Can processes fix everything? A process-oriented mindset.

I work in an organisation (about 100 backend devs) which has better and "less-better" engineers. It's pretty standard so let's move on.

I've found that there's particular one kind of people who I can't get along with, neither I can convince them that they are wrong (or maybe I am?) – those who want to fix everything with new processes (usually more sophisticated and complex).

Those people have usually Engineering Managers, Product Managers or Agile Managers titles. These people can't differentiate between good code vs. bad code; good engineering vs. bad engineering; good system design vs. bad one.

When things start to go south, those people usually wants to solve things systematically, by enhancing "THE PROCESS", e.g.:

• let's add a column that a task is in "Code Review" state
• let's have minimum X% of code coverage
• let's have another weekly meeting regarding this or that
• and so on…

I agree, these things help if people know what they are doing at the first place, but I've never ever seen a bad engineering (or bad egineer) that was solved by processes.

Of course, these processes becomes so convoluted, that people soon don't follow it and finds shortcuts anyway.

Did you notice similar "processoidoisis" disease in your companies? Any solutions? Advices? Comments? Or am I just exaggerating?

Many thanks for your perspective 🙂