<story><title>Microsoft execs on Apple&apos;s music store (2003)</title><url>https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1647317806697050112</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>operatingthetan</author><text>&amp;gt;FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I&amp;#x27;m not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.&lt;p&gt;In my experience it wasn&amp;#x27;t the excess employees (everyone seemed to be busy) but that processes in the org didn&amp;#x27;t match the size and leadership from the top down couldn&amp;#x27;t see the problem. So no efforts were made to make teams work better together and align their incentives.&lt;p&gt;A great example was API teams would ship incomplete and untested work as &amp;quot;done&amp;quot; because they were overworked and on an insane timeline.  My front-end team tested the APIs for implementation and discovered all the missing parts, and then we had to document all of it and ask the team to fix it.  The API team would then push back claiming we were wrong.  My devs would have to spend hours on calls with them going over each missing piece and the API devs played dumb every time.&lt;p&gt;I would have to escalate to my manager and he felt pushing back on the other leads would burn political capital he didn&amp;#x27;t have.  This wasn&amp;#x27;t just one API team, it was &lt;i&gt;seven&lt;/i&gt;.  Somehow the culture of the org caused them all to follow the same strategy to push their QA to other teams and delay completion. It was so crazy that they would get defensive saying &amp;quot;we have the best developers in the world, that is not possible.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;A true organizational illness.</text></item><item><author>thecupisblue</author><text>&amp;gt;Both teams on both sides wanted this to come together&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;It takes apple to make a move for us to break through communication issues and get anything done&lt;p&gt;Imagine paying millions of dollars for &amp;quot;the best&amp;quot; developers, designers, managers, yet they can&amp;#x27;t even communicate with each other properly to align with common interests. FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I&amp;#x27;m not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.&lt;p&gt;Where I&amp;#x27;m from we have an expression - &amp;quot;many grandmas, lazy&amp;#x2F;spoiled child&amp;quot; - and it&amp;#x27;s especially rings true in creative work.&lt;p&gt;For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It&amp;#x27;s extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams.
It&amp;#x27;s one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That&amp;#x27;s how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.&lt;p&gt;Recently I had a chance to work at a theatre production that ended up suffering from the same issue - the director had no vision but only an idea, so he delegated
different work to everyone, then micromanaged people and intersected into every attempt at collaboration with his own opinions and ideas. As new people were coming in, their ideas were added into the mix, creating a show that ended up being even worse than mediocre.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ecshafer</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve never liked having an API team &amp;#x2F; Front End Team distinction. I don&amp;#x27;t think it makes good software in most cases, it creates that combative element between the teams due to different priorities that you saw. A team with a product, needs to have the freedom and ability to work at any level of the stack to get that product out, sure that rarely happens 100% and there is coordination between teams, but Vertical slice teams do it better than Horizontal slice teams in my experience.</text></comment>
<story><title>Microsoft execs on Apple&apos;s music store (2003)</title><url>https://twitter.com/TechEmails/status/1647317806697050112</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>operatingthetan</author><text>&amp;gt;FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I&amp;#x27;m not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.&lt;p&gt;In my experience it wasn&amp;#x27;t the excess employees (everyone seemed to be busy) but that processes in the org didn&amp;#x27;t match the size and leadership from the top down couldn&amp;#x27;t see the problem. So no efforts were made to make teams work better together and align their incentives.&lt;p&gt;A great example was API teams would ship incomplete and untested work as &amp;quot;done&amp;quot; because they were overworked and on an insane timeline.  My front-end team tested the APIs for implementation and discovered all the missing parts, and then we had to document all of it and ask the team to fix it.  The API team would then push back claiming we were wrong.  My devs would have to spend hours on calls with them going over each missing piece and the API devs played dumb every time.&lt;p&gt;I would have to escalate to my manager and he felt pushing back on the other leads would burn political capital he didn&amp;#x27;t have.  This wasn&amp;#x27;t just one API team, it was &lt;i&gt;seven&lt;/i&gt;.  Somehow the culture of the org caused them all to follow the same strategy to push their QA to other teams and delay completion. It was so crazy that they would get defensive saying &amp;quot;we have the best developers in the world, that is not possible.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;A true organizational illness.</text></item><item><author>thecupisblue</author><text>&amp;gt;Both teams on both sides wanted this to come together&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt;It takes apple to make a move for us to break through communication issues and get anything done&lt;p&gt;Imagine paying millions of dollars for &amp;quot;the best&amp;quot; developers, designers, managers, yet they can&amp;#x27;t even communicate with each other properly to align with common interests. FAANG culture is becoming so slow and ineffective that I&amp;#x27;m not surprised they are cutting tens of thousands of employees.&lt;p&gt;Where I&amp;#x27;m from we have an expression - &amp;quot;many grandmas, lazy&amp;#x2F;spoiled child&amp;quot; - and it&amp;#x27;s especially rings true in creative work.&lt;p&gt;For something truly brilliant to be created, you need someone with a vision and freedom to implement it. It&amp;#x27;s extremely rare for something brilliant to come from committee or top-down designed by managers delegating work to a bunch of teams.
It&amp;#x27;s one of the reasons even open-source struggles with design - you need one or a tiny team of aligned brilliant people to work together, and you need to give them freedom to do it. Not constrain them with meetings, micromanaging the product and letting everyone express their opinion. That&amp;#x27;s how you get a terrible, bland, uninspiring design.&lt;p&gt;Recently I had a chance to work at a theatre production that ended up suffering from the same issue - the director had no vision but only an idea, so he delegated
different work to everyone, then micromanaged people and intersected into every attempt at collaboration with his own opinions and ideas. As new people were coming in, their ideas were added into the mix, creating a show that ended up being even worse than mediocre.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jiggawatts</author><text>Happens everywhere. I just advised a dev team manager not to push a code base to the test team while it was very visibly broken. You don’t need a tester to tell you it’s obviously broken, and any testing they do will just have to be redone anyway once the basic issues are sorted.&lt;p&gt;Nope.&lt;p&gt;“We have to show progress!”</text></comment>