How to deal with internal company frameworks and SW factories?

Question

Based on my own experience and on experience of my friends I see that many companies have some strange ideas to develop their own frameworks and SW factories (builds skeleto

Answer 1

Generalization is bad, but here is what I've noticed, especially in large enterprise projects:

• Such behavior is generally driven by one of few more software engineers (they usually name themselve software architect) that fall into the descriptions you wrote in your question. Everybody needs to be proud of something to have the courage to wake up in the morning. I will add that they are usually CV driven for that reason and try to apply the latest design patterns without thinking about business implications and ROI. The key is NOT to hire that kind of person (or try to coach him/her to understand business consequences of his/her choices). Trying to make them proud of working for the company instead of working on their framework may help too.

• Missed deadlines, bugs, high turn-over tend to be solved by applying fancy methodologies (usually badly implemented) like scrum or hired highly priced consultants that will make things worse,... instead of removing (or coaching) the persons that shouldn't have been hired at the first place.

• Removing the person in question is in most case a bad thing since he OWN the thing. So teach him/her to understand consequences of his/her choices is probably the most appropriate way to solve the problem. But to do that, you need a good manager.

So my only advice would be:

Hire better managers that understand very well both business and software development. They won't hire that kind of person or will try to teach them how to consider business in addition of pure software development. They will also understands that the most powerful motivation fuel for employees is making them proud of working for that company.