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Development speed is not a bottleneck

(pawelbrodzinski.substack.com)
191 points flail | 1 comments | 05 Sep 25 13:13 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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temporallobe ◴[05 Sep 25 14:00 UTC] No.45138694[source]▶
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??”.
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franktankbank ◴[05 Sep 25 15:40 UTC] No.45139841[source]▶
Why were you getting chewed out over it? Presumably the dickhead doing the chewing would be aware of the circumstances.
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1. whstl ◴[05 Sep 25 17:43 UTC] No.45141345[source]▶
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.