I have seen this a lot in a lot of organizations, this kind of process - or proxy - solutions to humans-in-groups problems.
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I have seen this a lot in a lot of organizations, this kind of process - or proxy - solutions to humans-in-groups problems.
I see this where I work: what you want from AI, you can have with proper engineering metrics.
What you want from Scrum, you can have by teaching people to run meetings, with an agenda and notes.
These are skills and tools that can be learned, that do not require strange new hierarchies and ceremonies.
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I sometimes fear that there is some deep set cultural drive in this industry to run from its problems instead of solving them, to genuflect to novelty rather than engage with the failures of the present. To rewrite code instead of fixing it, to adopt weird new ceremonies instead of understanding the details of the present. To throw it all out and start over, believing you’ve learned from the last iteration without really interrogating it. It smells of a sort of hyperactive nihilism.
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I mean, the seduction of novel ceremony is that - like new frameworks, like React, like Kubernetes - it provides structure without accountability. If the process fails it is the process’s fault, not its drivers, not its leaders.
Dan Davies created the term “accountability sink” - a kind of heat sink for diffusing human consequences, a useful term. We should recognize these things for what they are, I think, and more importantly when people are trying to create them, for whatever reason.
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We can easily spot these accountability sink practices at the individual level - that one engineer who insists on building their project in ocaml or pushes to rewrite it from scratch in React, so they can train up for their next job knowing they won’t be bearing the maintenance cost of their learning experience - but they’re not something I’ve seen rigorously discussed at the process or organizational level.
Have so many people job-hopped their way into leadership roles that it’s invisible now?
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Since I started working in tech, I have been at three different companies and had nine “leadership changes”.
First thing every new regime does is throw out the old and “start fresh”.
It’s not just the junior folk.