post-OSCON reflection

July 27, 2007

I’ll probably write more about this later.  Things have only wrapped up here now, but the overwhelming impression was definitely positive.  The polish, energy, excitement and ideas here was fantastic.  It only brings me down a bit to realize that many of these ideas and concepts won’t translate back to work.  A former colleague was here, and he left the job because of the stagnation.  He was there about 2 years, and had his fill.  I’ve been there 20 months and am getting to the same point he was.

I’d love to be able to reinvigorate our company culture - shake things up, get things moving again, inspire people to greatness (at least the tech/development side of things!).  However, I don’t think it’ll happen.  The roles are set, the culture is fairly stagnate, and there’s no spirit of curiosity, experimentation and other traits which were on display in abundance here.  I realize conference goers are a self-selected bunch, and that the ‘real world’ can’t be made of everyone thinking 100% the same all the time.  That’s not quite my point.

We will likely never get to the point where our systems are a pleasure to develop on.  We have too much legacy infrastructure, and changing it requires too much work to ever be considered.  So, like many shops, we continue to patch new ideas on top of old code in essentially a ragtag fashion, and which further compounds existing problems.  The systems *work*, and will continue to work, which is all the business side of things really care about.  But we can not react *quickly* and efficiently due to the overwhelming mediocrity of the existing systems.  We can react quickly, but do hack jobs.  We can try to be efficient and ‘proper’ about things, but that can not happen quickly due to the spaghetti nature of much of the systems.  It’s the classic “fast good cheap, pick any two” triangle.

What I got from being here and talking with other people is that it doesn’t have to be that way, or at least not as pronounced as we currently experience the dilemma.  Talking with other people who do continuous integration, unit tests, proper QA, have the requisite tools, environments, management and so on gives me hope that it really *can* be done (and is done in some quarters).  At the same time, it is discouraging because it becomes more apparent that where I’m at now likely won’t transition to that.  Because, ultimately, the development side of a business is just a reflection of the rest of the business - its priorities, values and so on.  The developers can’t be ‘agile’ themselves without buy-in from the rest of the company, because all parties are completely intertwined.

So, should I continue to come to conferences like these?  It ends up being a double edged sword - great ideas, good people, but a realization that I am not as satisfied as I would like to be, and that I’m unable to affect the proper change where I’m at.  Ultimately I will continue to attend conferences (codemash, convergesouth and possibly DCPHP) because it does give me the chance for good personal growth and development, but these aren’t things that have much impact in my primary day to day job.

Posted in Conferences, Development, Job, Personal, Software