You made this? I made this.
You made this? I made this.
Your company's parasite problem
Some years ago I was overhauling a very brittle, confusing, and disorganized thing.
The client relied on this thing working, but it was error prone and unsustainable.
I spent a month planning and validating, and another month writing and integrating, then another few weeks making it programmatically impossible to screw up for even the most absentminded developer (everyone makes mistakes!). I replaced the old footguns with a vigilant early warning system, and plugged it all directly into the CI pipeline. Custom lint checks! Full automation!
Then I made myself highly available to any developers that needed assistance, doing whatever it takes to get things sorted. My attention moved on to other nasty problems, where I repeated this process.
You made this?
A while later, another team reached out to inform me:
“We’re going to own
the thingnow.”
Sure, but why? It barely demanded any of my time any more, much less the time of an entire team.
“We’re going to migrate it into our repository.”
Their repository? That would undo a lot of my work. It makes no sense. I peek through the collection of what this team “owns”:
Internal libraries with zero consumers
Zombie slack channels filled with release notes that no one reads
A Jira board full of busy work
Not a line of code shipped to users
And now I understand. They don’t want to own it in the sense of being responsible for, or accountable to it. To be highly available to fix issues. To be the backstop, no matter who’s fault those issues are.
They want to own it symbolically. They want to take the shiny object back to their display case, only to gesture at it when the constable comes by to see their papers — their proof of productivity.
If they were really interested in owning anything, they’d try solving any problem from the dozens that have caused widespread headaches and misery. The thing, on the other hand, is a tempting acquisition: it asks nothing of them and looks good in their catalog. Aren’t we important?
I made this.
Maybe in the past, that team tried what I did. Perhaps they discovered that owning a problem in their organization was a long, thankless process.
And now, they prefer to own a solution (already deployed), hoping that if they stand close enough to it they’ll be mistaken for a load-bearing structure.
Oh, your team does thing? Keep up the nice work.