Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

As someone who has created several skunkworks projects at large companies which got shipped, I'm wondering what exactly the OP's definition of "Modern organized software" is. I have definitely worked in an environment where creating a skunkworks project was next to impossible due to a toxic micromanagement culture, but in that case I left the company instead of assuming that it was representative of the software industry as a whole.

EDIT: I'm also confused about the talk of "corporate rebels" on one hand, but the complaints about dealing with processes on the other. What do you think corporate rebellion means? Do you think that "rebellion" means not having to deal with any attempt to stop what you are doing? Frankly, trying to sneak around processes is half the fun!

Nope. Where have you worked to get that impression?

> But what it does mean is any company that runs an organized process

That organized process is for deliverables that the company is investing resources into (and managing the costs of). The existence of such a process does not preclude the development of software/products outside of that process.

I've delivered many "skunkwork" projects, some of which have become critical parts of the company, while still delivering on official projects. It's stuff that I've been passionate about, or a personal pain point, or an experiment.

I've even done it as part of official projects, e.g. "we need to deliver A, but that requires B which is really annoying/slow/expensive - I'm going to solve B first and then A will be trivial". No skunks required.

> It would be deeply frowned upon, likely a sacking offence, to create software outside the tightly controlled process.

Nope. The response is "let's adapt this to fit into our process", not "you're fired!". The worse response is usually "we don't want it" or "we already have a project in flight to build that" and you've just wasted a bunch of time.

> Modern organized software development kills innovation.

It sounds like you're recently frustrated about something? Many companies have delivered innovative software through modern, organized software development. Where do you think AWS came from?

I largely disagree not from a policy position but in practical terms. In most major employers modern software processes allow for major time gaps in delivery and productivity. That time can be spent on anything regardless of employer blessing. Although personal projects created in these time pockets do not carry the endorsement of the employer they are often silently blessed as no cost innovation.

"Corporate rebels", wow. What exactly are they rebelling against? The fact that the companies' ROI could still be higher?

It's like boys and girls having sex - they'll always figure out a way regardless of what you do to try to prevent it. Skunkworks works the same way. If you want to do it then you'll figure out a way to do it. That's the way it's always been, and I've been doing this for decades.

But at the same time it's so much easier (and even encouraged) to do your own thing. There are startups popping up daily.

So whilst modern "cog in the machine" software development kills innovation within the company, we live in an age where "anyone" could build the next facebook.

BS.

I've run skunkworks projects in every single organisation I've worked for, and it's vastly easier today to 'pad out' the way "Agile" is practiced these days than it was in the past.

In Ops, I've been in a situation multiple times that I was frowned upon for fixing production outages, instead of working on "The Sprint".

Example: I noticed failing memory banks on the primary postgres server. And got reprimanded for for fixing it (failing over to standby server, replacing mem, etc...), instead of working on the sprint.

> Modern software processes make this impossible. It would be deeply frowned upon, likely a sacking offence, to create software outside the tightly controlled process.

That’s a hell of an assumption. I guess it depends on the company?

I expect that away from central IT control "corporate rebels" in business units can still create mostly internal tools to improve productivity for smaller groups of users.

Innovation is not random; innovation is a process that must be deliberate.

Randomness can occur in the process but a deliberate process is needed for "random" ideas to become reality.

You are right at many levels. There are still many reasons why I would not like to work in a place that does just that - it's chaos. But some time should be spent that way, mandatory!

I actually have a boss that literally made a "skunkworks" weekly meeting that was 4 hours and meant "turn off phones, email, IM, work on cool things". It transformed into a full day (weekly) for a while, but we failed to keep it up. Fortunately this transformed into a full time, modern, project-only job for me.

We are lead to believe that "skunkworks" is done by R&D departments, but all I saw were failures in that regard. It was one of:

- R&D does cool things, keep them for themselves and maybe produce some procedures to pass further to Architecture. Random IT person has no benefit and no knowledge from that work.

- R&D doesn't do R&D, it does projects and development, they just have less compliance, which is destroying morale.

- There is a huge startup within the company, which has hundreds of "old" people transfered, new cool cloud tech, new offices, agile flow or whatever else they want to do. It never goes beyond that very group and dies as soon as the product goes into stable production (successfully). No lessons learned, we did things the old way.

- My Business colleagues in one of the biggest banks worldwide were doing full time "project" work, which meant they were designing and testing complex business system. Company had cool bonuses for "innovation". They did a lot of real innovation, proposed and implemented different ways to do business. Never got bonuses as "your team is a project team, so innovation was part of your daily tasks".

- Same company, but in IT - also awesome bonuses for innovation. This was THE topic, your yearly goals were all around it. Can we make tools? No! It's forbidden. Can we code? Forbidden! Can we script? Maybe, if it's not coding. But even if it is you are forbidden to install new tools anywhere. All script languages are forbidden.

I'm not a coder, but can't stand stagnation and obsolete tech. Did several tools which were plainly a workaround compliance. Implemented small custom DNS query engine in VBscript, as this was the only thing I could use on a workstation. In 2015 or so. Did file processing automation for production systems in perl. NOT OFFICIALLY, of course! Perl was forbidden, like everything. So I used Perl build into Oracle Client package - old Oracle with much older Perl inside. Hide and seek game, all day long.

Skunkworks should be mandatory :)