I don't know how we're supposed to be "productive" when they keep imposing new "processes" on us every week.. I started with a greenfields project four years ago to totally revamp a certain online portal for an established multi-national. We were pumping out features at a steady rate for a long while using continuous integration. But then the started demanding we add more infosec testing, sign off of multiple stakeholders for each new feature both in the requirements gathering phase and again at the testing and deployment phase. Things that used to take one two-week sprint to get into production now takes three months because it takes literally two weeks to get everyone's signature before you can start on a feature, and another four weeks to get everyone to sign off on the release. Meanwhile we are also now prevented from accessing any of the development servers remotely so the only way to test a small change is to create a pull request, which needs to be reviewed by a handful of "leads" and then deployed. You then need to perform a test, and then ask someone from DevOps to pull the logs for that request to see what it did. it takes about 30 minutes each time instead of it being instant on your local machine.
I never started with a greenfields project at any company so far, I envy you at this point. It appears to be the case that the more an organization grows the more layers some has to go through. including office poitcs and drama. I just wonder if there is any big company where processes are done efficiently and quickly,
It is totally up to the organizational leaders to decide whether their software engineering practices achieve their goals. I agree that long feedback cycles with asynchronous workflows and team coordination is a major barrier for rapid releases. If your organization wants rapid release cycles but fails to achieve them, first then can it be concluded that something wrong. In general an organization should strive for rapid release because it gives a competitive edge. However, it depends on how conservative/innovative the domain is.
Web development was much easier 10 years ago, you just had to know JS, some DOM manipulation and maybe jQuery to speed things up. Nowadays we're bombarded with shinier frameworks every week and I don't even understand why we need them anymore. I've always strived for learning how the lower level stuff worked before moving upwards on the abstractions, maybe that's why so much abstraction make me feel lost. I don't know man, feels like we've been building castles on sand.
2nd tier Wall Street white collars whom never get permitted into Wall Street rush into the web dev industry, which dictate the tools into a mess. They are not builders, they are KPI tech bros. They like shit, upvote shit, and now shits everywhere and no one can clean them up.
Programmers have to decide if we want to be more proactive in the direction of the organization as a whole, rather than trying to keep our heads down and hope leaders make the right decisions. They haven't, they don't care to, and they've proven they won't start to care. Somewhere in the last 15-20 years we decided to let managers tell us that we don't understand the product because we're "coders" and don't know how to deal with people, or handle business. That's obviously ridiculous, but it's up to programmers -the people with the actual ability to create- to take it back, or we need to start our own organizations, and not bloat them with 200 web developers for an eCommerce website and 50 "product managers". We need to start making our way out of these inefficient organizations like yesterday. A lot of these new frameworks come from programmers just having too much time on their hands. Let's get back to building.
I am also very curious at what time exactly we as developers let the management people take over us. And as you stated, since you as a single dev cannot change a whole organization on your own, the proper way to do so is by starting your own organization.
@@debugmeplease It was accelerated around the time the learn to code movement began, what with Bill Gates, Zuck and others started becoming famous for software, and the time when the word spread that Steve Jobs didn't have a degree, etc. At that time, some flocked to tech because they realized it is a space where if you want to make something, you can just create that thing. But others flocked solely to try to make money and gain status. This was during the hyper growth/ blitzscaling era of tech startups, early YC days and whatnot. It brought in a lot of managers -- product managers, the eng manager that doesn't code, new names for executives such as Chief Creative Officer, and other bullshit
"Things are messed up" because we made them be. Some time ago I had to re-deploy an old project (~5 years old) using an old Django version and Gulp. Python dependencies were loose and pip wouldn't figure out how to install everything. The gulpfile was using plugins which were not on the packages.json file (???). I had to waste about 5 hours to figure out how to make the thing run. Bro I was pissed.
I don't know how we're supposed to be "productive" when they keep imposing new "processes" on us every week.. I started with a greenfields project four years ago to totally revamp a certain online portal for an established multi-national. We were pumping out features at a steady rate for a long while using continuous integration. But then the started demanding we add more infosec testing, sign off of multiple stakeholders for each new feature both in the requirements gathering phase and again at the testing and deployment phase. Things that used to take one two-week sprint to get into production now takes three months because it takes literally two weeks to get everyone's signature before you can start on a feature, and another four weeks to get everyone to sign off on the release. Meanwhile we are also now prevented from accessing any of the development servers remotely so the only way to test a small change is to create a pull request, which needs to be reviewed by a handful of "leads" and then deployed. You then need to perform a test, and then ask someone from DevOps to pull the logs for that request to see what it did. it takes about 30 minutes each time instead of it being instant on your local machine.
I never started with a greenfields project at any company so far, I envy you at this point.
It appears to be the case that the more an organization grows the more layers some has to go through. including office poitcs and drama.
I just wonder if there is any big company where processes are done efficiently and quickly,
It is totally up to the organizational leaders to decide whether their software engineering practices achieve their goals. I agree that long feedback cycles with asynchronous workflows and team coordination is a major barrier for rapid releases.
If your organization wants rapid release cycles but fails to achieve them, first then can it be concluded that something wrong. In general an organization should strive for rapid release because it gives a competitive edge. However, it depends on how conservative/innovative the domain is.
Funny enough productivity kills productivity
Sounds like goverment...
@trumpetpunk42 funny enough we're actually working on a project with the government but sadly this crap predates the current project.
Web development was much easier 10 years ago, you just had to know JS, some DOM manipulation and maybe jQuery to speed things up. Nowadays we're bombarded with shinier frameworks every week and I don't even understand why we need them anymore. I've always strived for learning how the lower level stuff worked before moving upwards on the abstractions, maybe that's why so much abstraction make me feel lost. I don't know man, feels like we've been building castles on sand.
"feels like we've been building castles on sand" - so true!
2nd tier Wall Street white collars whom never get permitted into Wall Street rush into the web dev industry, which dictate the tools into a mess. They are not builders, they are KPI tech bros. They like shit, upvote shit, and now shits everywhere and no one can clean them up.
blame devops and scrum masters my friend
Yep, they are definitely a part of that
Programmers have to decide if we want to be more proactive in the direction of the organization as a whole, rather than trying to keep our heads down and hope leaders make the right decisions. They haven't, they don't care to, and they've proven they won't start to care. Somewhere in the last 15-20 years we decided to let managers tell us that we don't understand the product because we're "coders" and don't know how to deal with people, or handle business. That's obviously ridiculous, but it's up to programmers -the people with the actual ability to create- to take it back, or we need to start our own organizations, and not bloat them with 200 web developers for an eCommerce website and 50 "product managers". We need to start making our way out of these inefficient organizations like yesterday. A lot of these new frameworks come from programmers just having too much time on their hands. Let's get back to building.
I am also very curious at what time exactly we as developers let the management people take over us. And as you stated, since you as a single dev cannot change a whole organization on your own, the proper way to do so is by starting your own organization.
@@debugmeplease It was accelerated around the time the learn to code movement began, what with Bill Gates, Zuck and others started becoming famous for software, and the time when the word spread that Steve Jobs didn't have a degree, etc.
At that time, some flocked to tech because they realized it is a space where if you want to make something, you can just create that thing. But others flocked solely to try to make money and gain status.
This was during the hyper growth/ blitzscaling era of tech startups, early YC days and whatnot. It brought in a lot of managers -- product managers, the eng manager that doesn't code, new names for executives such as Chief Creative Officer, and other bullshit
"Things are messed up" because we made them be. Some time ago I had to re-deploy an old project (~5 years old) using an old Django version and Gulp. Python dependencies were loose and pip wouldn't figure out how to install everything. The gulpfile was using plugins which were not on the packages.json file (???). I had to waste about 5 hours to figure out how to make the thing run. Bro I was pissed.
Oh boy, sounds like hell. But I agree, things are messed up.