[bitwize]

In the 1960s, my father was a manufacturing engineer for BigTechFirm (this was back when BigTechFirms built actual stuff, rather than trafficking in webshit). On the shop floor, there were A, B, and C workers on a line in descending order of skill level required and roughly ascending order of available workers. It was a true assembly line model. I believe the A and B workers had more variety to their work but the C workers had precisely one job, like putting two parts together along a joint or tightening a specific set of screws. This introduced problems in the line when a C worker got sick: the line would be held up entirely while a substitute was trained and then the substitute would perform much more poorly than the sick worker.

My father's bright idea was to give each C worker a workbench and train them in several jobs, then have them perform all those jobs in one phase of the assembly. That way, if a C worker got sick, because all of their colleagues knew all the jobs that worker had to do, the line would be held up much less.

Upper management passed on my dad's idea back then -- but it became all the rage in the 1980s when it was rediscovered in the Toyota model, part of the massive fad for "Japanese management techniques" that prevailed back then.

I keep this story in mind when I have to deal with agileshit at a company whose management had apparently never heard of The Mythical Man-Month.

[chrisan]

It wasn't just your father. A lot of American companies never felt the need to improve. It's kind of sad really.

In an industrial systems engineering class we learned of Deming who was trying to help American auto manufacturers with quality control and they wouldn't hear of it. He later was in Japan and influenced the ideas over there. Japan would go on to create the Deming Prize as one of their highest awards one could be given for quality

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deming_Prize

[Ambele]

You should know that Toyota went full Agile last year. Not pure Agile but Agile in the Toyota Way -- where they produce 20x the documentation that the Waterfall Method produces. I'm not commenting on whether this is a good or a bad thing because my opinion doesn't matter but it enabled everyone to try something new. If the upper management in charge of tech had any free time, they'd might benefit from reading The Mythical Man-Month as you've brought up. Toyota has been about a year or three behind all of the car companies to adopt new tech like Alexa and Apple CarPlay. Regardless, Toyota has come a pretty long way since first being a loom company.

[c0vfefe]

Cutting-edge tech stuff isn't really Toyota's thing - they excel at quality, reliability, and lifetime value, and thus have an incentive to delay new tech until they can perfect it.

[erikpukinskis]

What is webshit? It seems like you are trying to say that you don’t think web developers build anything worthwhile, but I’m hoping there’s a less insulting interpretation of your comment?

[bitwize]

Television was developed with the intent of bringing culture, like Shakespeare to the masses -- but it was more profitable to present cheap-to-make, lowest-common-denominator entertainment and an increasing number of ads. Similarly, the Web was supposed to be a global information resource for scientific papers and other human knowledge, but the companies that dominate the Web today have turned it into television that watches back.

Somewhere there are Web developers adding real value. Sometimes I like to think I'm one of them. But that's not the LOB of the big players.

[Aeolun]

I think it’s just that anything that BigTechFirm touches in web land becomes polluted and shit.