I work in big tech and this is my life. I envy anyone who thinks you’re exaggerating, because that means they haven’t experienced the joy of spending weeks trying to track down the team responsible for a bug and then months hassling them to fix it.
I just stopped being hassled to fix a bug on somebody else’s system (that mine interops with), by the same developers responsible for maintaining that other system, because the problem got bad enough to escalate until somebody responsible for both sides looked.
And if they do talk to each other, the different departments need to go through the whole hierarchy for everything and each manager puts their spin on it, so you get answers back from questions that were not asked.
Here’s a real and true story about how separate Microsoft teams communicate and coordinate:
Few weeks ago, some Microsoft team from the US deprecated some critical service used by other Microsoft products. They just shut it off without notifying anyone. Other teams from other Microsoft offices in the rest of the world found about this deprecation when their production builds started failing to log customers in to the applications that they need for their businesses. People were called in from their vacations, emergency meetings were held to play hot potato with responsibility. Clients were PISSED. I stopped following the drama before it was resolved.
What is actually the best way to set up good communication between people and departments? Daily stand-ups tend to become hour long meetings. Make it an e-mail means people don’t read it half the time, some even having a rule to automatically shred that kind of mails. Set up talks between people and have a bunch of them not showing up but then get angry nobody asked them for their opinion.
I work in big tech and this is my life. I envy anyone who thinks you’re exaggerating, because that means they haven’t experienced the joy of spending weeks trying to track down the team responsible for a bug and then months hassling them to fix it.
Oh, man.
I just stopped being hassled to fix a bug on somebody else’s system (that mine interops with), by the same developers responsible for maintaining that other system, because the problem got bad enough to escalate until somebody responsible for both sides looked.
That said, I was just ignoring them. But hell…
And if they do talk to each other, the different departments need to go through the whole hierarchy for everything and each manager puts their spin on it, so you get answers back from questions that were not asked.
Here’s a real and true story about how separate Microsoft teams communicate and coordinate:
Few weeks ago, some Microsoft team from the US deprecated some critical service used by other Microsoft products. They just shut it off without notifying anyone. Other teams from other Microsoft offices in the rest of the world found about this deprecation when their production builds started failing to log customers in to the applications that they need for their businesses. People were called in from their vacations, emergency meetings were held to play hot potato with responsibility. Clients were PISSED. I stopped following the drama before it was resolved.
What is actually the best way to set up good communication between people and departments? Daily stand-ups tend to become hour long meetings. Make it an e-mail means people don’t read it half the time, some even having a rule to automatically shred that kind of mails. Set up talks between people and have a bunch of them not showing up but then get angry nobody asked them for their opinion.
For example a matrix org structure can do wonders.
Really, anything other than vertical hierarchical setup favored by so many tech companies.
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Wait does this mean I work in little tech?
Little tech? Like, a micro company that makes software? A “micro-soft”, if you will.
No no, it needs to be more present, more ubiquitous, more “ubi-soft”