| > Everybody makes serious mistakes that don't show themselves for years. I'd rephrase that as simply knowing the trade offs, knowing in which conditions your solution is valid, and estimating how long these conditions will be present, and then estimating what's next, and then taking that into account when choosing a solution (and trade offs). Some people are absolutely terrible at estimating change and pace. Some people don't see when it's time to involve higher ups, and some don't know when to do the inverse of that. > Those who don't stick around usually assume that any mistakes they find in their new company were due to incompetence. That's too general, but also not completely unfair. > Similarly, people who have not stuck around for years have never been instrumental in doing difficult culture transformations, or fixing long term architectural problems. Again, too general. Maybe you get hired for a transformation/migration/rewrite project, and basically you have a good chance to be hired as the Captain for the mighty Failship. And now let's discuss how all of the aforementioned are discussed to death in [Project] Management 101, and all of the following are discussed to death in [People] Management 101, yet what you write is still valid as ever. > It's truly unfortunate that the industry rewards those who don't tackle these kinds of difficult problems. Industry is full of incompetent showmen, useless middle managers, and a lot of extremely biased, uncompromising, uncooperative, power-hungry completely regular but overstressed underloved normal guys/gals. Yet society has a freak approach to freaks, because people think oh fuck them, why can't they just behave, but when I freak out, it's because reasons. And when Joe from IT is a social trainwreck then it's ostracization time! > The legacy is an industry where the problems are ubiquitous: flavour of the month architecture, my way or the highway bullying, either process of the month or "pragmatic" (aka ad hoc) processes, absolute disrespect for coworkers (I'm the only one with an ounce of sense). Yes, indeed. And this largely happens in other industrial sectors, but since change is slower there, these problems usually don't present themselves so acutely. |