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Comment by yarg | Hacker News Reader

I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about.

I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an entire team.

In many cases this is an impossible problem to solve - with non-technical executives sitting above the non-technical managers; a layer-cake of bullshitters blind to bullshitters with a vested interest (born of self-preservation) in remaining so.

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I think it's unfair to only blame developers for this bad culture in our industry. At every layer of the stack the same things happen. At my local government they reformed child benefits and needed a new IT system to handle it, of-course we ended up with the over-engineered enterprise architecture of micro-services running on kubernetes, communicating over an event bus with CQRS, continuous integration and continuous deployment all day everyday, managed priorities with using agile on a scrum board, for a specification that did not exist because the law hadn't been finalised until half way through the project, all to get people money on their account. But did anybody in charge bother fixing the situation where their are 5 different commercial and not-for-profit institutions handling the money, acting as intermediaries and thus profiting off the tax benefits for people to help them raise their children, No.

micro services on kubernetes is hardly over engineering things. its lightweight, fast and is easy to implement with.

Is your real name Lillian Hellman? Regrettably, in this instance, I am not Mary McCarthy.

You're right, but that doesn't take away your capability to say "NO" and go against that stream of bullshit. Caveat: you'll probably lose everything except your morality at that point. That's how it's all set up after all...

For every really-faking-it-until-they-make-it junior dev there's a goldbricking veteran spending 80% of company time on a side pursuit.

It's not "company time", it's time in a human being's life.

Amazing how easy it is to forget this

Both, and they coincide during business hours, at the least.

If their 20% justifies their salary, which it does by the fact they've not been fired, then I don't see your point.

How is the knowing developer, not with the lead title, able to survive on a team like this?

I tried escaping - from my bumpkin locale to Boston, a 3 hour trip every morning and 3 hours back, until I couldn't handle it five months later and went tail back to the same team with the same issues. Here, I'm still hopeful to eventually figure this out.

Find a better company (and let me know how you managed it).

I think it's a lot harder for a bullshitter to hide in a small company than in a large one, all else being equal. That's not everything of course but still probably worth some consideration.

so true, but its not just executives that get fooled. there's a whole company full of adjacent people, sales, marketing, finance, that fall for this bullshit too.

they add to this dust storm of fud that allows these people to exist.

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