What are you trying to achieve ?

This blog post is inspired by the recent multiple software bugs at the Paris-Montparnasse railway station, and other major software malfunctions encountered by the users and/or customers of the Agence Nationale des Titres Sécurisés and the famous Louvois Software.

It is also inspired by a radio interview of Daniel Glazman on this subject that aired on France Culture. The podcast can be downloaded here.

An finally it is inspired by Kirsten Butzow at BOS Europe 2017 : Dysfunctional Teams & The Wisdom of Ants.

My Vision and Mission

I strongly believe that my job is to help my customers “Embrace the cloud”. This “bridge metaphor” that I have is that building on Managed Serverless Architectures will free them to focus on their mission and vision, not on computing infrastructure.

What are the problems

After spending the last 25 years in the software industry in France, it is clear to me that often, especially in large organisations:

1. Software developers are not considered at their true value. I know that particularly well, because when I was 28 years old, I worked for a large bank in Paris as a developer. My manager rapidly said that it was time for me to embrace leadership, because I was already too old to code ! I thank him and did not took the position, because I (still) love technology.
2. Managers tends to think of products and not on the big picture which is the company’s vision. I think that this is a terrible mistake. In the Louvois case, if the teams involved were driven by the fact that the wellbeing of hundreds of thousands of families depended on the software, may be the result would have been different.
3. Products are sold before they even exist on paper. This may work on small projects driven by the agile methodology, but for larger projects ? I’m not so sure.
4. Prices are driven lower and lower. But efficiency has a price, and the price is high.

The solution

Whatever your position is in a team that is building software, you better have belief. If you don’t, ask your manager about help. I you can’t find a common ground about that, maybe it is time for you to look for other opportunities elsewhere.

I’ll ask you one more time : What are you trying to achieve ?