Tag: business

I assume most of you work with others in a team. Even if you are the data specialist and others work on different technologies, you still have a team. How long has your current team been together in this form? Have you had a stable team that might have grown, but the rest of the individuals and roles/responsibilities stay the same? Or has your team changed makeup, roles, responsibilities, or something else?

I don’t see a lot of organizations that change their team structures often. There may be people who come and go from a team, but the core structure remains the same. Even when your company might reorganize a bit, often it’s teams that shuffle between managers, but mostly remain the same. There certainly are exceptions, and some large orgs (Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) regularly shuffle lots of people around, but I’m not sure the teams change their makeup or their mandate much.

I was thinking about this as I read an article on knowing when to restructure your team. I won’t recommend you read it as I think seems to imply restructuring technology teams will make them perform better and start meeting all the commitments that have been made. While I do think that a well-led team can perform better, restructuring your teams isn’t likely to make them more efficient and productive. That being said, I do think the article raises some good questions about how you might evaluate your team.

There are certainly times when an IT team, whether in development or operations, might start to miss deadlines or may seem to work inefficiently from the outside. We are human, and humans can get complacent, or they might focus on tasks or work that they want to complete, ignoring work they don’t enjoy. The latter might be things the business needs, and restructuring the team isn’t going to fix that. Either the current staff has to be managed more closely to get them to focus on necessary work, or maybe different people should be assigned to those projects or tasks.

Just remember you work with humans, and they often struggle with change. Change might be necessary, but a little empathy helps us cope with the challenges and learn to work together in our new structure. If we don’t have that, likely nothing gets better and we fall into old habits.

Steve Jones

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I own a Tesla, which is essentially a computer on wheels. Much of the way the car works is driven by software, which I love. New features have appeared and minor fixes come through in the same way that they do for apps on my mobile device. It can be annoying to wait for an update to install, which has happened when my wife or I start the update remotely and don’t realize the other is planning on driving. Fortunately, I can set these to run overnight from my phone and they mostly disappear into the background.

I don’t worry about Tesla failing, at least, that hasn’t been on my mind, but I ran into this article about a company in China that is failing. The WM Motor Company filed for bankruptcy, and perhaps coincidently, their app stopped working. Owners couldn’t manage basic functions. The company put the server back up, but that brings up a bit of a concern for software that depends on external connections.

This raises concerns for Fisker in the US, and really, for any sort of device that one might buy that could depend on an Internet connection for operation. It’s one thing to have updates and options, it’s another for a device to just stop working because the company is gone.

Consumers don’t have a lot of power with regard to software companies, but we do have some. As software becomes more prevalent and important in other parts of our lives, I would advocate for some sort of open-sourcing of software in live devices if companies fail, or even if they decide to discontinue support. I have a 23-year-old car that works fine, and I can get parts. Dealers don’t want to work on it, and it has been a challenge at times to find OEM parts, but there are plenty of third parties.

We ought to have third parties in software as well.

Most of you work for a company, which often makes its own software. If your company abandons a piece of software, everyone adapts and moves on. Even if your company sells a service, it makes sense they could discontinue the service. However, when you sell a physical product or even a physical install of software, I think you ought to give customers a way to maintain their system if you decide to stop doing so.

Update: another issue with Fisker (SMH)

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.

I had someone ask me about DuckDB recently. Would I think that’s a good choice for a database? I don’t really know. From their blog and some online research, maybe, but it’s also a minority player in a niche space.

I had a chat recently with someone that had implemented ArangoDB, a graph database. Why that and not Neo4J I asked them? Someone at the company had tried the database and recommended it. Not a bad reason, as I think experience with tech is important, but it’s not the most important thing.

As I’ve aged, and maybe matured, I think less about the ability of a technology to work and more about the ability of a technology to be maintained over time. Not by me, but by everyone in my organization. Not everyone, but can anyone working on our staff learn and use it, including the future employees we haven’t yet hired.

There seem to be no shortage of new niche technologies. I have a few newsletters I subscribe to, and I see new projects and new solutions appearing every day. New tools, utilities, frameworks, even databases. Some of these might be amazing, and incredibly useful, but will they exist in a few years? In fact, that’s a question I ask myself about plenty of Microsoft technologies that appear. Will they really be around in 5 years? Long-term, or at least medium-term, supportability is important.

I also worry about the training and learning required for new technology. I’ve seen companies that adopt too many products in their tech stack and it becomes hard to hire experienced people. Even if we hire smart people that can learn, we have a lot to teach them. The more we need to teach, the slower they are to be productive. It can be even slower for us to trust them to work independently, especially in a crisis.

I think that most organizations should limit the number of technologies they use. This could be frameworks, languages, and more, including databases. Don’t add something new just because a developer, DBA, or even executive likes it. Certainly, be careful about changing technologies when the change isn’t adding value to your organization. Every change has costs, every new advantage contains a disadvantage, and every additional thing creates training requirements. Some people might pick things up quickly, easily, and during their off hours. That person might be you, but how many others will be able to do that?

Not many. That’s been my experience. The world is full of average people, by definition. While the average level (skill, capability experience, etc.) at your organization might be higher than our industry, over time, that will change. As our organizations grow, and as we change staff, we often become more average.

Our choices, and methodologies, our architecture, and more must survive the average employee, not the high performing ones.

Every organization ought to limit tech choices. There ought to be a process and way to add new technologies, and employees ought to be able to submit a request, make a case, and have others decide if taking on a new technology makes sense. If so, great, but do so carefully.

I like seeing new technologies built and adopted, but I also try not to just adopt the latest shiny things. Experiment, in a time-boxed fashion, and make decisions when appropriate, consciously because the benefits outweigh the costs. And not just slightly outweigh the costs, but substantially. In all likelihood whoever proposes the new tech isn’t thinking about the downside, and there will always be more downsides than you can see right now.

Steve Jones

Listen to the podcast at Libsyn, Spotify, or iTunes.

Note, podcasts are only available for a limited time online.