| This has a lot to do with putting processes over people and it's been a lengthy process of us as so called engineers getting our hands forced while maintaining an appearance of being cool and entitled It's well known that the systems an organization produces are bound to reflect the communications structures within that organization this is known as Conway's principle In order to maintain flexibility in the design it's necessary to maintain flexibility in communication but engineers have no incentive to push for free communication and stick together to see the job done right, each of them is attached to a management minder who reports to a rigid top-down governance structure with very different ideas on how software should be done, effectively stifling any potential dissent at the source and acting like an authoritarian regime with the desire to divorce the workers from ownership of their work and turn them into compliant and productive cogs in the machine The reason for this is not because corporacy sucks but because humans suck at corporacy and when placed in group environments of over a handful of people we tend to resort to mob rule and groupthink at the expense of culture and individual rights It's rather complex but incentives are the clearest indicator of outcomes people simply have no incentives to help each other but every incentive to seek permission and recognition from management In such an environment it's been postulated that four types of personalities emerge as people attempt to exert control and these are known as Control Dramas: - The Intimidator - The Interrogator - The Aloof and - The Poor Me You can look these up there are several good articles online about identifying and mitigating these but it's not always just one but a combination that people exhibit Framed in this context you can see corporations as implemented naively operate on only four cylinders even if it's only figuratively or intuitively true it's far from the humane ideal of what agile intended and this also has to do with metrics becoming targets and incentives trumping ethics In the end we trumpet DRY and try to 'focus on our work' while we repeat the same inane insane dramas day after day expecting a different outcome that's the worst form of repeating yourself but we collectively walk into it in every case I'm personally carrying a lot of resentment at the engineer class because we've been trained to know better but we simply can't get over ourselves and wake up to the fact that we're not just part of the problem, we are the problem but as such we also possess the solution if we really sit down and think about it The solution lies in the following concepts A) it's possible to have alignment and autonomy it's not necessary to choose between chaos and blind compliance B) It's possible to have investment and productivity but it's necessary to trust people and that ultimately is where we fail |