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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And I’d be surprised if management doesn’t blame it on them when it breaks.
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.
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I worked for close to 2 years developing this platform for a customs agency, the owner pretty much wanted that thing to replace every single piece of software they used lmao. Finances, inventory management, housebill trackers, task management, you name it. Needless to say it was an absolute headache dealing with the code of that thing and a micromanage freak of an owner, also front end was developed on a propietary javascript framework from eastern europe which made it a pain in the ass to get support.
I’ve found myself in a sort of product owner role, somewhat of a go betweeen and consultant communicating with users and developers. In a sense the benefit with the project I’m involved with is that it’s a company internal ERP system and not a product to be sold. It’s absolutely critical to the future functioning of the company so there’s no chance it’ll be written off before we finish. That being said, the deadlines are absolutely absurd, upper management has no idea what we’re doing or what kind of broken company they’ve built over the years, and on top of all of that the owner just decided to spin off sales as it’s own profit center/company for no communicated reason at all.
It’s seen as an IT project but it’s far more than that. Turnover with new hires is absolutely incredible right now as people start and realize within a couple months that this company is a complete disaster internally.
One thing I genuinely am excited about is that I’ve started to work on a sort of web app for our production teams that pulls data from the ERP system, and since this web app is all based on MIT-licensed libraries it’ll be open source (at least as far as I understand these licenses). It gives me a little satisfaction knowing that at least one thing that I’ll have worked on is out there, and that my employer paid for it, especially considering all the shitty ways this company has treated us workers.
We’re scheduled to go live with the new system to start the new year. The way things are going right now, we might end the company if we do that.
I get you about management not being able to see the mess they make. You being a product owner reminds me of some dumb shit my company does. A few months ago the product owner of my team quit. This lead to me hearing talk down the grapevine that management would only hire people from outside the company to the higher paying and higher responsibility product manager role. Apparently management doesn’t give a shit about experience in a given domain and want all their product managers to be generalists. This lead to the problem of product owners having a high turnover rate once they realize they can’t advance their career beyond managing single teams. I don’t think management has done anything about this or even plan to do anything about it.
Incidentally, according to a team member of mine who’s been on the team for many years, the team I’m part of in particular goes through POs very quickly. I think he said in 3-4 years, the team’s been through I think it was at least 6 POs.
There’s almost no way a team can work like that, it takes time for a PO to work their way into a project and into a team.
It just goes to show how out of touch managers are in for-profit and capitalist owned companies in general. When the people at the top are rewarded based on quarterly stock price performance, the longer term performance of the teams actually creating value is more or less irrelevant.
Career managers also often think that management is about managing skills and not relevant experience or expertise, when in reality it’s both. It doesn’t matter what I’m doing, if my direct supervisor can’t jump in and do my job passably, I can’t take them seriously.
Luckily I haven’t had an experience like that yet, but that sounds really exhausting. When you’re working for that kind of company, you should probably just do as little work as you can without being fired (even more so than for less shit employers)
The past few months there was enough of a developer to story ratio per sprint that we could pair on shit and pick up for each other’s slack when needed. However, one of the devs said that management might spring some tight deadline shit on us that none of us have experience working on.
According to that dev, management came to the team one day and said they had to implement a single sign on for a vendor within 3 months. Bear in mind that there was already a team that specializes in authentication, but they were too busy to get it done on the stupid deadline, so they forced it on his team instead. The devs protested vociferously, but none of it mattered. Most of the devs quit and my coworker and one other dev buckled down and did it. They received no thanks for it. Within less than a year, and my coworker only heard this in a passing conversation, the company had dropped the vender that he made the SSO for and switched back to the old vender. The icing on the cake? The company had never dropped the old vender in the first place.
Wow, just utter scum
Companies probably fail on purpose to get tax write offs.
If your company has totalitarian mindset and cannot adapt to the changing economy, then the firm need to be a large for-profit firm in a Capitalist system where government intervenes in the economy to ensure that the rich 1% can free ride on the fruit of the labor from the poor 99% to sustain their uncompetitive firm and convince people that the plutocratic command economy is an example of minimal government intervention. If the senior managers in your company has no connection to the Capitalist class nor to any corrupt senior government officers, then it could go bankrupted unless it gain shady connection with the corrupt elites or use the Neo-Liberal system to conduct criminal activities in poor countries. If your company is in a real free market economy which does not characterize Capitalism in practice, then it need to adapt to maintain success.
I think it succeeds by having a close to monopoly in its niche of financial planning software.
On the bright side, there was a piece of UI I was involved in developing that was an utter abomination and could have possibly been considered a war crime had it reached end users and now it shall never see the light of day. This isn’t like when FOSS software where the UX is shit because graphic design is not the developer’s passion. This shit was designed by UX designers and approved by product.
There was a list of bank transactions that you could scroll through, and you could expand a transaction and change some of its details. If you change its category, a list of checkboxes will show up for applying the category change to other transactions that are similar. This list also was scrollable. There was a scrollable list inside a scrollable list. Neither of these scrollable lists had a scrollbar.
The button on the expanded transaction for saving the changes triggered not one, not two, but three API calls. Everything’s peachy if all the calls succeed or they all fail, but what do you show the user if it some fail and some succeed? Who the fuck knows.
There was a scrollable list inside a scrollable list. Neither of these scrollable lists had a scrollbar.
What the hell? I am one of those FOSS devs that can’t make a good UI if my life depended on it, but even I can see this is stupid.
The button on the expanded transaction for saving the changes triggered not one, not two, but three API calls.
WHY?? What the hell? They managed to screw up both the frontend AND backend design. This is next-level incompetence. That’s coming from me, a 17-year-old who doesn’t even have a proper job yet.
