I work now for a long history smaller organization that formalized management and organization in the past 4-5 or so years. I joined midway of this - looking my way out now - and the focus on unconnected details only was odd right from the beginning. I attributed this to me being new and can't see the whole picture, digged into discovering my immediate vicinity. But after a year seeing we are still being obsessed only about those plenty of items that fit into a sprint multiple times remained sick to me. I discovered several embarrasing mistake in design of approaches, interaction or implementation that made me scared: how this went through at all, and how it remained there for so many years? Is this used at all actually?! People should desert us not paying for such nonsense (shit, actually). Reported these mistakes in our issue tracking system and those fit into less than half of a sprint landed back on me sooner or later, almost all. Not those first being very serious, but those fit into the schedule (but mixed in seriousity at least, those being serious first). My takeaways:
- Seriousness and functionality is not the primary concern, company management is!
- Others (about 2 dozens of engineers) did not take the effort to report. I am not brighter than them, I was novice in that environment and codebase and the actual technology, also what I was reporting stands out on usage level only, no tecnological knowledge necessary.
- Apparently problems are positioned proactively on blind spot to remain unrecognised. There must be a serious level of ignorance involved.
The company lived through decades of difficulties, never had investors but built and run by the increasing number of enthusiastic loyal people. The company organization was non-existing compared to today's norms meeting contemptuous looks from today'n collaborative organizational ninjas. I am sure several of the problems stems in the casual running of the organization, but the reorganization is not helping but making things worse, preserving, leaving in. The reorganization made the company look much shinier though. It looks much improved.
As I later learned the reorganization was needed for selling the company. The founders pushing retirement age and want to cash out. Even my employement was part of that show, fitting into making the company look similar to trendy ones clueless investors can find appealing based on the facade. We are agile in all sense, we are technologically advanced (AI feature is pushed in for the sake of it), our recruited HR professional is like all other, we are uniquely successful like all others, we are team, we care of employees a lot, we have workplace well-being taken the most seriously (just like everything else in HR), we are family in matching uniforms smiling happily into the camera in a team building excercise, and above all we have top notch marketing with thick flow of photographically illustrated success stories and dynamism.
And practically our backlog does not contain serious bugs.
For the matter of how users stay with us my running theory is that there is no better choice than this. Others are similar (also the lock-in effect to something they learned and invested in is there). I see complaints, I see angry complaints now despite me being disconnected from the client facing report system, I see their efforts for trying to make it work, finding workarounds of workarounds only reporting when the combination of workarounds collapse. They try to use it, they need something like this. I feel their efforts, this is what I am doing in increasing level with Windows, and the various software tools I use. Those look similar on the surface, increasingly so and it deteriorates as we speak.
- Seriousness and functionality is not the primary concern, company management is!
- Others (about 2 dozens of engineers) did not take the effort to report. I am not brighter than them, I was novice in that environment and codebase and the actual technology, also what I was reporting stands out on usage level only, no tecnological knowledge necessary.
- Apparently problems are positioned proactively on blind spot to remain unrecognised. There must be a serious level of ignorance involved.
The company lived through decades of difficulties, never had investors but built and run by the increasing number of enthusiastic loyal people. The company organization was non-existing compared to today's norms meeting contemptuous looks from today'n collaborative organizational ninjas. I am sure several of the problems stems in the casual running of the organization, but the reorganization is not helping but making things worse, preserving, leaving in. The reorganization made the company look much shinier though. It looks much improved.
As I later learned the reorganization was needed for selling the company. The founders pushing retirement age and want to cash out. Even my employement was part of that show, fitting into making the company look similar to trendy ones clueless investors can find appealing based on the facade. We are agile in all sense, we are technologically advanced (AI feature is pushed in for the sake of it), our recruited HR professional is like all other, we are uniquely successful like all others, we are team, we care of employees a lot, we have workplace well-being taken the most seriously (just like everything else in HR), we are family in matching uniforms smiling happily into the camera in a team building excercise, and above all we have top notch marketing with thick flow of photographically illustrated success stories and dynamism.
And practically our backlog does not contain serious bugs.
For the matter of how users stay with us my running theory is that there is no better choice than this. Others are similar (also the lock-in effect to something they learned and invested in is there). I see complaints, I see angry complaints now despite me being disconnected from the client facing report system, I see their efforts for trying to make it work, finding workarounds of workarounds only reporting when the combination of workarounds collapse. They try to use it, they need something like this. I feel their efforts, this is what I am doing in increasing level with Windows, and the various software tools I use. Those look similar on the surface, increasingly so and it deteriorates as we speak.