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Me: Why do we do this this time consuming, low value thing?
My tech lead: Because if we don't, a box becomes red on some executive report.
Me: Why is this deadline so important? It's not customer facing or any kind of critical bug/vulnerability?
My tech lead: Because it was a company wide mandate, and we'll show up on some executive report if we're late.
Me: *angry dev noises*

They must dole out lashings to the tech leads and the directors any time we fail to meet some completely arbitrary demand. The act like the world is going to end any time we get too close to a deadline 🤦‍♂️

Makes no sense that they then turn around and worship the ground senior leadership walks on. I wonder if it's some weird form of stockholm syndrome.

Comments
  • 0
    I see a lot of these posts about some task is deemed not worthy of my time. If it was really low value would it show up as a metric on a managers docket? Businesses are designed around systems theory (not sure the right term). So managers have their own business reasons for doing things. So is this a domain knowledge issue? I am sure a manager would view things that a programmer does as low value if they don't understand the reasoning behind it.
  • 1
    @Demolishun systems theory seems way too technical to be paired with the words business and design
  • 2
    @Demolishun the problem with a lot (not all) of the types of things I'm talking about is we often circumvent the actual value-add in order to show up green on a report. Dumb example: We submitted our code for automated testing to our security scanner, just to show up green, because the app itself wasn't supported. Later, there was a vulnerability in a dependency that required us to cut the dependency out of our tests. Again, so we show up green on a report. This was in code that never ran on production infra, that had no security scanning requirements.

    Other instances are easier to see at least SOME value-added, but the continued work required to remain in self-imposed compliance is not small.
  • 1
    @soggybutter Is there a way to flag items as "not being used" or something? Like a way to inform management of waste or inefficiency (terms they can relate to). I get it, its busy work to satisfy a metric. We have some of that too.

    For instance, when taking time off I have to fill out a form with the requested time off. I tell the manager that I want this off and he reminds me that I need to fill out this form. To me it is basically TPS, but to my manager he is using this to track "something". I don't understand that something, but it has value to him for his system (business).
  • 1
    @Demolishun Unfortunately there isn't. And after a few discussions about that we were told to just make the report happy so it stopped coming up. The same security tool will fail your project if you don't have any third party dependencies, because it assumes you did something wrong 🤷‍♂️

    I'm sure there are good theoretical reasons for most of the things that get passed down to us. The hard thing is that there's virtually zero nuance when it's a large company. Everyone gets the same blanket requirements even though the projects are extremely varied.
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