You were saving the company money but hurting their resumes.
I recently wrote about this. The TLDR is that 20% time is a great investment and can ultimately save the company a ton of time and money. It gives the engineers some playtime in order to build their CV's and "get their wiggles out". Ultimately, if done right it can protect your production systems from a lot of madness. https://hvops.com/articles/how-to-keep-passion-from-hugging-...
The message could be that the goal is about the destination not the journey.
Basically, they are looking for web developers but it seems like they have to filter out all the frontend ninja rockstars.
This sounds like typical anti-change pushback, which I have learned can actually be a good thing. However, this anecdote is severely lacking in insight; much like most people's support of, or opposition to, change. Further, like the widespread belief that sentences shouldn't start with conjunctions; much less conjunctive adverbs.
Not every web project needs react, or even JS.
the job that should be plain simple html was done in angular, and you could notice it, simple flickering and slowdowns for no aparent benefit.
just so stupid.
I'm sure there are declarative, object-oriented (rather than text-oriented) templating engines out there that use an approach like React's. But I would consider using an imperative, text-oriented templating language a yellow, if not red, flag in 2017.
It is functional (well, as functional as React), and templates compile to plain 'ol functions, so compatibility and static typing is the same as the rest of the your program.
Obviously, if I needed a SPA or something, it's not what I would use, but again, not everything should be an SPA.
Twirl is fine, insofar as it's attached to the Play (that's not to impugn you for picking it, my history with Play is colorful and frustrating). I wouldn't raise a flag for that. But not using something in this vein definitely is, and React is probably the most accessible way to do it for the 90-95% case of developers.
And your semicolon is misplaced.
On the other hand, we also had difficulties hiring "good" engineers. People chose either a company with a brand name recognition or one that's working on "exciting" technology.
As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost.
As leaders, we fail to put our companies first.
This is an industry wide problem. If past trends of other major industries are any indicator, the whole "meritocracy" of tech industry will disappear within the next decade.
People established in their career don't need buzzword bingo resumes. Stability is important because you can leave the job at the door. Other things are more important, such as paying the mortgage, taking kids to the park on the weekends and not working all hours with a fragile stack.
And they'd be stupid if they didn't.
The issue is that, compared to other industries, it's really hard to find people with that 20% in tech, so business people are forced to let political and image ignoramuses (sometimes ignorant to the point of failing to perform basic hygiene) into the club, and forced to try to stuff them in the attic or some other dark corner of the office where they won't ugly things up too much.
Many developers naively interpret this as a ruling meritocracy. The reality is that the business types resent having to do this, and a horrible technology worker with some image consciousness will easily destroy his better-qualified peers.
I'm familiar with a case of a person who can't even code getting himself elevated to a technical directorship with architectural and high-level direction responsibilities through such tactics. He appears to code by merging branches in the GitHub interface, by making vacuous technical-sounding comments in meetings with executives, by occasionally having someone come "pair" with him and committing the changes they make together at his workstation, etc., but if you locked him alone in a room with a blank text editor and said "Write something that does this", he wouldn't be able to do it. And the executives believe in him wholeheartedly and are currently working to install him as the company's sole technical authority. All significant decisions would have to get his approval, despite his being literally the worst technician in the company. All of his decisions up to this point have been politically motivated, aimed at coalescing power within his group and blocking outsiders who may want to contribute.
He was able to get there because he dresses well, he adopted the executive's interests and chitchats with them about these, he walks around the office telling jokes and smiling at people, and generally being what would be considered personable and diplomatic, whereas the other technical people go to their desks, hunker down, and spend their day trying to get some real work done.
Which strategy wins in the long run?
I read countless anecdotes on HN and hear many more in person of people with just the shittiest managers, of people who rarely see "competent" engineering organizations, of people who have "never" seen a competent project manager, that it really is a wonder we have any profitable companies at all.
In reality, if you don't understand the value someone is providing them, you should make an effort to understand what they might be doing before making claims like the ones you're making.
On the other hand, I am pretty convinced that there is a sizeable number of people in companies who create a lot of busywork "managing" things. The project I am on has 3 developers (as far as I can tell) and probably more than 10 business analysts, project managers, architects and other managers putting their name on it. I have tried to understand what they are all doing but from what I can tell there are two managers who actually help the project and the other ones write reports to each other, call a lot of meetings but don't really contribute. They just regurgitate what the few active people are doing.
Once I was on a team with 2 QA analysts, 1 Eng Manager, myself as PM, 3 BA's (that I did not want), and 3 developers, and one platform architect. All this plus 1 director overseeing our tiny team. Not to mention the 1-2 BA's I worked with whenever I worked on something that impacted another team.
During my 1:1 with said director, I once lashed out - I hadn't slept well in 4 days and I simply sounded off. I literally said everything that's been said in this thread: everything from why the fuck do we have so many people, give me 5 engineers and fire everyone else, to all you care about is the headcount that reports to you.
Luckily, I was a top performer, and while this tarnished my reputation with this director, I was able to smooth things over over the course of a few months.
This director explained to me that I was no longer at a start up. That this team should be resilient - that anyone should be able to take 2-3 weeks off at a time without interrupting the work. That they didn't want us working pedal to the metal 100% of the time. That it was ok that it was slow, and that I shouldn't be so self-conscious or hard on myself if I wasn't always working my fingers to the bone.
Now, I still thought we had way too much fat. Some of those BA's had no business being on a technical team, even as BA's and we should have traded in the architect and dev manager for an extra QA and developer.
But what that conversation did was bring me back down to earth. So much of what we view as right and wrong is personal preference. While I still disagreed with the amount of waste, it removed the chip on my shoulder and now I simply make sure to join teams that I like.
That's more of a ramble, but gives you some context as to where I was coming from.
This, however, doesn't excuse hiring incompetent people based on appearance and likability with blatant disregard for their competence (I recognize that for many non-technical managers, it is difficult or impossible to discern the quality of one's skillset), nor does it excuse stuffing teams with dead weight just because the hiring manager personally likes the people involved. And those practices are indeed rampant.
The company has zero loyalty to you and will screw you over if it makes business sense to do so. There is absolutely no reason to put the company above your career interests.
As said in this topic - it's true that in some places, resume-driven development pays off for the developers. It's not the same everywhere and to me it looks more like a symptom of a dysfunctional structure than par for the course in business.
This means it is in your career interests to increase company revenue and/or reduce costs, because this will make you more attractive to many companies (the ones we would likely want to work on) when you move on.
That's just my personal impression but I believe you have better chances coming from an unsuccessful company with all the right buzzwords than from a successful company with old tech. You will quickly be labelled as "dinosaur".
The real winner is to use cool stuff AND come from a successful/known company.
I have no experience in being labelled a 'dinosaur', but I'm sure there are jobs where being practical and generating actual results will matter. In ideal conditions, these are the jobs which are desirable to work at, so I don't like the idea of optimizing for hotness in itself (at least for my own career decisions).
Not everything should build their resume, but some of it has to. It's one of my arguments for buy over build.
To take it a step further, Management has to own up to their original failure and try to explain to their bosses how they could spend so much time and money unnecessarily.
Another psychological problem here is the perception by people who do not understand the technology that the higher priced solution is better because it costs more.
- Monty Python, Meaning of Life
Plus people jump on fads, big data is trendy right now and when you read and hear about something a lot your mind tends to go to it first.
Suppose management in a firm uncritically contracted the big data revolution meme. Then they believe they are in the position of a city mayor trying to build a bridge and some wiseacre comes along and says they can do it in an afternoon with two pieces of string and a stick of gum. The problem is that the analogy doesn't hold, but they don't know that.
Dick move but so is rejecting an objectively better solution to save one's own middle management ass.
The grandparent is correct. This is 100% a political problem. We have a bad habit of discounting such problems in tech. We shouldn't do that anymore. Life is much better when you cooperate, instead of fighting an uphill battle.
Compact, reasonable solutions are the domain of startups. Bloating the engineering layer beyond any reasonable limit is an inherent cost of growing the company, and we shouldn't try to counteract that. We must operate within the framework we're given.
The political concerns extend beyond the company's own internals. They must appear enterprisey if they expect to be treated enterprisey. Today, enterprises have "data science" departments and blow $100k/mo on useless crap. If they're not doing that, it's a liability for the whole company, not just from the petty territorial perspective of one individual. It doesn't matter that it's possible to accomplish the same thing with one one-hundredth of the monthly expense. The enterprise signaling is worth the cost.
Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple are definitely not enterprisey, and I don't think it has hurt their profits. I think they tend to be pretty frugal, overall, when spending their own money on hardware and infrastructure.
And I bet if the "enterprisey" company ever tries to compete with a company like Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple, they will be destroyed in that market.
Like most things that matter, the value of enterprise signaling is abstract, but it is undervalued at the company's peril. There are real consequences to getting it wrong, even if they're not directly measurable.
>And I bet if the "enterprisey" company ever tries to compete with a company like Google, Facebook, Amazon, or Apple, they will be destroyed in that market.
There are entire bodies of work on the question of when an enterprisey dynamic is better suited than a "disruptive" dynamic, to use Clayton Christensen's term, and vice-versa.
Such questions are not straightforward because in business, the winner is not the best technician. Good technology can give you an advantage if it's used right, but there is much more to business than just having the tech down. Most people cannot value the technology on its merits, and it therefore does not enter into their purchasing decision.
At the scale of most major, non-startup tech companies, however, 99k worth of work is miniscule: it is less than the cost of a single fully-loaded engineer's salary and benefits package.
We can look at the manager based on this and see his choice from two angles, depending on if we assume he has good or bad faith for the company:
>Good faith:
"The large team is effectively guaranteed to succeed.
The likelihood that the 400 dollar solution works is an unknown quantity, and since that single engineer made it in the first place, I'd be putting a lot of negotiation power in his hands to ask for some large portion of the savings back as pay, meaning it's less likely we succeed and extremely possible he goes rogue. I'll go with the team."
>Bad faith:
"The company doesn't care about the difference between those numbers, they're the same at our scale. If I can waste ten people's time and net a sexy resume boost out of it for that little cost to the company, I'm probably the best manager they have.
No, you're not going to get to sabotage my next job if you're not going to do any work helping me spin this as somehow being better for my resume than me running a department with 10 people under me.
Actually, I've got an idea about that! I'm sure I can find something either wrong with your solution (or you) that allows me to say I tried for the savings, and after that failed, I went for the department I wanted anyways. I love a good compromise, don't you?"
Spot on. I'm getting flashbacks just reading this!
It's so easy to create FUD around "the $400 solution" that it's laughable.
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Upper management will be filled with so many questions:
* "If this is so cheap, why isn't everyone doing it this way? Surely all those important people wouldn't be wasting money, so there's gotta be something we're missing here."
* "What have we been paying 4 guys to do this whole time? Surely they would've figured this out earlier if it could've been done this way. I hope my boss doesn't hear that I've had a completely redundant department this whole time..."
* "If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. This guy is probably just trying to supplant my trusted middle manager by making him look like a money-waster. I need to tell my secretary to filter my emails better..."
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And middle management can easily say:
* "While Bob is able to get the same output right now, he is doing it in a non-scalable way that will have to be rewritten over and over again as we grow. Our way costs more upfront but it will allow us to expand to fulfill EXECS_WILDEST_DREAMS. You don't want to go down the day that you're featured in Fortune Magazine because Bob's data analysis script hammered the database, do you? We should use the solution you wisely previously approved, the solution on which you heard that compelling talk at CIOConf last year. It is much better than being penny wise and pound foolish!"
* "If I pull up Monster.com right now, there are 500 Hadoop candidates in our area. How many 'Bob's Data Processing Toolkit' candidates are there? We would be painting ourselves into a corner, and if Bob ever left us, we would be stranded."
* "I too was amazed by Bob's Data Processing Toolkit, and I enthusiastically tried it. Unfortunately, my best employee Sally pointed out that Bob's Toolkit causes disruptive fits of packet spasm in the switch hardware, threatening our whole network. I asked him to fix this but he says that he doesn't even think that problem is a real thing. Yes, he had the gall to impugn my best employee, Sally! He is clearly in denial about this and too close to see the impact objectively, so I put him on another task. [Under breath: he is also clearly a sexist pig, and we're lucky Sally didn't call HR.]
"It was a valiant effort and I do indeed applaud Bob for his attempts and concern for the company's well-being, and I assure you, Mr. Upper Manager, that we are continuing to analyze his Toolkit's mechanisms in depth and we will apply all savings and optimizations that we can. However, as you know, if it seems too good to be true, it probably is, and it is just not realistic that a Very Important Company like ours could handle all of our Very Important Data for less than half the cost of your car payment each month."
I think you're conflating enterprise with old and stuffy, and non-enterprise with bright colors and cutting edge technology. When I think of enterprise I think of software that needs to operate at scale with strict requirements on performance and uptime.
Apple loses a lot of the talent to other companies, and has never really been known having strong technology, so I understand that.
That statement is just ridiculous.
Apple innovates a lot in the mobile and desktop spaces and on the software side they have pushed a lot of projects forward e.g. WebKit, LLVM. They also run some very large web services e.g. iCloud, Messages which are on par with some of the challenges Google and Facebook have.
But as a web service that underpins so much of iOS it is still on a scale and complexity that rivals anything Google and Facebook has. Apple doesn't get enough credit for actually make this work on a daily basis.
They definitely deserve credit for making it work because even at their scale it's an amazing feat. But there's no comparison to Google or Facebook's scale.
There are some "enterprisey" companies that do the same, but there are also a whole lot of companies that reach for big-data tools because they want to be like Google, ignoring that their problems are actually quite different from the problems Google faces.
Google publishes an academic paper on this and the general public misinterprets it as a recommendation. Soon you see people writing open-source implementations "based on the GoogleThing Paper", and a new tech fad is born. It will consume billions of dollars before it dies in favor of another fad "based on the FacebookThing/TheNextGoogleThing Paper".
Walk up to most business guys and they will jump at the chance to "become more like Google". Try to talk them down from this, and your challenge is to convince that no, we don't want to be more like one of the most important and influential technology companies in the world, the company that's on the news every day, and whose logo he sees every time he looks at his phone, and the company who keeps taking all of the best hires from the universities. Worse, you'll be making that argument because "we're just not as big [read: important] as them". Not a promising position for the reasonable engineer.
This has been a terrible blight on our profession these last several years, but we just have to learn to roll with it. It's only by understanding and accepting the psychology around this that we can formulate effective counterstrategies, or make the best of the situation that's before us.
A better question is what ROI does generic non-tech enterprise company X get from standing up a huge data science team for simple data management problems.
And I can assure they absolutely fall under the definition of an enterprise. Sure they develop a lot of technology in house but they still have significant amounts of classic, enterprise technologies. Especially in the "business" side.
Many times these issues are not in the core product teams. Companies tend to hire the best and frugal on spending as it shows up as COGS in their finance reports.
Issues crop up when it comes to non-core product teams. Example a business intelligence (BI) team is more prone to over spend time and money on getting huge clusters with "big data" because they perceive their users needing data in real time.
Because that's what you are doing with your statement above.
The reason they are the Google, FB, etc of the world is _because_ of that unique capability. Do you honestly think there is, say, a hospital, anywhere on this planet that can hold a candle to what they do everyday?
The poster above was simply stating what the normal world looks and acts like.
At some point, enough developers/managers will begin to take advantage of the system until executives wise up.
It's also possible that this is the CTO/CIO/management's first real position where they can throw around $100k projects out of a multi-million dollar budget and they are simply learning the ropes.
It's also again possible that the company has so much cash devoted to this department that no one cares because they are collecting large paychecks. In which case, you're likely acting against your best interest (long and short term) to not take advantage of it.
They only wise up if they have data that tells them they need to.
Who is the source of that data? Developers and managers.
This is why it is very, very hard for big companies to stay agile: the management hierarchy insulates self-interested managers from consequences.
This is a great opportunity to sell $400/mo. enterprise solutions for $100k/mo.
The key is that that value is not strictly technical. You can present a technical solution that is cheaper, but doesn't offer the non-technical value they derive from being a player on the "Big Data" scene. They can say "Yeah, we use our main guy's Perl script" or they can say "Yeah, we use Hadoop".
Is the value in that worth $99k per month? That's a subjective judgment for each company to make based on their specific circumstances.
And if you overcomplicate things, you can easily get to a state where there are 2 guys that both half-understood the Hadoop setup, but both left for different startups. Complexity alone does not make things simpler.
Of course, you can provide the non-technical value of providing ~training~ makework and resume lines for 10 code monkeys and their managers, but that is not really value to the company.
a) get its engineers to give a talk at a Hadoop conference, resulting in marketing [logo shown prominently around the conference], PR, and recruitment gainz;
b) get articles published about how the company uses cutting edge technology to do new things and all the other CIOs and big shots better listen up, resulting in prestige, PR, and recruitment gainz; (this happened to a client in real life)
c) reasonably field interrogatory questions from other fad followers, whether they are investors, journalists, peers, or whomever. When asked "How is YourCorp using data science and Big Data?", being able to say "We have a team working with that" is much better than having to say "Our guy Bob says that's just a fad, so we don't really 'do that'". This is basically a PR gain, but it means that investors and clients will feel the company is cutting edge, instead of backward philistines who listen to Bob all the time.
I could go on but it's pretty boring.
The point is that business is all about the customer's perception of the company as something to which they want to give money. If the business does not appear to be following the trends, they will be substantially harmed, because people do not want to get involved with an outmoded business. Being perceived as the last to adopt a new technology looks bad.