I worked for a client where we had successfully delivered a working FOH site and booking/order system. A new head of marketing joined, and from the first meeting this guy proclaimed himself as a “tech lead” and evangelist. He wanted “full FTP access” within the first 5 minutes of our meeting. We told him we didn’t use FTP as everything was deployed via our CI pipeline, and he kicked off.
After some crisis meetings, he said he wanted to change the entire CMS to be HTML boxes, threatening to ditch us if we didn’t give him what we wanted. They were paying lots for this change, so in the end we obliged. He proceeded to delete basically everything we’d built, and tried to replicate all functionality using a A/B injection tool and a HTML field. Clients were pissed, because none of it worked, and they lost some serious money from it.
In the end, we rolled back and said “fuck it, full git access, you’re a dev now”, and at midnight he brought the site down because he decided to rewrite some db transaction logic to write data to another store. To him, transactions were “outdated tech”, and he tried to clean it up by just performing destructive changes on their own…
In the end, they ditched us, and we were glad to be gone (they bought out their own contract). Sadly, he got his way, changed his title to “lead tech director”, hired a team, and their site went from fairly slick to looking like something from Geocities. That company no longer exists, and sadly, I can’t remember his name so I can’t see where he failed upwards to.
stuff like this makes me so pissed that it’s so difficult to get into leadership positions for most people, those with connections and money are free to fail upwards and ruin things, but the average joe can be the genius of our age and be stuck working at starbucks for minimum wage their entire life…
It’s also frustrating that a lot of baffling corporate decisions aren’t even excusable as being for profit, it’s just some executive being a moron and no one stops them! If it was for profit i could at least feel nihilistic about it, but this is just corporations actively choosing to continue letting things happen that benefit no-one.
I always think about stuff like this whenever libertarians talk about how much more efficient corporations are than government. I’m like, “Have you ever worked for a corporation?” Organizations are just huge dumpster fires in general, because they’re all run by humans.
They’re not dumpster fires because they’re run by humans, but because they’re run by unaccountable hierarchies. Humans are perfectly capable of running a sustainable and efficient operation if we only stopped to consider how better to make decisions collectively.
Can you give some examples of well run organizations and the techniques they use? I legitimately want to know if it’s possible to do better than most of our current governments, companies, and societies in general. This world is a mess and I have half given up on it ever getting better.
Wikipedia - While the Wikimedia Foundation itself is hierarchical, it manages Wikipedia through a process of community-led governance. Every article is maintained by a community of volunteers who engage in open debate to decide on content moderation policies. Wikipedia remains one of the few popular websites to avoid the recent internet enshittification.
Food Not Bombs - An activist organization that serves free food. FNB has no central organizing body, instead operating as a loose-knit group of independent collectives who voluntarily cooperate and exchange information and resources with one another. One specific collective, “A Food Not Bombs Menu,” has taken to coordinating the global activities of FNB collectives and helping people start new ones, but has no power over any others.
IWW - The Industrial Workers of the World, while hierarchical, ensures a hierarchy that is accountable to its’ rank and file members by means of a robust democratic process, as well as the right of any member union or individual member to leave at anytime and go it alone.
There are many more, but it’s late and it took me a while to pick out what I think are good representative examples of different ways an organization can be run well.
A box that allows someone to write HTML and JS and have it appear verbatim on a web page.
A horrific idea, and one that’s surprisingly hard to implement, as any sane CMS will stop you executing random code onto a web page, and any sane framework would stop you building a form in a free text box to POST data.
Every time we tried to fight this he would say “but WordPress would let you do this”. He tried to petition his boss to rewrite an entire web site and application we’d just built and delivered to spec and on budget in WordPress because “it would be better”.
He sounds like someone who read a Wired Magazine article and figured that made him an expert.
That company no longer exists
Not surprising if they’re putting people like that dumbass in charge. It’s just unfortunate that idiots like that end up costing everyone else their jobs too.
What’s funny is that this wasn’t a small company either. I won’t name it because it’ll be very easy to find this person, but they landed a leadership position with very little experience - think a few years working as a dev, and maybe one as a manager.
In my eight years working in consultancy, I’ve seen plenty of examples of this. I could write a book on some of the mental shit I’ve seen, from workplace wellness app owners trying to bully me online for having a single bug in their app, to finding several GB of fake Katy Perry nudes stored in a production database for a major company. Tech is totally fucked.
Unironically, yes.
I worked for a client where we had successfully delivered a working FOH site and booking/order system. A new head of marketing joined, and from the first meeting this guy proclaimed himself as a “tech lead” and evangelist. He wanted “full FTP access” within the first 5 minutes of our meeting. We told him we didn’t use FTP as everything was deployed via our CI pipeline, and he kicked off.
After some crisis meetings, he said he wanted to change the entire CMS to be HTML boxes, threatening to ditch us if we didn’t give him what we wanted. They were paying lots for this change, so in the end we obliged. He proceeded to delete basically everything we’d built, and tried to replicate all functionality using a A/B injection tool and a HTML field. Clients were pissed, because none of it worked, and they lost some serious money from it.
In the end, we rolled back and said “fuck it, full git access, you’re a dev now”, and at midnight he brought the site down because he decided to rewrite some db transaction logic to write data to another store. To him, transactions were “outdated tech”, and he tried to clean it up by just performing destructive changes on their own…
In the end, they ditched us, and we were glad to be gone (they bought out their own contract). Sadly, he got his way, changed his title to “lead tech director”, hired a team, and their site went from fairly slick to looking like something from Geocities. That company no longer exists, and sadly, I can’t remember his name so I can’t see where he failed upwards to.
stuff like this makes me so pissed that it’s so difficult to get into leadership positions for most people, those with connections and money are free to fail upwards and ruin things, but the average joe can be the genius of our age and be stuck working at starbucks for minimum wage their entire life…
It’s also frustrating that a lot of baffling corporate decisions aren’t even excusable as being for profit, it’s just some executive being a moron and no one stops them! If it was for profit i could at least feel nihilistic about it, but this is just corporations actively choosing to continue letting things happen that benefit no-one.
I always think about stuff like this whenever libertarians talk about how much more efficient corporations are than government. I’m like, “Have you ever worked for a corporation?” Organizations are just huge dumpster fires in general, because they’re all run by humans.
They’re not dumpster fires because they’re run by humans, but because they’re run by unaccountable hierarchies. Humans are perfectly capable of running a sustainable and efficient operation if we only stopped to consider how better to make decisions collectively.
Can you give some examples of well run organizations and the techniques they use? I legitimately want to know if it’s possible to do better than most of our current governments, companies, and societies in general. This world is a mess and I have half given up on it ever getting better.
Wikipedia - While the Wikimedia Foundation itself is hierarchical, it manages Wikipedia through a process of community-led governance. Every article is maintained by a community of volunteers who engage in open debate to decide on content moderation policies. Wikipedia remains one of the few popular websites to avoid the recent internet enshittification.
Food Not Bombs - An activist organization that serves free food. FNB has no central organizing body, instead operating as a loose-knit group of independent collectives who voluntarily cooperate and exchange information and resources with one another. One specific collective, “A Food Not Bombs Menu,” has taken to coordinating the global activities of FNB collectives and helping people start new ones, but has no power over any others.
IWW - The Industrial Workers of the World, while hierarchical, ensures a hierarchy that is accountable to its’ rank and file members by means of a robust democratic process, as well as the right of any member union or individual member to leave at anytime and go it alone.
There are many more, but it’s late and it took me a while to pick out what I think are good representative examples of different ways an organization can be run well.
Sounds like they had it coming. What are HTML boxes and HTML fields?
Fields usually refers to form inputs. Boxes could be anything, they could even be a box!
A box that allows someone to write HTML and JS and have it appear verbatim on a web page.
A horrific idea, and one that’s surprisingly hard to implement, as any sane CMS will stop you executing random code onto a web page, and any sane framework would stop you building a form in a free text box to POST data.
Every time we tried to fight this he would say “but WordPress would let you do this”. He tried to petition his boss to rewrite an entire web site and application we’d just built and delivered to spec and on budget in WordPress because “it would be better”.
He sounds like someone who read a Wired Magazine article and figured that made him an expert.
Not surprising if they’re putting people like that dumbass in charge. It’s just unfortunate that idiots like that end up costing everyone else their jobs too.
What’s funny is that this wasn’t a small company either. I won’t name it because it’ll be very easy to find this person, but they landed a leadership position with very little experience - think a few years working as a dev, and maybe one as a manager.
In my eight years working in consultancy, I’ve seen plenty of examples of this. I could write a book on some of the mental shit I’ve seen, from workplace wellness app owners trying to bully me online for having a single bug in their app, to finding several GB of fake Katy Perry nudes stored in a production database for a major company. Tech is totally fucked.