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Comment by pjc50 | Hacker News Reader

The huge achievement of Amazon was designing a system and selling it to people where developers no longer had to pre-approve spending. Previously developers were hamstrung by purchase order requirements; it could take weeks to authorize a single computer. Now the pendulum has swung in the direction. Developers can spend unlimited amounts of company money without realizing, billed in arrears.

And in many cases this is a huge net win! After all, there's another way to waste company money invisibly: design a process which requires meetings and waiting while work is held up.

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Overall good points but don't forget that pre-approval processes resulted in asking for resources that exceeded the near term needs and once approved ongoing costs were rarely fully reviewed. I have personal experience with "enterprise" clients making a huge months long process to get server resources, reminding us that changes would take 30+ days. when the project was over and we did everything we could to let them know that the servers could be spun down or put to other uses we got back a "ok thanks!" only to find them still running our project code YEARS later. This is infra that was costing them about 1 engineer FTE per year, not even a 10$/mo toy env

We should be getting kickbacks from Amazon for all the work we’ve done for their bottom line.

We kinda do; Amazon puts upwards pressure on US engineering salaries.

What? No? They are behind all major tech companies and notoriously one of the worst employers too.

I assume all of the unused resources end up subsidizing the rest of them.

Yes but it is up to a company to control its spending. It must have a process and policy in place to deal with this. It's not Amazon's fault if it hasn't.

That's the whole ploy with Agile, isn't it? In the classical SDLC or Waterfall paradigm, everything was pre-approved and signed off, not just the cost or billing but even the software design itself. Any change in the process and the designers had to raise a change request. Agile changed all of that and now we know how bad things can get with that.

No, Agile is about tight development loops. When weaponized/used by large corporations it often times turns into a Stay-Puft man of sorts, but as someone who _hates_ processes normally, I actually kinda like it and Kanban when done well.

It basically helps keep things clean with decomposition and doesn't necessarily hamstring older devs as much while giving a good guideline for younger devs to work in. All things considered, it seems like not a bad system to me, and the team customizing the process to their own needs is nice as well.

There's a million ways for it to go wrong, but it's not too terrible on the whole I thinks. <3 :"))))

> who _hates_ processes normally,

There is no such thing as "no process"; is something you always have whether you talk about it or not. The often heard "I hate process" is counterfactual then - what it really means is "I hate process that I see as intrusive/wasteful/whatever".

The +'ves you are listing are what comes from looking at how things are actually done and doing some of it a bit more thoughtfully.

The common -ves often come from stakeholders outside of developement injecting their needs ... sometimes this is unavoidable (e.g. regulatory) sometimes it is just political, but either way there are better and worse ways to do it.

But see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39092563 ; the cost of pre-approval can be pretty large, as is the cost of change once you discover that you've frozen in the wrong thing. Agile benefits both consulting situations where the client genuinely doesn't understand their own needs, and also startups where you're building a new product and need to rapidly iterate in response to market feedback.

(Escalating costs of pre-approval, and the need to design around every possible objection, are a big part of why physical infrastructure costs so much more in the West!)

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