Comment by gumboza | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumboza | Hacker News Reader

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Many years ago I worked for a big ecommerce "platform" with about 200 stores on it. They broke their checkout for non IE users for 9 months due to a shit security banner overlapping the make payment button.

Why 9 months? Well because no one gave a shit, not because it couldn't be fixed. I was handed the defect and saw there were over 150 customer reports attached to it. Total fix and test time? 4 minutes.

Asked around. Well the CEO was on fire about it, had lost several customers, had several $million on lost sales. Was anyone made responsible? No. And that's where the problem lies. Ownership and responsibility. It's up to that to come from the top down because as hard as you can try and own something from the bottom up, some asshole will no doubt screw it up somewhere in the chain of command.

Same thing at the last 4 companies I've worked at.

I worked for a Japanese corporation, and a really major default posture, was to make sure that someone was always on the hook for $THING, at every step of the development/maintenance process.

We never ended a meeting, without making sure that everyone had specific, well-documented marching orders, and we had an insane JIRA workflow, designed especially, to ensure that someone owned the issue, at every point. GitHub issues (my preferred method, these days) would never have been acceptable, as it does not force ownership.

They had huge Excel spreadsheets, that tracked issues, and there was always a “responsible person” column.

It could be a massive pain, but things seldom “fell through the cracks.”

This sounds so familiar.

I've seen so many problems caused by not having clear direction from leaders. I once pointed out to the president of a small/mid-sized company that he was acting CTO and it was hurting the company. All department heads reported to him, but he's non-technical so it was a matter of convincing him what the best thing to do was.

What ended up happening is political shenanigans from these department heads (2 of the departments were technical) because there COULD NOT BE clear direction due to the non-technical nature of the CTO. I recommended he hire an actual technical CTO who could call the technical department heads on their bullshit and actually get a meaningful direction going between the two.

I've seen variations of the headless leadership too many times over the years.

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