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Comment by _0o6v | Hacker News Reader

"You need to be able to answer the "what have you done for our users lately" question with "not much but I got promoted" and be happy with that answer to be successful in Corp-Tech."

Good quote. Although you can extend the lawyers theme out to the rest of the bureaucratic corp too.

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> at the end of every day, I always ask myself "what did I do for our users today". This simple exercise helps keep priorities straight. When I found myself avoiding this question because I was embarrassed by the answer, I knew my time was up.

I agree. Good quote

I think this guy missed the memo that Google bought Waze to put them out to pasture. They were the only real competition to Google Maps and were acquired to ensure Google Maps monopoly. Waze shipping features and winning in the marketplace would be a bad thing. I think a lot of his post stems from missing this.

You must not be a Waze user.

Hard to align that perspective with his acknowledgement that Waze was allowed to operate independently, and the fact that Waze has been launching lots of new features for the last few years.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

>All of our growth at Waze post acquisition was from work we did, not support from the mothership. Looking back, we could have probably grown faster and much more efficiently had we stayed independent.

He also details the constraints and additional burdens imposed by corporate as well the overall lack of support.

In that section of the article, he was talking about marketing and partnership limitations that are imposed by being a part of a larger conglomerate. This has little to do with feature development.

That doesn't support any claims of "putting them out to pasture". Is Microsoft "putting Github out to pasture" by taking a hands off approach and letting them keep doing their own thing?

It's not about the hands off approach or letting them do their own thing. It's about their long term goals. Microsoft wants GitHub to be successful while Google wanted Google Maps to succeed.

I think like 1/3 of the people I knew there who got promotions got it purely off of visibility and not actual customer impact. In one case they literally dumped an unfinished API on Chrome users before it was finished and then after collecting their promotion, abandoned it to let other people clean up the mess. In other cases schedules were compressed or important features were cut so that we could "ship" in time for the next promo round. So frustrating.

The problem with that question: who are the real users?

If the only user you can identify for the majority of your day-to-day tasks is "my boss" or "my boss's boss", then there's probably something wrong.

Everyone gets mandates from on high, but that shouldn't be all of one's work.

Parts if society will pressure you to stay on the ladder rather than seeking meaning or utility.

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