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Comment by cs02rm0 | Hacker News Reader

It's just big company talk to pretend they're cool and innovative. Obviously ridiculous garbage that probably got someone a good annual review score.

A small company I was working with had heard that IBM, who had a customer in common, were operating some sort of "garage" thing that the customer really liked. Rumours were flying around, someone had heard it was a video conferencing app, they were desperate to know more about this secret sauce.

Eventually I got to speak to an opposite number from them on a piece of work that joined with our own. They were calling any team of people a garage (because of the Amazon, Apple, etc stories). That's all it was, just a different word for team, like toddlers playing let's pretend.

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I worked within IBM garage, it's not 'any team of people', it's a specific organization that mostly does services work. Their 'secret sauce' is that they're trying to consult on technology and company culture at the same time, in line with Conway's lay.

I.E. If you want to be more agile you'll want to adopt CI/CD, if you want micro services you'll want smaller more autonomous dev teams.

Yes but the parent's point is that the term "garage" has nothing to do with how or where the team actually works. It's a make-believe name chosen because of its association/connotation, not because of any actual grinding in reality.

There is a physical garage (more of a hipster warehouse styled co-working space) that the org no longer fits entirely in, but was still in use up until Covid hit. The plan pre-covid was to build more of these spaces to use for co-working sessions with clients.

When I worked at IBM Cloud they copied the Spotify model of squads and tribes and guilds. I remember having to watch a video about it on my first day.

Woah I think we've stumbled on something here.. Spotify seem to be the source/example of all these new management fads. I remember having to sit through that hand-drawn sketch video (is there a name for these things?) describing how Spotify does SAFe (if you don't know what this is, pretend you never read it and continue your life as usual, please) and how awesome it is and why we all need to do it.

What sort of thing is SAFe? Is it some sort of unsuccessful corporate pantomime of a successful practice?

Opinions are my own, but it’s basically a worst version of agile (safe = scaled agile framework) that removes all autonomy from teams and gives upper management/leadership more power in making decisions at the team level.

If you never heard of Allen Holub look him up on YouTube/Twitter. He’s one of the same voices when it comes to agile frameworks.

The A stands for Agile if that gives you a clue ...

it’s “scaled agile framework”.

Move on.

Indeed, it was the same in the Watson group where I worked about 6 years ago. It was pure cargo cult activity that ultimately resulted in much lower productivity.

I actually liked my experience with the guild structure, as somebody new to the industry. I had my specialty, was the leader in my team in my particular specialty, but that's mostly because I was the only one in my team with the specialty. The guild structure got me the opportunity to network with people who were more experienced in that area

Where I work we have teams and guilds. Guilds operate every other Friday, they work on cross-team concepts (e.g. automation, ai/ml, security, open source). Some guilds work better than others. The downside is around ownership (e.g. A guild creates a useful tool that ends up being used throughout the org, who fixes the critical bugs that arise?)

We originally cargo-culted the Spotify model, but changed it to fit how we want to work, it seems OK.

When I worked at a startup we copied the Spotify model as well. We called it "functional teams" and so on but the idea was the same - we watched the spotify videos as well. To be honest it helped. I think this is a point in IBM's favor because they saw something better, and adopted it even though "it was not invented here".

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