We are pushing our product managers to communicate their requirements with live prototypes rather than PRDs and mockups. It forces them to actually think their ideas through, and even allows them to get some hallway feedback before even bothering an eng. This might help with #5. But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses. If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses.
Not all process is pointless, but needless process by definition is. There are also a shit ton of things that stop engineers from “striking out on their own”.
If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
The whole talk of “go[ing] it alone” kinda strikes me as “bootstrapping”, libertarian non-sense.
I don’t want to do marketing, sales, finance, investor, legal, and product bullshit myself. That’s why I’m an employee.
Two things can be true at the same time, for instance, a company can have a lot of bloated, needless process that stifles people and still pull in enough money to be able to pay for their employees to live a life.
With the amount of market concentration there is in every sector as far as the eye can see, nearly every software-producing company has a cash cow of some sort, and then has a bunch of complete money losers that are subsidized by that cash cow.
So, it’s completely possible that the company overall fully sucks and hasn’t developed anything new of value to someone in decades, but the legacy business keeps the miserable employees from the bread line.
To return to the point, AI doesn’t solve any of this or even help with it.
When I think about what limited my performance in the last year it was mostly:
Having to get 5 signatures before I am allowed the budget to install some FOSS software on my work PC that the corporation has already approved for use on work PCs
Spending 8 months working on a huge feature that was scrapped after 8 months of development
Being told that no, we cannot work on another large feature request (of which there are many in the pipeline) because our team said we can only fit that scrapped feature into this year and we are not allowed to replan based on the fact that the feature we were supposed to work on got scrapped by business
And then they tell us to return to office and use AI for increasing efficiency.
It’s all an elaborate play performed by upper management to feign being in control and being busy with something. Nobody is actually interested in producing a product, they all just want to further their own position.
The problems in software still remain the same though:
(1) Bureaucracy
(2) Needless process
(3) Pointy headed managers
(4) Siloed teams
(5) Product people who have no idea what they want to build
(6) Shitty, poorly performing legacy code nobody wants to touch
Honestly, AI is just the latest thing that can boost your productivity at starting up some random app. But that was never the difficult part anyway.
We are pushing our product managers to communicate their requirements with live prototypes rather than PRDs and mockups. It forces them to actually think their ideas through, and even allows them to get some hallway feedback before even bothering an eng. This might help with #5. But I’ve never had sympathy for engineers who think all the process around them is net negative, because nothings ever stopped engineers from striking out on their own, without all that, and making great businesses. If your PM and VPs are bringing you down, go it alone. If you can’t pull that together into a paycheck then maybe it’s not all as useless as some say.
Not all process is pointless, but needless process by definition is. There are also a shit ton of things that stop engineers from “striking out on their own”.
The whole talk of “go[ing] it alone” kinda strikes me as “bootstrapping”, libertarian non-sense.
I don’t want to do marketing, sales, finance, investor, legal, and product bullshit myself. That’s why I’m an employee.
Two things can be true at the same time, for instance, a company can have a lot of bloated, needless process that stifles people and still pull in enough money to be able to pay for their employees to live a life.
With the amount of market concentration there is in every sector as far as the eye can see, nearly every software-producing company has a cash cow of some sort, and then has a bunch of complete money losers that are subsidized by that cash cow.
So, it’s completely possible that the company overall fully sucks and hasn’t developed anything new of value to someone in decades, but the legacy business keeps the miserable employees from the bread line.
To return to the point, AI doesn’t solve any of this or even help with it.
This, so much this.
When I think about what limited my performance in the last year it was mostly:
And then they tell us to return to office and use AI for increasing efficiency.
It’s all an elaborate play performed by upper management to feign being in control and being busy with something. Nobody is actually interested in producing a product, they all just want to further their own position.
The problem is the N+2 is in on it too. And so on. “It just works!”