Many people think about their concerns before going to bed or upon waking up. I'm not an exception. This morning one popped up in my head from habr:
A colleague in the chat shared a story:
I had an awesome client the year before last, this is when I took a pure “crisis”.
The client has two teams in the devgroup, each one deals with its own part of the product (conditionally, back office and store front, i.e. software working on order formation and software working on order execution), occasionally integrating with each other.
The back office team went straight to the bottom: half a year of continuous jambs, the owners threatened to fire everyone, they hired a consultant, after the consultant they hired more than another (me). Moreover, the second team (front-front) worked normally and continued to work normally, it was the back-office team, which had also worked normally before, that began to mow. Teams sit in different offices, they are used to pissing off each other.The reason: the store and the back are one system, there are a lot of dependencies in it, the teams in different offices did not communicate with each other. The owners always “look” at the backfront, so they have new features, ideas and control there. It was a boy of all trades, a combination of BA, designer and bring us coffee. This boy, unnoticed by his team, performed a bunch of small tasks like “warn the second team about the deployment”, “update the documentation”, etc. routine, up to “add all sorts of version numbers and components in fat to the ticket”. But the boy did not write the code, and at one point the owners decided to optimize it by firing him. Nothing has changed for the store team, they just didn’t contribute or update the docks, and the back office team found themselves in a situation where the store releases break something for them, and this is their problem, and if their releases break something for the store, it’s again their problems, because the store is in full view of the owners 🙂
What this comment hooked me on and what the seeker from the title will find - under the cut.
I have been developing web applications for 20 years, so front/back is not just words for me. These are very closely related things. For example, I cannot imagine a situation where the front is being developed in complete (or very strong) separation from the back. Both sides operate with the same data, perform very similar operations. I can roughly imagine how much information is moved between the developers of both teams to coordinate the development, and how much time and how often these approvals need to be done. Teams cannot help but communicate closely, even being in different time zones. Especially with JIRA.
I know that it is pointless to warn about the deployment of the back development front. The new version of the front cannot break anything on the back, but on the contrary, yes. It is the front devs who are interested in letting the back devs know that they need new or changed functionality. The front depends on the deployments of the back, and not vice versa.
What a boy who"bring us coffee", cannot be a BA (if BA means "business analyst"), and a BA cannot be "boy bring us coffee". And certainly, "add any version numbers and components to the fat"without discussion with the development teams, neither the "boy" nor the BA can. It's like the cart before the horse.
Since the "boy" was fired, then these functions, from "bring coffee"and to"add to fat", should have been redistributed among other team members. In an established group, information flows and roles are fixed, if the performer of one or more roles left the stage, then the rest of the group members still need to receive familiar information from familiar roles. They simply cannot help but notice that the information needed for work has ceased to come to them.It is like a drug addict who cannot help but notice the fact that the supply of drugs has stopped.And just as a drug addict seeks and finds other channels, so the members of the group will try to find sources of the information they need on the "other" side and new performers of old roles.And they will definitely find.At least the one who, in their opinion, should give them the necessary information.
Even if we assume that the usual channels of information have been closed, and those who should do not think they should, then the developers of the back, under the threat of being fired, will not hide the reasons for their own failures from the owner for six months, knowing that they have jambs due to the lack of the necessary them information. The owners will not "stupid" for half a year, seeing that the necessary information was previously "was in fat", and now no one brings it in. And the first consultant was hardly so unprofessional as not to talk to the developers of the back and go to the source of the problem - the lack of agreement between the teams. This is the reason for the described troubles, and not in the dismissal of the "boy ".
The banal lack of communication between developers is a typical cause of a bunch of problems in development and not only. You don't have to be an outstanding consultant to discover it. Just being smart is enough.
I think the whole story is well thought out and beautifully told. Well, not entirely fictional - all elements taken from life (front, back, development, boy, coffee, "fat", ...). But they are connected in such a way that such a construction does not occur in life. Individually, all this can be found in the outside world, but in such a combination - no. Above I wrote why.
However, it is very plausible. It is read with interest and there is personal involvement. Sympathy for"boy-of-all-trades", an underestimated little mechanism of a big machine (it's about me!). Condescension towards developers who are so smart and experienced, but do not see beyond their own nose (they are all around me!). A slight mockery of the owners, rich uncles, who made themselves "bo-bo" with their own hands and do not understand the reasons (well, poured out my guide!). Disregard for the first "consultant" who failed to find such a simple source of problems (yeah, recently he came like this in glasses, walked with a smart look), and an enthusiastic union with the "real" consultant, who was the only one who could appreciate the real role of the boy-of-all-trades (that is me!).
Do you feel inner satisfaction after reading this comment? Our role as small cogs in a large mechanism is actually not so small! Wonderfully stated, albeit not true. But what a pleasant aftertaste.
I don’t know what kind of colleague and in what chat I shared this revelation with a colleague and why colleague mkrentovskiy decided to publish it under the article ""an outstanding habra-author 'a (which, by the way, is in first place in the Habr rating at the moment!), But I admit that a colleague mkrentovskiy did it extremely well. The message of the comment and the style of presentation are so similar to the message and style of other publications nmivan'ah, what might you think that the crisis consultant from the comments and GG of many publications nmivan'a' is the same person.
I read quite a lot of Ivan Belokamentsev's publications when the author started his activity on Habré (in 2017). Some even enjoy, ). He has a good style and an interesting presentation of the material. His stories are very similar to life stories, but they have almost zero chance of actually happening, in . Here's how with this story in the commentary.
To tell the truth, I personally do not think that with the publications of Ivan, Habr has become better. But his rating other inhabitants of Habr say the opposite:
I don't understand your whining. Habr has long rolled down, and the author gives a little spark and improves the mood of readers) pulling the resource out of the abyss.
Yes, Habr is not charity, Habr is a commercial project. Habr is a mirror that reflects our desires. Not my personal desires and not the desires of each individual visitor, but the totality of all our desires - "the average for the hospital." And Ivan Belokamentsev feels better than anyone what we all need in the aggregate, and gives it to us.
Perhaps I would not have written this article if I had not started watching the series "".
"We have lost God" (with)
It's from the series. And this is about us.
We have ceased to be carried away by the reality created by the Creator.
God, Nature, Big Bang - whatever. Reality it is. around us and independently of us.
We live in it in accordance with the laws of nature (God's Plan). We learn the laws (Intention) and learn to use the reality in which we live in order to live even better. We test our guesses by practice, discarding the wrong ones and leaving the actual ones. We interact with reality and we change it.
And we have been very successful in that.
There are many people on the planet. So many. With the current productivity of labor, we no longer need to survive - a minority can provide the majority with everything they need. Most people need to keep themselves busy. Historically, the surplus of resources allocated to creativity fell to the most talented (or the most prolific, which is also talent). Now there are so many free resources that everyone is somehow talented, regardless of the level. Compare how many films are released per year around the world and how many of them you can watch. How many books are written, and which ones can be read. How much information falls out on the Internet, and which of it is usable.
Why is the IT profession so popular? Yes, because in IT you can merge the abyss of resources and no one will blink an eye (remember at least about the problem of the year 2000). Indeed, in IT, you can develop applications for years that will become obsolete even before launch, you can try to integrate incompatible components and still make them spin, you can invent your own bicycles over and over again, or you can start supporting Fortran programs right now, which is overgrown with moss for another 20 years ago. You can spend your whole life in IT and do nothing useful. And most importantly, no one will notice! Even yourself.
Few of us will be able to leave a mark in the IT industry. And even fewer people will be able to leave a good memory on their own. The results of our work will depreciate in the next 10-20 years at best, or even earlier. And certainly in our lifetime (if we make it to retirement age). We will not be able to show our grandchildren the computer systems that their grandfather worked on in his youth. People will just forget their names. I raised postal stations at the beginning of my career under "". I'm 20 years old before retirement and 10 years before my grandchildren, but by now most of you have not heard anything about the "outstanding mail application of the mid-90s" ("top email software package of the mid-1990s")
Maybe in reality we are poorly aware of the futility of our IT burden, but on the subconscious we strive to escape to where we are comfortable. To fictional worlds where the use of Scrum and Agile will inevitably lead to the emergence of products that conquer the world for decades with their usefulness. Where we are not simple small gears of large mechanisms, but gears, without which large mechanisms break down. Where our life does not flow in the senseless execution of routine actions, but is filled with creativity and creation, the results of which we can be proud of.
We run away to these beautiful, invented worlds from our own worthlessness in the real world. We seek solace in them.
We are looking for consolation, including on Habré. And Ivan gives it to us here.
Source: habr.com