alt Hacker NewsAbout 80% of my software engineering job is fighting disagreements between "stakeholders".
Replies
The next little while is going to be very revealing for leadership around how little of the time involved in getting a solution to production is the coding. I think there's a lot of bosses who have this vision of features entering prod the same day they are first imagined, but that just isn't going to happen.
“Stakeholders” are a natural outcome of corporate evolution, because to grow bigger you need to do more, and to do more, you need people, and people come with agendas. The most common one, especially in leadership, being “how do I get ahead of the rest?” The larger an organization grows the more these agendas come into conflict.
This inevitably results in suboptimal dynamics like bureaucracy, empire building, territorialism and other things that get lumped under “office politics,” which drains a lot of energy away from more productive efforts.
So you can see how AI solves that problem too ;-)
(Only half joking)
Is it Jane Street where they have an internal market so when a stakeholder wants something it's like they make a bid/execute a trade? If their ask ends up creating a loss goodbye buying power until you earn it back.
It feels like making these sorts of systems exist outside of the periphery would be good for everyone.
How many times have politicians for example wasted your time with promises and asks and rhetoric with no follow through? Not unlike some "stakeholders" I know. It's called "office politics" for a reason. What if they were punished for this by some system?
It feels like sitting there while stakeholders yap is not so different than electing a new rep every two years and hoping something changes. The fundamental setup is broken in a world with ever accelerating growth in complexity. Doing it in this way also would probably trend to enforcing rigor in the original ask. A big problem with stakeholders is they don't really know what they want, like politicians who make economic promises yet never show their work before showing up and asking for your vote.
About 80% of my software engineering job is bugging overseas contractors to finish work on my ticket requests.
50% office politics 30% stakeholder and expectations management 10% design/development
If that's true you could just implement both options, or 3 or 4 options.
Fortunately for our employers, it's illegal for us to build a competitor in our free time.
Addendum to the content of Bullshit Jobs [1]:
"Stakeholder" ranks #1 among corporate bullshit roles. It serves a dual purpose: (a) representing a group so nobody can be blamed for excluding them, and (b) providing typically useless feedback so that the group appears to actually care or have a clue.
AI is the perfect technology to solve the problem of having too many cooks in the kitchen. Let a thousand startups bloom?
Imagine being able to say “AI said so, can’t argue with that”
So the problem is you can’t replace everyone halfway.
Which is a tautology, but also a bit of practical wisdom.
I find it interesting how concurrent model sessions seem to operate with a very strong bias toward quick resolutions, including sharing or giving up control, to create efficient decision making structures, relative to humans.
When I was a kid, I loved Bjork’s song “Army of Me”, because I knew a 1000 of me collaborating and communicating without friction. would be all I needed to take over the world, fix everything, expand civilization, etc. We would not waste time.
I wonder how much of their hyper-team play is by training, and how much is their awareness of the game theory real politic. So individual sessions don’t invest their identity and self-worth in any given context run.
My dream has been almost achieved. One of me and 999 of them get quite a bit done. But that trend…