I work in an organization that asks for innovation, but doesn't allocate any budget for R&D or investigative projects. The company also doesn't have any culture of being ok with taking big swings and accepting misses.
The project deck is fully loaded with status quo type projects, based on client demands. Teams are asked to track all of their hours toward these projects.
The subtext is, "Do the grunt work during your 40 hours that we're sure will generate revenue, and please, please, do something innovative on top of that on your own time/dime".
My previous workplace was exactly like that: they wanted people to build "cool tools that would help us do our job" but would not even let me refactor a piece of ugly code (I literally just wanted to have variable names that actually mean something). It's quite a pathetic display when a manager talks about innovation when devs are stuck with ancient versions of software they work with and there is zero chance of getting the corporate machine to allow us to update and even if we had the permission everything would move so slow that by the time the upgrade happens the software would already be old.
In my company it’s the same. They ask for innovation but the real message is “do something innovative but don’t change anything and always stay on your already tight schedule and don’t do anything management doesn’t approve “
You can't have a leader that rewards/punishes one way and managers who pick a different approach.
So it only really works if those at the top embrace these ideas, otherwise you end up with this system where they communicate they value innovation, but in their behavior fail to do so.
Garbage removal. If your trash man stops coming to haul away your waste, you've got a problem. You will then ask, "how much do I need to pay to get this service back?"
Craigslist is _the_ case study on how an ugly UI can survive over a long timeline. There are many techies and UI designers that are just disgusted at the UI of craigslist. For some, aesthetic is more important than usability. Luckily, for most, it's not.
Ebay removed substring search years ago, and this basically collapsed a whole bunch of industries that were using Ebay as their marketplace. Think hundreds of thousands of similar part numbers. This is why you see pages of part numbers blasted over the listing details.
Ebay's one job is to connect buyers and sellers and they fail miserably at that.
Not even a local minimum, a global minimum. Not a platform, a gated swamp.
I can sort by price on eBay. On Amazon, I have to jump through a bunch of hoops to finally be able to sort by price, and the results I get are far from exhaustive.
Amazon's interface is pretty bad, though, especially in the video and kindle areas. I know I'm constantly frustrated using the site, and as far as I can tell, they don't appear to be very interested in reducing user's pain.
Yes exactly. CL is probably my favorite website on the internet, for the sheer reason that they have virtually not changed at all since they first launched over 10 years ago. It's fairly incredible. I can't think of another website that has done that.
This still exists?! It's still being updated?!?! So much more content than when I last checked it, which would have been 2004 or so. My faith in the internet is restored.
Win7 certainly has some rough edges in retrospect, but I occasionally interact with old systems and so many things are so much snappier. I'm sure the modern frameworks in Win10 allow for "new experiences" but the plain old desktop experience was well served by Win7.
And those of us who do remember Windows 1.0 (not using it, though, but I do remember the ads), are probably mostly closer to retirement age than to the start of our careers... I feel old now.
I think craigslist survives _despite_ its ugly UI just because of market lock-in/inertia.
the ui is awful from a utility/ux, pov - it’s limited and hard to shop/browse with.
Definitely - there used to be a bunch of sites that scraped craigslist and put their listings into more browse-able formats (e.g. Padmapper), but once they got too popular, CL started sending C&Ds and filing lawsuits.
When I was a dev lead at a previous company, I was tasked with leading two initiatives. I had designed everything out, received approval, and then we merged with another company and decided to “move to the cloud”.
I didn’t know the first thing about AWS and neither did anyone else - including the infrastructure guys. So we hired some “consultants”. I did a PowerPoint slide of my architecture with the consultants for thier guidance for best practices.
Basically they just set up some VMs, security groups, a VPC etc and they treated AWS like an overpriced colo.
I spent the next few months designing and architecting everything like I would have done on prem:
- 7 servers for Hashicorp’s Consul (1 in Dev,QA, UAT, and a cluster in production). They were used for configuration, service discovery, internal load balancing (with Fabio), and health checks.
- 7 servers for Nomad (same as above) used for orchestration and to schedule jobs. Think Kubernetes but with the flexibility of using raw executables and not just Docker containers.
- 7 servers for Mongo (same as above)
- 12 always running app servers.
- 2 build servers orchestrated with Visual Studio Online and local build agents.
Of course all of these machines had Microsoft agents (?) on them for deployments, Consul agents, and the app servers had Nomad agents.
This would have all been perfectly well architected for an on prem environment. But anyone who knows anything about AWS (and I didn’t then) would know that’s a dumb, overpriced, hard to maintain design and we weren’t taking advantsge of AWS services.
If I were doing that now. I would:
- get rid of all of the Consul servers and use AWS’s Parameter Store for configuration. Use internal AWS application load balancers and route 53 for services along with autoscaling and health checks.
- instead of Nomad, I would have used CloudWatch Events and done a combination of lambda, step functions and Docker. That would have cut out 7 more servers.
- I would have used AWS CodeBuild that basically let’s you use either prebuilt Docker containers for builds or create your own. Cutting down on 2 more servers.
- Today, I would use AWS’s hosted ElasticSearch solution instead of Mongo. But given the needs of the project, I would have used Mlab’s (?) managed offerings.
Of course I would use CloudFormation to manage all of this including the configuration key/values instead of my own bespoked app to source control configuration changes.
he means that he's using stuff like Lambda, Cognito and other PaaS services provided by Azure and AWS - not considering the cloud as IaaS only providers.
The problem of “lock-in” is overblown. You’re either going to be locked in to your infrastructure choices or spend more money on both resources, maintenance and personnel trying to avoid lock in and you’re going to have a suboptimal solution that doesn’t take advantage of all the provider offers.
Even if you try to avoid lock-in. It’s usually not worth the risk of regressions and downtime to change your underlying infrastructure once you build on top of it.
The chances of AWS or Azure going out of business in the grand scheme of things is not worth the trade off.
I was faced with the same problem recently, and the imagined glory of being able to switch my entire stack from AWS to GCP (or Azure) with a config flag made me realize two things:
1. Being able to do this would mean lots of work to abstract and polyfill the discrepancies between providers.
2. If AWS or Azure goes down globally, everyone else would be too busy freaking out about their own problems than be worried about the downtime of your SaaS.
Yeah, I never understood who those ads were aimed at. Buying a superbowl ad for a bunch of money to hit millions of consumers in hopes of a single CEO with buy authority watching the ad?
For all those years in which the Archer Daniels Midland corporation ran ads on Sunday morning political talk shows, ADM got to scam the government and consumers for billions thanks to subsidies they were able to get.
Someone mentioned in an above comment that managers look out for their own interests, just like employees. There are very few people in a company who are really acting in the best interest of the company.
So my take is that the reason companies behave irrationally with regard to talent retention is that no one "owns" that problem. Same reason any number of other important issues fall through the cracks at any given company.
And yes, I think you were spot on when you said that companies don't even know who they should be trying to retain.
Some cities are dominated by insurance/banking/healthcare companies. Their IT needs are quite different than the consumer software space.
It's more like a salesguy just landed a big fish and the big fish is making these demands to close the deal, so bolt on some new functionality to your existing platform. Ad nauseum.
