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Comment by piva00 | Hacker News Reader

How do you expect a staff engineer in the middle of driving a multi-year project to revamp some large crufty part of the architecture to a better state, something that will pay off in 3-5 years time, be able to take screenshots of their "best work" to prove to Elon Musk they're worth it?

It's a special kind of hell, it manages to be much worse than the hell it is on having to politically push this kind of project to multiple layers of decision-making higher management to get enough buy in because it's a damn expensive project.

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In this hypothetical, did the staff engineer do anything besides attend meetings in the last 12 months? Did they write any code, or design docs, or actually contribute anything?

Elon’s a jerk, but this thread seems to be full of people saying “I deliver value even though I can’t actually demonstrate any evidence of it.”

Do you write code?

Only at home these days. First fifteen years of my career, as engineer and TL, I wrote a ton of code — every day was for coding, and even late nights and weekends for the extra-fun projects.

Now as a manager and sometimes architect, no code from me but I still review code and spend time stopping bad ideas, getting teams to work together, and all that fun stuff. But I still regard code merged into master, as the ultimate tangible of our work.

So you wouldn't have a single screenshot of code to show for the past year either?

So, you DO understand what we're trying to say on this thread. I don't get why you are defending this measure as a valid way to measure engineers

No, I completely disagree with the premise here that only a minority of the software organization should actually be expected to deliver code.

As a manager, it’s not in my job description anymore. And when I put on an architect hat, my output is design docs and aligning many different opinions between teams. Also, the senior-most people on my team are no longer coding 100% of their time (they’re designing, reviewing, mentoring) and that’s obviously ok and good.

...But if >50% my team spends every week only mentoring others and attending meetings and writing design docs (as someone else suggested here), I think it would be appropriate to ask what the heck is going on. The idea that for a typical rank-and-file developer (not the TL, manager, architect, etc) that they should be seen as productive software developers without being able to show even a handful of code examples over the course of a year, I’m sorry but I just don’t understand how such a software org would ever actually function.

> only mentoring others and attending meetings and writing design docs (as someone else suggested here)

If you are mentioning a previous comment of mine [1] in this thread I think you're grossly misrepresenting my words. And if so I definitely take offense in that as it's not only uncharitable, it's completely missing the point and reducing a brief expansion based on one of your questions to "only attending meetings and writing design docs", something I've never mentioned in the hypothetical scenario you raised.

I expect my assumptions are wrong because if not I'd definitely say you're not fit to be a leader or architect of anything.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33660403

No, that was about someone else who posted that they would not expect even half of software developers, to be actually writing code. I found that statement bizarre.

Like, yeah of course the top engineers find themselves less and less hands-on-keyboard as they turn more to technical leadership roles. But some people seem to be arguing that code isn’t the bread and butter work for majority of developers. Who’s doing the actual work then, is my question for them.

>someone else who posted that they would not expect even half of software developers, to be actually writing code.

I don't think anyone actually said that.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33660042

I wrote:

> In an org with thousands of software engineers, shouldn’t most of them be writing code?

And this person's reply was:

> no, I don't think most of them should be writing code

Read more than one word answer you expected to find.

> I wouldn't put any kind of quantifier on it. I'm willing to bet most, if not all Twitter developers were above average across the industry and were producing work of value.

He literally says he doesn't expect most software engineers to be coding. That's outlandish, and his follow-up that thousands of Twitter engineers somehow can still be "producing work or value" without coding is ridiculous.

No. They're saying it's impossible to demonstrate in 10 random screenshots with code lines in it. Not if Musk asked for Powerpoint presentations...

The thing about powerpoint presentations is that the slides are not the focus. What the presenter says is.

Yes, of course they did: design docs, RFCs, some PoCs to validate assumptions on small scale, etc. that's all part of a staff engineer job.

Now the question is: does Elon have enough technical expertise (or access to such) to be able to judge if a collection of assorted 10 screenshots without context of some GDoc pages, some shoddy PoC code and comments on RFCs is up to par with his bar of what a Staff Software Engineer title should produce? I highly doubt it.

It's not about showing evidence of work, it's that technical work can differ so much depending on context and constraints that it's impossible to demonstrate its value in such a reductive way, it's simple and clear stupidity to even ask to be demonstrated that way.

I’m actually not defending Elon. A blanket “show me ten git snippets” is dumb. This is a horrible way to start off as new boss. I’m only saying, there’s way too much apologism in this thread for not having tangible work results.

To your point, if I started as new manager for a team and the TL said they mostly wrote RFCs and design docs, my next question would be whether those docs led to an actual implementation (by orher people is ok). IF it turned out they write go-nowhere docs and sit in meetings giving obvious advice all day, then I’ll flag it as a potential problem that needs deeper investigation.

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