> They made (good) tech decisions (based on the advice of outside people who understand the tech) but they feel very uncertain.
If they took advice of internal people and then made the same internal people work on it, this trust issue might get solved.
Ultimately by showing lack of trust in their developers, they are showing lack of trust in their management skills for having selected the correct developers. They are doing one core part of their job very badly.
The problem with hiring good developers is that you need good developers and a solid corporate tech culture to hire them.
If you don't have anyone you can trust to interview technical folks, how will you avoid hiring bad developers?
And similarly, if you hire good developers but your corporate culture is bad, they'll leave, and eventually the only remaining developers will be bad ones.
It's very hard for non-tech companies to hire and retain quality talent.
> If you don't have anyone you can trust to interview technical folks
If you have an IT or SWE department, you let them hire people they need. Which means you put technical people in charge that knows what is required. If you don't have trust in your department, no one can fix that.
> And similarly, if you hire good developers but your corporate culture is bad
That's on the company. And I found it's when they want to applies a standard policy across all departments. Like the same standard issue computers and a management software that eats half the ram. Peter can work fine in Word, but Julie's IDE is freezing every hour.
> It's very hard for non-tech companies to hire and retain quality talent.
It's very easy. Pay them what's they're worth and let them work on your problems.
If you have incompetent people in your IT / SWE department, they're not going to make good hiring choices.
Similarly, corporate culture is very little about stuff and more about processes. If hardware or software environment problems exist, will they ever be fixed? At a lot of companies, no.
And "pay them what they're worth" is a relative metric. Non-tech companies aren't going to be able to afford to pay a cost center what tech product companies can pay a profit center.
> If you have incompetent people in your IT / SWE department.
Same for every other deparment. Incompetent people won't hire competent people.
> Non-tech companies aren't going to be able to afford to pay a cost center.
Isn't that a mislabeling issue? If software being better implied more profit, then it's a profit center. If your legal department being good means fewer legal fumbles, then isn't it worth it? Same for software. Yeah you can deliver mediocre software and still retain users, but that just leaves you vulnerable to competitors.
Profit- vs cost-center is pretty ingrained into a company's management DNA, for all companies.
From top-down perspective, it's a question of "If I +$1 to this department, what +revenue do I realize?"
In non-tech companies, that's a long or abstract link: "How does funding SWE help me sell more furniture?" In tech product companies, it's trivially obvious.
Tl;dr - always work for a profit center, never work for a cost center.
Firstly because the tech team has varied enormously over the last 25 years. Some have been around a while, some are new.
Secondly because middle management (and for all I know upper management) has cycled a lot over the last 25 years. (We've had 3 different middle managers on this project in the 2.5 years since the project was first proposed.)
So, speaking generally now, it's common for the people who did the hiring not to be the ones who now have trust issues.
Equally decades of failed software projects (industry wide) have lead to a (well deserved) reputation for IT not being trustworthy.
I think very few execs care about the cost of individuals. Firstly it's not their money, secondly they're not rewarded for "hiring cheap" but they are penalized for their failure to perform.
Throw in that hiring in general is hard, and that hiring technical people when you are non-technical is even harder, and it's hard to have lots of confidence right out the gate.
> I think very few execs care about the cost of individuals.
From what I've seen, it's always about cost. They would post salary ranges if that weren't the case.
> hiring technical people when you are non-technical
Non-technical people are always hiring technical people. How do houses get built? Who hire lawyers?... It's either references or researching the person's professional experience. And yes, people can lie. But that happens everywhere not just in tech.
If they took advice of internal people and then made the same internal people work on it, this trust issue might get solved.
Ultimately by showing lack of trust in their developers, they are showing lack of trust in their management skills for having selected the correct developers. They are doing one core part of their job very badly.