Comment by hobs
5 days ago
It's just not though. People above you are making decisions to not pay what generally amounts to trivial amounts of money to (in many cases I have seen) completely fuck up their products.
I have worked with enough C levels to understand that most of them just want you to manage all the problems while they collect the money and make "strategic decisions" (follow whatever fad is hot right now.)
It's why I like working with smaller companies, usually not established enough to just make middle management eat shit and ignore customers.
As an IC, one reason I left my old (hated) job was precisely that. The product was barely-functional shit. We once spent 8 months implementing a "feature" that had senior engineers walking off the program in protest, only for them to be validated when said feature caused us to miss our contractual requirements just like said senior engineers said it would, and we spent another 8 months ripping it out.
Naturally I went looking for answers, started asking polite questions of my boss at 1-on-1s, started attending program-level meetings that engineers didn't typically show up to but were large/open enough I could blend into the background, and discovered that the root of the problem was roughly 3 levels into management and they weren't going to give a shit about what some engineers thought they should prioritize, even if we could tie it to financials/hours worked/cost savings (we tried and were politely ignored).
Left for a smaller program at a different company, and it's night and day. I remember suggesting that it would be nice if we could have an additional server for a system we were building and got told "yeah good idea, go ask <PM> if it's in the budget". It was, and we got it. I was in heaven.
It's good to do some snooping up the food chain like that.
I've been at a few small-scaling-to-big firms going through tremendous growing pains. Most of the time it was that they had the insight to hire team leads & ICs with experience from bigger competitors but not any higher up the food chain.
That is - higher extremely experienced, talented people, and have them report to the some guy that was hired 20 years ago because he went to school with the founder, or his buddies kid, or some dude who never worked elsewhere in the industry. So ultimately the deciders and decisions didn't change and it was all window dressing.
Even more well managed projects are just "here's the budget figure it out yourself or come talk to us if it will make us XX% more", but SOCII still manages to make a lot of things take forever even in the best of situations.