If you work for a for-profit company, you might want to ask yourself what this productivity is for. If you have an Agile conscience, don't you want your work to be directed toward user satisfaction, toward giving the customers what they need - what they ask for, adjusted to fit the constraints you've helped them to understand?
But your company has a fiduciary responsibility to direct your productivity toward the maximization of profit. The image of a loving provider of wonderfulness to the world, which your company has spent millions to promulgate, means nothing in the face of that legal obligation.
For me, this is a bedrock contradiction and a source of frustration and self-doubt that drove me out of the dev racket for a while.,
I am awed by the dedication of the folks who struggle to bring agility to to profit-driven hierarchically stratified companies, but it's a sisyphean mug's game. The facts of the fundamental incompatibility of priorities don't give a fuck about our feelings.
Hope is an opiate, and cold turkey would just aggravate the suffering.
P. S. Please have some respect for "semantics" - your dismissive use of the word comes off as ignorance.
I'm not sure where you're from, but here in Canada "fiduciary obligation" is defined as the responsibility for looking after the best interests of another party. There's nothing stated about maximizing profits. Indeed, the goal of maximizing profits has arguably led to much of the short-term thinking that pervades corporations today, to their long-term detriment. This can also be linked to the incentives that are installed for the executives which encourage this behaviour.
Now, could you please help me understand how your comment applies to my concerns about the use of "hope" when building software?
1. Not realizing you were Canadian, and assuming the U. S. IRS' definition of fiduciary responsibility was global - typical "American" tunnel vision (after all, we hijacked the name of the hemisphere).
2. Uncalled-for sarcasm re "semantics". Excuse: in a former career I was a linguist.
I should have led with my wholehearted agreement with your point about the inadequate audacity of hope and the need for a scientific perspective.
The point I was failing to make is that opiates are destructive, as you explained, but cutting them off - cold turkey - without dealing with the underlying pain (the contradiction) only adds to the suffering. I'm talking about "psychological safety" as championed by folks like Industrial Logic.
Maybe this only applies to for-profit companies in the U. S.. But I have to wonder: how often will a for-profit Canadian company chose support for the customer's needs over profit, other things being equal?
If you work for a for-profit company, you might want to ask yourself what this productivity is for. If you have an Agile conscience, don't you want your work to be directed toward user satisfaction, toward giving the customers what they need - what they ask for, adjusted to fit the constraints you've helped them to understand?
But your company has a fiduciary responsibility to direct your productivity toward the maximization of profit. The image of a loving provider of wonderfulness to the world, which your company has spent millions to promulgate, means nothing in the face of that legal obligation.
For me, this is a bedrock contradiction and a source of frustration and self-doubt that drove me out of the dev racket for a while.,
I am awed by the dedication of the folks who struggle to bring agility to to profit-driven hierarchically stratified companies, but it's a sisyphean mug's game. The facts of the fundamental incompatibility of priorities don't give a fuck about our feelings.
Hope is an opiate, and cold turkey would just aggravate the suffering.
P. S. Please have some respect for "semantics" - your dismissive use of the word comes off as ignorance.
Thank you for your comment, Tom.
I'm not sure where you're from, but here in Canada "fiduciary obligation" is defined as the responsibility for looking after the best interests of another party. There's nothing stated about maximizing profits. Indeed, the goal of maximizing profits has arguably led to much of the short-term thinking that pervades corporations today, to their long-term detriment. This can also be linked to the incentives that are installed for the executives which encourage this behaviour.
Now, could you please help me understand how your comment applies to my concerns about the use of "hope" when building software?
I'll start by apologizing for two things:
1. Not realizing you were Canadian, and assuming the U. S. IRS' definition of fiduciary responsibility was global - typical "American" tunnel vision (after all, we hijacked the name of the hemisphere).
2. Uncalled-for sarcasm re "semantics". Excuse: in a former career I was a linguist.
I should have led with my wholehearted agreement with your point about the inadequate audacity of hope and the need for a scientific perspective.
The point I was failing to make is that opiates are destructive, as you explained, but cutting them off - cold turkey - without dealing with the underlying pain (the contradiction) only adds to the suffering. I'm talking about "psychological safety" as championed by folks like Industrial Logic.
Maybe this only applies to for-profit companies in the U. S.. But I have to wonder: how often will a for-profit Canadian company chose support for the customer's needs over profit, other things being equal?