<story><title>When the &quot;R&quot; goes missing from R&amp;D (2021)</title><url>https://madned.substack.com/p/when-the-r-goes-missing-from-r-and</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>btbuildem</author><text>Tangential, but it seems to me that as organizations grow, more and more resources are poured into everything other than what made them successful in the first place. Bureaucracy grows, hierarchies increase, teams upon teams organize, things are envisioned and realized and KPId, volumes of messages and emails shift back and forth, endless hours are met in meetings...&lt;p&gt;At the same time, productivity is reduced, actual communication diminished, gatekeepers slow everything and everyone down, fiefdoms form with their territorial turf wars, naked emperors run amok fanned by yes-men. On average three people out of a hundred are doing something actually useful, while the company slowly loses its grip on whatever niche monopoly has allowed it to so grotesquely exist thus far.&lt;p&gt;Everyone else is gradually PTSD&amp;#x27;d into a corpo version of Homo Sovieticus, filling out time sheets and RTO attendance records while duly marching towards V17 in the most recent two-year plan, aligned with the corporate values writ large on the HR site&amp;#x27;s main banner.</text></comment>
<story><title>When the &quot;R&quot; goes missing from R&amp;D (2021)</title><url>https://madned.substack.com/p/when-the-r-goes-missing-from-r-and</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>debacle</author><text>In my experience, this was likely entirely driven by one person, my guess would be two levels above the author in the org chart. It&amp;#x27;s sometimes frighteningly easy to convince business leaders that the dev teams are wasting a ton of time, doing the wrong thing, etc. It&amp;#x27;s even easier when that direction is coming from a consultant (might not be in this case, but I&amp;#x27;ve seen it happen a few times).&lt;p&gt;Someone who was supposed to be advocating for their team (maybe the author&amp;#x27;s boss) wasn&amp;#x27;t, or was being out-advocated by others, and that led to breakdowns. As a manager, I keep a lot of KPIs and do a lot of postmortems (lean), because you need to be able to counter the gut feeling of &amp;quot;development should be faster.&amp;quot;</text></comment>