(2023-11-24) The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work

Nikhil Suresh: The Failed Commodification Of Technical Work The most talented data engineer I know, and my first manager, is a man that loves cooking. We're talking about a culinary madman, capable of anything... Every day, we would step out of the office to get some coffee, and on at least three separate occasions we ended up talking about the difficulty of running a top-tier kitchen. And, most shockingly, on all of those occasions, he professed an admiration for the complexity required for McDonald's to run.

the optimizations and discipline required to ensure that two different acne-ridden teens with wildly varied education levels, separated by oceans, are capable of producing the same burger are non-trivial to say the least.

A Brief Glimpse Into The C-Suite Mindset

Many years ago, trying to figure out what the goddamn hell is going on in the tech industry, I ended up reading The Phoenix Project.

there's a whole genre of corporate fanfiction out there. Was it useful to read? Yes. Does it miss some of the real barriers to organizations improving? Yes, which I should talk about in another article. Was it cringe-inducing at points? Hell yes.

Some interesting ideas there, but then I realized that there are a few books that express this kind of sentiment

they're all inspired by another book called The Goal. (Eli Goldratt)

Ooh, a fast-paced story about improving factory throughput? Fuck yes, I'm getting shivers just thinking about it. These all sound like novels that aliens wrote because they've only been able to decrypt the traffic from LinkedIn.

And then I read High Output Management which really was good without having as many caveats around the tepid style.

A very large component to all this thinking is about economies of scale and the flow of work - these themes come up over and over again.

Many months later, and I was walking around the floor of a vendor conference and something began to strike me in the offerings. As a rough rule, I knew the products were not particularly good.

I currently believe that there's only one way to buy yourself out of technical issues and bad data models, and that's buying a really talented engineer whose sole focus is fixing the problem.

But what interested me is that they did not spend any time selling me on the technical details of the product. The pitches were entirely focused on something I wouldn't have noticed prior to reading all those books - they were focused on the reproducible delivery of work that was good enough to accomplish business objectives, without having to rely on all those pesky technicians to be good enough to do the job correctly.

I think this is the gist of the sales pitch. It is the promise that you can do away with the pesky implementation details of hiring correctly, or addressing all the bad decisions your predecessors made, or even telling your stakeholders that you've over-promised. Nah, you just buy the increased throughput widget, and now all the story points will be done on time.

Heck, even the way Agile is typically implemented at your average (read: dysfunctional and ineffective) workplace reflects this mindset. You count up how many units (story points) of parts (deliverables) that your machines (engineers) can produce, and then you let 'em rip, only to return next week and wonder why the machines only ever hit 50% of their target.

All of that sounds great... McDonald's almost never fails to produce fries of approximately the correct quality, within five minutes, every single time I've asked for them, and some of the absolute sons of bitches that I've worked for have clearly never shipped something that delivered value in their whole careers.

They just buy a license for bad software, say that they've successfully implemented it since no one can really check

Let me repeat that again more bluntly - we haven't figured out how to commodify a lot of this work

There might be the appearance that many of these things can be neatly commodified, but the majority of these seem to simply be companies that shouldn't exist selling a product that doesn't work to other companies that have oblivious decision-makers.

Rich Hickey has a delightful talk titled Hammock Driven Development, which I highly recommend... My man is out here advocating of a workflow that consists of feeding your subconscious mind research for four hours, then meditating on it for another two, then sleeping and praying that the Gods of Design simply bless you with an answer in the morning

In fact, all programmers seem to have experienced the strange phenomena where they walk away and the answer comes to them.

There are harsh realities to grapple with, and society runs on commodification, but anyone that thinks that you can run on pure commodification, without any understanding of their specific craft, or the human complexities, needs, and frailties of the people around them, who think that you can just buy more enterprise licenses and that giving someone a salary is enough reason for them to subjugate the entirety of themselves as they turn up to work every day...