<story><title>Releasing software to the fleet far too quickly broke stuff</title><url>http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/04/23/rel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpoe</author><text>I work at a very large IT org (1000+) and the only way I have ever seen anything change substantially and persistently was when the change was introduced and made it far easier to do the right thing. Ultimately if you want people to do the right thing you can&amp;#x27;t force them into it, you have to make them want it.&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there are lots of opinions on how to change an organization or introduce improvements but ultimately if you aren&amp;#x27;t making people&amp;#x27;s lives easier, making them want the change you are trying to bring about, you&amp;#x27;ll find it almost impossible to succeed, human inertia is just too great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cthulhu_</author><text>The only major changes I&amp;#x27;ve seen in IT organizations of companies was where the existing IT department had declined or was let go over time and any development was in slumber mode. Then an excited manager comes around and erects a new IT organization from nothing (usually leaning heavily on consultants and freelancers), having sold a Digital Transformation to the company. The new IT &amp;#x2F; developer department spends millions a year in conjuring up a new server stack (cloud native) and a new software architecture (microservices woo), often building on top of existing ancient software (probably running on a mainframe three further abstraction levels down), with the intent of eventually replacing them. Eventually. Maybe.&lt;p&gt;Usually those things got bogged down in the end because after 1-2 years, the first wave of developers get bored and move on to other opportunities, and the architecture they made is poorly abstracted microservices communicating via undocumented and unstructured REST APIs, with not nearly enough end-to-end tests or traceability to reliably make changes or add features.&lt;p&gt;[&amp;#x2F;rant]</text></comment>
<story><title>Releasing software to the fleet far too quickly broke stuff</title><url>http://rachelbythebay.com/w/2020/04/23/rel/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hpoe</author><text>I work at a very large IT org (1000+) and the only way I have ever seen anything change substantially and persistently was when the change was introduced and made it far easier to do the right thing. Ultimately if you want people to do the right thing you can&amp;#x27;t force them into it, you have to make them want it.&lt;p&gt;It seems to me there are lots of opinions on how to change an organization or introduce improvements but ultimately if you aren&amp;#x27;t making people&amp;#x27;s lives easier, making them want the change you are trying to bring about, you&amp;#x27;ll find it almost impossible to succeed, human inertia is just too great.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>davedx</author><text>If only CloudFormation followed this philosophy. Unfortunately, doing things &amp;quot;The Right Way (tm)&amp;quot; within AWS means torturously long feedback loops, tearing down stacks and rebuilding them again over and over again (and when you&amp;#x27;re working with RDS databases, &amp;quot;tear down&amp;quot; is 10 mins and &amp;quot;rebuild&amp;quot; is 15 mins), then some stacks fail to delete because an IAM role that was just created is now somehow unable to be deleted...&lt;p&gt;Our company has restricted it so CloudFormation is the only way to provision infrastructure because doing things the right way makes our lives significantly harder.&lt;p&gt;And so the &amp;quot;native cloud&amp;quot; tax continues to accumulate and grow until you spend more and more time and money on just building and maintaining infrastructure...</text></comment>