The Dude has been on a bit of a hiatus, but recently, he has been dealing with a serious what the actual fuck situation. Alas, this caused him to stew, and then he remembered that he had an outlet for rants.
Engineering Fuckery
It started about 3 weeks ago when the Dude was invited to a meeting ostensibly to discuss shortcomings in an internal tool that sort of works, but has a lot of oddities and quirks that are just annoying enough to piss people off (and the Dude is one of these people pissed off), but it is an integral component of our tool chain to publish the work product.
The meeting was to begin the process of documenting these shortcomings, with an intent to drive a revision cycle to “tighten up” the tool, and make it usable (we use Atlassian’s Jira for our workflow in the creation of our “product”, and this custom portal that we were discussing is more of an aggregation of data and tags that drive downstream work by tams like Marketing, Operations, Scheduling, and delivery.
If that sounds like a bodge, it is. But it does work.
The principal complaint, and one that the Dude shares, is that there is no integration between Jira and this tool, so we (product management) get to enter all the relevant data and tags twice. Once in Jira when we commence the development, and once in this “Single Source of Truth” or SSOT.
Annoying, but hey, if we could automate the population of the common fields between Jira and this SSOT tool, it would make the Dude smile. And I can assure you that he needs some smiling in his life.
The first step in getting to this desired state is to meet and define the problem and parameters.
That was the purpose of this meeting.
What happened
The meeting was scheduled for an hour, led by our “platform product management team”, and the first 10-15 minutes were pretty standard.
Then Engineering spoke.
Their revealing was that they had already built a prototype of a new tool, a “replacement” for the SSOT.
The Dude and the platform PM looked at each other, wondering what the fresh fuck this was? They essentially rebuilt the SSOT tool using the Salesforce “Dream Force” system, to make a cleaner presentation of the information, but it failed to address the issue that was the original intent, to facilitate the population of data from Jira.
In short, they just decided to build a fucking prototype, without understanding the requirements, displaying epic levels of arrogance and hubris, but not solving the problem.
Then they had the audacity to be upset that we weren’t floored by their brilliance.
For fuck’s sake, Engineers need adult supervision.
They 100% require supervision. You will end up in ditch every single time without it.
So damn often in my career I have seen Engineering careen into the ditch.
And they always find a way to scapegoat product management.
Thanks for the note! I am still surprised anyone reads me.
Love your stuff, keep it up!
Ha I’ve had experience with orgs that were engineering driven. Best functionality possible that no one wants to use 🤪
Amen brother. And when they fail, they then will blame sales, the customers, management, and anybody they can, besides themselves. idea crashed and burned.
And years later, when someone makes a similar offer and is successful, they will scratch their heads and wonder why their
But will they ever listen to product management when they tell them they are smoking bad ditch-weed?
Nope.