Let's say you need to choose some technology for your project, or you already have problems with some technologies, so you want to replace them with others. If you do not maintain a decision log, you have a high risk of making bad decisions that are biased, based on authority, and take too long.
  • overcast5348@lemmy.world
    2 years

    In a former workplace, we had a process that was close enough to what’s recommended in the blog, and it worked well. Really well even, there were hardly any ego clashes, everyone would negotiate a consensus and we had “spike” tasks in our sprints so that we can take the time to think about and research complex problems.

    And then the fire nation attacked…

    A director left the firm and they hired someone from Amazon. He said that we should have a “bias for action”, and got rid of this process, and a lot of other stuff we had going for ourselves using other such catch phrases.

    Getting him as a director was probably the worst thing to happen as we were under pressure to deliver stuff quickly all the time, and we’d then have to rework most of the shit because of missed requirements, or tools used not being insufficient for the task at hand etc. He was okay with it though, because “we delivered (shit) quickly”, and “our efficiency went up as indicated by the team velocity charts”.

    Pretty much the entire team had left the company in ~1.5 years, and customer satisfaction metrics were in the gutter when I left.

    I don’t know if he misunderstood “bias for action” and implemented it badly or if that’s genuinely how people at Amazon operate, but I won’t even think of joining AWS. Fuck that noise.

    • vitonsky@programming.dev
      2 years

      Exactly! I see how a mindset “we delivered (shit) quickly” successfully reproduces itself, over and over in a lot of companies.

      I think the actual reason is that business want to make money on promises right here right now. Business promises a lot of features to investors give money, and then business implement a lot of (shit) features. And then they continue kinda “okay, features broken, give us more money and we will fix it”.

  • Ategon@programming.dev
    2 years

    If anyone still sees messages from the spammer in the comments let me know, federated removals are wonky sometimes

  • PrinceWith999Enemies@lemmy.world
    2 years

    I can’t say what their corporate culture is like now, but they’ve had a pretty poor reputation in the past, including the notion that the lowest performing 10% should be fired every year. The Amazon folks I’ve known have been great people - not at all the Gordon Gecko types you’d imagine from that - but culture in large corporations varies a lot by the team you’re in.

    I came up with a saying back in the 90s when I was doing the startup scene - “Do you want it right, or by Tuesday?” Sometimes they do indeed need it by Tuesday. More of the time they have no idea why you need the extra days to get it right. But it’s really important for those in a leadership position - whether they’re managers or senior engineers - to push back and set expectations.