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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a shop with a psycho-in-chief who thought he was Frank Underwood on House of Cards. Internal competitions were one of his favorite things, but he generally had a pre-ordained winner.

In one example we had two teams asked to deliver the same calculation enginer: - Team A: 1 dev, ~1000 lines of code, ~ 3 months but in a tech he personally hated vs - Team B: 15 dev, project manager, 100k lines of code, 18 months.. and they stole someone from Team A to basically explain the business logic to them

Team Bs solution was also on delivery 10x slower. Team B won.

A year later once he was gone, it was all scrapped and given back to Team A.

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I'm going through this same thing this very month. I personally am responsible for architecting and building a complex data store, data pipelines, and interface. This is to be used for complex targeting based on rapidly changing data.

I am doing it by myself. I'm the architect and I'm the engineer. I'm drafting the design and building it. And I did it. By myself. Inside of a month.

At the same time, another team is working on the same thing. Dozens of people on the team. Architects and engineers and a couple of data scientists. They took three months to get their first design out and it failed during testing. Their estimate to next iteration is two more months.

My design passed all the tests but one in the first trial and I fixed the remaining bugs inside of a week.

There's a good chance that the other team is going to have their product pushed into production ahead of mine, which will negate the need for mine so my code will get pushed to some archive server and sit there gathering dust.

Same goes for the azure work that I'm doing. Again alone and without any support vs our internal IT apparatus who has infinite money and can spin up temp teams with the push of a button.

And 'round and 'round it goes.

I understand some managerial shenanigans in this scenario where you might view Team A of 1 as being something of a McGyver solution. I'd expect the natural step though if you have someone solving a problem in with 10% of the staff, 1% of the code and 2x the performance would be to shift some resources to them to productionize/productize/whateverize the thing.

While in the open market the best or first product doesn't always win, it's at least a competition of cost/value/quality/marketing/timing.

Internal competition is largely personalities and politics, with a predictable winner before the timer starts. In the long run if there is enough management turnover the rational solution can win, but you are basically playing chicken with senior management to see who quits first!

Surprised Team A was still working there!

Edit: totally misread this on the first pass :-) Team A was kind of golden handcuffed so hung around for a while...

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