How Developers Can Fight Creeping Mediocrity

Nerval's Lobster writes: As the Slashdot community well knows, chasing features has never worked out for any software company. "Once management decides that's where the company is going to live, it's pretty simple to start counting down to the moment that company will eventually die," software engineer Zachary Forrest y Salazar writes in a new posting. But how does any developer overcome the management and deadlines that drive a lot of development straight into mediocrity, if not outright ruination? He suggests a damn-the-torpedoes approach: "It's taking the code into your own hands, building or applying tools to help you ship faster, and prototyping ideas," whether or not you really have the internal support. But given the management issues and bureaucracy confronting many companies, is this approach feasible?

Comments

Why Fight It?

[Greyfox]

Just go somewhere that sucks less. The company you're working for (Doesn't matter which one, they're all the same) would butcher you for organs if they thought it would be profitable enough. I guarantee you their marketing guys are still trying to figure out how to put a positive spin on it. You don't owe them anything, and they don't owe you anything. They understand this quite well, and you need to do the same. If you don't enjoy the part of your relationship where you get to solve neat problems and write cool code, find a job where you do enjoy those things. Or at least one that gives you enough bread that you can swallow their shit sandwich.

Re:Why Fight It?

[monkeyxpress]

This is true, but the problem is that our economy is not setup to care about compassion. Just look at the continuing problems in the Bangladeshi clothing industry. People are generally aware of what is going on, but in the end they still buy the clothes from Primark (that they don't even need). People just don't really care and so the company that skimps on worker compassion wins out in the end.

The only reason industries like technology are insulated from this sort of harsh reality is that there are still lots of tech companies that make obscene profits, so they can afford to pay workers good wages and absorb some inefficiency while keeping shareholders happy. However this does not characterise the whole tech market, and there are certainly areas now that are coming under ruthless competition.

Capitalism has always been a race to the bottom limited only by the extent to which society accounts for externalities, like paid vacation time or limited work hours. Otherwise you eventually just get the crazies on the margin dictating how the majority must work. It is really madness, especially now that the economy is largely generating pointless jobs through the whole legal/advertising/corporate industries.

Re:Why Fight It?

[Bengie]

"Union" is a dirty word because of cases like this. Someone at a local union shop was coming into work 2 hours late, strait from the bar and pissed up, then would leave 2 hours early, handled heavy equipment which resulted in some near accidents. No one told on him because he was high in the Union, but the company looked into the near accidents that got reported. Once finding out this guy was coming in late and drunk and leaving early, they fired him. A month later, the Union successfully sued the employer for firing the employee without first consulting the Union for permission. The person was rehired at his original wage and pretty much given a job to do nothing because he was always drunk. The employer finally got him to leave by offering him money to leave.

Crap like this is why people around here hate Unions.

Software engineer fails to understand business

[Anonymous Coward]

No shit, the company's going to die because an insane brogrammer asshole decides the codebase needs to cater to the whims of the twentysomethings who read about something neat on the internet. Then he burns through the development budget rewriting the code to fit the new paradigm while simultaneously failing to provide the deliverables.

Re:Software engineer fails to understand business

[preaction]

And then this developer blows away existing code supporting existing users because they truly believe that the team is catering to the wrong users (despite those users being both more numerous and more lucrative), leaving them to find another solution, destroying the team from within. No, I've never seen that happen, why?

Re:Software engineer fails to understand business

[jellomizer]

If programmers are left to their own devices, no code will ever get released, because complex systems have too many variables to test, take a long time to code, by the time you get to the end you realized you could have done the beginning better.
There are so many times I go back to my old code and say to myself what was I thinking? There is a much easier way to do this.

Sometimes it is cheaper to leave the bloat and use more hardware to compensate.

I have a lot of half done apps in production. There are thing I want to do to make them better, however I probably won't get to them by EOL because the customer is generally happy with it, and I have other higher priority projects in my queue.

Bravo

[lucm]

When I found out I couldn’t commit CSS without headaches, I rewrote the entire front-end.

Says the guy who bitches about unrealistic deadlines.

Re:Cycle of life

[rtb61]

For companies is it not quite the same. Reliable older company treats it's staff and customers well. Along comes the psychopath vulture capitalist who works out they can buy the company for more than it is worth and the dress it up for sale by trading on trust while delivering cheap crap, getting rid of expensive stuff, wiping out after sales service and support and voila big profits for a few quarters until it all goes boom but then it has been sold by then.

Reality is companies pretty much keep going until the slick psychopaths take over all full of charm and bullshit and try to fill their own pockets for as long as possible until the company goes belly up as a result of their total incompetence beyond their skill and getting employed. They of course focus all their efforts on blaming everyone else for the problems created by the psychopaths.

Want to keep companies going longer, really easy answer, start testing for psychopathy before letting new executives in the door.

Re:QMS

[Opportunist]

That's only true because you can't get ANYTHING done anymore. Of course that also excludes the creation of any shitty code. If you can't get ANY coding done, it can't be bad...

Re:Who knows best?

[Todd Knarr]

Counter-argument: Obviously management knew much better than the engineers how to run the Space Shuttle program, so they were entirely right to ignore the engineers' warnings about how freezing temperatures would affect the SRB sealing rings on Challenger and how ice strikes would affect the leading edges of the wings on Columbia.

Fuck that: most developers are customer-ignorant

[mveloso]

I work with an application where the VP of engineering burned 6 man-years on dynamically loadable plugins, a feature nobody IRL actually gives a shit about. It made the code unreadable, caused all kinds of work due to the total refactoring of the application, and caused performance to degrade tremendously.

In addition, it is practically impossible to tell what version of a plugin is correct or if it's loaded.

Why? Because he thought it was cool.

So, when developers tee off on upper management decisions that kill companies, I can swing right back on dumb engineering decisions that kill companies.

Re:QMS

[Anonymous Coward]

Please mod up. Any shithead that throws up one of these frameworks as a solution shouldn't just be fired, they should be taken out and shot. These frameworks always get corrupted to sell more management process and wind up being worse than useless - they become destructive because you keep repeating the same shitty ineffective safeguard procedures and filling out more and more paperwork for more and more teams only to waste time and find you have none to actually build anything. FUCK!