Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

For me the sufficient reason is in the second paragraph

You will have little to no meaningful autonomy, impact, or influence.

This is pretty much by definition true if the place you work at hits a certain size, you become an ant in an anthill, hyper-specialized with no meaningful holistic task.

Life is too short to move things in and out of protobufs for a living, I'd rather live in a garage like a broke college student and have some agency in a five person company and see an entire project through and do interesting work rather than fixing the pipes on some gigantic monolith.

I read that Airbnb blogpost recently about moving to react native and back and I can only imagine the amount of hours of human life that were wasted in meetings alone makes Kafka's novels look harmless, why do people do this to themselves.

View on HN

i work in a megacorp, in developer tooling. so in some sense i'm fixing the pipes, and nothing i do is even remotely related to any of the company's core products. but on the other hand my primary project has a three-person team, we have tons of autonomy, and a pretty large impact on code quality and developer experience across the company. plus most of what i do is open-sourced, and there is a lot of engagement with the open source community at large. and this year i'm going to expand my role to spend some time contributing to the cpython interpreter, which my manager is very supportive of.

this pretty much is my dream job; everyone's dream doesn't have to include having visible user-facing impact or being part of product development. also the work-life balance is great; i get to put in my hours at work and actually be able to make plans that involve leaving at a reasonable time, which was not the case when i worked at a startup.

Have to disagree almost entirely.

Any big tech co worth its salt acknowledges the outsized impact a single engineer can make and rewards them appropriately. The important thing here is defining "impact" and "influence". As a standard L4 / SDE-2 engineer, you can have enough impact to make a company like Amazon several 10s of millions of dollars year in and year out. Sure you can't change the strategy of a trillion dollar company, but very few people can claim to have such an outsized impact and still complain about it. It might be adding some prime badges here and some ads there, or improving a recommendations algorithm by 1% but given the scale at which they operate, a 0.25% win in conversion rate because of an idea you've had / executed is enough to drive 10s of millions of dollars in top-line revenue. In terms of technical impact, L4s generally have a fair share of interesting problems to work on - reducing latencies, saving fleet costs, solving recurring bugs are all well rewarded.

- As a Sr SWE (~5-6 years of experience) - you're expected to have an influence on the direction of an entire team. You have input into setting OKRs and idea generation is expected for this level (especially at Amazon, not as much at G from what I've seen).

- As a Principal Engineer - your influence has to stretch across an entire org.

You can vaguely say "oh but I don't care about making my employer gobs of money or solving somewhat interesting problems" but then you'd have to define impact in engineering terms.

> As a Sr SWE (~5-6 years of experience) - you're expected to have an influence on the direction of an entire team. You have input into setting OKRs and idea generation is expected for this level (especially at Amazon, not as much at G from what I've seen).

FWIW as a non-yet-Senior-SWE at Google, I have input and influence in OKRs both for myself and others on the team. This depends a lot on the particular work though. I work on internal infra, which is driven less by PMs and external market things, and much more by engineers proactively identifying areas for technical improvement and user pain.

> Life is too short to move things in and out of protobufs for a living, I'd rather live in a garage like a broke college student and have some agency in a five person company and see an entire project through and do interesting work rather than fixing the pipes on some gigantic monolith.

This is really just dependent on whats important to you. If spending all your waking hours in front of a computer writing commercial software is how you want to spend your life than sure work at a small company that will become your identity. Or write plumbing, get paid well, and live a well balanced life, one thats not dominated by work.(I think the language to describe the scenario emphasizes the spin on the scenario)

> (...) Or write plumbing, get paid well, and live a well balanced life, one thats not dominated by work.

More than 1/2 of your awake life is spent working. So better make sure it is fulfilling.

I still think that’s an overgeneralisation. I’d say make sure you can be content with your work. But would I trade half the fulfilment for double the salary? You bet I would. My family could have a better life, I could do more exciting things in my spare time, I could even make sure my children have a better education, etc etc.

It all goes back to what the OP was saying: it depends what’s most important to you.

There’s 112 waking hours per week, if you sleep eight hours, so more than half that is 56 hours a week. Are you working seven days a week or something?

> This is pretty much by definition true if the place you work at hits a certain size, you become an ant in an anthill, hyper-specialized with no meaningful holistic task.

This size is much smaller than a megacorp, though, at around 100 people you'll either have very little user-influencing work or you'll be working on such small features that they won't be very noticeable.

Exactly. Even on a team of 10, unless you're especially outspoken, you're not going to be heard very often.

>why do people do this to themselves.

Lots of money.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com