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Comment by karma_vaccum123 | Hacker News Reader

Well look at it this way....if all of those things were to be provided to you, they could probably find someone to do your job for 30% less. There are some upsides to software being a total shitshow.

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I would, as an engineer, be okay with that. As you imply, that makes me considerably more valuable. The problem is that I'm never given time for any of it. As soon as "MVP" status is reached, the feature is launched, declared a victory, and then we move on to the next thing, while the users note the half-assedness of the delivered product, and never looked on again. Meaningful work (aside from the occiasional bugfix) never occurs, as it can't ever get prioritized higher than the current MVP of the day.

Sounds like planning economics in a miniature kingdom.. does not matter whether the product sucks, as long as it gives bragging rights to the duke. The problem is that most of management, contrary to there claims, are totally detached from market forces as long as a company has a cash cow.

a lot of the crucial work in engineering happens only after you learn when to say "no".

I wonder how much more happens only after you say "fuck it I'm doing this thing that we've desperately needed to do regardless of manager approval or sanctioned time."

When the whole dev team is in on it it's actually not too hard to bake in extra time for the unseen things by just everyone taking longer than they would if they were doing purely what the managers wanted. (Though ideally by doing some of the unseen things the total time for future work will become less than it would have because you don't drown yourself in tech debt by trying to do the PM's MVP only every time... It's nice to have a PM who understands that tradeoff.)

You shouldn't worry about software being late. Work at a good clip with the time you have. This is just the norm for this industry and the only managers who presume otherwise are themselves novices.

Unfortunately, one needs to get a bit of experience (and risk early burnout) before they cotton on to that fact.

My first real junior dev job [1] gave me an ulcer. I only relaxed when I realised what you allude to: people yelled at me and complained about my working pace (and the fact I didn't... smile) but there wasn't anyone else willing to do the job I was paid a pittance to do, especially not with that money. I could just take my time and do my best in the time I thought was appropriate and let middle management go screw themselves. Poor bastards anyway- they were the de facto product testers so they probably had it worse than me in the end.

[1] In other words, working for a company that didn't give a shit about me and just used me in a "human-wave" sort of approach to development. This also came after a stint at a company that treated me fairly and gave me a full "software engineer" title, no "junior"s, so I had the chance to observe the difference between the two models very closely.

Or are cynically using it to crack the whip and aggrandize power with zero regard for whether the deadlines are meaningful.

"Noted Good Developer A thinks it will take at least 3 weeks for you to complete this feature request, but we're being pushed to get it out in 2. I think you could manage that, but what about you? Can you do it or not?"

Yes. I've been getting thrown into the team lead position quite a bit as I've gotten older.

I get tasked with delivering arbitrary deadlines for impossible features and timelines to my team and managing the outcomes.

There really are no other reasons for some of these deadlines other than higher mgmt. competing against each other. There are no business reasons.

Long ago I just started ignoring them and giving my team deadlines that were both reasonable and obtainable. I don't want anybody stressed on a daily basis.

If mgmt thinks they can do better, go for it.

Yes, and the more I work with software, the more my shitshow tolerance goes up (and the more of a hardened old man I become).

I've become especially cynical of highly marketed "shiny" third-party things that are actually completely broken when it comes to technical innards:

MongoDB, Segment analytics, Unity3D game engine, to name a few...

> "shiny"

Ahhh yes. Fancy website? Grandiose claims? Piece of crap.

Essentially plain text site? "just a tool"? Couldn't live without it

Case in point: vim's web site looks like ass:

http://www.vim.org/

>> they could probably find someone to do your job for 30% less.

Aye, and that person would be called a "junior developer".

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