This is pretty good advice that can apply to a lot of fields. But the opening note needs to be kept in mind. Their perspective is as an Engineer at Western Startups or mid-large sized corporates....
This is pretty good advice that can apply to a lot of fields. But the opening note needs to be kept in mind. Their perspective is as an Engineer at Western Startups or mid-large sized corporates. But tech is a lot of things between and beyond those points. Being a consultant in the middle east, in house IT in latin america, small dev house in central Africa. There's a lot of little things that needs to be considered, but in the end it's all very "same same but different" (I know that phrase grinds at native English speakers but it's the only one that really gets it across).
Anyway, if I can add some very good advice I picked up sharing an office with an old Novell specialist maintaining a critical government system in 2018. You need to have a good idea of how nontechnical people see you:
Expectation management is one of the biggest parts of this industry and it goes well beyond the code. "Tech" is a horrifically ambiguous term that covers so much. For people in the field it's hyper granular while everyone else (most likely everyone above your manager) puts hardware scientists, project managers and printer repair people in the same box.
Hell, I got out of tech 6 years ago and jumped as far away as I possibly could. And I ended up being the one man e-commerce team at my day job because I was "suited for the job" ("we don't want to pay a cent more than we need to"). I used to work on EAM systems at industrial sites with an interest in integrating legacy analog systems into our SCADA dashboards. I designed the virtual equipment hierarchy module that could drill down into individual screws and welds. The e-store I made can be described as "almost a CLI".
Point of the story: when decisions are made by people outside of your scope; you're going to be judged by their standards of things they know nothing about. And I'm hearing horror stories about companies following the Musk example and setting KPIs about line counts and commits so be aware of that. and I'm definitely not saying you should exploit the flaws in poorly considered metric to puff yourself up while not compromising the work
There also a point that is mentioned but not really dug into.
Create a “How We Make Money” Diagram
He mentioned it in the context of startups and that's very important. A lot of new companies get lost in the sause and focus on value to the detriment of revenue.
But when you get to FANG scale corporate, this is an invaluable exercise to keep yourself covered.
The thing is that at a certain scale, a company is going to cannibalize itself. Google is the prime example. I could rant on this for days but it blows my mind that regulators looked at it and said that Chrome is the key to breaking it up.
When you're dealing with people, be very aware of their goals and metrics because it can run contrary to you own.
Below is just a little rant/anecdote of corporate gig that killed any passion I had for the industry. It's not everywhere, but I've heard similar stories like this out of a many of the biggest companies. And it's not just tech.
Imagine you get a job at a massive tech frim that has a several major diviswill. RnD, support, software licensing and consulting/bespoke development (if you know them, you know). The value chain is obvious. RnD makes software, licensing sells it, consulting deploys it and support will be doing gods work and keeping things running smoothly.
But now you have the situation where licensing needs to sell as many licenses as possible, but customers don't want to pay for premium, in-house consultants to deploy. So licensing will then be recommending the work to third parties they will have thier own support offering. Now consultants have no work, so they have to sell their own licenses. So now you have developers doing sales work for months on end. But the sale need to go through licensing, and there's nothing stopping them from upselling licenses by recommending a cheaper consultant.
Consulting is a sinking (technically sunk) ship, so you jump over to RnD. But it turns out research is a time and cash hole with no guarantee of returns. And you could spend months working on a high value offering, only for a startup to beat you out the gate with a half baked prototype that we essentially whiped out in ideation. The RnD budget it diverted to aquiring that startuo. They slap on a bad API to say it's part of our intergrated ecosystem, ignore the many security and stability issues and licensing ships it out to customers as the the latest and greatest tech that will solve all their problems. This is about where I snapped.
Anyway, while I'm ranting: Agile is a lie made to make MBAs feel like they have something to add. AI is going to be the next Cloud and will never overcome the costs to retail customers. MS is top of the pantheon of slimy, unethical corporates and I hope they crash and burn. And the only thing worse than big corporate is working for you family business and wosre than that is if the two combine.
Is this a7e? I could not figure out what the heck the company does from what’s publicly available on the web, and it surprised me because of how big this company is and how little I have ever...
Is this a7e? I could not figure out what the heck the company does from what’s publicly available on the web, and it surprised me because of how big this company is and how little I have ever heard of it.
The original manifesto has some value, but the whole ecosystem is really sad. So so many people don't understand the point of the processes or want to make agile into something it's not. I was...
Agile is a lie made to make MBAs feel like they have something to add.
The original manifesto has some value, but the whole ecosystem is really sad. So so many people don't understand the point of the processes or want to make agile into something it's not.
This is pretty good advice that can apply to a lot of fields. But the opening note needs to be kept in mind. Their perspective is as an Engineer at Western Startups or mid-large sized corporates. But tech is a lot of things between and beyond those points. Being a consultant in the middle east, in house IT in latin america, small dev house in central Africa. There's a lot of little things that needs to be considered, but in the end it's all very "same same but different" (I know that phrase grinds at native English speakers but it's the only one that really gets it across).
Anyway, if I can add some very good advice I picked up sharing an office with an old Novell specialist maintaining a critical government system in 2018. You need to have a good idea of how nontechnical people see you:
Expectation management is one of the biggest parts of this industry and it goes well beyond the code. "Tech" is a horrifically ambiguous term that covers so much. For people in the field it's hyper granular while everyone else (most likely everyone above your manager) puts hardware scientists, project managers and printer repair people in the same box.
Hell, I got out of tech 6 years ago and jumped as far away as I possibly could. And I ended up being the one man e-commerce team at my day job because I was "suited for the job" ("we don't want to pay a cent more than we need to"). I used to work on EAM systems at industrial sites with an interest in integrating legacy analog systems into our SCADA dashboards. I designed the virtual equipment hierarchy module that could drill down into individual screws and welds. The e-store I made can be described as "almost a CLI".
Point of the story: when decisions are made by people outside of your scope; you're going to be judged by their standards of things they know nothing about. And I'm hearing horror stories about companies following the Musk example and setting KPIs about line counts and commits so be aware of that.
and I'm definitely not saying you should exploit the flaws in poorly considered metric to puff yourself up while not compromising the workThere also a point that is mentioned but not really dug into.
He mentioned it in the context of startups and that's very important. A lot of new companies get lost in the sause and focus on value to the detriment of revenue.
But when you get to FANG scale corporate, this is an invaluable exercise to keep yourself covered.
The thing is that at a certain scale, a company is going to cannibalize itself. Google is the prime example. I could rant on this for days but it blows my mind that regulators looked at it and said that Chrome is the key to breaking it up.
When you're dealing with people, be very aware of their goals and metrics because it can run contrary to you own.
Below is just a little rant/anecdote of corporate gig that killed any passion I had for the industry. It's not everywhere, but I've heard similar stories like this out of a many of the biggest companies. And it's not just tech.
Imagine you get a job at a massive tech frim that has a several major diviswill. RnD, support, software licensing and consulting/bespoke development (if you know them, you know). The value chain is obvious. RnD makes software, licensing sells it, consulting deploys it and support will be doing gods work and keeping things running smoothly.
But now you have the situation where licensing needs to sell as many licenses as possible, but customers don't want to pay for premium, in-house consultants to deploy. So licensing will then be recommending the work to third parties they will have thier own support offering. Now consultants have no work, so they have to sell their own licenses. So now you have developers doing sales work for months on end. But the sale need to go through licensing, and there's nothing stopping them from upselling licenses by recommending a cheaper consultant.
Consulting is a sinking (technically sunk) ship, so you jump over to RnD. But it turns out research is a time and cash hole with no guarantee of returns. And you could spend months working on a high value offering, only for a startup to beat you out the gate with a half baked prototype that we essentially whiped out in ideation. The RnD budget it diverted to aquiring that startuo. They slap on a bad API to say it's part of our intergrated ecosystem, ignore the many security and stability issues and licensing ships it out to customers as the the latest and greatest tech that will solve all their problems. This is about where I snapped.
Anyway, while I'm ranting: Agile is a lie made to make MBAs feel like they have something to add. AI is going to be the next Cloud and will never overcome the costs to retail customers. MS is top of the pantheon of slimy, unethical corporates and I hope they crash and burn. And the only thing worse than big corporate is working for you family business and wosre than that is if the two combine.
Is this a7e? I could not figure out what the heck the company does from what’s publicly available on the web, and it surprised me because of how big this company is and how little I have ever heard of it.
The original manifesto has some value, but the whole ecosystem is really sad. So so many people don't understand the point of the processes or want to make agile into something it's not.
I was originally more gung-ho on it because I'd only seen it used well. Then I worked at a bad company and learned where this blog post is coming from: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-haymaker-you-if-you-mention-agile-again/