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Comment by f1codz | Hacker News Reader

In real world this is what happens:

- your main business is not IT

- your IT dept is under pressure to do a lot with very little

- your tech debt grows and grows until it becomes actually apparent to the business that even small changes are taking tremendous effort

- your IT team is not just stuck with legacy code but also with legacy skills

- someone has the sense to measure your IT throughput

- "expert" IT consultants are called in

- experts call for a total overhaul using some fancy terminology

- some $$$ later we have a n% transformation, some unhappy permanent employees who think they could have done this themselves, reluctantly acquired knowledge, skeptical internal users

- you now learnt the hard way to listen to your IT team more when they say that they need support with learning new skills and time to fix tech debt

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You forgot the end:

- A true tech company arrives in the market

- They iterate faster

- Hire the few good members of your IT team, leaving you with the truly outdated ones

- Market share erodes

- "In this tough economy, we all have to make sacrifices"

- IT gets its budget slashed

It's an interesting narrative, but I can't think of any examples, since business is more about sales than "software iteration" - whatever that means.

Most of the successful startups that I can think of are still running basically the version 1.0 a founder wrote.

Can you provide some examples?

Also, you're mixing up the concepts/terms of software development (writing products) and IT. Software product companies don't call software engineering/development "IT" - IT is the guy who buys computers and restarts the wifi AP as needed.

To be fair this can go the other way too. There are some big boondoggles caused by upper management listening to IT when they said they needed to make huge investments in refactoring and architecture. The business ends up with a new product that does the same thing, at the cost of millions of dollars that will never be recouped.

You raise a good point.

In my experience, upper management with enough years in the business do not feign as much authority in understanding how IT works. On the contrary IT people who have been with the business long enough seem to think they understand the business pretty well. They don't. And half knowledge is dangerous is indeed a wise saying.

So even though those system architects buzzing with their confidence due to years of being part of the business often provide helpful insight, i would always always run crucial decisions that effect the business functionally, by business people only.

  - you now learnt

Great punchline. In the real world, no such thing was learnt. The new management that hired the consultants claim victory, and nobody remembers what got them into the mess in the first place.

hmm sadly i have to agree with you, but there is hope

But the manager gets transferred or promoted or leaves, and the new one hasn't learned this lesson.

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