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Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

1) I think most software companies can probably survive with far fewer programmers if they were willing to cut dumb features. Are they though? Bloat is kind of a lot of businesses business.

2) For what it's worth, the Twitter employees let go were not just programmers, but also fulfilled other roles. I'm not quite sure what percentage of programmers Twitter lost, but I bet they lost a much higher percentage of other roles such as HR and content moderators.

> BTW. Figuring it who is the core team is not that complicated. You just ask everybody to name five people who are doing well and who they want to work with again (in the next company).

For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest.

The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.

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> Bloat is kind of a lot of businesses business.

One person's bloat is another person's critical feature. The vast majority of people use a small percentage of Microsoft Excel features, but the feature use is such that you cannot replace Excel without supporting all this esoteric stuff some small percent of users are leveraging. Excel's "bloat" gives it a competitive edge over the competition and makes it difficult to replace because of all of these edge cases in use.

"People use 20% of Excel's features, bit it's a different 20% for everybody."

Apologies to whoever I ripped that off from, I'm not finding the quote anymore.

I think it was Joel Spolsky:

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...

> For what it's worth, this might yield a misleading answer because it could become a popularity contest.

Not even a popularity contest, in all likelyhood just a visibility-of-your-position contest. Some roles at companies interact with many more people in the company than other do; if you're competent and not a jackass you'll be well-regarded in them.

Shit at one job for a while part of our onboarding process for everyone was to spend half a day sort of pair programming through the technical details of how the platform worked. I used to teach programming, am good at pairing, and am nice in real life, so I did almost every one of those. If you asked anyone outside of eng for a list of best engineers I'd be near the top, because I was one engineer everyone had had a positive technical interaction with.

I eventually got, correctly, fired from that job for underperforming! No one could believe it! Except every engineer I worked with, but that was only 1/4 of the company. The rest were baffled.

I worked at a B2B company with a monolith without API's that rendered old-style CSS. Big projects included defining and writing API's to support a self-service web app for admins, as well as a new web app for end users which was responsive on their tablets and phones. Similarly, a B2C company on features for four sets of audience instead of two. I worked closely with PMs on front-end.

Software engineers who are hired to think, and not just type, can provide a lot of value to teammates, product managers, and designers, and also supplement these other roles. But typing lots of lines is the way to look good in a spreadsheet during layoffs. And, many engineers want projects where they get to type for 4-12 months before users use the features.

Note, the above is not a complaint: I recommend software engineers track and ship a consistent number of diffs every week. It forces you to ask yourself if someone's blocking your reviews, or if maybe it's a good time to squeeze in several quick, safe unrelated improvements, etc. Shipping code should not feel like a chore; the company "owes" you the ability to ship code to production since they value your performance based on that.

Their curated trends team was noticeably axed. There's no more context added to any trend anymore.

I found the curated trends to be highly biased. They would elevate weeks-old events, claiming they had just happened. This always involved news items that fit a certain ideological bent. Seeing that made the timeline algorithm suspect in my mind.

Oh I agree, it's just something I've noticed has disappeared.

Putting aside the accusation of bias for a second, which is obviously hard to prove, 2 things come to mind.

1) Why would it take a team to do this job? Was it a large team? I joke, but seeing what's trending and giving a short human description could seemingly be done by a part-time intern while on a bathroom break. I could imagine some reasons for this, but I'm curious.

2) Perhaps a company that's been bleeding money doesn't need to spend money on these kind of roles? You hate to see anybody lose a good job, but it's better than the entire company going under because you can never turn a profit.

The trending topics were hyper-localized, often down to the city. It's a very small task that they scaled up to a massive degree.

Twitter pre-acquisition wasn't bleeding money, and it's plausible that these positions had positive ROI if they increased engagement and thus ad views.

> The charismatic guy who plays office politics and tries to make everybody their pal might score highly here, but the smart engineer who just sits down quietly and churns out good features might be forgotten.

Well it is a software engineering company/business is it not?

The socially connected engineer will know more people who can be leveraged to meet the goals of the organization, even if they themselves are not as capable in isolation.

If businesses were judged on metrics like “most autonomous engineers who can write perfect code” then the businessy types would be disadvantaged (and the company would fold)

Yeah exactly. Having someone who know reliably who knows what and how to get that person time and attention is important.

Specially in corporate settings where the gears need greasing. People are not gonna magically do the right things. They want context and understand why you are talking to them.

I constantly get told off by my boss for trying to be too clean and extensible at the expense of timely delivery (ie yesterday) but I am also the socially connected engineer who knows who’s good at what, and how to butter them up.

In my mind I’m not getting paid to write nice code, I’m getting paid to help ensure the software side of things keeps expanding without breaking within constraints of time and money. I’m very happy when this involves writing code but I’m also happy if this involves brokering, nudging, reminding, motivating, flirting, cajoling or otherwise positively interacting with the highly talented people I work with.

Social skills don’t come naturally to me, but the time investment spent figuring out the rules/heuristics has given me more bang-for-buck than any other lang.

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