| Great comment, I think a lot of us can find something in it that we relate to, even if not the whole story. > Nobody wanted to be the team that missed an integration test which came up as a cause of an incident. Our net reliability didn't actually change though This caught my eye because I’ve seen similar phenomena as well. No matter how well meaning those processes are very rarely do apps get significantly more reliable. It still seems entirely down to how complex the software is, it’s very hard to integration test your way to multiple 9s if it isn’t simple (some companies do it, but at bigger cost and slower velocity). As for some other points… I’ve come to believe change in culture is really something inevitable after a certain number though. And that number for an engineering team is not even hundreds, but may be only dozens. You operate less as a team and more like an army, with all the personnel issues that come with it. What interests me lately is the idea that, for many companies, 80% of the value/growth seems to be delivered when the company is relatively small at X headcount. Then increasing the headcount to 5X does not deliver much more than incremental changes built on top of the core product. Now if you have that many employees you need to find things for them to do, like managing themselves, creating processes or going off on new market bets, and you risk losing focus. But at the same time a company with 5X headcount seems more attractive to investors than one with X. The measure of success being only an IPO means there isn’t much pride in being well-run, small and focused, admitting that you’ll never be the top player in the market. That precipitates changes in developer culture. |