No Matter What They Tell You, It's a People Problem (2008)

I'll say this much: People problems are behind the majority of failures I've seen in my career. A project isn't delivered on time, and no one knew it was going poorly? People problem. A team spends three months building the wrong system, because they didn't work out the details with the right stakeholders? People problem. A critical person is fired, and the processes they manage predictably catch on fire a month later? People problem.

There is a category of problems that, I think, are mainly engineering problems (a few examples below.) You could argue that these, too, are people problems, because the team lacked experience and someone should have hired better engineers. However, given how difficult and unpredictable hiring is, I think it's better to treat questions of engineering design as primarily engineering problems, since that's a much easier problem to address. Some examples:

* An analytics system without tests that generated incorrect results silently.

* A project management system that ran out of memory when usage increased and couldn't be fixed without completely re-architecting it.

* An accounting system that wrote the same value in two places which frequently got out of sync.

This type of post is practically a trope at this point: technical blogger who digs deep into tech inevitably has a grand epiphany that it's really all about people, not tech, and that's what we should really be interested in.

Maybe this is the unofficial CTO creed or something.

The main problem I find is that the people who want you to build a technical system are unable to explain how the existing business system works.

Sometimes I feel like the industry has just given up on solving people problem and is trying to fix stuff with Dockerfiles and yamls..

> If you aren't working with people you like, people you respect, people that challenge and inspire you-- then why not? What's stopping you?

God I wish the world was like this again. I know so many people that don't have jobs and can't land anything because there isn't enough open.

Yes, when people will throw money at you to pick low hanging fruit, it is simply a matter of not squandering the incredible opportunity.

This very quickly becomes not the case due to the limited availability of... low hanging fruits.

This is of course not mentioned because why let reality get in the way of a good story.

Folks love a good fortune cookie - 'it's a people problem' - it only has 2 words! :)

I think this is basically true in moderation.

I certainly agree that a lot of problems (including a lot of very difficult problems!) are not amenable to purely technical solutions.

But sometimes you have a difficult, technical bug to fix, and the "people problem" is making sure that someone has the knowledge, context, time, and incentive to fix it. This is not necessarily easy!

... especially if enough people have bought into "everything is a people problem", because then the technical work of fixing the bugs isn't valued or incentivized. Why would it be? It's not solving a people problem.

I think the viewpoint "everything is a people problem" can create a feedback loop that leads to poor incentives - which, ironically, is a people problem.

"The hardest parts of being in business long term are all people problems." - Alex Hillman

> How many lines of code will your team write?

That's how you know the article is pure nonsense.

As Stalin said, no man, no problem.

Nevertheless, this observation is too trivial to be useful, with the possible exception of "design things so that some automatic mechanism, independent of humans, is able to detect errors".

There's a tension here which I can't quite put my finger on, but perhaps it is: If everything is a people problem, why do we need engineers at all? And if the business can't be run solely by MBAs and project managers, and we bring on engineers for that last part, is it really just a people problem they're solving?