How a Rowing Team's Reorganization Led to Disaster

I smirk and laugh this little slideshow and then remember that my own work involves internal tools to promote governance and productivity while formalizing requirements to two outsourced developers.

I don't think I'm one of the red team's 7 captains, but I don't exactly have my hands on the paddle every single day. After all, I can find the time to lollygag on HN between 9-5.

The intentional bad UX made me read the whole thing, instead of skimming through.

In this day and age, bad UX is great for preventing ADHD users

Private firms are entertainingly idiosyncratic in ways only founder-powered public firms barely approach. The other big one I find entertaining is Dr Bronner’s soap which has a massive label full of dense text that is totally stream of consciousness sentences. Amazing.

Perhaps it’s a characteristic of closed groups. SQLite has its moral code that is the Ten Commandments++. Good stuff.

I think generalizations are usually bad. I genuinely am weirded out by management's fascination with consultants. It really is about incentives, and consultants usually do not have the right ones, at least the big ones. Also, there are management which feel like companies always need change, but really you have to examine the competitve position within the broader industry not just a vacumm. Things honestly stay the same for a long time. IBM had more revenue then Microsoft all the way up to the early 2010s. Switching costs are powerful - https://s-1.vercel.app/posts/why-dropbox-is-a-obvious-pe-tar...

I think a key takeaway is the human nature to constantly act, and not just sit and do nothing. Lot's of value in sitting around, especially in investing.

And then they came up with a brilliant term called "agile methodology". The word "agile" was a big selling point. Under the new methodology, there will be standup meetings and introspection every 5 minutes during the race.

I spent a few years on and off consulting working for two of the Big 4. I can’t speak for all the teams but the ones I worked with provided good value. Our job was to protect our customers from poor designs and lack of accountability. Some of the projects I worked with were very big involving dozens of suppliers. Our customers didn’t have the capability to coordinate so much work and they also lacked the know-how and expertise in many of the domains. Also many of the big engineering and tech companies out there can be very sloppy. Don’t think because they carry a recognizable name (I don’t want to name them but they are SP500) they always do good work. I have seen stuff that is really really bad, like unsafe bad. That’s where my team would step in and fill those roles on the customer side. Many of the projects I participated were also highly regulated, and that’s a whole additional layer of complexity for which you need people with experience in very particular areas. A bad design that leads to an environmental disaster or even a violation of regulations can be extremely costly.

Am I misreading something, or was it not in fact the corporate leaders who torpedoed the reorg suggestions they knew were coming, who were at fault?

This is a classic hierarchy-brain/ bureaucracy problem, where "leaders" think the top is more important to the org than the bottom.