Comment by rbthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rbthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Throw away time.

I work for a company in slow decline. We’ve been churning like 5-10% of our customers for a few years now. Old VP in tech was pushed out and a new one was brought in.

This guy (1) fires all the project managers (2) flattens the tech org such that he has over 50 direct reports and (3) institutes a mandate that all developers are now accountable directly to their business stakeholders. Anyone who doesn’t like this plan was told to GTFO.

We have never been more productive. However he alienated many people who’s skills I respected and they left the company. Also there’s a fine line between accountability and leading via fear, especially during times like these. Sometimes he crosses that line I feel.

That said, flattening the organization and pushing accountability directly to developers did improve output. You can’t hide any more as a dev. Everyone has visibility into what you’re delivering. I don’t meet with project managers any more, instead I meet directly with people in business units. He also does a good job of recognizing individuals when they step up and deliver.

Agreed. Best projects I worked on were led by the business stakeholder. No project managers. No scrum master. No QA folks. The tech leads translated business speak into tech requirements and educated the business on the art of the possible. Because the business drove it they learned very quickly and took ownership. The entire project was managed by word documents stored on a file share.

as a test person I can see an organization without a dedicated QA organization or even dedicated people, this is even somewhat of a recent trend, but someone still needs to test and take care of the test infrastructure and this is not a small nor easy task for someone who is also in charge of developing the feature.

The problem with this approach is similar to the problem of having a dedicated org for ops: the qa/testing org is disjointed from any sense of delivering business value and its goals are somewhat arbitrary. This team usually does not have a good understanding of what devs workflow looks like and instead it mandates some things that look good on paper but end up being quite useless in practice. Eg “have functional tests for every application” becomes a mandate that devs pay lip service to. It becomes another annoying box that devs need to check rather than something that actually improves the reliability of their applications.

A better approach is to discuss the reliability goals with the dev team and let them employ/buy any testing tools they need and hold the team responsible for the result. Developers want to build reliable apps. They know how their applications work. They want what they build to not break.

The only exception is that you would probably still need few test specialists, the same as devops specialist or frontend developers no one person can know all the tools and methods.

Or to have the infra team learn how to do UX design.

No I do not mean Photoshop/InDesign/Balsamiq/Dribble etc. I mean user experience design. Like https://fishshell.com/ or https://www.digitalocean.com/docs/databases/postgresql/quick...

Removing layers can help a lot. Were you using JIRA or anything before? Did he purge the tools that were in use at all?

How big and far along is your company? If engineers are supposed to listen to the business stakeholders I would imagine that a lot of tech debt will build up rather quickly as the business people just want the fast thing now.

Having to deal directly with the business stakeholders can backfire so easily though. I wonder what the difference is between the companies that can handle this kind of re-org and the ones that will completely collapse after it.

This sounds like a place I could work.

Interesting approach, but it sounds like a lot of baby went out with the bathwater.

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