[willvarfar]

> we talk about programming like it is about writing code, but the code ends up being less important than the architecture, and the architecture ends up being less important than social issues.

A thousand times this! This puts into words something that's been lurking in the back of my mind for a very long time.

[nuclearnice3]

Strongly agree. Peopleware 1987 [1]

> The first chapter of the book claims, "The major problems of our work are not so much technological as sociological in nature". The book approaches sociological or 'political' problems such as group chemistry and team jelling, "flow time" and quiet in the work environment, and the high cost of turnover

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peopleware:_Productive_Project...

[no_wizard]

I’ve been drumming this for so long now, even before I heard of (let alone read) this book.

I feel that the development of psychology and sociology has been lost on the workplace and it isn’t well applied. Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves, even when study after study shows that for companies to perform optimally their workers must feel well compensated, well valued, balanced freedom in the workplace, chances for advancement etc.

In many respects you could apply psychology and sociology to how products should / could behave etc. as well, which I’m sure due to the monetary component some companies have taken seriously at least in some periods of their lifecycle, like Apple under Steve Jobs in his comeback

[pydry]

>Executives want everyone to be widgets except themselves

Of course. This maximizes their relative power within the company.

Some executives are focused on the health of a company as a whole but not many. To most of them the pie can be assumed to be a fixed size and their job is to take as much of it as possible.

[zemvpferreira]

For businesses or business areas where excellent isn’t necessary and good will do, this attitude can even be considered to be in the best interest of the company. The more fungible employees are made, the less bargaining power they have.

[nuclearnice3]

Fair point. You could also imagine it's an easier management task to have fungible employees. Sam quits. No risk to the company. Our employees are fungible. Sarah can step right in.

[zemvpferreira]

I guess so. As a business owner/administrator it’s easy to see how your interests align in this way. As a worker your priority should be the opposite of course.

[BOOSTERHIDROGEN]

What if the company has significant constraints on its financial health?

[lmm]

Then it's all the more important to avoid unnecessary employee turnover.

[mst]

People tend to vastly underestimate how much the time needed for a new hire to come up to speed costs the employer.

This is true even of (theoretically simple) things like retail jobs, because even if you're proficient in the basic skill set on day one, coming up to speed on the rhythm of a specific workplace still takes time.

I'm buggered if I can remember where I saw it, but there was a study once that showed that (in that specific instance, I have no clue as to whether or not it generalises) a minimum wage increase actually *saved* retail/service employers in the area money overall, just because the reduced churn meant that over the lifetime of an employee with the company the fact that said lifetime was longer meant they were getting enough more value per hour out of each employee to more than compensate for the higher cost per hour.

Of course the study could always have been wrong, but it didn't seem obviously so back when I looked at it and it at the very least seems plausible to me.

[mihaaly]

Considering that programing and tools used for it are not for computers but humans, and that apart from most trivial things more than one people is necessary to make something that work on/with computer(s), it is no surprise that SE is much more social science than many would like to admit or feel comfortable with, over-emphasizing its natural science part to the level of failure eventually (on the product level aimed at addressing needs of the people). Probably because social sciences are very fluid and much less reliable than natuaral sciences, so we have an inner tendency avoiding the social bit, or handling it on a very primitive level? I do not know, this is a feeling. So much focus on atomic details of technology yet the group effort of the product is still rubbish too many times.

[transpute]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

> Organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. — Melvin E. Conway, How Do Committees Invent?

[transpute]

Source code repos could have USER.md and DEVELOPER.md files to record social context.

[lou1306]

But again, that is at best infrastructure documentation, not code. Unless you dilute the term "code" until it loses nearly all utility.

[transpute]

User (social) org structure and Developer (social) org structure are unavoidable requirements which constrain code implementation, as much as processor speed and memory capacity.

[Swizec]

In my experience roughly 80% of technical issues are because 2 people (or teams) didn’t want to just sit down together and talk it out.

[Agingcoder]

Yes, because ‘they’ ( the other team ) are not doing it right so not talking is best

[zelphirkalt]

It is not a dichotomy though, as a good architecture manages to fulfill the requirements people have for the system _and_ keeps it understandable for human beings.

[IgorPartola]

This precisely describes why Google Glass failed.

[mattigames]

Elaborate?

[IgorPartola]

Doesn’t matter how good the platform was, it wasn’t a socially acceptable product.

[mst]

I *really* wanted basically "google class without the frigging camera."

Being able to overlay an 80x24 terminal over one of my eyes (and drive it with a bluetooth keyboard or whatever) would've been fantastic for me.

Unfortunately for me, this is enough of an outlier desire that it doesn't seem likely anybody will ever want to sell me that at a price point I can convince myself of.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Even Realities is approaching that now:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bckifBIPlHI&t=136s

[mst]

Having poked around https://evenrealities.com a bit: Yes.

Not sure I can convince myself to spend the money to find out, but they're definitely going in the direction I was thinking of.

Ta.