The fundamental trap of the only relevant metric

Essay abstracts: people prefer status confirmation to direct financial gain; between the desire to strengthen their status and the fear of losing other people's money, they, as a rule, choose the former; therefore, employees of customer companies willingly initiate web projects (and other projects in the field of information technology) for which they have no reason and economic calculation; the only thing they can control is the requirements, therefore they are actively changing them, and so affirm their status; on the other hand, information technologies developed so rapidly that they created a shortage of labor resources at almost all levels; this vacuum has drawn those who can somehow solve problems, even if they don’t even understand what is happening and how; And this applies both to developers and managers; almost all managers do not know how to manage requirements; therefore, web projects almost never pay off; and almost no one can close the project at the stage of economic calculation (because almost no one does this calculation).



Everything is bad, everything will become even worse, anyone will pay for it, but just not employed in the field of information technology, for us there will always be a side job for bread with butter and cheese.



One of the main properties of the human psyche of a modern civilized person, familiar to me in observations (including myself), is the habit of looking where it is light, and not where it is lost. This is convenient, simple, reliable and completely incorrect - but the first three significant advantages outweigh the insignificant last disadvantage.

Unfortunately, this habit is reprehensible. They are ashamed of her, subjected to obstruction and, sometimes, financial or physical abuse. Therefore, people prone to it are very inventive in disguise and justification, logical arguments and everyday sophistry in explaining the reasons why it is necessary to act in this way and not otherwise. Even if these reasons are purely for personal use and other self-deception.



Very venerable scientists, really exploring the real world in its darkest and most secret manifestations, play into their hands. These scientists make limited models of the world, within which it is convenient to test hypotheses and theories, and experiment. But the descriptive models they created are taken by their followers as prescriptive, and are used in their own activities and in teaching the younger generation. Of course, such training comes down to the ability to tailor a solution to a previously known answer with the elegance of a card cheat.



Sometimes a scientist masterly combines intellectual courage and uncleanliness, and he himself formulates the use of his systems as absolute and unified, explaining anything and on any conditions. The books of such scholars, as a rule, have large circulations and high sales - everyone is pleased to have a solid, unshakable basis in their discussions of man, but not all metaphysics are satisfied with a low sense.



Of course, this means, first of all, that the general knowledge of culture known to me in observations is based on an incorrect interpretation of the misunderstood theories, many of which are formulated in such a way as to exalt the author and affirm his ideology.



If it were a material construction, then on such a shaky basis it would not stand even a minute. Fortunately, this is more likely not a foundation, but a reference point, separated from the observer and placed in a pile of garbage with diverging motion vectors and imaginary proximity in an airless space perspective.



An organically complementary property is sociality. On the one hand, it’s convenient to operate with common values ​​and judgments for the group - you can not waste energy and time on coordinating actions. On the other hand, little is more important than what and as they say in the group; and in conditions of a resource limited in design of a group — situational alliances and a system of loyalty and influence.



A group is much more effective than a loner in its influence on the world. It is not a trivial task to determine the direction and strength of influence, to overcome inertia (of rest, and the wrong direction of movement). It is more difficult only to notice and admit that there is no movement at all or the direction was chosen incorrectly.



And taking into account the separation of the origin from the observer in favor of a disconnected pseudo-system of multidirectional objects, one can always justify the fidelity of the direction of movement, and, in fact, its presence.



The most important factor characterizing the IT industry of the modern world is its hyperinflation. The growth rate of the sphere of information technologies and its inclusion in the backbone of pre-existing industries is only increasing, more and more specialists are required, the speed of their training is growing, and the requirements for their quality are falling. The situation when the problem is solved in private by the correct combination of framework modules without understanding the essence of what is happening is not at all uncommon in our beautiful world of web development (like developers without mathematical knowledge at least at the trigonometry level; project managers without understanding the subject area and what is included in the cost of an hour of specialist work).

And this illegibility to specialists and the speed of their training dictate training within the limited models of the world.



But the applicability limits of these systems are either not defined, or they are extremely blurry, and the specialists I have trained in this way often simply do not take them into account, preferring also to combine ready-made answer blocks from mental frameworks until a response is received that will be accepted (or will be similar on believable).



What defines that zoo of tools and methodologies in the field of web project management, which I have been observing from the inside for seven years (and before that from the outside since 1997).



First, of course, professional requirements for all participants in the process are extremely low; secondly, the market, mainly dumping; thirdly, education is left to chance; choosing a normal training course is extremely difficult (due to the abundance of offers); and the demand is so high that, in fact, the IT market is dominated by the market for the employee, not the employer, and the seller, not the buyer. Which, of course, is good in the framework of the pursuit of universal communism, due to growing labor productivity and a shift in the paradigm of private ownership to joint ownership within the framework of a sharing economy; but somewhat depressing for end users of systems that have all the risks of working with products and have few benefits, mostly illusory, formulated by marketers.



In such chaos, of course, everyone needs some guidelines, simple and understandable metrics. Although somehow people only know how to count money (rather badly, I must say, the illusion of control over their wallet is strong even for the credit holders I know, not to mention those who have at least a small surplus in the family budget), therefore it’s simple (and the only important ) the metric is considered the profitability of the project.



Personally, this is quite ridiculous to me, because of all the customers I know of website development (refinement) sites, including large corporate portals and online stores, even the banal planned ROI was considered only by myself when I was a young and green website administrator of a local restaurant.



They say that it must be considered, that's all. Count units.



But even despite the lack of economic justification for the project and cost estimates, its profitability is considered the most important indicator for its implementation.



- Hey, birdie, let's make a website, it brings a lot of money.



This, of course, is a direct consequence of the orientation towards sociality in a limited world model, not applicable in the realities of the project customer. Now everyone says that the profitability of the project is most important, we will say that we are launching the project in order to profit from it.

How and how (and how the new site will be better than the old in this regard, and how to determine the degree of this best) is the tenth question. First of all, of course, you need to confirm belonging to the system of values ​​and value judgments of Princess Marya Alekseevna, or another weather vane of public opinions that form the customer’s social network (and its employees), and even direct financial losses have a rather secondary priority.



From this grows the methodology of quick and cheap test (which is not fast and not cheap), that is, the technique of hasty making costly mistakes. It sometimes can cost five million, saved on engineering research and spent on the consistent refinement of prototypes of, say, smart furniture - but following the course of work, defined in the discourse as correct, is much more important than money. This is exactly what the whole history of my relationship with project customers teaches me: no one needs the technically correct solutions. No one is interested in economically sound ideas. It is necessary so that it is exactly like the five specified competitors, but with the observance of corporate identity and with the use of fashionable words and methodologies.



Although, very often, you really need to either do it wrong (but much cheaper) or cancel the project altogether as something that will never pay off, but it will never work out to boast of the right solution.



- Once we didn’t make an online store, it’s an absolutely right decision that no one will appreciate, which will not become the basis for a press release and will not be reflected in the annual report for shareholders, and which I saw absolutely once in my life.

In contrast to the created online store, which together with the development costs more than the profit that it will bring before the inevitable redesign; but he brings benefits to everyone except the owners of the company.



This, you know, is such a version of primitive corporate communism, when everyone benefits from the large budget allocated for the company’s project, except for the one who owns this budget and allocated it for the project. From a little bit of everything - not theft, but sharing.

Perhaps this is reasonable and fair - because if the project shoots, the superprofit will still go to the owner, all the rest will be able to enjoy only the miserable crumbs of their own greatness, which has grown from ownership of success.



Sometimes you can deceive yourself that ownership was crucial to success. Sometimes from complicity it even gets heavier in your pocket and your salary expectations in your resume increase.



In fact, this still does not change anything in an industry that is so bloated that it’s impossible to assess the incompetence of the contractor - because there is no one to evaluate, the customer is incompetent and cannot even formulate his expectations in terms of numbers and the specific financial result, he can only change their requirements at every stage, introducing chaos into the already unstructured development process because 9 out of 10 project managers I know, including me, do not know how to manage requirements and do not even know that there is such a discipline (and if they know, then they can understand its subtleties only from their own experience, because they have neither teachers, nor masters capable of this, there are only vague references to this thaumaturgy in the annoyed citadels of elderly engineers).



And this continues and will continue, a new strain of mutated capitalist socialism, which dialectically combines the birth trauma of corporate nomenclature and educators from the hype institute, will come on the shoulders of Internetization of everything when everyone will make a couple and get some kind of crazy money for it, printed, according to modern monetary theory, only in order to collect taxes from them.



Against this background, unconditional basic income looks like a reasonable and high-quality alternative: some people really need to pay only so that they do nothing, manage no one and work nowhere, this alone will give an economic multiplier and a leverage of growth many times greater than the general labor conscription and compulsory education.



And only this will be able to break that unique metric, which is only and significant in this our society, which I have the good fortune to observe around me. A metric of an unformed social rank that needs constant reinforcement.



I have good reason to say that most web projects are initiated only because someone in the customer’s company needs to show, strengthen and monetize their status. I assume that this applies to almost all projects in hype industries and many projects in conservative and honorable industries. I think that many recent technological scandals (from diesel gates and self-igniting phones to the Boeing-737 MAX) are caused by this counterproductivity of top and middle managers and low qualifications of developers, executors, customers and final users.



I even believe that the system's ultimate strength has not yet been reached, but is already approaching, and that the collapse of this rapidly expanding bubble of digitalization of everything and the inclusion of everything on the Internet (sucked me in because there is nobody more competent in the proposed money in the delta neighborhood at the time I didn’t enter the profession), it will affect everything, but it will not reduce the need for low-skilled developers and managers (because others will not be affordable, and because there are too many critical business systems that have access to strength, will be tied to systems vulnerable to collapse).



For all the mess I get together in the field of information technology, all other areas pay - and they also benefit, they make transactions cheaper, easier to manage, cheaper to collect and calculate data, blah-blah-blah, but this the benefit also flies into the pipe because almost no one knows how to use it (and half of those who know how to use it are not profitable, because their relative status is canceled and the muddy water in which they lurk for profit is transparent).



And this is the side of information technology that few people mention. Because this is the invisible hand of the market that grows out of the ass (and it is invisible because it grows inward), and what the hell is the difference that it is gold, 995 samples?



From observing nearly a hundred web projects that I did not manage: nine out of ten low-budget web projects (up to a million rubles for development and the first year of support) fall apart for various reasons, and only those who have counted them reach the final expediency on the part of the customer is a competent specialist who is more interested in a working project than a shock at the status of negotiations. On the side of the contractor, the project’s meanings are poorly defined because the contractor is completely justified in shaming the customer’s internal communication structure, he provides an interface, and how they work with him is not his problem (they won’t work with him, you can put money on it) .

The situation is worse only with sites on international partner state projects or legally binding.



And do not call this system a waterfall - a properly organized waterfall is a song and a fairy tale, and in the wild is much more common than a properly organized agile.



By the way, the modern justification of the approach described in the long post is the agile methodology. Like, we work on it, people are more important to us than documentation, so that's how it goes. What you want is agile.



Nope, not good. By applying hype to the organization of damage, DNA is not treated.



What to do is also clear, of course.



All according to the precepts of Ilyich: to study, study and study again. And teach, and educate colleagues, and subordinates, and customers. Only self-education and active enlightenment (and the self-organization of the working masses on scientific and transparent principles of education to increase opportunities, and not to report or assess the quality of a person, or by coercion) will bring into this world at least a little reason, free from the continuous demonstration of a bright red status.



And, of course, this also becomes a hype, and also becomes a way of obtaining a microstatus convertible into benefits and money in microsocium, which is guaranteed by business youth and other personal growth coaches.



But cheers to us, there is no other tool and never will be.