I’m an individual contributor. In theory, my job is to build stuff, which - again, in theory - involves writing code, debugging, solving deep technical problems, and so on. Unfortunately, due to the culture of writing and reading I spend most of my time mired in documents. Every breath we take produces a wall of text that must be reviewed and commented on. At this point it’s been about three weeks since I’ve written code.
Not every question deserves the dreaded one-pager. Not every potential code change must be foreshadowed by an exhaustive treatment in a peer reviewed design doc. Not every potential failure mode must be imagined and written up in detail, including all hypothetical gory details.
And don’t you dare protest! You’ll be labeled not a team player, poor communicator, a lone wolf. You’ll get a negative performance rating in the next cycle and then “managed out” for non-compliance with prevailing culture.
Oh, performance reviews are a special kind of joy. For a few weeks each year the economy of writing traffics mostly in documents written by employees who must openly brag about work they did over the past year. It’s a kind of literary hunger games in a corporate setting.
Oh, and this Kafkaesque machine has feelings too. It’s weird about “tone”: disagree with someone’s writing and they see a personal attack. Sickly sweet praise is the name of the game, whereas legitimate critique of another’s writing must be circumspect and formed such that it cannot be “taken the wrong way” or else!
I’m so done.