It takes a long time
Tell you friends!
I have enough momentum (me actually doing it) and some praise for this newsletter that I’ll pander to you now: help me get more subscribers! The best way to do this is to forward it to you friends (or, sure, enemies if they’ll subscribe) and tell them they should subscribe to it.
If you haven’t already bought my book at a super cheap discount (if you have: thanks! You flatter me!) you get for signing up, I’ll tell you what: if you get one person to subscribe, I’ll send you a code to get the book for free.
I AM NOT UNKIND.
BASK IN MY PDF BENEVOLENCE.
Original content
The janitor strategy - Developers don’t buy anything, but they make other people buy things. We try to, once again, build a theory of how developers drive IT spend. Also: hotel shampoo bottles, Scottish vikings, and Kiwi slang.
It takes a long time
Large organizations take a long time to change. They just do, and it’s frustrating. They’re not really built for quick changes: they’re built to reap profits from known business models, always optimizing how products are made and sold, growing the customer base for those products, entering new markets, and, most importantly of all, retaining their current customers and revenue…at the very least. You can’t do less business, you have to do more each year. Money is never satisfied.
So, companies take a long time to change.
This conservatism trickles down to technology choices and use as well.
Us technologists are frustrated by this to no end. But we don’t feel the pressures of screwing things up. We can just skitter from one thing to their other, even one job to another.
While you can rollback a software release, it’s hard to rollback a business model change. Of course, the reason you can rollback a software release is because you’ve built the whole machine around achieving that goal: you make small, weekly releases running on-top of infrastructure that prevents you from messing around with all the computers. You make tiny changes with a very good safety net in place. As Andrew Shafer put it once: if you want to learn to surf, you should know how to swim first.
If businesses want to innovate, they need similar structures in place - they probably need all the feel-good stuff from the DevOps world, especially blameless postmortems for when they fail, well, you know, learn that something doesn’t work:
Take-up was as we had expected – at peak times better than we’d expected – and it’s clear that not all our customers are ready for a totally till-free store. Some customers preferred to pay with cash and card, which sometimes meant they were queuing to use the helpdesk, particularly at peak times of day. This is why we’ve added a manned till and two self-checkouts back into the store so those looking to pay by cash and card can do so quickly and conveniently. We want to be the most inclusive retailer where people love to work and shop, so it’s really important to us that our customers can pay how they want to.... We’ll take the learnings from this experiment to develop our technology even further to help make shopping easier and more convenient for all our customers.
Technology innovation is relatively cheap and risk free, but business innovation is expensive and full of risk, fatal risk. Billions of dollars are spent trying new things out and many of them fail, and it can take once screwup to tank a company or just push it down a dark path.
Don’t get frustrated with slow moving business people, they’re not there yet when it comes to failure-driven success. Instead, maybe you could try to help them by showing them how (in our ideal state) is technologist lay out those safety nets and change what we do to benefit from failing.
What motivates executive decisions
Speaking of what companies are built for, Matt Levine lists what motivates “companies,” that is, the excerpted norms of what teams of executives are shooting for (I added the bolding):
Sometimes companies will do nice things for their workers or whatever, but it will always be for the same melange of reasons—tight labor markets, long-term profit motives, real or pretend CEO benevolence, genuine culture of respect for colleagues—that motivated U.S. public companies in 2018, or 1998, or any other point during the long reign of shareholder capitalism.
Relative to your interests
The 17th century Dutch business-empire had a lot going on. “Clean mother.”. There’s the “less than $3bn” cloud native strategy, and then the $34bn one.