> The engineers are bored and they're rewriting perfectly-good codebases in Common Lisp and OCAML for funsies?
Sounds like the bored engineers need to be allowed to go home early, or have some 20% projects.
Also, as John Gall teaches us with his tounge-in-cheek, yet never-the-less true principles[1] -- a principle so obvious most never give it any thought:
"New System, New Problems"
Can someone please just ask "what do we expect some of the new problems to be?" If you get blank stares and no good answers, then you know they haven't thought it through.
> "what do we expect some of the new problems to be?"
A name for this I’ve heard (and use) is the “pre-mortem”; you can get folks in the right headspace for what you are suggesting by asking them to imagine they are writing a post-mortem after the proposed initiative failed.
A good way of surfacing failure modes / potential quagmires.
> imagine they are writing a post-mortem after the proposed initiative failed
I was thinking more along the lines of "imagine they are writing a post-mortem after the proposed initiative succeeds". Even if everything goes perfectly, what do we honestly expect to have at the end? A system without problems? Nonsense.
Sounds like the bored engineers need to be allowed to go home early, or have some 20% projects.
Also, as John Gall teaches us with his tounge-in-cheek, yet never-the-less true principles[1] -- a principle so obvious most never give it any thought:
"New System, New Problems"
Can someone please just ask "what do we expect some of the new problems to be?" If you get blank stares and no good answers, then you know they haven't thought it through.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemantics