Comment by lnsru
10 hours ago
I work for a small German company. Some time ago the owner sold it to big bloated company. At the time under the owner the management circle was 6 people, now it’s 17!!!!! And the revenue is lower with bigger headcount, because managers manage and do not work.
I almost cry at work from sadness. So much potential wasted, the company has great market access and still good name. Polishing old products would make this hockey stick revenue growth. But with management explosion everything is being wasted. Meetings about meetings, no product upgrades and total stagnation. While managers fight over parking spots near front door for VIPs.
I know. I work for a mid sized German company in the auto industry, and when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.
Germans just don't seem to get that successful SW was built by empowering the geeks working in "the trenches", and not by suits with business degrees in running conveyor belt assembly factories where everyone is a fixed cog that needs to follow a strict process thought out by someone above them.
Wow. That reflects my experience with another mid sized German company in a similar industry.
Their original roadmap for their next gen products was not good and the product was getting delayed by a few months.
They brought in a new manager to fix the timeline. Instead she increased the bureaucracy. OKR tracking every other week. Hired a scrum master. Brought in external "certified code reviewers", delayed the project a little more and ended up cancelling the project within a couple of months. "Hardware products are not as profitable as proprietary cloud software as a service company anyway".
>external "certified code reviewers"
That's another big issue with Germany, is they obsess over certifications when hiring, as if they're some confidence of high quality hiring bar, when a lot of those certifications and degrees in the IT industry are just scams.
I think it's caused by the fact that firing a bad hire is super difficult past the probation period, and since HR/recruiters are clueless on screening what makes a good SW dev, so they just go with filtering for credentials to cover their asses, in case of a bad hire they can say they followed the process and screened for the ones with credentials.
3 replies →
“ which became a 45-60 minute daily”
I remember at one company I worked they had figured out how to get a project back on track: standups twice daily and justifying everything you did in the few hours before.
What would you say...you do here? — Bob Slydell
I figure that is sarcasm.(I hope).
https://youtu.be/_iiOEQOtBlQ
To be fair, the cycle of adding overhead until efficiency improves is the norm in American companies, too. There are a handful of companies which do better but don’t make the mistake of assuming even a majority do.
> when our SW project was going to shit due to insufficient resources and mismanagement from the start, what they did to address it was not to add more developers, but add two managers from other projects to our daily standup, which became a 45-60 minute daily, and I'll let you guess if that improved the product deliverables and team morale.
That's what you do if your goal is to blame developers for the project failing, and you double-down on management to underline the root cause as developers going off rails and thus the fix is to reign them in with management. The managers jumping on board have no downside as the project was either doomed or they flexed their superior management skills to revive the project.