Setting the story straight on quite a few issues
rachelbythebay.com
rachelbythebay.com
Friends had reached out to me. "We need a director for our reliability software engineering stuff". They asked for my help. They wanted to build something good, like the early days of a few former places I had worked at. I was willing to help out, but honestly, only as a contractor. I had enough of the full time tech thing for one lifetime already.
Tech has an image of itself as a magical place where we're changing the world while getting to indulge our inner geeks. And yet a director title for an individual contributor and top 1% pay is not enough to close a hire. The top people are essentially taking early retirement. People in other fields (doctors for example) continue working long after retirement age. Maybe tech is not such a magical place?
Sure, it's not like that in every company, but I don't really care enough to try and find one that's fun. I'd rather hang out with my family, and make outlandish devices and services I'd like to use.
I have a lot of other hobbies that save me, but the math vs. tech mindset is very real to me in the workplace context. I am not saying all mathematicians are good, or good people, but it helps to have something more real to hold onto.
I think the same holds for hacker culture. If you are a hacker more than a "techy" (Edit: I think there should be a better word here.), sometimes that distinction is what saves you.
In my experience, the attitudes of software developers, as seen all over the web, are basically the definition of “privileged” in a way that does not match almost anything else. “I didn’t like my manager, so I quit and spent a few months counting my $$$ until I found something I liked more” is something that very few other professions can flaunt. This is, incidentally, why old-school managers are basically incompatible with the sector: in any tech hotspot, you literally cannot threaten or bully a tech employee, unlike any other employee. I bet lots of people high-up hate this so much.
The other way to look at this is: companies pay programmers ridiculous salaries because the working conditions are so hated. Junior programmers (even those who have never been to college) are paid about as well as dentists, and they still often quit after a couple years. This is way above the $75K happiness threshold. We literally can't pay them enough to stay working for us!
Hypothesis: software development is one of the few industries that I've interacted with where the workers haven't organized yet. When there's no union for collective bargaining, what lever does an individual employee have, other than asking for yet more money, or quitting?
P.S., In what industries do you commonly see managers threatening or bullying workers? I haven't seen that at all.
I think any blue-collar worker would be laughing his ass off at this statement.
> paid about as well as dentists, and they still often quit after a couple years. This is way above the $75K happiness threshold.
Fuck-you-money actually enables this sort of freedom, since you're less scared of going jobless for a few months thanks to all the fat you've stored. So might as well quit and think about things for a while. Over certain levels, the meaning of one's job can take priority over immediate compensation.
> We literally can't pay them enough to stay working for us!
In the end, everyone deep down would rather not have to work for someone else, or to not work at all. Programmers in tech hotspots are lucky enough to actually be able to do it, and pretty often too, without any serious repercussion. For many, this is a golden age the likes of which we've never seen.
> In what industries do you commonly see managers threatening or bullying workers?
All of them - we wouldn't have unions otherwise. There is a reason the word "boss" has negative connotations.
I very much disagree. I like that my company cares about things like sales/marketing/HR/finance so I don't have to. And anyway, for most jobs, you need a supporting structure that has your back, like a company or a government agency or whatever. Sure, you could start your own company, but at that point you'll most likely spend more time doing management rather than actual work. I like that I can focus on my technical role since I'm very much not a manager type.
why do that when Civilization V exists?
I'm not sure how this is in different countries. I've not heard that many horror stories in Germany, but most work here is also not VC-backed startups, and the compensation is much lower in comparison. The non-vc-investing might of course also be a reason for lower compensation, when your valuation can't explode, attracting the top developers is less of a priority.
> P.S., In what industries do you commonly see managers threatening or bullying workers? I haven't seen that at all.
Sales (a lot!), restaurants (pretty much every line cook I've ever spoken to mentions it, and what I read in comments online sounds like it's the same in all countries), call centers, transportation off the top of my head. The main difference is that they're usually not paid well.
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
The minute her boss actually told her she was "on thin ice", she was out. Despite her being effectively outside the preferred "socioeconoethnic" groups that most companies self-restrict to, she was practically free at all times to walk out and get an equivalent (or likely better) job. That's a massive privilege.
By the time you hit your late thirties you're already too tired for this crap. By your forties you're looking for an exit. By your fifties, you're one job loss away from semi-retirement.
The constant churn of the actual technology has many people running to catch up. What worked today no-longer works tomorrow because there is no considering in the engineering, if that even happens, of permanence. Because of the heavy involvement of software the hardware is often burned at the end, some products took longer to bring to life than they lived, because its all disposable. The software, the hardware, the people.
I think to see why women and older engineers are few and far between we should be looking at these issues, because in some technology companies outside big tech we see plenty of women and older engineers, but since those companies don't "innovate" every quarter and pivot like a top, they trudge on outside the limelight, some doing great things we take for granted.
It's funny to me that people think the first options "sounds good". The second option didn't even sound like it was an option at all (to tech people). My silent reaction was along the lines of: "Do you really think I am kidding about the second option?"
> Part of me wonders if this is genuine, like these people actually enjoyed being gaslit
100%, yes.
I once took a class from someone who was, let's say, not my favorite professor. He was one of those young "fun" types. Despite being a science/engineering class in a department with a reputation for being rather tough (with the previous instructor, just retired), it was not particularly deep or rigorous. All the other students loved him because he was "cool".
At one point, we had to do a standardized Scantron survey about the course and the professor. I looked at each question and answered truthfully: "Did the professor provide a syllabus?" Easy: no. "Did the professor make it clear how you would be graded?" Haha, definite no. And so on.
Normally that's the end of it, but the next week, he was chatting with some students before class about the survey. "I think someone answered all the questions backwards just to mess with me or something. Funny!" "Yeah, that's weird, dude!"
Apparently when you're giving feedback on a popular leader, the correct response is to ignore the questions and simply give them the maximum score in every category. And when you're a popular leader reading feedback, if there's any responses that don't match this, you can safely ignore them.
People like Rachel (and myself) who speak up from the very start and never stop speaking up are unfortunately very rare. Employers who can recognize how valuable we are, are luckily not that rare, so long as the truth-teller can maintain their composure.
If you start at a company and they can't have a computer/desk/whatever you need ready without a good reason, that's a terrible start. I've worked with people with very little money or resources who still manage to create a quick, sane, respectful onboarding process. There's no excuse for anything else, and in my experience it's a great indicator of things to come.
One thing to consider is to not engage with the critics. It's hard, I know -- really I know. An engineering mind set might make you not want to "flip the bozo bit", and to learn as much from your detractors as possible.
There may be strategic reasons to get your story out -- e.g. if your co-workers or potential clients are getting a distorted story, but the personal cost in time, annoyance, and loss of peace of mind is high.
So maybe, if possible, take a usefully arrogant / narcissistic view as a form of sanity-protection. Why do you need to respond to a bunch of internet nobodies? Why waste your time dealing with HN's mental illness?
Anyway, hope this doesn't poison your day.
EDIT> Everyone even moderately notable eventually learns that you don't read the comments.
Why did you choose to pressure someone else here to ignore “HN’s mental illness” and let it fester, rather than to pressure HN’s commenters here to stop being poisonous to others?
> Ignoring the critics allows them to swell in self-importance and gather a crowd around them.
Strongly disagree. Making your case and setting the story straight is of course reasonable, but in a way it gives power to your critics. Often it can establish power/dominance better to just be like "Who the fuck cares what you think? Replying to you is beneath me." But to do that without even saying it. You don't come off as an ass, and they are just howling on the internets. So ... ghosting.
EDIT> By all means call out the bad behaviour, but like a comedian would, not like an engineer. An engineer answers point by point and tries to make a rational case -- too much effort and it won't stop the hate. A comedian says "So, these morons said X, look how stupid they are ... and that's why I don't read comments anymore." applause. <- low effort and deliciously dismissive.
Readers can decide for themselves wether or not, eg, kubernetes is right for them.
Additionally:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
2 minute timers to finish tasks like naming a dog! Love it.
If the story is of the oft-posted, "My nightmare dealing with a legacy codebase" or "My nightmare delivering a project for an inept client" flavor, there's no shortage of people jumping in the comments to echo the sentiment and reinforce with their own stories.
You change a few details, however, to the "My nightmare onboarding with a new company", and suddenly the comments dogpile on "Wow, this person must be incompetent!" sentiment.
What's the secret sauce here? Age? Reputation? Subject matter?
Now, whether that comes down to "things used to be less stupid and we're just all younger and don't know any better" or whether it comes down to "the author just got really frustrated and impatient about things that didn't bother most of us" I don't know. But I will say that I've gotten unreasonably impatient about different things before, so I get it, and I think a person has the right to rant about work without backlash even if it doesn't make for the world's most insightful piece.
Edit: I read the rest of it, and yeah, after the dev env stuff things got a bit weirder. However, in my limited experience, it's not outside the norm for large tech companies to treat their employees like children (which is one of my pet peeves too, which is why I don't work at them). It's also not outside the norm for "new-wave" tech companies to be a bit haphazard when it comes to office/workstation setup and such. But generally you're picking one poison or the other. Given that I'm pretty sure the author was talking about Lyft, I can see how in this case they ended up with both.
I've had on-boarding that was basically: set up SSO creds + 2FA, login to the wiki, read all of the things, install your own damn tools. I had a PR open by the end of the day.
I've been at the complete opposite end as well: no PC for the first 3 days, multiple systems with unique logins and varying password requirements, file multiple tickets in some ancient (HEAT) ticketing system for access to different things, setting up meetings with different teams just to find the code and infra that it all runs on.
Some companies end up with solutions that just don't age well. Most of us struggle through it because we know on-boarding will eventually end. The group activities are probably not a good indicator of things to come, but tangled systems are.
Sounds like some one in HR has built a little empire out of this.
My first job onboardings consisted of a tour being issued my lab coat and being shown the portacabin that was my office.
Then it was go and se Keith he will give you a quick run down on how a PDP11 works and there is a book on Fortran in the company library learn it
I kept going, and it wasn't worth the read. The seven paragraphs on the internal tool training were only a bit weird. I could see a company spending an hour or two having new hires answer contrived questions with internal tools.
Being a woman. The dogpilers are most likely cluing in on her name.
What this means is that no measured discussion can be had either way and the comments are almost always a disaster (at least here, on HN).
It's weird, I don't know what's the root cause of all this vitriol (other women authors don't get this treatment on HN, it's just this particular domain).
I’ve made another comment here about what I think is behind her post. But if you want my general common sense opinion on why the post didn’t resonate with most people is because it falls under the old adage of ‘know your audience’.
People are getting laid off, there’s entire groups trying to break into the industry, there’s entire groups in inconsequential positions that are easily commoditized, and so on.
Yet here is someone being critical of what appears to be a 3-day on boarding, many of us would be lucky to have that job, and even luckier to be able to bounce from it on a whim.
Goto a third world country and complain about how Costco has long annoying lines in America.
Anyway, that’s the underlying sentiment behind the post that I think most people are reacting to.
Know your audience, or even better, get your timing right. Don’t bring this up when there’s 39 million unemployed.
You seem to misunderstand my “serious accusation” as if I’m saying criticizing a woman is unacceptable. I’m saying I believe there’s a gender difference in people’s default level of empathy.
Spoiler: I thought her post about the onboarding sucked too, for all the same reasons everyone else did. And I’m someone who usually loves her blog.
I try to be empathetic to the fact that we’re all different people and will react to the same situation in vastly individual ways. Her reaction to that onboarding situation is her own, and those emotions are the kind of thing that can’t really be “wrong” or up for debate. You can’t reason somebody into un-feeling an emotion.
Maybe the HN discussion for her post could have been about making these kind of huggy feely human processes more accessible? Instead it was about how she’s so ungrateful, or about how she shouldn’t have published it, or even speculation about her neurotypicality.
Lots of people in tech circles talk a big game about how they’re so progressive and support all people’s differences because a person can bring so much in other areas despite the areas where they are weak. Just don’t be female I guess.
As for how to bring up her issue? Well, her initial way was one way. It turned out it wasn’t the best. The parameters you can modify is when and also to whom.
Believe it or not, speaking directly to faang level senior engineers can provide insight into higher levels of standards that a larger diverse audience can extract value from since due diligence was done on providing perspective. That’s an adjustment.
Edit:
I’ll just add one thing to give an example of honing perspective. It is entirely possible that the first three days of on boarding is a dream come true for a lot of people, just to finally be at that company. Now how would I sound if I compared my dismissive experience of it in contrast to that?
If this is you fifth or sixth go around, and you picked up some good/bad, make that clear, and be aware of the diversity in people’s experiences so that your critiques are palatable in a variety of contexts.
I would trust that both of you are telling the truth about the way you experience reality, wouldn't assume that one had to be false for the other to be true, would probably try to offer some words of sympathy or encouragement for your bad experience, and would do my best to accommodate both in the future, of course :)
On-boarding is harder to empathize with. For most readers it was likely a while ago, and other memories of their company have replaced the experience of the very first week. Even if it was bad, readers who are employed at a company just put up with it. Thus, Rachel's "this is stupid and so is everyone one involved except me" tone, falls flat by insulting the reader.
Then there was the promise - of hearing about red flags. Personally I expected some sort of horror story. "Here's the Kafkaesque story of why I didn't have a laptop for 3 months and was forced to access my email using a fax machine".
Instead, there was this bit with having to gasp talk to a coworker while being taught the company's HR system. Searching for a dog is inane, but hardly a nightmare. I'll be honest, I didn't keep reading much past that.
If you changed the details in "my nightmare delivering a project for a client" to be "THEN, the client spent a bunch of time with me speccing out the work to be done, and then gave me plenty of time to do the work they asked, and I couldn't do it", would you blame the commenters for a "this person must be incompetent" sentiment? The situation's less clear cut than that, but the devil's in the details!
I suspect tone to be the secret sauce. You can rewrite most things in ways that at least some people will dislike without changing the facts. You can also rewrite them in a way that will solicit sympathy from those same people. Tone can change a lot.
And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory.
Except here.
I disagree with this. I think Rachel's blog is fairly aggressive as far as HN submissions go, which doesn't elicit a lot of sympathy. It's pretty argumentative with sniping and a sense of superiority:
>Now, when I run into a thing like this, I start getting snarky and bitchy and start thinking laterally. Like, okay, watch me not use your stupid system but get the answer anyway.
And I don't think that's an unjustified reaction based on the content, but it's also not typical for blog posts that show up here. So the tone is aggressive, and commenters end up being unsympathetic. I completely agree with the parent comment that changing the tone of the post would likely result in a different set of comments (not that the author seems to care).
I've also noticed this in the HN comment section. There's a well-known member who ends up picking fights often in the comments; I usually don't read usernames at all, but if I notice a comment written in a certain bitter, argumentative way, then it's almost always from this person.
You can sound arrogant, you can call people names, you can sound like you're about to ask to speak to the manager, you can add some self-deprecating jokes, you can show empathy for whoever created the mess while describing the problems you had with said mess etc, that's the tone.
The content stays the same, but people will react very differently to it based on the tone. Some styles work for nearly all audiences, some don't.
The process was surely designed with good intentions, perhaps by committee. And it's been designed to help those that need help.
For those that don't need help, these things suck.
Providing an out for new hires who don't need this handholding is problematic. You can't just make this stuff optional. You don't know what you don't know, and junior devs often think they know more than they do. Too many people would miss information they actually need. I think a senior-level engineer needs to understand this, and be able to cope with the anguish. Sometimes there are actually useful processes in place, but only useful for a select few, but because it's impossible to know who those few are, everyone must go through it.
There are usually ways for anyone to affect change in an organization, but unless you've been specifically hired to make changes, you're going to have to wait a while, and even then, you may never be able to make the changes you really want. But such is life. Figure out what truly matters to you, in the long term, and you'll likely find you'll become much more influential amongst your peers, and even upper management. If you can't change the things that matter to you, don't torture yourself further; it's probably time to move on.
On the flip side: if you just want to work for a smooth-running, well-oiled machine that aligns with your ideals already, good luck on your search!
My last on-boarding, for example, I thought was approximately the right balance. Bootstrap the most basic credentials, set up MFA that covers 90% of your needs, get your access badge, take care of HR stuff, get walked through the HR stuff you will need to set up in the next month or so (health insurance, etc.), get handed a list of resources you will probably find useful, sit through a talk about company principles, and then you're off to meet your team where the remaining 80% of your on-boarding that is more specific to your division/team/role will happen. Your laptop will be waiting for you at your desk.
I think, for example, being made to walk through exercises querying the company org chart app is superfluous, but handing you a cheat sheet that includes the URL to get to the org chart app is a great idea.
Of course, there are places that are run by egocentric upper management that aren't qualified and won't listen... in which case my comments don't apply, but I don't think that is the norm.
In my experience it's not an issue of egocentric upper management. It's an issue of a process that is 80% tuned and for various hard to solve organizational reasons it doesn't get to 90%+ tuned.
For example, in my own latest onboarding about two years ago, in hindsight I definitely feel that about 1 hour of it was dubiously useful and was a political concession to someone playing visibility games, out of about 6 hours of up front orientation.
I think that grade of "off for reasons but not always good ones" is the norm. It's like the event planning equivalent of that one corner of the code that makes no sense because someone bikeshedded it last year.
If using the company directory is necessary to know, then something is needed, then why not try to user something fun? really though, I think the real problem here is probably that this company doesn't really need all employees to know how to use the company directory.
Hiring (or training) good managers is very hard, even more so for engineering managers. But it’s so bad as an employee to have a manager that doesn’t advocate for you, good people will leave, and that’s just a downward spiral.
Please get on your phone, turn off your wifi, and then navigate to HN, then to new, then find the post, THEN upvote it. Don't upvote it from the post itself.
The company, however, does. A LOT. (Explains a few things, doesn't it?) »
HN comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23280610
He's like those teenaged IRC admins who only let you on their server so they can choose your nick for you. The web's not a dumb pipe, it's a pipe I can beat people up with, apparently.
The worst that I experienced was a requirement that all new hires complete a training course for Splunk, the log aggregator. Why? Apparently, Splunk was a shared resource for this massive company. As a result, careless queries or logging could result in degraded performance for other teams needing to query their logs in Splunk.
Ok, no big deal, right? That's what I thought too. I dutifully started working on my training to get it out of the way. I took detailed and copious notes like my job depended on it. After an entire week of eight hour days doing nothing but taking Splunk trainings I was finally done...with section 1.
What the hell? There is another section? As it turned out, it took most new hires 2-3 weeks to complete the trainings. If a new hire did not complete the training they could not access Splunk, and apparently this meant they could not do their job. Absurd on many levels. To add insult to injury, this was a new requirement and many on my team were given access and were never required to complete the training. Those very same people kept telling me "oh, just do it, we don't expect you to be productive right away".
Well, I didn't do it. I refused. I told anyone that asked that I thought the requirement was unnecessary and a waste of time. Eventually, my manager got very pushy about it. I continued to stand my ground. In particular, I told my manager he needed to go to bat for me and get me access if he wanted me to do my job.
LO AND BEHOLD, I was given access.
The author is right for not wanting to be forced to do stupid things and have their time wasted. I don't know where some commenters get off calling the author "entitled" or "not a team player". Why are they so invested in this?
Not having a desk to work at is inexcusable, and definitely seems like a fluke rather than the norm.
What’s wild to me is the amount of people who are berating the author for an opinion post. She is describing what sounds like a garbage experience, and it shouldn’t be that hard to understand/empathize with
1. The onboarding process at this company was absurd.
2. The author's response was to show contempt and derision to everyone else involved. The "everyone responsible for this is an idiot" vibe was so strong throughout both posts.
Running large, complex organizations is extremely difficult. I wouldn't want to work at that company, but I sure as hell wouldn't want to work on a team with the author, either.
In theory, they can be good things.
In practice, it feels like they're often just used to justify poor decisions while "blaming the victim".
If someone wasn't willing to work long hours for free to build better tooling to support the project, then she's "not a self-starter".
If someone feels strongly about using a certain tech stack or architecture on a project and doesn't just go along with the old PHP 5.x or Python 2.x stack the company has always used, then she's "not a team player".
To some extent, caring enough about your projects that you're willing to work the occasional weekend means ALSO caring enough about your project to have a say in the choices that are being made, or being unwilling to accept something as it is when you think it could be much better.
It means getting frustrated when the feedback you are presumably being paid to provide goes unacknowledged.
You can just not care, and show up, do the minimum amount of work and go home, but presumably managers don't want that out of their top tech talent.
I'm not saying traits like "team player" and "self-starter" are mutually exclusive traits, but they also have consequences. They shouldn't be code for "just do what we ask of you".
What I find a bit annoying from this article's feedback, though, is how many engineers seem happy to ALSO take these terms and weaponize them against their colleagues' opinions.
Is she famouse somehow that she gets to HN frontpage? It can't be because of writing quality, it's pretty mundane.
Quick, incomplete, and mostly wrong version: she's simply an engineer whose writing tends to resonate with the HN crowd.