Development speed is not a bottleneck

About a decade ago, I was the sole developer for a special project. The code took 2 weeks to complete (a very simple Java servlet + JDBC app) but an entire year to actually deliver due to indecisive leadership, politics, and extremely overzealous security policies. By the time it was successfully deployed to prod, I had been chewed out by management countless times, who usually asked questions like “how on Earth can it take so long to do this one simple thing??”.

I see that a lot too. Something is super urgent, you work your ass off to deliver and then somebody sits on it for months before actually shipping. If ever.

I don’t actually mind (because I won’t work my ass off). So when enthusiasm fizzle out, I just take a lot of notes (to onboard myself quickly) and shelve the project.

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Not always simple to switch jobs unfortunately

I saw two projects in a row in a German Fintech (the one that has AI in its name that forbids usage of AI) go exactly the same way.

Two/three months to code everything ("It's maximum priority!"), about four to QA, and then about a year to deploy to individual country services by ops team.

During test and deploy phases, the developers were just twiddling thumbs because ops refused to allow them access and product refused to take in new projects due to possibility of developers having to go back to code.

It took the CEO to intervene and investigate the issues, and the CTO's college best friend that was running DevOps was demoted.

Why were you getting chewed out over it? Presumably the dickhead doing the chewing would be aware of the circumstances.

IME, in most cases, it's the dickhead's fault in the first place.

This is often a CTO putting pressure on a dev manager when the bottleneck is ops, or product, or putting pressure on product when the bottleneck is dev.

The normal rationalization is that "you should be putting pressure on them".

The actual reason is that they are putting pressure on you as a show of force, rather than actually wanted it to go faster.

This is why the only response to a bad manager is to run away.