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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

I have no sympathy for that view. I work for a large bank where getting anyone to write any line of code, even for non critical infrastructure, requires a huge amount of energy, frustration, and with anaemic results. Trivial things are overengineered to an absurd level. I estimate that it must take 3 hours of discussions, reports, chasing, conference calls for every minute of code written. And at the same time, while IT cannot deliver even the most trivial changes, they are trying to do everything they can to reduce the productivity of end users to a halt, preventing them from writing any line of code, using any sophisticated tool, locking down the platform, and basically perpetuating copy-pasting, email based processes forever.

There is code that I literally prototyped myself in a week and that I am told would take years to rewrite by IT.

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Think about the great lengths that good technology companies go to to get decent productivity. They have to work very hard to get it - companies that don't understand it won't.

What you have is incredibly common in non-technology companies. Good engineers are now very hard to recruit and expensive. Unless your company values them enormously, your engineers are going to generally be pretty mediocre[1]. On top of that, your company isn't going to understand engineering projects - when you need to invest in infrastructure, tooling and technical debt.

These factors together multiply up over time until everything grinds to a halt.

[1] An aside - in my experience of organisations like this and also mediocre engineering organisations, there is usually one guy who knows his stuff, and is holding it all together. Some of it is like Brent in the Phoenix project, but some of it is that the rest of the people are just rubbish.

Out of curiosity, are there any common themes on why that person (ie Brent) sticks around? Part of me wants to say that if a company is so disfunctional that one engineer (or a handful of engineers) prop it up, it deserves to fall over

There's a few options. The easiest to understand and the least likely is that they like being the big fish in the small pond. They enjoy being in demand from everyone around them.

More commonly it's a lack of ambition and a comfort with where they are. They're happy with their environment, they don't want to to risk the change and they don't see why they would. They may have only worked in that sort of place (or only in that one place), and haven't seen how much greener the grass might be elsewhere.

Two things to consider: 1) audit + compliance are running the show 2) the bank not killing the golden goose is more important than anything else.

This is a great point too. There is always two sides to this story and often the other side is the budgeting office.

Its difficult to see all perspectives in organizations and operations as complex as this.

That's generally why management gets paid what it does. Although they're not any more immune to this exact problem...

So why not outsource important stuff? Freelancers and dev houses have the needed expertise. They'd be head over heels since it's a large bank and would probably pay well. Many big organizations can surely afford hiring people with the know-how even at $100/hr if it boosts productivity and gets things done.

These 2 things can and do both exist - they both represent a pretty worst-case outcome respectively for users and for IT teams. I feel I’ve worked at both these places.

I don't disagree. I don't really know anyone working for tech companies, particularly startups. But outside of tech, everyone I know (in various sectors) has the same stories about their IT dept. So I think that this tendency to over engineer and deliver nothing is more than an isolated anecdotical experience.

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