Comment by kiawe_fire | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kiawe_fire | Hacker News Reader

> You may think that being on a project that will never ship and never have any or many customers is great because you’ll have a light schedule and can improve on some skills on the side...

Unfortunately, "bullshit project" and "highly visible project" are not mutually exclusive opposites.

Some of my biggest bullshit projects have been projects that had several prominent eyes watching them closely, demanding frequent status updates and demos (the subject of which was not always articulated).

Nothing worse than working on a project that you feel is doomed to fail or at least fail to meet overly lofty expectations, yet still feel entirely responsible to try to pull something, anything off.

Also, never doubt the ability of managers and even less skilled developer-leaders to concoct improperly defined software projects to solve poorly defined problems.

I've seen, multiple times, management say "I have problem {X}, and I think a project doing {Thing A} will solve it", only for the same management to have "problem drift" such that "problem {X}" morphs into loosely-related "problem {Y}", which "{Thing A}" won't actually solve, but too late -- management is now convinced that problems {X} and {Y} are virtually the same thing, and {Thing A} which was poorly conceived to begin with, can now definitely solve {X} AND {Y} if only you'd read their minds and connect whatever vague dots they have floating in their heads for them and built the proper {Thing} for it".

Wow... this comment turned out to be a rant.

tldr; I somewhat relate to this article.

The worst part is when the whole architecture has to be designed around the frequent demos.

There's never enough time to actually design anything, you have to make sure you have something to show by the end of the day.

This feels like the equivalent to the busywork example in the article. Instead of sweeping the already clean floors just to appear busy, we're scurrying to show frequent progress towards the impetuous goals set from the previous demo, for the sake of showing visible, arbitrary progress.

It would be like an architect and builder assembling a shoddy movie set facade of a house without a proper foundation or framing, just to please a client who expects to see visible, street-facing progress on a steady and consistent basis.

Perhaps it falls to engineering to educate management on setting proper expectations, and creating a proper timeline with milestones.

But much like an employee at Tim Horton's isn't often in a position to tell the boss that time spent physically recovering will be far more useful than cleaning an already clean floor, we're often put in a position of enabling improper client and management expectations, with an implied "or else".

> Perhaps it falls to engineering to educate management on setting proper expectations

This has been a consistent recipe for burnout for me. Don’t do it. Nothing will change because “you’re not paid to think about these things”. You’ll spend your energy talking to a wall and become a target because you’re threatening the status quo.

Better spot this kind of environment early and leave as soon as you get a whiff. It’s not worth your health and they’re not interested in improving anything.

Frustrating to read that, because while I've seen enough to generally believe that, there's always a few counter-examples to prove that "no, see, they're listening and really want to change. how can they change/improve if you won't even voice your concerns?" And yet I've seen it happen relatively rarely that trying to find that needle-in-a-haystack is often not worth it, as you say. Just take note and make plans to move on.

Never happened to me in my 10+ years in industry.

Things usually get that way for a reason and that reason is that no one who matters is interested in fixing things. And those who suffer these inefficiencies usually have learnt helplessness and made themselves ok with the situation (or left after the polite amount of time, 6–24 months depending on the country)

Even then, the chances of the org being open to change are very slim as we both seem to have experienced. Do you really want to put your health on the line for a small chance at fixing a company that’s not even yours and isn’t very likely to reward you for the waste reduction anyway? I know I don’t and quit rather than try to fix.

I'm going back closer to 25 years, and a lot of my experience has been in smaller orgs (less than 50 people). I think I've seen this work once in a larger orgs (>1000 people) but the core issue at stake was overall pretty small in the scheme of things.

I was on a project that had "board level visibility" once, at a Fortune 500 company. Once I dug into a bit, I'm not even sure what they were shipping, other than a minor upgrade to an existing project. Also, it turned out that like 6 people at the company actually used the product, although it integrated with pretty much everything in the supply chain.

This project also was planned to have a Phase I and Phase II, and they ended up eating all the budget and time in Phase I and ... I guess Phase II wasn't really all that important?

Ahah, you're lucky if Phase II never happened.

Usually it's planned to build on whatever foundations were built in Phase I. But by the time you actually get to Phase II, it's morphed into something radically different and incompatible with Phase I. So you have to tear apart and rebuild all the previous work as well as you can while simultaneously trying to build the new stuff - on a tighter deadline because you're already over budget and time.

And if you don't burnout, the only thing you have to look forward to is a new Phase III, which is somehow even more unfeasible.

Hey I think you articulated your point really well, and the thing you described is something I've come across so often myself.

I've found it worth building a literal picture or map of what the hell is motivating these managers and decision makers to persist with the bs. So often it's schedules or money or hobby horses or vested interests, egos, sunk cost fallacy. Time and again bs proliferates because bs begets bs.

Fight bs by separating out the concerns into standalone problems, and season with a healthy dose of yagni.

This is precisely why I hate my job so much right now.

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