Enterprise Hell

--- BEGIN TRANSMISSION ---

I have to vent.

I’m at a big enterprise software company, and we’re doing a massive ground-up rewrite of a system that’s been around for 20+ years. This overhaul will have a huge cascading effect on many internal teams and customers.

Months in, and we haven’t written a single line of code. It’s been an endless slog of documenting legacy features, building PoCs, and presenting “recommendations.” The process is slow, tedious, and entirely detached from actual development.

Meetings dominate everything because leadership insists on following something called "SAFe Agile". Planning meetings, then meetings to plan those planning meetings. Scrum, scrum of scrums (wtf is this?), PI planning, dependency alignment meetings, release train events, workshops, showcases, demos, feature mapping sessions, metric reviews, and an ever-growing list of seemingly random syncs across hierarchical layers.

To make things worse, the company has hired more managers, consultants, and architects than it knows what to do with while actual development hasn’t even begun. And now, they’re gearing up to hire contractors saying it will speed up the rewrite and calling that work “trench work”. Meanwhile, we still lack clear business requirements from stakeholders because the teams driving this are overwhelmingly process-oriented project management types. The current ratio? About 1 developer for every 6 process people.

This rewrite has high visibility to the CEO. I have never been so fundamentally opposed to an approach in my life. It’s inefficient, destined for failure, and completely the wrong way to handle a large-scale system rewrite.

We’re rethinking everything, data layer, object layer, databases, integrations, messaging, microservices, APIs, and starting from scratch in the worst way possible.

I left my last job because I wasn’t writing code, and now I’ve landed in the same mess.

I’m in enterprise hell. Send help.

--- END TRANSMISSION ---