The only good programming sub on reddit was /r/ExperiencedDevs because it used to be a sub that was just devs who had actually worked on difficult code bases and scenarios, actually built teams and software soup to nuts.
For the last year or two it's the same ChatGPT careerist bullshit that doesn't even understand what it's saying. There's literally a post on there where a dev is complaining that tech lead is telling him to refactor code he's touching and he's asking the peanut gallery for solutions.
Most of the peanut gallery is telling him to try to throw the work back through the ticketing/prioritization process.
Any place that I've ever worked at, good software, or at the very minimum software that wasn't extremely painful to work on, was created in spite of managerial decisions and processes. I've been a senior tech leader for like 10 years now, and all this is telling me is that people have no fucking clue.
Is there any community out there that understands that no matter what, when you put 2 proposals in front of a bean counter business guy who barely comprehends how to breathe, they're going to choose the one that is proposing a new revenue stream and not the one that's nerd bullshit --and that all decision making in companies is boiled down to a sequence of these moments? that all of your backlogs and engineering roadmaps are just wasted effort and time that creates a mountain of tech-debt debt to go through? that the only way to actually fix this shit is to enforce professionalized boundaries and tell the business that it's your job as developers to decide how to implement things and not theirs?
ExperiencedDevs used to actually tell people like this to fuck off, that they weren't a career advice sub. It used to be a sub where OP would be questioned if they were presenting themselves in a weird or perfect way because so much of this job at high levels is incredibly contextual and systems based. Now it's just the same shit as every other "the sky is falling", careerist, opportunist tech bro dump. It's worse than fucking Hacker News, because Hacker News at least understands P&L and knows it exists, that how you interact with it has conseqeuences. Half the comments in ExperiencedDevs are now like 'You have to have you Product Owner make the decision.'
Every product owner I've ever met was only focused on defining their own product within the business context (you know their job?). They had no idea how to build it. Most of them could barely systematize their own product features in a sensible way.
I'm so tired of this corpo trash where the only unsaid growth strategy is throwing "bodies at it" in a completely wasteful con-artist way. These people have never worked in different economies of scale let alone built systems at the higher levels, which is why they suggest these corpo processes to each other as if they actually produce anything other than trash code and maybe conversions. Then these absolute apes pat themselves on the back because they think smashing the keyboard to make the shittiest website was the "most valuable thing" in the process.
tl;dr is there a programming sub that isn't filled with mid-level morons that don't even know how their businesses work that simply fall back on these corpo agile processes as if they weren't captured bullshit? Where can I find a place that isn't this Medium, Learn2Code, I learned this from an influencer whose never actually done anything garbage?
Honestly you sound kind of toxic to work with. I agree with some of what you've said but there's like zero capacity for self criticism displayed here.
Where do you see designers playing a role in all this, for instance?
I have no problem with designers. They have a real job and the best of them make really great interfaces. It's a really difficult skill. They are a parallel work capacity to me. Most of the time most software has really bad UI/UX because designers are treated even worse than us at companies that have been financialized to the hilt. I've been at several places that have fired designers only to have to rehire them again.
I know I make programmer interfaces. Designers help refine those to something simpler and more usable. I actually have had multiple talks to designers at multiple companies saying how we needed to push for a unified product style guide + component theme to standardize the visual language and design. This helps lighten everyone's load because it makes time for building important shit on both sides. It's so hard to explain to business how valuable it is to have a process for building a durable library off the shelf components.
And how do you expect to build a design system without some kind of task tracking or governance process?
Certainly it's an issue how product people get to control these mm processes but that's an implementation thing.
Business does not actually govern according to anything but profits. Product is highly aligned with business goals at the majority of places because they often have the same metrics breakdown of the problem, marketability = features, features = money, new features = recurring revenue from subscriptions. Product managers going against business is often a sign of a toxic company or a misalignment in strategy/market position/expectations. Enterprise features = durable recurring revenue.
I usually advocate for increasing the scope of governance decisions to include production stakeholders (not just tech, but design and other production functions depending on industry I'm in) to achieve economies of scale for systems. The reality is the governance process at most places is nonexistent, and is solely a managerial function. The reason that leadership is split into technical and managerial in most modern tech companies is to consecrate governance power. We're told to as tech dweebs who cannot commune with the scam that is stock companies that we need to "manage up" instead.
I'm not against ticket tracking. I'm against the corpo culture where process is used as a soft power against people who are only treated with respect because the relation of their job to the market that leads to micromanagement and worse financial outcomes anyway.
Enterprise sales is a death knell for so many software teams because it disconnects the payer from the user. Meaning recurring revenue from sales to the same user aren't an organic process of conversion based on good software, they are a managed process of procurement. It creates a bad product and a bad set of incentives that ends up undercutting the original value prop. This happens bright as day within our own industry with our own tooling. Things like Jira, Trello, DataDog, AWS, tableau, looker, etc. I have a friend who's in the data science space with purchasing power and they change tooling every 2 years because as companies ramp up to the enterprise sales pipeline they stop maintaining the core offering as well and things get slow. Tableau and Looker are perfect examples that I've personally seen completely hollow out in my life time.
This is the agile version of real (capitalism/communism/socialsm) hasn't ever been tried. Not only are processes picked by their susceptibility to managerial meddling, but managerial meddling is a feature. That's why nobody uses XP and everyone uses scrum. That's why companies where there's push-back on mid sprint re-prioritization and waste go to kanban. These systems are ultimately products and are sold as such to management. That's why SAFe is getting incredibly popular in enterprise despite being overwrought garbage that cuts its own legs out from under it, and is more waterfall in design than the average scrum implementation.
I mean I def agree with you about SAFe being garbage. And a lot of what you say I agree with or am open to.
But if you're not against tracking tasks or governance what do you think the solution is?
I def agree that the incentives of enterprise is a big part of the issue.
As a designer I've found it hard to work with some devs because they don't believe my work is real, or worth tracking in the same systems they track their work in. They'd prefer me to kind of hang on the outside and make pretty graphics at the whim of them and the product manager (they usually think of the design process as a coat of paint applied after the real work has been done, so that it can look attractive to stakeholders up stream. But in fact design is not primarily about aesthetics or "look and feel")