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Comment by ScottFree | Hacker News Reader

> I don't know if there is a lesson here. But if you are bad at your job, it pays to have good connections.

The lesson here is that companies are social entities, not technical ones. Relationships matter more than profit. If you're going to play the "game of thrones" as it were, learn the rules first.

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Here are the rules: http://ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle

And they make for uncomfortable reading.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention "Developer Hegemony" [0], a book about dealing with this sorts of garbage. Even thought it's forward looking there's a lot of practical advice. Here's a review [1] that does it justice:

> It’s not a book about software development, it is a book about the industry of software development and why it is fundamentally different than “traditional” industries. And it is a book that promises an outlook on “the future of labor”, at least for us developers... It’s about finding your way in an industry that is in very high demand and mostly consists of players that play by the rules of an entirely different game: industrial manufacturing.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35051753-developer-hegem... [1] https://schneide.blog/2019/10/14/book-review-developer-hegem...

That's an interesting read. However what it describes looks like a very shallow version of lam-rim chen-mo, volumes 4-5, that explain the concept of emptiness and the danger of falling into nihilism. Edit: the tricks like "powertalk" and "information poker" are interesting, but rephrasing the book, manipulating people is not a game worth getting good at.

I found that the article (I haven't read the book) makes a reasonable defense of "loserdom" - it's not a bad life if you seek meaning external to work and it certainly offers a more fulfilling existence than that of the deluded clueless.

> If you're going to play the "game of thrones" as it were, learn the rules first.

Agreed. Or decide to not play. And just leave to a different job.

One thing though that I see far too commonly is that engineers think that people in power "don't know or care" as opposed to "don't want to know or care" or "know damn well and want it this way". People in power may not be geniuses, but they likely aren't incompetent either. They probably have a fairly solid level of political skill or they wouldn't have gotten to that level.

Start from the assumption that things are shitty for a reason or you are going to miss something important.

Start from the assumption that things are shitty for a reason

Problematic when the shit is something safety-critical, a large chemical plant, the 737-MAX, even a banking app with vulnerabilities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_injury

I'm glad you cited the 737-MAX, because that's a PRIME example of "things are shitty for a reason."

If you tried to move the system and it conflicted with "we will not recertify this plane under any circumstances" you were DOOMED.

At that point, you have to leave or become a whistleblower as you are fighting legions of managers united around a common purpose.

To me, starting with the assumption that things are shitty for a reason doesn't mean "start with the assumption that it is ok that things are shitty", but instead, "start with the assumption that the 737-max is shitty because letting it be so is serving someone's interest". Indeed, if someone with technical and political savvy and the talent to think ahead had figured out what interests in Boeing were prioritizing shittiness over safety, that someone might have been able to intervene effectively. If the engineers or statisticians at the FAA who wrote the buried report [1] had had the political savvy to understand why management was burying it and understood how to escalate it, they might have been able to get it out before the second plane crashed.

There is often a (political or human) reason why things are shitty, and if you can understand and game that, you can be more effective in changing the shitty stuff.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/internal-faa-review-saw-high-ri...

does "decide to not play" ever worked out well? I have never seen it.

Get financial independence and escape the need to kowtow to those who don’t have your interests in mind.

Tech is one of the few industries where this is possible fast.

https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...

You've never met an entrepreneur with a solo lifestyle business?

OP doesn't mention any problems with their work life until they decided to play.

no tribe is perfectly flat and knowing which way the gradient goes is a good way to climb it; somewhere it is social and somewhere it is more technical and leaving for a company that's more technical oriented is still playing the game.

however what's common everywhere at the bottom of the gradient is that there lies worse work and the least gratifications and that not playing the game is the sure way to end up at the bottom, from where of course everything looks like it's shit.

so basically, the bad manager was there to intentionally run the departments into the ground so there would be clear spots to axe following the company's acquisition

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