:wave: Hey all. I'm the author. This content is over ten years old now (2013), as is the slide tech backing it.<p>Hopefully it's obvious that the click-to-advance is a style that suits my presentation style, and I would have made different choices if I intended it to be consumed online.<p>In any case, I've learned a lot since this talk and have on occasion considered updating it. I'm pretty surprised it's trending, TBH.
> what is "enterprisey"?<p>> documentation over working software<p>In the spirit of no true Scotsman, you're not truly enterprise until there is a combination of barely working software and aggressively wrong documentation working in perfect harmony
The content seems like it might be interesting but the presentation is so pretentious that it's quite literally unreadable.<p>I gave up after about a dozen "give me the next word" finger taps on my phone.<p>Just post the prose. Better writers and worse writers have done so, and people have read them.
It's hard to be critical of the content — if you take it from the perspective of a mid-senior developer within a non-Big Tech role who is starting to see into the leadership decisions being made or pathways available to them, it's probably true to their experience.<p>But I would caveat that the "hell is other people" and "learn to not-obey" section are recommending behaviours that at best the organisation's people managers, and at worst leadership, would recognise as "career limiting" — and would end that person being stuck in place or on a performance plan. The stance is confrontational and not collaborative — somewhat myopic.<p>"Business has a short memory. take advantage of it." — Very true, but only when it is adventitious to do so.
I had to close this after the 10th click the next slide for a single word to appear "Like Ninja" No "Like a Samurai!" No "Like a ninja samurai". Yeah can't handle this.
Trying to summarize what I'm reading here.<p>"Enterprise-y" appears to be a catch-all term for an organizational culture built on a foundation of lack-of-trust where interactions among people need to be gamed in order to accomplish...well, anything. And the presentation covers strategies of how to be effective in that kind of environment.<p>I like some of the tactical suggestions, which apply in any organization trying to get things done. I dislike all the actions that are based in hidden agendas or ulterior motives, no matter the intent.<p>As always, your mileage may vary.
"Working code always beats vaporware" is very good advice. I got a lot better at engineering when I realized I could just... stop trying to convince people of things and start shipping instead.<p>You do have to be working on a long enough timeline. I've seen vaporware beat working code over the scale of a couple of years, when it's the current exec team's pet vaporware, but eventually execs rotate.
Here's a low-effort attempt at putting this all in a single page for everyone complaining about clicking through it: <a href="https://rentry.co/iudx6" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://rentry.co/iudx6</a>
I was hoping this was something about how to survive (and thrive) in large organizations. And it is. It's a little bit cynical but still well done.
Not sure if I trimmed too many elements, but this should be the gist of it: <a href="https://pastebin.com/C6VjB341" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://pastebin.com/C6VjB341</a>
> you know you're "enterprisey" if ... you don't know that you're a software company<p>That hit hard. I've seen so many companies that defined themselves as something else, despite employing more than 1000 programmers. In denial of being a software company - a bad one. Limping along due to strong brands or regulatory barriers to market entry.<p>Every day I'm getting more and more convinced that this attitude will get their lunch eaten by a company that can software.<p>Companies like Stripe and Rippling have so much potential displacing "enterprise", it's disgusting.
This is very good, but I think there is one thing missing:<p>Understand your organisation's DNA<p>You need to understand the way your organisation thinks. Do they sell products or services? Are the products physical or digital. Are the services digital or people based. When you understand the world view of the exec you can then understand how to talk to them and persuade them.<p>A case in point. I was originally recruited into a large infrastructure management organization (bridges, roads, airports - that sort of thing) to answer a client question: Do we need more remote monitoring of our infrastructure. The answer turned out to be "no, you just need to understand and make better use of the data you are already collecting". All well and good, and we built (and now sell to major clients" a remote monitoring, data integration and ML platform. The problem was selling it internally. The organisation (in those days, and to a lesser extent still now) had a DNA of a service organisation, selling people (some of them highly skilled) at day rates. Do they didn't understand the idea of selling a software based service. Initially we could only give the software away and sell support contracts - because that was selling people at a day rate, which they understood. And their understanding went to: how do we write contracts for selling people, what are the risks and potential liabilities of selling people, and how do we mitigate those risks.for a software solution they didn't understand what questions to ask, so they couldn't understand the risks.<p>It's taken a long time to change things, and while the organisation still mainly sells people at a day rate, software solutions are understood, and we can sell them.<p>I'm now working on building IoT sensor systems within the same organisation. But my better understanding of the organisation's DNA makes it much easier and more effective. For example, it is cheaper to spend more money on working with a partner than spending less on doing it internally - because our organisation understands systems integration (we now sell it as a service) so building sensors with a partner and saying "we do the systems integration" is easily understood. If we tried to do it internally we would spend huge amounts of time and effort explaining (repeatedly) why we were doing something that wasn't in our organisation's DNA
Wouldn’t it be cool to write something that is ostensibly interesting and then spend a bunch of time obscuring it through an annoying click-for-each-word presentation?
made it 5 slides in before closing. this kind of stuff is like early 2010s level marketing lol.<p>edit: which now makes sense! didn't see the date.