this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2024
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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.
Exactly! I see how a mindset “we delivered (shit) quickly” successfully reproduces itself, over and over in a lot of companies.
I think the actual reason is that business want to make money on promises right here right now. Business promises a lot of features to investors give money, and then business implement a lot of (shit) features. And then they continue kinda "okay, features broken, give us more money and we will fix it".