot of money by cutting labor out of the equation as much as possible."
To be fair, this is a capitalism problem rather than an inherent flaw with the technology itself, but without changes to our core priorities as a society, this seems to only exacerbate the challenges we're already facing.
ChatGPT is just the beginning: Artificial intelligence is ready to transform the world
]]>Agile ceremonies are a massive waste of time, and if the team can’t communicate well enough asynchronously then your team is busted.
]]>It's like they genuinely don't understand how the world works. They skate by on the cultural inertia of the company below them. But then they get horny for more money and think they can run things all by themselves, only to make the dumbest fucking decisions possible.
Silicon Valley needs to stop laying off workers and start firing CEOs
]]>When they talk about free speech, what they really mean is being able to spew any horrible hate they want and suffer no repercussions, not even social ones, for it.
They have one commandment, it's the only thing they have ever supported: "Rights for me, but not for thee".
'1st Amendment' Group Sues New York Times Over Unflattering Description
]]>Whenever there is a crisis or a problem, typically the person who can actually fix it sits six levels down from senior managers. What happens though, in reality, is that senior managers run around like a headless chicken trying to solve the problem, until they realize the person who actually can fix it was laid off a year ago in the latest round of budget cuts. So they go out and hire a bunch of consultants and contractors at twice the price who take five times as long to fix it. All because, as you said…management views employees as a number on a spreadsheet in a cost center, and not an invaluable host of institutional knowledge on how the company actually runs.
90% of senior management is useless. They’re only there because of ambition, the lack of empathy that allows them to make “tough” decisions like making blanket layoffs, and because they know which corporate bingo bullshit buzzwords to say during a speech to their bosses. The ones that are actually decent get burned out from all the nonsense they have to deal with.
]]>For example, the retail side of Amazon is an order fulfillment and distribution system. Jeff Bezos would be perfectly happy to have fully automated warehouses requiring no manual intervention.
On one side, these companies can bring tremendous economic growth. But can be ruthless towards the individual worker. However, it’s our society. We should have the governance in place to ensure there is a safety net for the individual.
]]>they must have thought about this aspect, right?
Inertia and friction. Lopsided risk vs reward.
The company only think in terms of value. Does that new feature add to product value, company margins, etc. Add that new feature immediately, so it can improve quarterly financial reports.
"Developer experience" doesn't directly translate to immediate quantifiable quarterly financial reports.
Most devex happens because the very few, 10x, 100x devs get bored or tired of the stupidity, and does things to improve and automate dev processes. The very best that can improve devex quickly realize they can get higher salary and better roles at better companies, the they job hop ruthlessly.
Why don't organizations pay more attention to developer experience?
]]>The reason they do layoffs is because is easy to quantify how much money is no longer being paid to someone’s salary, but incredibly difficult to quantify how much was lost through hiring, onboarding, training, and everything that slipped through the cracks due to lost institutional knowledge.
VP told me not to look at my job being offshored as a job lost, but an opportunity gained
]]>I guarantee that if house prices ever do start falling the federal government will step in within 5 seconds with insane economy distorting policies to support house prices.
Because 65% or so people are homeowners. About half of them are still paying off mortgages. Any government that didn't do everything in its power to keep house prices rising forever would lose so badly at the next election they'd be in opposition for at least 4 terms.
In other words, it's all a massive fucking scam for all those who don't own property. Free market capitalism? Bullshit. It's more like feudalism than anything these days. And it's going to get worse, so much worse.
Sorry to be such a pessimist but we're going to see mass homelessness on a scale we never ever imagined could happen in Australia in the next two decades.
And there will be weeping and wailing and endless cries of "won't somebody please do something!"
But nothing will be done. Because this country has gone psychotic over property prices.
(And sorry but anybody who buys the complete bullshit that cutting migrant intakes and throwing money at private developers to build so-called "affordable housing" will be sorely disappointed.)
There's a serious disconnect between the mindset of landlords and reality.
]]>Those who see a broken system and strive to change it,
And those who see a broken system and strive to exploit it.
Had a genuine conversation with a young medical student who was explaining to me that you can’t make money practicing and that your goal should be instead to own the practice. He didn’t seem to think that there was something broken with a system where it is better to own doctors than to be a doctor. Through our conversation I realised that he saw the problems with the system and was trying to figure out how to “come out on top” of it. These people get on top and then naturally want the system to stay broken because they put in the effort to become an exploiter. They genuinely don’t understand why people might want to change the system, rather than exploit the system. They think we’re too stupid to exploit it.
Higher interest rates smashed landlord profits, but negative gearing means few sold up
]]>Guy has one great idea in his entire lifetime, through luck of knowing the right people and good timing, he was able to turn this idea into a multi-billion dollar business.
Since then, all of his ideas have turned out to be bad.
Maybe he will never have another great idea in his life.
Someone else will come up with a better idea and replace that man.
The best thing this man could do is to sell his business, pocket billions and go live a life of bliss outside the public eye.
Get over it.
]]>There's a good reason why the survival rate for companies on a long enough timeline is zero. Most become so inefficient that they'll be beaten by a smaller, more efficient competitor at some point.
Depends on the market and it's barrier to entry, also if you've reached the "Too big too fail" stage you can be as inneficient as you want that you will be saved by the tax payer (e.g: GFC 2008, YPF in the late 2000s, etc)
Im not against efficiency by itself, but I have seen enough profitable industrial workflows running on tech debt from the early 80s that it made me realize that the world is not fair from an software engineering PoV. I wouldn't be surprised to know that my mortgage is processed by a system that nobody knows how it works and has no source code running on vb 5.0 on a physical server from 1997 on Windows ME
6 Lessons I learned from working at a dysfunctional workplace!
]]>Having to change your two-week plans regularly because you ignored something obvious isn't working incrementally. It's just bad planning.
If you are regularly encountering "unforeseen problems," then the issue is not unforeseen. Whatever the source is needs to be factored into your planning in the short-term, and resolved in the long-term. You are posting on ExperiencedDevs, not csMajors, so things you mentioned like tech debt are your problem as a professional to identify, raise, and successfully advocate for fixes for.
And so that they can put a hard stop on a “project” even though there almost never truly is
As a business you need to decide what level of investment / what quality of product you are aiming for. You cannot just allow things to drag on forever, or you'd constantly be wasting time adding bells and whistles instead of delivering the next big chunk of value for your customers.
Your meeting situation sounds funky, but I'm not grasping how you're simultaneously in hours of meetings every day yet struggling to schedule meetings due to time zone conflicts. People shouldn't attend meetings that aren't relevant to them, but that is all a matter of company culture and completely independent of agile.
]]>I'm all for a return to principles -- but the minute it becomes commercialized again under a new brand name, the cycle will continue
]]>So in environments where the power balance is heavily skewed by upper management that do not know the purpose of agile, agile will die. For agile to thrive, it needs to be in an environment where the workers have more power in the balance, or the upper management is very well versed into the why devs need agile (very rare that upper management deeply understands the why.)
Upper management needs predictability, because they are steering a huge ship, and it doesn't turn on a dime. So they need to see what is going to happen down the line to make decisions and steer the ship properly.
Developers need adaptability because the customers don't know what they want, and the path to get there is not fully known. They do not necessarily know ahead of time how to get there. So they need to adapt on the fly. This is the purpose of working with an agile mindset.
Predictability and adaptability are the sides of the same coin, or they are a spectrum. When you cannot adapt quickly, you need to predict to be able to thrive. When you cannot predict you need to adapt quickly to be able to thrive. If you cannot do either even god can't help you.
So, upper management needs predictability, and devs needs adaptability. If the upper management has too much power and not enough wisdom, they will enforce their need down the line, forcing dev to not work with agility.
The middle management is the one that needs to translate the adaptability into predictability, and predictability into adaptability. If things don't work well (the upper management is not able to have the required visibility/predictable outcome to make their decisions, and devs are enforced to work in a predictable way (not agile/usually waterfall)), its because the middle management do not make the bridge properly. Assuming they are competent, it's usually because they are strong armed by upper management.
]]>Just like art, sadly it's all lagging indicators: good art is recognized only after its creation, and it's the artist you must recognize made it good - not some specific reproducible technique. It's that artist. Management never of course wishes to hear that, they want everything to be good by direct reproducible application of approaches. They can get part way there, but the real stinker they refuse to accept?
Good software is only recognizable by lagging indicators after it's made. That's just the fact that so much of our industry fights not to accept, wanting predictive indicators but sorry. The predictive indicator is the quality of your artists, the lagging indicators need to be watched more:
Tons of garbage software with all the latest greatest approaches used in their creation are garbage art, they work and have no defects but take a year to repair or enhance because the artist didn't have the qualitative vision.
Are more developers burning out? Or am I just seeing things.
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