throwaway for obvious reasons. I work at a deep-tech startup that's been struggling to find product-market fit for a few years. Funding is obviously getting more scarce, and there is a crunch for us to finally make a product that works and brings value to customers. The general product approach is very good and feasible in my eyes, but we just can't seem to make it work. I joined the company about a year ago after previously only working at larger enterprises. At the beginning I thought that there was just not a very good leadership culture, but that engineering made stuff happen anyways.
I've realized that there is a non-trivial number of coworkers (>50%) in the company that is in love with processes and rules. They make everything slower by making sure that everyone sticks to their processes and rules. I don't take issue with that if it works - the problem is that it doesn't. Clean code, unit tests, integration tests, plannings, refinements, reviews, etc. I don't have a problem with that per se, but they are religious about it yet nothing comes of it. They discuss for hours (!) on end about the naming of one function or class, take days to write tests for simple functionality, and weeks to finish a single feature in a team. They take feedback from others in a review meeting and then continue as if nothing ever happened. Their code doesn't work. Not simply not run, but it does things it shouldn't do, and it doesn't do things it should do. They also aren't able to debug things quickly when they find these problems, taking days or weeks to resolve simple issues. And they don't care when customers aren't happy with what they produced because "that's not my problem". Product owners are super rigid with their roadmaps, telling customer-facing people that they can get their feature in the roadmap in 6+ months, everything before that is already planned. Meanwhile individuals who ignore these rules have been the main driver in actually implementing major parts of the product that is well-accepted by customers, by talking to people and getting quick feedback.
I'm at a loss about what to do in this situation. I deeply believe in the product we're trying to build, but I fear that if the company works like this, we're not going to get enough traction before money runs out. Any recommendations for how to rally people around the idea of producing something of value using common sense vs. just following the rules and ignoring customer wishes to stick to processes? Is this a common pathology in startups?
It's not really your problem to solve unfortunately - unless you hired them. Startups flourish when you have exp. engineers who know which rules to break and when, any less and it's bikeshedding over snake_case as the runway collapses.
At best you can try to offload some of the stylistic complaints to CI/CD pre-commit lint checks etc. etc. but not sure how valuable that is if the code doesn't work!
Maybe you should also spend a moment thinking about what you'll do if the company does run out of money... Is there a way to salvage the product in another incarnation of the company? (Or is there a competitor where you could eventually take all your hard-won expertise?)
Please share how these folks are getting things done. Have you spoken to them?