The worst thing is not even knowing if this iceberg won’t crack underneath all this complexity and fail miserably. The team I am on directly is very talented but we all suffer under the same strains. I was recruited into this position but the actual process was changing a lot and no one really knew how this big project would be done, so I had no idea what a giant mess it would be. I want to help but we have such strict hierarchies and silos that not only can you as a developer not suggest anything, but you may not even know who to suggest it to, if you could.
#Deltagraph wikipedia code#
I don’t enjoy just writing code to spec on a time clock and fixed budget decided by others. While some of us here are passionate about doing great work, the other teams are often random collections of contractors, often in various countries, who really have no understanding or interest in what we are doing or what our customers care about, and are just mechanical in working and making sure the billings continue. To me that’s the beauty of having an involved, excited team building stuff we all care about. I miss being involved in all the roles I’ve been the head person as well as just a team member, but in these great places I was always able to suggest improvements, try new things and have everyone bounce ideas around to make stuff better. It’s frustrating and the developers have almost no say in anything other than these random guess estimates based on often vague stories which become cast in unobtainium and scheduled to the day. We call it agile but it is just waterfall with agile floaties, barely keeping above water. Design, product, process, schedules, estimates, and change requests are a constant swirl of confusion. Today the pressures and stress is insane, mostly because there are so many people doing so many things that all have to be coordinated and contented and cajoled and sometimes forced to do things. Even back then we rarely had to work extra time since we shipped when it was deemed ready and not on some random number schedule. We also had full-time QA people who knew the products backwards and forwards and made shipping a breeze (which it had to be in those days we shipped on floppies with no chance for patches). It was rewarding to work on something where you had input into everything from UI to functionality to experiments in wild new features. Of course my two little companies were the same, the first that shipped Trapeze it was 13 people, and the second was just 5 that worked on Persuasion (for the author) and Deltagraph for 5 years (for the publisher) and was similar. We had fun together and did virtually no overtime at all. We shipped frequently, even daily sometimes, we all traded off different products, participated in product decisions, design decisions, iterated on ideas and even interacted with actual customers to see what else we could do. We had 4 apps for iOS, one for Android, mobile web and also a mobile API in front of the monolith backend. The CEO left us alone (with 2% of the companies employees we did 15% of the revenue) other than one time to build him a special app. At the travel company mobile team we had about 20 people including all of those roles and just a single manager. A lot of times in my 35 years that was the situation including my two companies (85-94) and other occasions including two jobs ago at the travel company (now sadly just a brand of HugeTravelInc).īeing a part of a team all working together on one or more products, with a product manager, designer, QA, developers and maybe a few other folks all together is to me the perfect environment. I really miss being part of a small wholistic team, where everything and everyone we need is right there or at least fully involved if remote. I often say we are the little penguins on top of the giant iceberg: everyone sees us but no one seems to notice the massive berg below.
This project has visibility to the parent CEO and a lot of investment. It’s beyond frustrating and is clearly a big company problem. We have to worry about distributing budget, getting and making estimates, try to negotiate with other teams for their part, and somehow make progress with our part. Constant changes coming from all over the place make even knowing what we have to do and when a continued struggle. Yet we are dependent on a dozen teams, spread out over the whole division, with an insane amount of dependencies, meetings, processes, systems and modules. I work for Ginormous Corp, Massive Division, as part of a high profile project, doing the part of it everyone is watching. I Miss Being Part Of A Complete Team November 10, 2016
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