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Comment by joe_mamba | Hacker News Reader

I know. I work for a mid sized German company in the auto industry, and when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.

Germans just don't seem to get that successful SW was built by empowering the geeks working in "the trenches", and not by suits with business degrees in running conveyor belt assembly factories where everyone is a fixed cog that needs to follow a strict process thought out by someone above them.

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Wow. That reflects my experience with another mid sized German company in a similar industry.

Their original roadmap for their next gen products was not good and the product was getting delayed by a few months.

They brought in a new manager to fix the timeline. Instead she increased the bureaucracy. OKR tracking every other week. Hired a scrum master. Brought in external "certified code reviewers", delayed the project a little more and ended up cancelling the project within a couple of months. "Hardware products are not as profitable as proprietary cloud software as a service company anyway".

>external "certified code reviewers"

That's another big issue with Germany, is they obsess over certifications when hiring, as if they're some confidence of high quality hiring bar, when a lot of those certifications and degrees in the IT industry are just scams.

I think it's caused by the fact that firing a bad hire is super difficult past the probation period, and since HR/recruiters are clueless on screening what makes a good SW dev, so they just go with filtering for credentials to cover their asses, in case of a bad hire they can say they followed the process and screened for the ones with credentials.

That plus the german system of "Zeugnisse", which if you squint you will see that is totally against GDPR and even constitution: whereby you get marked (for life) by your employer with a document that has the same validity as any other public document, they "document" your performance (according to you current boss, anyway, in case you do not have a good relation you don't get a good certificate) in a language which is absolutely in code and not meant to be read by you.

A bad "Zeugniss" could leave you out of the work market for years, and all is needed for that is a boss that does not like you. Moreover, you can only understand that the document implies you are not good by decoding it with special tools in internet.

I hate that shit too, but the zeugniss situation is in practice not that draconical these days AFAIK I can't remember the last time anyone wanted to read what previous employers said about me,at least in software/hardware industry. Maybe it's different in more credentialed professions like medicine or civil engineering.

They just want to check that you actually worked where you said you worked in your resume, and today you have other official governmental digital records you can pull to prove that.

Well. I‘m searching now, and they are asking for it pretty much everywhere. I‘m lucky I had good relation with my boss.

What are the other documents you can get?

“ which became a 45-60 minute daily”

I remember at one company I worked they had figured out how to get a project back on track: standups twice daily and justifying everything you did in the few hours before.

What would you say...you do here? — Bob Slydell

I figure that is sarcasm.(I hope).

https://youtu.be/_iiOEQOtBlQ

To be fair, the cycle of adding overhead until efficiency improves is the norm in American companies, too. There are a handful of companies which do better but don’t make the mistake of assuming even a majority do.

> when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.

That's what you do if your goal is to blame developers for the project failing, and you double-down on management to underline the root cause as developers going off rails and thus the fix is to reign them in with management. The managers jumping on board have no downside as the project was either doomed or they flexed their superior management skills to revive the project.

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