On Fri, 26 Jun 2015, Brad Beyenhof wrote:
On Jun 26, 2015, at 1:05 PM, David Lang <[email protected]> wrote:
If your company has under a half dozen to a dozen techies total to run
everything, a "cowboy culture" is probably correct because everyone needs to
do everything, and there is very little commonatlity between tasks. As you
grow and bring in more people, tasks get more repetitive and standardizing
the response to problems becoems both more desirable and more possible.
Having said that, I think it's important to note that every company that
becomes large enough to standardize processes used to have a cowboy culture,
and the processes they standardize just turn out to be "whatever proved itself
to someone with authority."
So the standardizations at these various companies are largely arbitrary, and
often incompatible with one another. From a professionalization standpoint,
this makes standardizing the industry as a whole the worst kind of cat-herding
imaginable.
Yep, there's not much worse than having someone start at a new company who is
convinced that they know the 'one true' way of doing things to the point that
they don't even consider asking what the company standard is before making
changes.
The rapid turnover makes this worse because very few people are at a job long
enough to see something that they built get replaced. They always come in with
the "what was the idiot who set this up thinking". People who are around long
enough see the same mentality, but they were "that idiot" and can explain why
things were done that way (which may be as simple as "we didn't have time to do
better and this worked")
At least car manufacturers are held to standards, and not anybody can just
fashion their own chassis in their backyard. But that's what's being done in
software every day.
actually they can. If they try to sell them they have to go through
crash tests, etc. but you can build a vehicle from racks of steel, and as long
as the result meets the requirements (which are much less detailed than you
would think) you can register the result to run on the road.
David Lang
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