{"id":1389,"date":"2025-09-08T23:43:16","date_gmt":"2025-09-08T23:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/?p=1389"},"modified":"2025-09-08T23:43:16","modified_gmt":"2025-09-08T23:43:16","slug":"oomp-our-business-is-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/2025\/09\/oomp-our-business-is-different\/","title":{"rendered":"OOMP: &#8220;Our Business is Different&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I have heard this comment in almost every company where I have worked. Without fail, this response occurs when someone on the technical staff suggests adding a practice accepted in other parts of the industry. Some variations are<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;It might work for others, but the problems we work on are harder.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;We have really good people, we don&#8217;t need that.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;That may be fine for academics, but we have a business to run.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>&#8220;We don&#8217;t have time to change.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Early in my career, it was used to justify not using version control (yeah, I&#8217;ve been at this for a while). I&#8217;ve personally experienced this mindset with regards to<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>version control<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>unit tests<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>any form of automated testing<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>coding standards<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>agile practices (not necessarily the consultant-driven capital A, Agile)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>training<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>In every case, no amount of technical proof or information from other sources makes any difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Counterpoint<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p>This is not to suggest that every new <em>best practice<\/em> should be adopted by every company as soon as it comes out. Some practices won&#8217;t work well in some environments. Every new practice will take some adjustment time while it negatively impacts productivity. Many will eventually make productivity gains later.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The important point is that &#8220;Our business is different\/harder than others&#8221; is almost always a fallacy when deciding on adoption of a technical practice. Lack of time or expertise with the practice is a good reason to hold off. Worry about destabilizing an important system is legitimate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If a practice seems to be a good idea, a pilot project and\/or research is a valid way to determine if it might help. But rejection because &#8220;we solve harder problems than everyone else&#8221; is probably not the right approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The funny part about this is that everyone&#8217;s systems have parts that are different, and more complicated than others might expect. On the other hand, people don&#8217;t realize how much of their systems and practices are not really different than what others do.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have heard this comment in almost every company where I have worked. Without fail, this response occurs when someone on the technical staff suggests adding a practice accepted in other parts of the industry. Some variations are Early in my career, it was used to justify not using version control (yeah, I&#8217;ve been at\u2026 <span class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/2025\/09\/oomp-our-business-is-different\/\">Read More &raquo;<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,10,19],"tags":[205,247,397],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1389"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1391,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1389\/revisions\/1391"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.gwadej.org\/programmer-musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}