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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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"

> 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.

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.

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

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