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This right here. And adding to Charlie's original note, there's people who think their entire job is to have meetings and never actually accomplish anything.
raddevus wrote: In reality, most companies are so frightfully mis-managed by the dumbest of people, who just yammer away about nothing and are completely ineffectual. However, they are quite good at lying to the bosses just above them (playing the role of sycophant). And so it goes on.
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charlieg wrote: Corporate IT spent 10s of millions of dollars on a new more flexible approach such that they never get anything done.
...but the meeting minutes looked faaaaabulous.
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(not excusing red tape)
Sometimes companies try different management approaches and it kind of goes way too much into a direction before they need to scale back.
CI/CD = Continuous Impediment/Continuous Despair
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sure. but when the goal is "have we documented everything" vs did we fix the elephanting problem or request? Stuck on stupid. And the money marches on.
Don't get me wrong. The people at the top make the money because well it's just the way it works. What saddens me is the very experienced people rolling with the plan while the Titanic sinks.
For the record, this company tossed a senior vp under the bus because he was passionate and would not play along with their bs. Worked for the company since he was 18. Board hired some useless turd. Stock down $40.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I spent 1 year at a large company and went crazy waiting for work and then approvals when I did do said work.This is why I only work for small companies (less than 100 people but preferable 25 ish people). When you hardly have enough revenue to pay the people that are there, everybody has to work and do multiple things. You learn more when there is nobody else to do the work. When a company gets to big, I'll move on to somebody that actually needs me.
Hogan
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Agree - please start your own company. 
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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charlieg wrote: meetings
Old saying -
Meetings where the minutes are kept, but hours are lost.
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Management. The fact that an entire stratification of a business does not contribute to the company's bottom-line in a meaningful way leads to this. They have to validate their existence so they invent a bunch of bs to waste time and make it seem like they're contributing (see: PIPs, Scrum, most meetings, micromanagement*, requests, etc).
*: Seriously, how does no one understand that if someone is hovering over you 7 hours of the day, that means THEY aren't doing anything productive?
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Jon McKee wrote: They have to validate their existence so they invent a bunch of bs to waste time and make it seem like they're contributing
Very good analysis & summary of the situation at many companies.
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raddevus wrote: Very good analysis & summary of the situation at many companies all levels of government
FTFY.
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We agree on far more than you might think. 
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LMAO
I know plenty of people who work for the government. As such, I try not to generalize and respect those people.
But some of them make it extremely hard.
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I'm a solo developer in a small company. I wfh and they let me do what I want as long as the plates keep spinning.
I still get caught up in long, boring conference calls/teams meetings though at least once or twice a week just for torture. If that's not enough, I have a retired, narcissistic, bil who calls every day at 4:20PM out of boredom (he thinks it's funny)...and because he says that I need to take a break. It's like I stop work for the day and put out the sign. 'The Doctor is In'
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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Welcome to retirement, sit back relax and enjoy not having managers and user to pester you!
I had exactly the opposite experience with my last (14 year) contract with a bank in Singapore. Senior person was an ex coder who was a workaholic and had prodigious knowledge of the industry. His protégé was a junior support tech when I started and ended up running the department. They were of the opinion that if you did not have 3 projects on the go you were under utilised. Both were brilliant to work for.
Mind you some of the meetings would bore the tits off a cow, if there were more that 6 attendees I left as it would be a waste of time.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Those who can, do. (or leave)
Those who can't, become managers.
Look at Boeing..... more managers than engineers. That's why stuff comes falling out of the sky.
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I once worked for a company who wanted a new website where customer could leave their data and that data would be processed by some third party software.
Ultimately, the software would calculate if someone got a loan or not, and the third party software would handle the loan.
It wasn't all that complicated.
If I had to make an estimate now, I'd say a few months of work, somewhere between €50K and €100K.
Project cost millions! 
The entire team of forty people were external (including me) with, of course, quite high hourly rates (at least compared to own employees).
But out of those forty people, I'm guessing at least ten were managers!
And some of those managers knew each other, some were even from the same company!
The project would go a lot smoother when one of those managers was away, but the manager directly above him was also his business associate.
We had an overall manager, a manager directly beneath him, two scrum masters whose only job it was to master the scrums (although they weren't in any scrum meetings!), two managers to manage the two scrum teams (incl. the scrum master), one (or two?) release managers, a test manager, a data manager, an architect who fancied himself a manager...
Most of those managers came there after me and didn't even take the effort to get to know the teams.
You just can't make this stuff up.
Anyway, there was some disagreement between some of the managers about who the release manager was.
Bob thought he was it, but so did John (not their actual names).
Bob was from my company, so we kept in touch, and I don't think I ever spoke to John.
But here's the thing... I did the releases on our side and had been doing it for months!
And a release for us was clicking a button (in Azure DevOps) for every service that had to be deployed.
It was so easy, I sometimes did releases (for example bug fixes) outside the "official release window" because some stuff just isn't all that critical.
So one day we had a release planned (with all third parties, etc.), and as a developer I was pretty up to date about the software changes and I simply pushed our changes to production because it didn't really matter that time, we just had to be earlier than some third party.
And about an hour later John comes in (for the first time ever) claiming "we can go live NOW!"
Now keep in mind, John didn't know me because why would a release manager know the person who does releases (he also didn't know the software or what changed).
And I'm like "I already did that."
Now John and the software architect did not like that at all because I guess I ignored (one of the?) release managers who never talked to me before in the first place.
I think the architect was only bothered because John was there, because he knew I did releases like that and he never complained.
Next time I wanted to do a release, the architect had set approvals for each and every service I wanted to deploy.
I deployed them all, probably spamming his mailbox with approval requests, and told him he could do releases from now on if he wanted control so much.
A few months later my contract ended and didn't get renewed.
I was so happy to be out of that managerial hell hole I didn't even mind the one week notice and losing income 
The people who did actual work (not the managers) were pretty pissed they let me go.
One even said "while everyone is playing ping pong, Sander does all the work!"
But I guess by that time my down to earth work mentality stepped on too many fragile manager egos
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Age old adage: "as companies approach the size of government, they approach the same efficiency".
2. The problem was diagnosed to be too much bureaucracy, so they assigned a bureaucrat to solve it.
>64
It’s weird being the same age as old people. Live every day like it is your last; one day, it will be.
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I see that in operation every day in software development. The primary cause comes from the trend where non-technical managers have decision-making power over the technical (development) team.
They took QA out from under the development manager, so now a QA manager has authority to dictate to development how to manage the SDLC, even though QA rarely has the knowledge, skills, and abilities that software engineers do.
Then, non-technical CxOs decided that the one(s) in charge of software engineering decisions (e.g. CTO, VP Software Development, etc.) did not need to have the depth of knowledge, skills, and abilities that the senior software engineers do.
The end result is having non-technical people making poor and uninformed technology decisions based primarily on management techniques suited for manufacturing production lines.
Hence, since meetings can be useful tools for non-technical business operations, they wrongly think they are productive for IT and software engineering.
Lots of meetings (including daily standups) create great inefficiencies and lower productivity and quality. The intellectual rigor needed in software engineering and IT in general is easily derailed by too many meetings interrupting the day.
I have seen the decline in code quality in several companies over the years from this non-technical business management approach.
The decision making roles, that directly interface with the business end (sales, marketing, etc) of a company need to be currently proficient senior software engineers with a solid business understanding and the ability to translate “geek speak” into the language of business, so that non-technical business types can understand.
The business side of a company should limit their involvement to defining requirements in a timely manner and leave the technology decisions (and costs within a budget) to those who fully understand the technology across the entire life cycle.
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Interesting analysis and it fits with what is going on inside said corporations. Tasks that should be trivial go on and on and on. The good news is that the engineering "supervisor" is very technically adept and does a good job of shielding the developers from excessive meetings.
Charlie Gilley
“They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759
Has never been more appropriate.
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I have never worked with a team of developers.But as a young just graduated Pharmacist I worked for a family owned company that went mega corporate. 12 local pharmacies to multiple states with over 300 pharmacies. Before I went to pharmacy school I mowed Eddie Schuman's lawn Eddie had a daughter who married Sheldon (Bud) Fantle. I also mowed Bud's lawn. Bud was the president of the empire. When we went from a Royal Typewriter to computer I was in my element and learned how to break in to the system software. I taught the computer to write my order it had a counter that every time you sold 100 tablets of a medication it increased the counter and would print a report on how many to buy. No one even the IT guy knew about this function. How did I learn most of this I call Honeywell who wrote the software. I was dam lucky I got 2 guys who were very helpful and friendly.
Because my pharmacy was in a highly competitive area 5 pharmacies within a 7 mile area I decided to create my own prices. I took that store from 150 prescriptions a day to 450 prescription a day. This caught local managements eye. I knew not to spill the beans or I would be GONE. But one day I showed the IT guy who I was friends with how I wrote the order. He passed this information on to Bud. Then one day I started working and all the prescription prices were increased by 35% or more depending on the volume of he medication. WHAT the Heck was going on ? ? Check the price file and all my lower prices were replaced we are talking days of work. YEP I called BUD and went off about the prices.
He said I understand you have your own price scale in the computer BUSTED
Then he said calm down. I have one question why has no one else called me about this?
I said they know but are too afraid to complain.
A few hours later Bud called back and said his son who was part of the company was messing with the computer and had made a mistake. During this few hours my local manager called and said "I don't believe it you called Bud" I was offered a better store which was not doing a large enough volume but Mr. Hoover (the Sweeper guy) was a customer nice fellow.
I moved on to Grand Canyon yes I lived inside the park. Installed a computer in the little pharmacy. HOW Called the guys from Honeywell and bought a used desktop system and printer for $500.00 When I got the store at GC we did 30 prescriptions a day took it to 200 a day by treating the people in the community like what Bud Fantle & Mr. Hoover had taught me.
That's my Story and I am sticking to IT
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Cool story! Too bad it's already way back here and fading fast...but that how it goes in the lounge.
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
"Hope is contagious"
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In my experience in over fifty years, I have observed that the type of person who earns a BBA or an MBA and aims to rise into corporate management often becomes a problem rather than becoming an asset. Many have either an ego problem or a hubris problem or both. The Business Administration coursework leans heavily on case studies and simple-case problems. They usually start in sales, marketing, or finance. They have little-to-no practical experience in the complexity of running a real enterprise. Their best skill is selling themselves to human resources and middle management -- employees who are desperate for someone to fix the mess left behind by the last idiot they hired and who just left to screw up another company. They think they know what they are doing, but in reality, they are starting way out of their depth.
A few of these BBA and MBA idiots will survive and even thrive, but most will move on to another company, leaving a significant amount of damage to the company they are leaving.
Why does upper management allow this to happen? Because upper management consists of those that thrived and learned. Often, they have the eternal optomism of a salesman or a marketeer.
__________________
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept that there are some things I just can’t keep up with, the determination to keep up with the things I must keep up with, and the wisdom to find a good RSS feed from someone who keeps up with what I’d like to, but just don’t have the damn bandwidth to handle right now.
© 2009, Rex Hammock
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They had a really great conductor.
I'll get my coat.
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First thing I thought
GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X
The shortest horror story: On Error Resume Next
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