[mysterydip]

I wish this was easier to do as an employee: you see the writing on the wall, they pay you to be an expert in a field, but no one listens to your "we should be moving in this direction". You're met with one of my most annoying phrases: "this is how we've always done it."

The opportunity passes by, now your company is playing catch-up and managers above you are asking how they missed it. If you say "I told you so," you get a reprimand instead of acknowledgement.

[throwaway13337]

It really depends on the direction.

A lot of times, devs want to move in a new direction of whatever the hip tech stack is this year. This would help their career by adding the tech to their resume but the business benefit is almost always net negative.

Rather than arguing with a developer, they might just give a response that is outside of the developers' domain. The real reason is that it was a bad idea for the business.

[mysterydip]

That's a fair point. The perspective of developers is different from that of a manager with perhaps a longer term view or other knowledge than the people in the trenches.

[DayDollar]

Managers simply retrieve there value and validation from past accomplishments. Its very human to interpolate from the past to the future. Its very dangerous to stick your neck out and make wild guess. Also demand for changes are usually absolute- as in - we should give up our current field, and go all in, noir, 42 - so to speak. Lots of times, recommendations ala- we should invest 2 weeks to build a prototype to explore the field, and be ready to expand upon, should this explode, would be a lot wiser. This is not black and white. This is a grey area gradient.

Mix in the usual human bias ("We got to have 1 Leader, with 1 plan, else we have civil war and unrest") and you get viewed as a failure as manager- even though you prepared the underlyig plattform technology for future successes, because one product didnt take off.

I was really spitfull on management for this. but they are limited in quite a lot of ways.

What helps is creating the ilusion that others already have done a innovation..

[wolco]

This is part of company memory/history now and you can reference it in the future.

We don't want to avoid doing x because we will end up like [the time we missed the boat].

[brlewis]

Did you follow the advice of this article and describe why the old way won't continue to work? Did you point to winners who have already gone in the direction you want to move? Did you dissect the pros and cons, acknowledging what's true on their side and being specific about what's false? (Disclaimer: my current project is about doing that last one)

[LaundroMat]

Only this week I had a discussion about a client we worked with 2 years ago (large retailer). Their IT infrastructure was and is a mess and seriously hampers the development of their business. We spent a lot of time back them telling them about it and showing them the way forward. (Mind that our proposals were not all beneficial to us even).

Their request today? "You were absolutely right two years ago. Nothing has changed in the mean time and things have become even more complex now. But could you develop X for us, knowing that you can't touch or change any of the architecture?"

We did dissect the pros and cons, pointed to winners, showed the opportunities ahead etc etc. We were discussing everything at C-level too. But sometimes it just doesnt work.

[BubRoss]

This is a logical fallacy known as appeal to tradition