• 0 Posts
  • 14 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 14th, 2023

help-circle









  • In a former workplace, we had a process that was close enough to what’s recommended in the blog, and it worked well. Really well even, there were hardly any ego clashes, everyone would negotiate a consensus and we had “spike” tasks in our sprints so that we can take the time to think about and research complex problems.

    And then the fire nation attacked…

    A director left the firm and they hired someone from Amazon. He said that we should have a “bias for action”, and got rid of this process, and a lot of other stuff we had going for ourselves using other such catch phrases.

    Getting him as a director was probably the worst thing to happen as we were under pressure to deliver stuff quickly all the time, and we’d then have to rework most of the shit because of missed requirements, or tools used not being insufficient for the task at hand etc. He was okay with it though, because “we delivered (shit) quickly”, and “our efficiency went up as indicated by the team velocity charts”.

    Pretty much the entire team had left the company in ~1.5 years, and customer satisfaction metrics were in the gutter when I left.

    I don’t know if he misunderstood “bias for action” and implemented it badly or if that’s genuinely how people at Amazon operate, but I won’t even think of joining AWS. Fuck that noise.