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Demoes are always concepts, they are not a showcase of capability instead it is an artistic impression of what is possible in the end state. A frequent repeated pattern in the enterprise software I see is that – someone builds a something eye catching in a short turnaround time, it gets coverage and people are assigned to take it production and then it stalls like how the loading icon appears when you try to watch a hd movie with a poor connection.

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I had been an advocate of rapid prototyping & development and XP practices all along my career. It is in my best interest to find increasingly faster and sound ways of developing software. The first problem to solve in software development is never programming, it is to figure out ‘are we building something that people would want it very badly?’ Building something was expensive so people had to be extra careful to understand if they are going down the right path. With advent of more and more easier programming tools, the building part became easier and easier to the point right now that we can do lots of work in an extremely short window.

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This paved way for ‘Let us build first and check if it works’. This is where several people stumble and I am reminded of the infamous developer quote ‘It works on my machine’. ‘Works’ means different to different people. Productionising an application is far from development completion. It involves architecting, designing, testing, certifying, securing, scaling, monitoring and on and on. The UX has to be top notch, architecture should be easy to scale, design should be able to add more components with less effort, when scaled and distributed it should take advantage of economies of scale and bring more returns.

Another bigger problem I see with the current state of development is that zero to one has become an easy to solve problem but people are stuck at level one and very few have the capability and grit to move beyond the starting point. What has in fact happened is that the starting line has moved from zero to one, the difficulty of getting to the finish line still stays the same. I feel it is momentary that people are getting carried away and impressed by the quick turnaround time.

Only when all the parts of the cycle from start to finish are transformed to a rapid development pace, then demos will be an engineer’s showcase not like an artist’s impression of how the finished product will look like; which is easy to demo and hard to ship

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A lot of CEOs are openly misanthropic, they dehumanise people as another expense in their sheet. Very open statements like the ‘New tech is going to do all the jobs, we do not need to hire humans anymore” are presented to drive insecurities among people. Historically, every revolution has required lesser and lesser humans for an activity thereby contributing to more people to higher order work. One single farmer can easily feed another 10 while a hunter-gatherer could not feed beyond their family; which meant farming communities had a lot of people available to figure out to do more than just try to figure out how to eat day in and out.

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What if everyone loses their job to AI? It will lead to extreme poverty and zero buying power leaving the companies with no buyers which is nothing but a self destruction. Another issue is with the thinking, every other leader I come across, hate humans and see them as expenses. A very bad mindset where the very nature of human existence is questioned. Society truly advances when there is boredom, not enough work to do while still being able to afford a living. When an executive only thinks about a cheaper present and not an advanced future, it is not anything about progression but regression disguised as progress.

If the executives still push for a cheaper present in a misanthropic manner, then governments have to turn to being socialist. Pay people a living wage, healthcare and basic shelter which will build boredom in people’s life to do something meaningful to create a higher order future that results in progress. If that does not happen and no one takes any step against misanthropy, there will be a collapse in the society to reach a breaking point, before misanthropists are dethroned but not before extreme regression resembling feudal societies.

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I have observed one common thing across different organisations I have been associated with, how the appraisal process works. Bell curve is the default standard. Over the many years; I have seen this kill very high performing teams by promoting silos, heroisms and also a rat race to avoid the bottom.

One place I remember very well was when I was coaching a hand picked team. This team was assembled by the business unit leader to adopt XP practices to switch from waterfall. This team was phenomenal, picked up concepts and intents of XP very well and showcased to the entire org on what lies ahead with the new ways of working. Then came in the annual performance review. Until that point I have not see the ill effects of a bell curve, it was always give your best and reap the benefits.

Lion and fox chasing impala on dry savanna grassland
A lion and a fox chase an impala across the African savanna at sunset.

This was a curveball that no one expected in the team as they thought they were immune from the old ways of performance management. As per the process, one of them will be labelled as a non or poor performer and penalised. So much for a team of handpicked top performers in the org. In the end, the one who was named as poor performer left the team and the org. It was a lose-win situation, the org and the team lost a good developer but the developer got a bigger and better role due to the upskilling.

When I asked an executive about this, the answer I got was that “It works for me and everyone around. Why fix something that is not broken?” That was an answer that stumped me on how normalised this has become. I know I can’t fix their process overnight but planted a thought on them by reversing the decision process, why are they limiting the number of people who can perform better than that is expected of a role. Aren’t they signing up for less?

The executive accepted but said that too little can be done about at large corporates. Many of them are too big to fail and have a good market share that it is hard for them to get disrupted. I did not give up though, I was able to persuade some of the smaller companies that I was involved to look away from this bad system of finding a prey and become a prey. Bell curve or forced ranking is quite detrimental to collectively up the game for an organisation.