The Software Quality and Productivity Crisis Executives Won’t Address Reflections From the Long View – 50 Years in Software Consulting Over my five decades in software consulting, IR…
I’ve been a developer for thirty years. This is mostly nothing new. I’ve been ranting about the next quarter mentality since the early 00’s. Cool shit does get built, but it’s mostly hacky stuff that proves its value and then must be turned into the real product it pretended to be.
I’m much closer to the deliver management side of things (at least that’s what my timesheets say) and it’s still someone who has only thought about happy path stuff deciding and selling (Tia customer or to upper management) how long a project should take before there are even people to build it.
I’m ramping up a project now to replace an existing hacky React solution with a BFF/orchestration service with a Salesforce front end. It’s been scooped at 4 months since I was hired on 5 months ago. Wednesday we had a meeting to the effect that it was only scoped as a dumb proxy to rebuild the same janky solution in SF that we have in React. Except in none of the planning meetings did that ever come up. So I’ve been architecting an orchestration layer and the customer is only expecting to pay for dumb proxies. I wonder how this project is going to go…
That being said, I’m not hating the job. It’s always been this way. I’ve always had to fight with my managers to eek out decent products while working with my team on what can be compromised and removed from MPV in the how the customer will see the value and give it more phases of development to achieve the original vision. I even have a common refrain for my customers: “I want to make you happy. If my company can turn a profit from that, that’s between you and them.”
I’ve been a developer for thirty years. This is mostly nothing new. I’ve been ranting about the next quarter mentality since the early 00’s. Cool shit does get built, but it’s mostly hacky stuff that proves its value and then must be turned into the real product it pretended to be.
I’m much closer to the deliver management side of things (at least that’s what my timesheets say) and it’s still someone who has only thought about happy path stuff deciding and selling (Tia customer or to upper management) how long a project should take before there are even people to build it.
I’m ramping up a project now to replace an existing hacky React solution with a BFF/orchestration service with a Salesforce front end. It’s been scooped at 4 months since I was hired on 5 months ago. Wednesday we had a meeting to the effect that it was only scoped as a dumb proxy to rebuild the same janky solution in SF that we have in React. Except in none of the planning meetings did that ever come up. So I’ve been architecting an orchestration layer and the customer is only expecting to pay for dumb proxies. I wonder how this project is going to go…
That being said, I’m not hating the job. It’s always been this way. I’ve always had to fight with my managers to eek out decent products while working with my team on what can be compromised and removed from MPV in the how the customer will see the value and give it more phases of development to achieve the original vision. I even have a common refrain for my customers: “I want to make you happy. If my company can turn a profit from that, that’s between you and them.”