This is the title of cormac's webcast tomorrow. The more is 5G in addition to everything else. Less is 30% layoffs.
9 replies (most recent on top)
Apple used to laugh about our tools. Then the laughter turned to resigned headshaking. In the meantime, it has turned to pure anger, because there really is zero progress on our side. I have no idea how often I have heard "We don't have that problem with Q!" from Apple managers.
And yes, it a taboo topic by now in iCDG. It's the elephant in the room that you must not address. We have been actively told by managers all the eay to Aicha to stop complaining about tools.
Sure, every team has some room for improvement, so it looks like we always just point to "the others" when we complain about tools, but when people have had to work hundreds of hours of overtime and weekends to make up for our tool problems, then how can you ask them to think about ways to improve? Their first answer will always be: "Solve that tool b---s--- first, then I will deal with my own problems."
"take everyone who has ever worked in development or management of STT, UTP or OptiCM and fire them all. then give maintenance of these tools to external companies or move to industry standard solutions like JIRA. result: huge immediate cost savings " - that is so true - this horrible crappy mess called "development toolchain" costs millions of developer hours.
The UTP workflow is just absurd - nothing makes sense, endless input fields to be filled up with nonsense that nobody uses and understands. "Waiting for info" is forever, nobody cares.
Ask any developer how much time he/she spends with real work like coding/testing and how much time just fighting against those windmills.
The SW test infrastructure in ICDG is a joke with the sole purpose of covering manager's a..s and produce nice looking statistics, and is the biggest productivity killer I ever saw in my career. One code change triggers hunderds of tests, of which some always fail because of "infrastructure problem", which become then developers problem. Countless toolchain bugs that will be fixed "in the next release" since years ... just wait for the next OptiCM release.
We certainly could do more with less in mobile, but not with the old Siemens "everything is good the way it was" managers in Germany, the "I'll be so happy if the other sites die" Indians and the "micromanagement is the way to success" managers in the US. No idea how so much useless deadwood made it through ACT.
Cormac should have a face to face with every manager in his org and ask "What is YOUR vision on how to improve your teams' performance" and if the first word in the answer is "Errrr" or "Uhmmm", then fire that manager on the spot. Get rid of all the deadwood that Aicha kept protecting.
They can hire top managers from Qualcomm. They can hire engineers from Qualcomm. But the middle management is still made up of the same old guys.
these guys are idiots. how about do more with better. those Q clowns are not 'better'.
so fully agree on the tools topic. take everyone who has ever worked in development or management of STT, UTP or OptiCM and fire them all. then give maintenance of these tools to external companies or move to industry standard solutions like JIRA. result: huge immediate cost savings and after a year a 10% efficiency gain from rapidly improving tools. absolutely win-win!
when it is about maintenance or development of our product, management is always quick to outsource or buy some company and their code. but when it is about our tools, everything has to be in-house. bizarre.
Nothing new there. That had been Aicha's mantra throughout all of her tenure. But all good ideas for improving our efficiency died sooner or later, because our middle management is incapable of accepting that there are actually ways to improve things.
Just look at what happened to those Agile initiatives. Middle management still has no clue what Agile even is, and they refused to attend trainings and workshops on that. Some project managers from Nokia got hired who were supposedly Agile experts, but it turned out they had no clue what Agile actually is, and we continued with waterfall projects in a pseudo-Scrum mode, adding Scrum overhead without reaping Scrum benefits. Lots of managers took the chance and installed one-hour daily status meetings, calling them "Scrum meetings".
One other example are our tools. If the tools teams had an external customer, they would have lost that customer many years ago. Our tools are still a huge reason for our inefficiency, but now we are told "Don't complain about the tools, nobody wants to hear it anymore!" Yes, and that is exactly the reason why they still s--- and why improvements in that area are often a "two steps forward and one step back" process. I don't get why so many people there who have continuously failed so badly still have a job. We should just get our tools done by external companies.
Just two examples where we will never see any improvements. So take your "more with less" and stick it!
Bring it. It's time.
The topic is pretty generic, if true.
I wonder if 30% will be distributed across the groups or sites would be shut down