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Comment by rektide | Hacker News Reader

> I solved it, I got nothing.

Alas one of the most defining aspects of business seems to be an entire lack of rewards for being the Johnny On The Spot, for tackling shit. It's absurd how little benefit there is to being good or caring or taking on the hard shit.

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I don't know if this is even solvable in principle. There's just little to no correlation between the tough parts of this job, and the outcomes visible to stakeholders (even technical managers).

Spent two days dealing with memory corruption caused by a badly-written third-party library (proprietary, binary-only distributed)? I may have felt like I own the universe when I finally found the problem, but what does my manager see? Me having promised the feature today, and now saying it'll be next week.

One of the many ways management benefits from having hands-on experience prior.

Options including selling your accomplishment, not doing thankless work, moving to a better-run company, and starting your own. I made my choice.

Which option did you decide?

Started my own company. If you want something done right...

Congrats on taking that step, I've often debated on doing the same but can't seem to make the leap. I checked out your company and am very impressed. While the site says "Sorry, we don't currently have any open positions." I'll take this opportunity to ask: Could there be a need for someone with two decades of diverse technology expertise, or a role that specifically requires skills in C#, SQL, or AWS, which hasn't yet been filled within your company?

I think you visited a different site; the property risk platform. We are the remote work company.

I'd personally solve it asap but I would never declare it until it was absolutely critical and then look like a superstar at day0 to offset all of the time I spent doing nothing for weeks.

"Oh THAT is why we keep Bellend"

A manager should never see only "having promised the feature today, and now saying it'll be next week."

A bad manager may ignore everything but that, but if a manager isn't even aware there was much more to the story than just that, both the manager and the individual have failed.

There are a lot of bad managers out there.

> Me having promised the feature today, and now saying it'll be next week.

That's a different problem altogether. This isn't a factory and robots. There's no way anyone can estimate if and when an unknown can be solved. The game of estimates for these things is silly at best.

> There's just little to no correlation between the tough parts of this job, and the outcomes visible to stakeholders

There is if you make it so. If the stakeholder only cares about new features that's how we end up with products releasing new features non-stop but never fixing bugs that users care about.

The problem is the attitude and treatment towards software engineering being like a factory worker. It's not predictable the way they want it. They don't understand what's tough.

Move to greener pastures and let the competition eat their lunch. Voting with your feet is how we have nice things.

Yep. I just quit my last job because I bust my ass with zero recognition or credit. Annual pay raise was less than inflation. I'm out.

I used that very line about the inflation when I left too! And my last manager was nice, but the company was rudderless and mismanaged. I believed I could do better.

My employer interestingly didn't ask anything about compensation during my exit interview, and I wasn't about to say anything that was negative or not prompted. Benefits me not at all to be honest.

I don't think it's "wrong" for employers to not at least match inflation. Ultimately I accepted the job for a set salary. If I want to negotiate higher, that's on me. If they want to do a better job retaining me, they need to offer it without me prompting it. After a promotion I got while there, I was getting paid $110k for a job that averages $190k in my city. Didn't make any sense and the raise was 4%, so I left.

They look at you as a process. Paying you more is like disturbing the process. Better keep the process running without touching it. They can always offer you more if you decide to look for a job elsewhere.

It's sadly very true. Yes-men, doing their best to handle everything without asking .. get nothing[0]. I think it should be taught that any favor in a professional context should start with a negotiation until you trust these people to respect your engagement and involvement into caring for the project.

[0] it can go even worse, I was thrown under the bus while doing everything.. i have no proof but i assume the other people were too happy to see me burn so they can go back to pretend working without someone showing what's the normal output is

I heard Google has a peer bonus. Maybe for situations like this?

There was an article about these very people working at Google.

> Alas one of the most defining aspects of business seems to be an entire lack of rewards for being the Johnny On The Spot, for tackling shit.

Rewarding this behavior incentivizes the creation of unnecessary problems only Johnny knows how to solve.

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