Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

andrewmcwatters

I agree with Nihilartikel’s comment. It’s nice when you’re the one doing business development.

But as a manager at any organization, the correct answer is to fire people like this because they become insidious and take over your business.

Have a moral backbone.

Is it fair? No. Lots of corporate decision making will never ever be fair. Deal with it, or work with these people. Find ways to financially incentivize morally correct behavior and exceptional engineering. The latter is important because good people leave and they’re literally worth more than your other employees.

Oh and by the way, they’re disgusting to work with, and regardless of your moral compass they will make you a worse engineer.

I worked with these types of people at my last job.

One guy didn’t know how to fork a repo and maintain an internal copy of a project with clean portable diffs.

The other was afraid of regular expressions and didn’t understand libc versioning.

Losers behave like losers.

As an addendum, you don’t need to kill yourself over your job. Just do what’s asked of you.

But you don’t need to be a parasite either. It’s disgusting and you WILL be remembered for it years later.

I won’t be at my employer years later, so why does it matter? Max of 4 years to cash out the stock.

one has to have honor for themselves

you may win the FIRE game but you've cost yourself the chance to be something you respect

This line of thought shows a fundamental difference in perception. To a lot of people, working a 9 to 5 will never make you respectable no matter what it is you're actually doing. These people work to live, whereas your stance is that of someone who lives to work. I don't care how the company remembers me after I've retired and never have to give them so much as a spare thought. I have a whole life ahead of me that I intend to live without having their massive black hole of time waste looming over me.

Shit, I lost that when I went into the industry.

Because the people you work with might also move around and end up with you again.

> One guy didn’t know how to fork a repo and maintain an internal copy of a project with clean portable diffs.

Or don't care about it. I started my new job by forking 2 or 3 repo (one was from an almost new project), but then i looked at the commit history and i was like "Fuck it, i'll just branch out and rebase before the merge to clean up my shit". I know how to do it, i do not bother.

My commit titles are often enough, i sometimes add a commit comment but i know no one really cares. I just do my job well enough, and try to stay motivated by doing the most interesting parts well, and do not forces myself on the boring parts.

Managers are not somehow exempt from this line of thinking. Firing someone is labor intensive for a manager and will actually reduce their power. No one wants to fire anyone, especially lately.

This is clearly the result of corporations destroying workers’ incentive to produce quality work. If you don’t pay people to care, they will not care

Meh. I’ve seen very good and caring workers at all levels of the pay scale. Pay impacts caring, but caring doesn’t start with pay. Many people care because they value quality work intrinsically.

My experience is that the managers themselves are the ones driving this behaviour. They either don't even know who are the best engineers in their team, or they know and assign all the work to them.

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