Today, a project I was working on with a team for about 7-8 months got canceled abruptly. I was part of a team that was making a website version of an existing mobile app the company owned, hitting the same backend as the mobilie app and shit. Nobody was using the app, so management decided to pull the plug.

Flashback to earlier this year. I was part of a team that was working on a marketing thingy for financial advisors that connects to our bread and butter app. After about a year of adding features to the thingy and refactoring horrendous code, our team was about to start working on a big addition to the thing. We got as far as setting up the environments for the microservices when management decided to cancel all future development on the marketing thingy and everyone on the team was moved to different teams.

Before all that, I was part of a team that was working on a single page application meant to fit into our bread and butter financial planning app to make the experience of interacting with some existing stuff less shitty. I don’t remember how long that went on for, but the plug got pulled on that before any of that UI could make it to production. Most of my coworkers quit.

In my somewhat over 4 year career as a professional code monkey, the only code I’ve written for my employer that has reached development have been small tweaks and refactors to software that no longer receives new features.

The original sin of my company (besides the obvious one of being a capitalist enterprise) is that all of our software is made at the behest of the financial advisors, with minimal to no input from the end users.

I know some other users here are programmers and probably understand some of what I’m talking about. I figured this vent would be interesting and discussion provoking. Fuck, I have a few other things about the company I could talk about that people might find interesting. It’s a fintech company after all, and I’m sure the ML website is gonna be full of people who understand finance capital’s role in imperialism.

        • Muad'DibberA
          3·
          2 years ago

          Haha, the article gets into it, but proles are only “economic losers”, the clueless are the real losers who have no personality separate from the pathological organization they work for.

    • Arsen6331 ☭
      8·
      2 years ago

      I’ve heard so many stories of companies operating like this, and it always turns out badly long-term for the company, but they can’t seem to think beyond the current quarter.

      I’ve also heard stories of companies that have non-technical people make technical decisions, ultimately costing the company a lot of extra money when devs have to undo the mess made by the idiots making the decision and then redo everything from scratch.

      This kind of stuff just keeps happening. You’d think the capitalists would learn from it, but they’re incapable of learning anything and unwilling to do so.

        • CannotSleep420OP
          4·
          2 years ago

          If there’s ever a competitor who skips the financial advisors and goes to the proles (and have lots of capital) they might be at an advantage. They’d be starting with modern tech. Meanwhile there are parts of the company’s bread and butter app that are essential to its functioning and key selling points that are written in 20 year old code.

            • Arsen6331 ☭
              4·
              2 years ago

              The frightening thing is not it no longer working. If it’s worked for this long, it will most likely continue if someone is there to maintain it, but the longer software exists without updates, the more bugs are found. Eventually, someone is bound to exploit one.

    • Drive-by Lurker
      6·
      2 years ago

      That quote from OP‘s passage hits hard my friend.

      I was talking to my friend just last night about this, and how it incentivises poor quality software at places I have worked, because our priority is to push out features as quickly as possible, even when that means we accumulate a ton of code debt in the process. This then leads to a situation where developers are stretched thin between building evermore new features and fixing predictable new bugs, all while trying to keep the code debt under control. It can be pretty demoralising, unless you’re able to check out.

      Of course there are the developers who try to encourage their colleagues to insist on being given enough time to build things properly in the start, but there are limits to what they can accomplish, since the firm still needs to stay competitive, or you don’t have a job.