Seeing like a software company
seangoedecke.com
seangoedecke.com
I think the reality is that a CEO (sort of like a president) only has about 7% control over a company. The rest of it is everybody they've hired -- they are just the brain not whole the body. However they like to believe that they are the most important thing, and quickly disregard everything they don't have the time or specialty to understand (i.e. seeing engineers as interchangeable when one may be a genius who got into MIT and could be advancing whatever field he works in -- while the other is just some random bro who took a bootcamp).
When people talk about something like google succeeding it's easier to give credit to 2 founders or a CEO than it is to track the dozens of brilliant employees who built the best search/mail/maps/ads/etc platforms
This is a strawman. No competent CEO thinks they need to be on top of your unit testing practices. The levels of legibility that companies actually aim for are much more defensible.
It is not. I once had the misfortune of glancing at the metrics that went into an "executive dashboard" for the CEO/CTO at a startup, and started paying close attention to what they talked about during the weekly all-hands. Other more recent, and widely experienced examples of micro-management by CEOs are forced RTOs and diktats forcing employees to "leverage AI" in some form or fashion, with little care about how this impacts individual teams.
> No competent CEO thinks they need to be on top of your unit testing practices.
You seem to be acknowledging that such CEOs exist, but you built an escape hatch by labeling them as not competent. Your second sentence appears to follow the first, but it doesn't, and is a an unfalsifiable tautology.
Many companies run in such a way that there is no bucket for "engineers get to do stuff they know is important x% of the time." So what happens is that things that executives don't understand the significance of all get 0 time allocation. Other teams may be told they aren't allowed to work on something owned by the CI team (again often for legibility reasons).
This is how I work at a "startup" that has just a single test environment that everyone has to share after 10 years of existence.
The CEO definitely felt he needed to be involved with these practices, to forbid them.
However I find most rules have a decent enough reason. Let's say you need 2 cose reviewers. This is to avoid mistakes going into prod. Not many reviews are rejected but if you had no code to reviews to prod I bet there would be more outages and cowboy code slings.
So it acts as a forcing function. Now I dont need to break that rule because lots of other things are not degenerate. But maybe I do one day. Maybe 90% of my team get pulled away to some high severity incident and so we left in the team cant get the reviews. Maybe we need to break the rule for a day to get a critical fix out. I think yhat would be OK because balancing the reason for the rule with the reason for the fix and the reason we cant follow the rule.
If there are rules you cant understand and feel like pure bureaucracy then I leave. Worked places like that where someone has a pet process and they'll shout "you holding it wrong". For most it is SCRUM but there are other ones. The people running things care more about process and ego than actual progress. Then leave.
I have hundreds of unit tests for Tritium, but it wasn't until I started writing a blog using it[1] that I started finding qualitative bugs that weren't picked up (and would be really hard to pick up) with unit tests. They were illegible.
I think this is why indy game dev is resilient to market economics where other software verticals become winner-take-all. Game devs are able to make their products qualitatively better because they dogfood so well. They also, as alluded to in the article, have a smaller "enterprise" surface area which requires so much legibility.
Truth is, you need both qualitative and quantitative measures.
The tighter feedback loop that helps to answer that question comes from dogfooding.
GC isn't really incompatible with games, for the overwhelming majority of games, it's basically a non-factor in performance if you spend even the slightest amount of time on performance.
It's kind of similar to native code - don't allocate too much, reuse resources, don't leak them uncontrollably.
It's only a problem when you need guarantees (i.e. the game should never drop a frame) but basically no game fulfills that nowadays and it isn't a player expectation.
When saying these words aloud (or even on HN) many will reinterpret them as "tests are worthless". It's hard to reorient to "tests are incomplete". I'm not sure why this is such a difficult concept to understand. Unless you're omniscient, how can they be complete?
People need to understand, you cannot measure anything directly. You are always doing so by proxy. If you do not know the limits of your proxy then you're only allowing yourself to be blind to foreseeable problems.
So, tests are hints, not proofs. They prove correctness in narrow areas, but not completely. Worse, you cannot test unknown unknowns. Which, as you suggest, is why dog fooding is such an important part of the development process. You aren't just a developer, you need to be a user and an adversary. You should try to see your programs from as many perspectives as possible. This too won't get you to full coverage, but it'll get you a lot further than just tests and it'll help you find what tests need to be created.
If you're just doing TDD, you're just applying Goodhart's Law
Maybe it's the mathematician in me who enjoys building models of abstraction.
Not sure in which vein you meant: 1. Humans exhibit some behavioral patterns.
2. Cognitive bias where the brain thinks that there is a pattern when no such pattern exist.
I think you meant the second one. I used to think I am good at noticing patterns. But then I realized that this perception about myself clouded my vision of looking at a given problem or system because my brain tried to pattern match problems and solutions. While it worked in some cases, it did not in others. And just telling myself that while I think that there's a pattern here, there may or may not be a pattern helped- just being aware of cognitive bias.
There's definitely a lot of differences but I think the larger a business becomes the more government like it becomes. Or at least it appears that way to me. I mean they're both very bureaucratic
In some countries they also have the burden of being legible to outsiders. Between the shareholders (voters) and journalists etc there's a lot of process that has to be transparent.
This transparency is legibility driven to extremes. If an enterprise kills a project (think Windows Phone) its done, and we move on. If a govt kills a project there's a lot of external attention on what went wrong, who's getting fired (or going to jail) and how "our money got wasted".
So yes, as things get bigger they matter to more people. The more people involved the more every single thought and action has to be meticulously detailed.
Which is party why (democratic) govt is soooo bad at actually getting anything done. Feudal govts, and autocratic businesses, get a lot done - much of it quickly. It might not be good. It might be motivated my enrichment not care, but it gets done fast.
A good autocrat moves the needle, and things get a lot better very quickly. A bad autocrat achieves his goals, often at enormous cost to the organization (which may not survive. )
Autocrats don't automatically execute faster.
Similar to what you suggest, many say history is written by the victors. But instead history is written by those who can write and survive. There's not much written from the perspective of a commoner for most of history. But where those writings survive, the situations do not appear pleasant.
What solved all those things you list was industrialisation and (arguably) capitalism*, but capitalism itself is tens of thousands of village-sized autocratcies** where each has the freedom to try things and fail (though even that varies with time, hence debtors' prison), and back then people were still working out what "workers rights" and "health and safety" meant, hence the radium girls, or children being crushed by the power looms they were paid to clean while they were still running.
To illustrate your list with e.g. food, what solved food was the Haber-Bosch process, which is responsible for about half the nitrogen in our bodies today; the British Empire thought famines were nature's way of finding balance.
* the argument against capitalism here is the Soviet Union; the counter-argument is that the Soviets could literally just look at and copy what already existed by that point; the counter-counter-argument is that they also invented some stuff of their own; the counter-counter-counter-argument is that vanishingly few of those examples were actually state-of-the-art, and the only ones I can even think of is the first half of the Space Race.
** most corporations are not democracies; the rare ones which are, are "worker co-operatives": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
> Which is party why (democratic) govt is soooo bad at actually getting anything done.
All that happened under democracy.
So I call BS to claims that democracy means the government is so bad at getting things done. Perhaps you're pointing the finger at the wrong variable.
> A good autocrat moves the needle, and things get a lot better very quickly. A bad autocrat achieves his goals
But if these autocrats were as good as you suggest then it begs the question of why the Industrial Revolution and many of the great leaps forward didn't happen under them? Or why during the rise of democracy in the west did the remaining monarchies and autocrats not also flourish? Post WW2 why did the top down economies of the USSR and China also not see such success? (China didn't succeed until much later, when it opened up) Those countries across that same time that democracies made such advancements did not win out.
You can say that maybe those leaders weren't the best, but we're talking about many generations here. So then what? Benevolent autocrats are rare? That seems like a great flaw.
You also forget the old cliché: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. History has shown that there were many kings and rulers who sought to do good and do good by the people, yet in these efforts caused great disaster. You could take the Four Pest Campaign as a relatively recent example. It was definitely implemented with good intentions but ended up being one of, if not the, greatest environmental disasters of all time. Estimates are that between 1% and 10% of the population at the time starved.
This is not to say that democracies have not also caused great harm. One needs not believe there is a global optimal solution to such a complex problem, but that does not mean certain solutions aren't strictly better than others. A benefit to democracies is that it is difficult to bury the mistakes. They say history is told by the victors but that's not entirely true. History is written by those who write and the writings that can be preserved. In democracies this is available to far more people. It is unlikely that you have an accurate understanding of the daily lives of those who lived more than a few hundred years ago. No one was recording that.
On paper I think the idea of a benevolent autocrat sounds good. But in reality there are so few examples of benevolent autocrats who made their citizens lives better. Sure, many built great monuments but that's not the same thing. It is simply difficult to role effectively over so large of an ecosystem. The world is too complex for one man to make informed decisions. I'm sure if you are honest with yourself you'll find that even far smaller tasks, ones you may be apart of, share this feature. When a single mind cannot handle all the complexities, you must turn to a collective. But a feudal society is not a dictatorship, even if it appears so locally
Imperial Germany was a practically feudal political system and yet it still managed to drive some of the most important inventions of its time and rivaled the UK and US in its economy. France under Napoleon III was by no means democratic, but had no trouble growing its economy.
More recently China has moved from an almost purely agricultural society to a fully industrialized country entirely under the auspices of an authoritarian communist party. Opening up and reform still happened under autocracy, it did not lead to any further political freedoms. The Soviet Union actually did have tremendous growth during the Great Depression but of course also stagnated after WW2 (perhaps due to its very high military spending trying to keep up with the US).
I think in general there is just a correlation between economic growth and democracy, but that they are not causally related (democracy might rather be caused by economic growth, but that is still debatable).
I think you're conflating "governments were democratic at a time these things happened" with "the government did these things directly itself via its institutions".
Of those achievements, only the space race was actually executed by the government, and it's not a great counter-example because it was done purely to compete with the achievements of an autocratic government (the USSR).
The rest was private sector efforts. It wasn't a government institution that built toilets.
> it begs the question of why the Industrial Revolution and many of the great leaps forward didn't happen under them?
They did. USSR famously went through forced industrialization.
> Of those achievements, only the space race was actually executed by the government
> The rest was private sector efforts
(1) The comment you're replying to didn't say autocrats were "good", they said they were "fast".
(2) Authoritarian failures are also present in capitalism, because most corporations within capitalism are top-down organisation, "my way or the highway" from whoever your manager is, and most corporations fail quickly. The reason this works anyway is that society benefits because of the out-sized benefit of the few which succeed wildly; on a global scale there's something similar, with ~200 experiments called "nations" rather than "corporations", and right now the world is mainly getting richer and cleaner because of the outsized success from China — because the economic policies of China happen to be the ones which work, not because China's the most free.
Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".
> Consider a recent cliché: "Move fast and break things".
The "move fast and break things" strategy is a fantastic strategy when you are approaching a problem and trying to figure it out. But if you don't go back and clean things up when you do then you're left with a lot of junk and dead weight. A lot of technical debt builds up this way. It's slow and no singular instance is to blame. Just like how you don't get fat by eating a single cookie. Hell, you don't get fat by eating an entire fucking cake in one sitting. You get fat by doing so repeatedly and by not doing things to mitigate that buildup.
You can't run fast when you're fat. And you don't get fat overnight. It is slow. Maybe you gain a pound a week and lose a second on your mile time every day. You likely won't notice such effects. But by getting fat you have to work so much harder to move fast.
This is true for weight, software, countries, and all sorts of things. Professional athletes spend far more time on maintenance and implementing good habits to ensure nothing slows them down. But often we look at those things as if they provide no progress. Maybe they don't move us literally forward, but they are definitely key to doing so. Let's not make this mistake
> It's pretty hard to move fast when you're wading through a pile of garbage.
One of the key things about autocrats, their defining characteristics even, is they get to disregard any law they want to.
This is not fun for anyone relying on that law. It is not somewhere sensible people will choose to invest in.
But it is fast.
Technical debt is a fine example, but you know what? Easy debt fuels capitalism. I've seen one codebase that had an incompetent mutilate it for something like a decade, and another that was ISO 9001 rated. The train-wreck with all the debt was still easier to handle and faster to implement features and fix bugs within, and lasted in prod much longer than most software companies.
Lots of governments keep promising the equivalent of finally refactoring the old codebase, it's hard and slow but some even make progress. Autocrats? They can just order them all gone. And when it turns out that wasn't a good idea? It was a bad idea done fast.
> Again, you're arguing here on the basis of quality.
Or have a made some bad assumption that quality isn't relevant at all? That you're arguing fat void of all correctness? If so, I'm not sure there a meaningful conversation to have at all
But instead if there's any measure of quality that must be satisfied, even if the bar is on the floor, then reread my comment again. I'm afraid you're reading what you want to read rather than what I wrote. You're going to have to work with me here as I can't beam my thoughts directly into your head nor am I willing to write a novel in reply. I've already been quite verbose
> you're missing two things here:
> (1) The comment you're replying said they were "fast".
> (2) Authoritarian failures are also present in capitalism
> success from China
But when looking at China make sure you consider 2 things
1) China didn't succeed until it opened up and started working with the West. The policies from Deng greatly reshaped China. A man Mao kicked out of the party twice and was called a capitalist. He was the one who created the special economic zones they have today (like Shenzhen). It's something his successor continued and even Xi has. Interpret this how you will, but China's wealth didn't happen until these events and the wealthiest regions are either those zones or incredibly close to them (like Shanghai being sandwiched by two)
2) it's much easier to play catchup than lead. I expect every programmer to recognize that building a flappy bird game is pretty easy, but doing it first isn't. China has been done great on this front and hasn't fallen for the middle income trap like many others but they're not completely out of it yet. It looks like they'll succeed but be careful in counting your chickens before they hatch.
(You should also consider that information is distributed differently. As we've previously discussed and others mentioned. While in the US all our atrocities are out in the open, this is not true for autocracies. 64 (Deng was in power at that time) is a much more taboo topic than say, the Trail of Tears. In America we're quite self aware but even forget that our northern neighbors did something similar, but worse. But Canada isn't even trying that hard to hide those things. Even a much more open country like Japan is not so open about things like their invasion into China and Korea during WW2. You're aware that you should be careful in interpreting history of America as told by America, but such care must also be given when reading about others. Propaganda isn't uniquely American and we're not even that good at it)
But regardless I'm not sure what China matters in this discussion. I said
> there are so *few* examples of benevolent autocrats who made their citizens lives better.
And I want to restress something from my first comment. With great power comes great responsibility. In other recent threads we've been talking about government overreach and Flock has been in the news a lot lately. So the concept of Turnkey Tyranny gets discussed. This is still relevant here. One of democracies greatest flaws is that has the power to turn into an autocracy or any other form of government, at the will of the people. So the concept here is that you do not want to give strong powers to benevolent leaders because you cannot guarantee the next won't be. The core idea here still holds true under autocracies. The trouble is, a Turnkey Tyrant is always on the table for those countries and there is no defense. This key can turn even with the same person in power and is frequently turned with a belief that the ends justify the means. It's an all too common occurrence in autocracies, happening with people we've discussed and many of those benevolent autocrats we alluded to.
> I actually did address this. It is my opening paragraph
This opening paragraph?
I find this and similar claims quite astounding. The last few hundred years seems to have been some of the most productive times for humanity. The great technological leaps forward. In that time we went from an agricultural society where many were malnourished, illiterate, and life expectancy was far lower (not only was the child mortality rate magnitudes higher but expectancy past 60 years old was abysmal) to a society that put a god damn man on the moon and maybe more importantly a toilet in every home.
But then you followed it with:
All that happened under democracy.
> I also addressed this, in my second to last paragraph
This one?
This is not to say that democracies have not also caused great harm. One needs not believe there is a global optimal solution to such a complex problem, but that does not mean certain solutions aren't strictly better than others. A benefit to democracies is that it is difficult to bury the mistakes. They say history is told by the victors but that's not entirely true. History is written by those who write and the writings that can be preserved. In democracies this is available to far more people. It is unlikely that you have an accurate understanding of the daily lives of those who lived more than a few hundred years ago. No one was recording that.
95% of businesses fail. How transparent are those failures? Generally not, which also leads to people making predictable mistakes like investing in bubbles.
> 2) it's much easier to play catchup than lead.
Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45516066
> (You should also consider that information is distributed differently. As we've previously discussed and others mentioned. While in the US all our atrocities are out in the open, this is not true for autocracies. 64 (Deng was in power at that time) is a much more taboo topic than say, the Trail of Tears. In America we're quite self aware but even forget that our northern neighbors did something similar, but worse. But Canada isn't even trying that hard to hide those things. Even a much more open country like Japan is not so open about things like their invasion into China and Korea during WW2. You're aware that you should be careful in interpreting history of America as told by America, but such care must also be given when reading about others. Propaganda isn't uniquely American and we're not even that good at it)
I could ramble on for a long time about how I think national self-images differ from reality, to the cost of those living in them, but I don't think it would add much over noting the current weaponisation of the word "woke" by those who want to deny all historical mistakes, and before that having grown up in the UK with "it's political correctness gone mad", and the UK's political classes' differing reactions to the destruction of two statues dedicated to two different philanthropists — one of whom was a slave trader (apparently we should be sad about the destruction of that statue), the other was Jimmy Savile (where the destruction of the statue was met with broad agreement).
Also as a Brit, lots of us have absolutely no idea why most or all of our former colonies might not like us.
> If given odds like that, which would you prefer?
In this hypothetical, am I in the aristocracy or in the working class?
If a citizen, you're still missing my point entirely, and I think the parent point too.
Illustration of why: same question but of corporations, workers vs. shareholders (the equivalent of aristocrats). What the people with the money want has very little in common with the interests of those at the (metaphorical or literal) coal front.
Move fast and break [things | laws | treaties | people]. Sucks to be the one who gets broken. Sucks more when it's broken fast. The point is, and only is, that it's fast.
Because at the heart of it it’s all the same. It’s humans acting like humans. Every person (and organization) has desires and fears. When two parties get together, balancing everyone’s wants is fun. It’s like a complicated engineering problem, except with people requirements instead, and politics is the architecture.
I think people are rad and genuinely enjoy these kinds of problems.
A group I used to work with framed it as needs and fears, and would produce a ‘conflict map’ when heading into a situation with multiple stakeholders.
The conflict map set out the needs and fears of each group, and indicated where they were incompatible.
That information was used to proactively resolve, or at least plan around those areas of conflict.
How was it a map?
The conflict maps I was exposed to were much simpler - just a bunch of wobbly circles surrounding a centra issue or event. Wobbly circle intersections denoted needs/fears incompatibility implying potential conflict.
Although this also happens in office environments, there's more accountability and continuous planning, making requirements changes something that is undesirable.
People are irrational actors way more often than they are rational ones.
> People are irrational actors
An irrational actor is one who is logically incoherent. I don't mean illogical, I mean something closer to incomprehensible.
Maybe an example helps. Let's say our actor expresses that they want to live and is trying to get to work. An irrational action would be for them to pick up a gun, point it at their head, and fire under the condition that they are fully aware that this will kill them. But instead, if the actor believes shooting themself will teleport themselves to work, then it is a rational decision.
Or another example, an actor trying to win a game of chess knowingly marches their king into a capture position. But instead if they were unaware that such a move leads to a checkmate, then they're still rational.
An irrational actor has a logic that cannot be understood. It's not about the quality of their logic, it's about the existence. Even an actor acting probabilistically has some logic, as we can quantify it (using a density function).
Basically an irrational actor is one who knowingly undermines their own goals. It's a very narrow definition. Irrational actors are logically incoherent. So
Keep in mind that our brains are made of meat that talks to itself via chemical reactions. Brains are not digital computers, and are very much an analog thing. Brains can and do make actual mistakes all the time. Like straight up "this computed incorrectly" or "there was a transmission error" kinds of mistakes.
Humans are not rational actors, and never have been. That's why economic theory so frequently fails to predict behavior in spectacular ways.
> people are irrational actors. We make incomprehensible choices all the time
I want to make it very clear to make sure we're on the same page. There is a difference between "incomprehensible" and "not understood." As an example of this difference, a neural network isn't a black box because we can't understand it, it is because we don't understand it. It's why in my examples I tried to make it very clear that the actions depended on what the actor thought would happen. Suicide cults like Wako are considered rational in this sense, even if from the outside it seems incomprehensible that someone thinking that killing themselves would beam them up into a spaceship disguised as a comet and the alien soul harvesters would reward them for doing so. The "rationality" is that __a__ logic exists, not that there is a good logic or even reasonable one.
> Even in keeping with your definition
Example, around a year a bunch of product people and like-minded engineers wanted to develop something that we believed could benefit other teams as well as ours. To fund officially (legible channel) would have been a nightmare for many reasons at the time so it was agreed that we would just do it (what OP would call illeigible channel) this required massive degree of trust and respect which this group had.
It felt like a pure grassroots initiate and not driven by top down, as such this helped the development get traction across the org, surprisingly quick in some cases.
Fast forward to today and senior management now citing this as a success story that fits into the narrative they are presenting...great..but...of course...no good deed goes unpunished!
The team is now having to retrofit the business case and justification through the legible channels, it's painful of course but in same easier as the chance of failure has been massively derisked.
One of the much more fun, satisfying and rewarding projects I have worked on in recent years.
Pretty please?
I have to ask a follow-up - there are cases, where the teams don't see any value in security at all, so they don't want anything that I'm selling. I think I know the answer to this one (namely, you need to build relationships with and convince the leads). But I am still looking for an alternative as the above is hard in all cases and impossible in some.
Anyone willing to comment for whom this is their area of expertise?
My take as a middle manager in medium sized company (but who came from a startup background) is that some structure is necessary as a company scales just for people to know how to do their jobs. You can design it lots of different ways from light to heavy, but once you go beyond Dunbar's number you can't just rely on common sense and informal communication. If you really really hate "process", you can push things pretty far, and I guess Steam would be the canonical example here, but even there you see that it heavily filters for certain personality types and the politics can be brutal if you're not part of the in-crowd.
The worst case is your auditor “fires” you as a customer. For example, https://apnews.com/article/super-micro-computer-stock-audito...
A small company, (let's say, below Dunbar's Number) has a matrix of almost all 1's just naturally. But as the company grows that matrix gets sparser and sparser- by the time you get to something like Google (180k employees plus roughly that many again contractors) you have almost all 0's with only a few 1's scattered through it. But information still needs to flow through the company, from outside a given two pizza team in, e.g. "build this not that," or from the team out, e.g "this project sucks and needs to die," or from the side, e.g. "Group Digut solved that problem that you are facing, use this package they wrote" or more personal things, e.g. "employee 24601 is awesome and needs more responsibility."
But that information is actually hugely important to the company, in an important sense all of that information is the company. So important that companies formalize the responsibilities of that information flow with managers, and formalize processes for this information to flow, so that they ensure that something is happening for all of those- that's what planning processes and promo packets and the like are all about. They are trying to make the information flow legible- the responsibility of a specific person in a specific way.
The square root of the number of people does half the work. (Think of the matrix diagonal.) With three people in a group, 1.5 of them do half the work. With 10,000 in a group about 100 of them do half the work.
Price's law also seems to be recursive. Just like Pareto's 80/20-rule.
Add Conway’s law to this and you are all set.
On the order of 100 people is very different from being on the order of 10,000 people.
There seems to have been an article on HN in the last few months that made a similar point related to building bridges of different lengths. About about every two orders of magnitude everything changed. A one inch bridge could be made out of spaghetti. A 2 yard bridge is different, a two mile bridge is different yet again. And a 100 mile bridge has to think about tectonics.
At the end of the day businesses build money machines that you put money in and you take money out from various markets. You need legibility if you want to tie all development work to how it affects how much of the market you own. And it's not quite legibility that is needed, it's accurate future market share prediction, which requires a particularly strategic form of legibility. The only way to increase market share without luck is to accurately forecast what your actions will do to your market share. But how can you do that if you have no idea what your devs are building and shipping?
We tend to make fun of incompetent business people but this is what the competent ones are doing - being super accurate in their forecast of future revenue, and forcing devs to build things that will help gain market share.
Devs often don't think about business strategy enough (as evidenced by the original article, no offense). So they aren't usually good at tying everything they do back to gaining market share. Devs who are the market audience for their app can be naturally good at PMF and going from 0 to 1, but as you scale its very hard to find devs that are also the market audience of the product they are building, so they tend to be bad at predicting how their dev roadmap will affect market share gain.
Without legibility, a team of devs can be a slot machine where you pull the lever and hope the features hit the jackpot or at least a modest return and not duds. With small bets, that's a great way to become large, but its no way to run a competitive large business.
I was an engineering manager for 25 years, and had to deal with the balance. I worked for a heavily process-driven company. It could be infuriating, but they did manage to consistently produce some of the finest hardware in the world (unfortunately, the same could not be said for the software).
I have found that writing things down, can ossify a project, but you really can't do without. Communication overhead is the single biggest killer. That's why a small team of experienced engineers, that are used to working together, can often do amazing amounts of work, and that "tribal knowledge" -that bugaboo of software process gurus- is actually a very important accelerator.
I wrote a post called "Concrete Galoshes"[0], that talks about the things that add structure and inflexibility to projects.
The single biggest lesson, is that we should be very careful about "One Size Fits All" solutions. Different types of projects need different types of overhead and structure.
True. To put a fine point on this I would add that enabling requisite communication is an exponential equation. Specifically, adding team members typically increases intra-team communication requirements exponentially as does adding teams to the organization.
> That's why a small team of experienced engineers, that are used to working together, can often do amazing amounts of work, and that "tribal knowledge" -that bugaboo of software process gurus- is actually a very important accelerator.
I believe both situations you have identified are derived from the same concepts - trust and understanding.
Trust, in that small experienced teams who have worked together for a nontrivial period of time learn in which areas each excel and where they do not.
Understanding, in that those highly effective teams value the trust established and seek to complement each other's skills.
I believe "tribal knowledge" should be an expected product of the above and is ideally captured via documentation, mentoring, presentations, etc.
More abstractly, explicit rules are a substitute for trust. You can run your family or friend group without coming up with a literal rulebook, but this already fails in a bigger village. So you first get mythical oral religious laws, then city-state laws etc. It's always a trust-substitute. But that's the only way to scale to civilization from distributed tribal lifestyle.
Being at a disadvantage in annual reviews is certainly a part of it I'm sure. Another non-trivial risk an organization must manage is retaining knowledge in a shareable form should team members transfer to other groups, take on a new role within the organization, or leave for reasons other than failed salary negotiations.
> More abstractly, explicit rules are a substitute for trust.
This is an interesting concept, thank you for sharing it (seriously). Stating it the way you have succinctly explains some of the asinine policies I have experienced in the past. Usually in large, dysfunctional, organizations I might add.
It sticks to the world view that SWE are the leafs in the graph. The assembly workers at the assembly line. Though, the author knows this isn't true, as noted in the "Legible assumptions" section.
Software engineerings are managers extending the organizational graph. With code. There are some peculiarities to it, but they are managers. A lot of problems in one domain have an analogous in the other.
> These [tiger] teams are given a loose mandate - like “stop the database from falling over every few days” - and allowed to do basically whatever it takes to get it done.
> The actual way around this problem is *illegible backchannels*.
The post seems to be based on organizations where teams aren't organized, and responsibilities aren't assigned to teams, in such a way as to allow teams to independently deliver value with minimal handoffs.
If you need to pull engineers from multiple teams to fix a problem with the database that the teams all share, that suggests that the teams' applications aren't restricted to communicating with each other over their external interfaces.
If determining which team should work on a project requires negotiating among VPs and senior managers, that suggests that the teams' responsibilities aren't clean, clear, and tied to the business's value streams.
I think a more fundamental way to address the problem of team A being blocked by team B is to organize the teams so as to minimize cross-team dependencies. I don't think the solution of illegible backchannels addresses the root cause of the problems observed by the author.
1. Teams or organized so as to minimize cross-team dependencies.
2. We notice that those projects which nevertheless do require cross-team dependencies are very hard.
3. We lionize and promote those who demonstrate successful cross-team project delivery and leadership.
4. Teams are organized so as to maximize opportunities to demonstrate this competency.
Enterprise design is all about making processes into legible functions with inputs and outputs to maximize accountability, even if it means that responsibility is spread far and wide.
The thing I've noticed is that formal rules and processes, while necessary, over the long term tend to lead to rigidity/petrification and to losing the creative spark and the ability to adapt to changes. People get so used to them that the process becomes more important than the end goal. It seems really hard to keep things fresh, alive and prevent them from falling into routine, it's like fighting entropy.
I guess money is in a way like the blood of a company but I doubt that most people are truly inspired or motivated by it, hence making money is necessary, but not a good reason in itself for a company to exist.
Decide what work should be done is just as important as the actual work, sometimes more.
For example, all of the goals quoted below are parametrized and tracked by most of large & mature companies, oftentimes daily, through NPS, cost/profit analysis, and many other "legit but inefficient" tools:
> Note that “shipping high quality software” or “making customers happy” or even “making money” is not on this list. Those are all things tech companies want to do, but they’re not legibility.
There is also insider information appealing as evidence ("Any practicing engineer knows how ridiculous this is.”), mocking ("Are they stupid? No.”) and survivorship bias (treating most small companies as "more efficient” by default) among multiple other rhetorical tricks and anecdotes. It captures the frustration engineers feel in large orgs, but then inflates that into a universal theory of how all companies operate.
1. Beware of savvy product managers (and others) exploiting illegible channels to chisel work out of naive engineers
2. Competent engineers should work on “side bets” that are outside the normal planning process
3. Getting promoted to Staff and above has very little to do with the formal job ladder
Coordination at scale is the reason, not just enterprise deals (although enterprise deals are a sub case of coordination).
Alignment is the single biggest challenge in management, at any size.
The title “DevOps Engineer” often fits a permanent role of sanctioned illegibility in large organisations. One cannot explain exactly what a “DevOps Engineer” does, because (a) you cannot _engineer_ a culture, and (b) largely these engineers do urgent and important work that cannot be planned, estimated, put into sprints, etc.
I’ve had this title through several of my roles at orgs over the years and I detest it, but nonetheless understand why it exists.
I think the more boring answer may be that in any sufficiently large organization, the only way to maintain control is through legible processes, because the sociopaths do utilize the legible processes to keep things running (and utilize the illegible processes to make deals). Without legible processes, after dunbar's number, your communication falls apart.
You manage surface area, not volume or area, and the coastline is pretty bumpy.
I would say that these pathologies come from the lack of trust, and thus the need to surveil and control. The problem of trust does not usually occur in a small team. It does not usually occur in a commune of like-minded people, too. It's not about the economy and property rights, it's about communication and game theory.
Actually knowing minutiae of what they do seems like make work to me.
We've largely managed to, in the face of corporates wishes, maintain our speed and agility. With recent rounds of layoffs, we'll see if we can keep that up I guess.
I have come out of this experience genuinely wondering how large companies manage to stay in business. I frankly think it's down to resting on laurels.
For instance, if another department needs something fixed in an API we manage, assuming the work is simple, we can usually have it fixed and live within the day. We have had issues with APIs from other teams where an API we depend on has been offline for literal months because "there is no time on the roadmap" and it took six months for, from my understanding, a service to get restarted. This happens all the time.
Every single piece of work needs to be "planned". It needs to be fit into this imaginary schedule. God forbid you turn on the lights without a plan. The number of "planning meetings", sometimes multiple days long, that should have been an async slack thread is absolutely insane.
Almost always we could have everything being "planned" done inside the time of these meetings.
> Increasing legibility thus often actually lowers efficiency - but the other benefits are high enough that organizations are typically willing to do so regardless.
I dispute the second half of this entirely. Planning the unknown has so few real actual benefits in building software as to be nil. Perceived benefits, sure. Actual? Nil. The road before you literally unfolds as you build and sticking strictly to a map drawn by the blind is literally insane.
We give this imaginary "map" of what is supposed to be happening to managers and investors. Does this result in better software? God no. The results take far longer and are far worse in quality because we stuck to a map drawn by someone without impossible knowledge of the full scope of the problem because the only way to get that knowledge is to actually work through it, and if you do that you have the product. It's literally The Halting Problem. You cannot know the scope of a problem without doing the problem.
All it does is provide management and investors warm fuzzies that they think they know what's going on when they don't.
I was drawn to tech as a young man for its logic, reason and provability. As an older man, I find it so full of cults. Cults of process, cults of personality, cargo cults. It's all the junk I wanted to get away from.
Smaller more nimble orgs that are still finding their feet have an uphill climb, but the cost of mistakes is lower
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
"Don't be snarky."
Did you have something more to add? I am definitely curious to understand more of your perspective.
Cheers.
If you don't have time to write a detailed refutation, that's entirely understandable! But if you do, I would love to read it.
I did appreciate your paragraph length comment on the matter elsewhere in this thread.
Topics age out very quickly on this site.
I have two lengths: aphorism or six pages. The graf that you so kindly praise raises more questions than it answers and I am not comfortable with that.
I am also not comfortable with spoon-feeding my own views, which are evidently idiosyncratic. At medium length, that is the effect. To marshal citations and evidence in order to re-attain objectivity really does explode the level of effort. It is worthwhile, but this is a quick-hit forum, things roll off the front page usually in about an hour or two.
The flip side of that is that there will be other opportunities.
The topics of the roles of accountants and auditors crop up much less often, which is puzzling all by itself. But you absolutely cannot talk about ERP adoption without getting into those things up to the elbows.