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Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

The real trick is that caring about anything in the modern corporate workplace is a mistake. Unless you hold equity and board position in the company, then you are completely replaceable at any time for any reason.

The only thing you should be doing is ensuring that the chain of decision making is documented so blame flows upwards. And exercise some discretion in ensuring you get away from managers with a track history of poor decision making.

Workers don't own the company, and they have almost no power (nor the time to engage in the politicking which would give it) within the decision making structure there. Look after yourself first, and plan to leave when people who do think they have an ownership start making bad decisions.

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This really is the answer. In the past I would have regarded this as horribly cynical, but not so now. You're not being paid enough to risk your career by crusading for truth, or to go down with the ship.

None of this means you can't or shouldn't do good work, even somewhere badly managed. Do good work, polish your resume, and disappear without a trace.

> The real trick is that caring about anything in the modern corporate workplace is a mistake

If I could go back 20 years and give myself one piece of mental health advice, this would be it.

This is an "I told you so" to myself. For all of my carreer I avoided big corporate companies because I just assumed I would hate it, even though at least in the past it maybe sounded more glamorous and I could probably make a lot more money. Recently, through no action of my own, my company was sold to a much larger company. Well I was right.

And you have nailed the essential heart of it I think. You just have to not care about what you're doing, how well it could be done, or what tools you're using to do it.

Which is just no way to live.

But you still have to excel and look good somehow, even with no freedom of movement to excel IN. All you can do is do the pre-scribed wrong things, well.

> You just have to not care about what you're doing

You do have to care, you're just mistaken about what it is people in big corporate companies are actually doing. What they're doing is advancing their own careers and those of their network.

> how well it could be done

Reflected in the rate of advancement, which can be actively maximized through effort and attention.

> what tools you're using to do it.

The "work" is in fact one of several tools used to advance the career. This is why it is so frequently performed with little care or love. Often it only matters to the career to the extent that it can be declared "done." Most companies lack mechanisms to tie what happens later back to the original doer, so the marginal benefits of care and quality to the career are low.

If you care about the actual "work" and craft it's best to find a place with little to no concept of advancement, in my opinion.

EDIT: Some people really are just phoning it in for a paycheck, and who can really blame them? Others who may appear to be lazy or careless simply have a different set of priorities. If those priorities offend you but the person is nevertheless succeeding, probably a good idea to move away from that environment.

This has not been my experience at a big tech company(well, amazon)

There's plenty of leeway for choosing solutions and who's responsible for what kind of failures.

I for one have spent a while trying to make sure I just have to throw an exception(with increasingly better messages), and somebody else needs to solve the problem

It's harder when you're designing something that matters and can hurt people if done badly, such as a medical records system or voting machines.

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