Comment by dagw
12 days ago
Could it be because those companies are full of people who somehow occupy important positions without understanding the basics of the engineering work.
Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they would like to do than they have engineers to do it. The problem often isn't that they don't understand why fixing technical debt is important, it's to decide if fixing that particular technical debt right now is the best use of these resources right now. Also they might also know things that I might not know, like long term plans for and the relative profitability of different projects, which will affect how they make decisions. No point in spending effort fixing technical debt if that project/department is already slated for closure.
Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every engineering and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the person two steps above me was basically always an engineer or at least has a science or technical background.
Sometimes they're looking for the next big product that will make millions but IMO they never really stack the odds of that working against the chance of losing current business through not updating, improving their current offering to make it e.g. more sticky.
Hence you work on "huge priorities" and then they turn out to attract 2-3 tiny customers....Meanwhile you have horrendous problems with things that do sell that make them inconvenient for your customers such that they will be delighted to go elsewhere the moment they find out that your competition does it better.
> Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they would like to do than they have engineers to do it
I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-offs are... strange in that world.
> Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every engineering and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the person two steps above me was basically always an engineer or at least has a science or technical background.
I haven't found that to be common in the US. I've had a number of front-line managers who were (somewhat) recent engineer conversions, rarely had anyone above that level who was.
> I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-offs are... strange in that world.
Never seen that in my life, and I've worked at small, medium, and huge companies. Sounds wild. So they actually have zero bugs in their bug tracker, and no feature on deck waiting to be built? What do they do all day?
Typical case I've seen at many companies is: Team has N engineers, with a rough capacity to fix N x 2 bugs per week. Bugs come in at a rate of N x 3, and the bug backlog is N x 80 and constantly growing until the team does periodic "bankruptcy" ritual where they mass-close N x 50 bugs that they admit they'll never get to fixing. Repeat forever.
No, the company obviously makes up work to occupy their spare engineering capacity - but the point in that era of BigTechs was to hoover up all the engineering talent, whether or not you needed it.
A big chunk of the company would be off doing Greenfield projects that would mostly get cancelled before they ship, another big chunk is off working on multi-year rewrites of existing services (that never finish), every successful team sprouts spin-off teams with amorphous charters like "apply machine learning to service X"...
It's a side effect of an incentive structure that drives all the managers to grow headcount as fast as they can (since you need more reports to justify promo), and money basically growing on trees in those places