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Engineering-drive organisations

Last post 06:30 pm March 15, 2018 by Jeffrey Verona
2 replies
Jason Pearce
09:06 pm March 11, 2018

Hi

I am on the infrastructure side of the house but am interested in learning about Agile to make our organisation more effective. I came across this article here;

https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/06/06/why-agile-and-especiall…

In particular, 

"Silicon Valley has gotten a lot wrong, especially in the past five years, but one of the things that it got right is the concept of the engineer-driven company. It’s not always the best for engineers to drive the entire company, but when engineers run engineering and set priorities, everyone wins: engineers are happier with the work they’re assigned (or, better yet, self-assigning) and the business is getting a much higher quality of engineering.

If your firm is destined to be business-driven, that’s fine. Don’t hire full-time engineers, though, if you want talent. You can get the best people as consultants (starting in the $200-per-hour range, and going up steeply from there) but not as full-timers, in an business-driven company. Good engineers want to work in engineer-driven firms where they will be calling shots regarding what gets worked on, without having to justify themselves to “scrum masters” and “product owners” and layers of non-technical management.

Ultimately, Agile (as practiced) and Waterfall both are forms of business-driven engineering, and that’s why neither is any good at producing quality software or happy employees."

Would this forum agree that Agile (and Waterfall) for that matter are business drive engineering as opposed to engineering driven? If so, what is an example of a methodology that is engineering driven? Are Google, Amazon, Microsoft etc engineering driven?

Ian Mitchell
10:59 pm March 11, 2018

I’d say that waterfall processes are push-driven by stage-gates and schedule, while agile ones are pull-driven by evidence and flow.

Referring to companies as being “business driven” or “engineering driven” seems more like an assessment of certain organizational schisms or cultural imbalances which have been allowed to arise.

Jeffrey Verona
04:30 pm March 15, 2018

I too read his article but most businesses have a profit motive or are trying to deliver a service/product to a customer to address a customer problem.  Neither "engineering" teams nor "business" teams can fundamentally ignore this fact.  As Ian states, this seems to be an observation about organizational culture since many "engineers" go on to lead and run companies as "business" leaders.

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