Organization probably doesn't want to improve things
ludic.mataroa.blog
ludic.mataroa.blog
It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo.
At no point does this article, or most articles like it, do any effort to realize that things are not always like this. Even if there is some unavoidable law that huge companies inevitably fill their ranks with idiots, like this article suggests, you do not need to work at a huge company.
Most people do not work at huge companies. There’s lots of amazing tech companies with fulfilling jobs and they want you, now. But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”.
There’s some weird kind of suffer porn going on here that’s just unnecessary. If you choose to trade your sanity for a high salary then go right ahead but don’t act like you had no choice.
But it is.
I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.
So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice.
Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win like being an early employee in a unicorn startup is not a real plan. It's wishful thinking.
I hate this is the world we live in and my soul dies a bit every day I have to waste my talents writing useless software, but there's no real choice.
I work from home for a mid-sized company for <=40 hours a week. I turn off my computer at 5pm and don't think about work until 9am the next morning. I work with people I like and we get stuff done. And in spite of all that, we're hardly impoverished—my current forecast is I can retire 10 years early at this rate. Tech salaries are good everywhere in the US, they're just not as insane as they are in Silicon Valley.
I could probably retire even earlier if I were willing to enter the rat race, but I'd rather be there for my kids' childhoods than resurface from the grind just in time to send them off to college.
In other words, it's absolutely possible to choose to avoid it, and it doesn't even require much sacrifice.
And I'll work until I'm 75.
I say this not out of being bitter, but for the context that many (probably most) people who do what they love to do don't get the massive paychecks even mid-tier tech jobs get. Context is everything.
My salary is much higher than household average but far from unheard of in tech. There are definitely some scrappy college grads getting offers higher than it. and I have 3+ decades to increase it.
If you’re lucky. Modern medicine still has yet to solve most major disabilities for people in their sixties. It will be hard to work if you’re suffering any of the innumerable disabling diseases. What will you do then?
Hard disagree. Have never worked for "terrible big company" (though some mediocre medium companies!) But outside of the super high cost of living areas like NYC and San Francisco, it's trivially simple (if not easy) to live on $50-60K USD each year (adjust this number for inflation as needed) while still enjoying yourself, having high performance technology, doing some travel, etc. You can't buy every damn thing you want or live like a millionaire, but you can live a great life.
How many software / engineering jobs in the U.S., excluding terrible big tech companies, pay more than $60k USD per year?
Almost all of them. In fact, it's not hard to make well over $100k. And live on half that. So you don't have to work forever just because you're not making $500k USD each year at some huge terrible tech company.
As I said, anyone in software is likely making over $100K. A $500K house with 20% down would have a P&I payment of $2,715 / month (at 7.2%, plus taxes/insurance.) That's less than $33K / year. (I bought my first house for $155K making $55K / year, and my second house for $390K making $100K.) If you're making over $100K, and spending under a third of it on housing, you should be able to afford to live, unless you're careless with your money.
I don't think I'm making any sacrifices in my life, because I don't think of the things you can overspend on as sacrifices. As I said, I eat well (at home and at restaurants), I travel, I have great technology / toys. And at 44 I have a 7 figure net worth. Because I'm still spending under $65K USD / year, I could likely live off investments in a few more years, though being in software, it's easy to continue contracting on my own terms and having extra money.
I guess technically that's a choice, but it's so bad in the long term I personally can't consider it valid.
I find it funny that the internet exaggerations have convinced non-US people that:
1. Doing a couple LeetCode problems is the only thing interviewers look for
2. Everyone here automatically gets a high paying FAANG-like job if they can memorize enough LeetCode problems
3. All of these jobs just write useless software all day and never really do anything productive
and
4. LeetCode problems are impossibly difficult and it’s a tragedy that anyone would be asked to code during a coding interview.
I struggle to read these threads any more because everything seems so stretched out of proportion from the real world. If your view of what US development or interviewing culture is like comes from HN threads, you’d probably be pleasantly surprised by what it’s actually like here most of the time. The weird catastrophizing that happens on HN and Reddit is hyperbole.
Basically since Joel's posts in the early 2000s. He promoted a reasonable idea-that programmers should know how to program. Then B and C players rushed to make that happen! Similar to how agile became the complete opposite of what it meant originally.
> So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice.
Literally hundreds of millions of Americans retire on much less than than BigCo compensation.
Let’s revisit this comment in 15 years or so.
Can they sustain a medical emergency?
Can they pay for their kids college?
I'm sure some can do all this. But I'm pretty sure most can't.
Money being important is not part of the world, it's part of you. You even say so a few lines later:
> ... I don't want to work forever.
So yes, you indeed have no choice but to treat money as important because... you've chosen to treat money as important.
I'm offering this in the hopes that you can stand back and look at your need from a distance. What are other ways to satisfy this need without you writing useless software _and_ without money being the main constraint? Get creative!
Look, money isn't everything. This isn't a video game, where the highest score wins, and you chase points just for points. But money lets you buy things, and some of those things are important - food for yourself and those who depend on you, shelter, healthcare. (But there's a bunch of stuff that money can buy that isn't important, and learning to let go of those things is really healthy.)
So: Money is important, because some of the stuff it can buy is important. That's not going to change any time soon.
yes, I have chosen to treat the ability to have a roof over my head as important. Rent in my area is 2000+ minimum so I at the very least am recommended to make 60k+ in salary to support that.
add on basic utilities (water, electricity, inernet), food above rice and beans, and maybe a little bit of premium entertainment and we're talking more around 70k+ a year. And this is all for supporting myself. If I ever want kids I either require a working spouse or to make even more money to support a full time parent. So yes, I'm talking more around 130k+ minimum. Not unreasonable in tech, but it sure does start to exceed the salary of many other industries
>What are other ways to satisfy this need without you writing useless software _and_ without money being the main constraint? Get creative!
With my current skillset? I suppose I embrace hustle culture and try to make a side income with my talents. try to make some small apps or games that give some continual income. Could also find an angle as a content creator. Both basically eat into my time since this is in tandem with full time work, so it doesn't really fix the problem.
Despite all the obsession with FAANG, I find it harder getting responses from small studios writing not-useless software. They want very experienced personell both for branding (how many new startups have you seen with pitches of "with talent from Apple, Blizzard, Deloitte, etc.") and the fact that they need someone who can architect a project from the ground up.
It isn't like these opportunities are everywhere.
As much as people pretend, it is in fact not easy to just uproot your family and move across the country to work at a challenging startup. So there are good engineers that get stuck in BigCorp Jobs that do suck your soul, just like these online rants depict.
Even stepping back and forgetting the ranting. All big human organizations, eventually become bureaucratic, and locked into hierarchies, and have a difficult time making decisions. And all of these things make IT and writing software very difficult. And, because of individual constraints on geography, family, etc.. good engineers do get stuck in these big organizations, and tend to suffer.
Of course it is. Taking leetcode job because you don't want to work forever is buying a lottery ticket. Maybe it's your ticket to financial independence, but maybe not.
The alternative, of taking a more normal job that affords you a higher day-to-day happiness level but doesn't pay as much is a legitimate other option. Plus, doing that doesn't exclude being able to achieve financial independence.
There's no right or wrong choice here. It all depends on your personal attitudes, goals, and tolerances. But there is a choice.
Behind all such writing is an unspoken piece of context: those terrible huge companies pay software devs better than small ones. It's not that they can't work at a smaller company - it's just that it means taking a hit to your take-home pay, so it's Not An Option.
I cannot wrap my head around it. Being happy with your life is not a one-to-one correlation with income. You can make less money than "maximum" and still have a great life.
I think the bigger assumption here is "all companies are bad, so even if I change I'm simply choosing another poison".
What alternatives do you have in mind? trying to join a startup? That means having the money/idea for yourself and pitching to investors or being experienced enough that other founders want you on the ground floor with them (i.e. going back to spending 10+ years at "not an option" BigCo).
If you prefer to maintain a 9-5 schedule at these companies, it's extremely possible as long as you:
1) genuinely stick to a 9-5 work routine (some individuals I saw struggling were actually working something like 11-4).
2) are comfortable with the possibility of not experiencing rapid career advancement, potentially reaching a plateau at the first terminal level.
I have friends at Amazon who have started to miss our Saturday events because they’re feverishly working to avoid being caught in the next round of layoffs.
I also have friends at some FAANG companies who seem like they’re barely working (their own admission) so it varies wildly. Can’t really generalize.
People are bad at understanding risk. When a company pays significantly more for the same job than another, there is always an economic reason:
* The job is undesirable because of how people are treated, and as a result the only way to attract and retain people is to overpay. The extra pay mitigates flight risk when the inevitable bad day or week happens for the hire.
* Management is likely to or has a history of sudden lay offs and firings often indiscriminately. The extra pay mitigates the risk of sudden loss of income to the employee.
* Poor reputation/employment brand requires paying more to get people to avoid the risk of associating with that bad employer brand.
The extra money is being paid not because the employer wants to. It is exactly because they have to in order to hire and retain people that can do the job. The whole "we're better and pay a premium because you are the best developers in the world" is really management self-justifying having to overpay due to risk.
When you look at compensation, ask yourself and the interviewer why is the company over-paying? You'll often save yourself years of misery.
The rubber band is snapping back, though. Layoffs are hitting all of these companies and expectations are rising quickly. Inevitably, companies paying a lot of money for people will expect to get their money’s worth out of them.
One can argue that the snap-back is exactly they had to offer more money to have large teams of highly qualified people.
> expectations are rising quickly
I think more reality hitting than expectations hitting.
This is what I term the “dirty secret of BI” - for most organisations, most dashboards are unused, except by the teams creating them.
This is because reports need to be useful to be used, and most are not. In my opinion useful means one of:
1) Aiding people with actual decision making power to make decisions
2) Improving the ability of “front line” staff to complete their day to day tasks better
PowerBI and similar tools are poorly suited to the above because 1) requires mgmt to understand the data they are looking at, which is difficult without context in a grid of charts, and 2) requires a thoughtfully designed, fast UX that is basically impossible to deliver in a dashboard.
I’m now working on an open source BI tool, Evidence.dev (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence) which is targeted at these two use cases. It enables you to add context to data inline, design the UX for the use case, and is just fast.
Previous discussions on HN:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35645464 (97 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28304781 (91 comments)
1) For someone in BigCo it is fun to read.
2) BigCo is not a bad place for most people. Management should just shut up about efficiency and data driven. No one believes them, not even themselves.
I'm all for looking at processes periodically to make sure we are doing the right things to get everything released, but when you come at it from a hitting ever tighter arbitrary KPIs you just make everyone angry or apathetic to your words.
We only have to consider that building and maintaining an organization is not a clear science. To think otherwise is to indulge in utopian thinking. So there will always be wasted effort in any organization, whether it's BigCo or SmallCo or Boy Scouts or the local Church. It's like, if you build any machine, that machine will produce waste. Heck, if you undertake any venture, such as cooking a meal or writing a book or running a 5k, you will produce waste: wasted food scraps, wasted words (that the editor will remove), wasted trainings (when you werent really focused, eg.)
A person being unhappy about an organization happens because of a single reason: they are placed in a position in that organization that makes them unhappy. They can change their position or the organization. Or they can recalibrate their mind to make themselves happy.
And this is what happens: people move around or change jobs or reflect and discover a new purpose.
So I'd argue, working at a small shop, while not rare, also isn't as predominant as you're portraying.
EDIT woa that page says there’s 320k software engineers in the US. That’s one entire percent of the population! That’s a lot, could that really be true?
Which is even more surprising on 'hacker' news. Maybe the average (US-centric) 'hacker' nowadays is just a corporate worker dreaming.
I recently joined a megacorp after decades of small companies and I'm having quite enough fun on the project side and everything. Corporate bureaucracy is nothing after you dealt with actual international bureaucracy. Only downside is that pay is /too low/.
We’re apex predators; laziness is inherent to our being. Or at least thats my head-canon :)
As an employer, I find that the inverse holds too - applicants that find us via the "Who's hiring?" thread are much more often a potential fit than those who find us via other routes.
I don't know, it sounds like you think people actually like their jobs. Seems like for most of us, we do work at shitty BigCos. Plenty of small shitty companies too. That's just how life goes.
I scored that once by accident. We all keep in touch, people from every department, and recount how it was the best job we ever had.
It was acquired by a medium company of limited competence and everyone was scattered to the wind in a frenzy of empire building by the managers in that company.
I have been consulting/contracting and visiting megacorps since then. Traumatizing, to say the least.
The smallest studio I worked at was still 100+ people, and grew to 200+ by the time I left.
Not a major driver of improvement, that there attitude.
The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow themselves be dragged into endless meetings and they know the script (that the OP author is referring to several times) and they recite it by heart. Because if they don't, their manager is going to think they are useless and will inevitably fire them.
People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.
At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men.
Quite tragic really. All of this is a collective delusion.
I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...
Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than try to fix the social and political structure of your organization. Mostly because even if you succeed, the organization wouldn't be sophisticated enough to understand and credit you for the work.
The effects of my work strategy and behavior on the company's revenue, profit, vision, products are zero.
On the contrary, the effects of my work strategy and behavior on my salary and position can be quite pronounced.
My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of.
It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.
As for "being difficult", yeah, that's a huge culture problem of many Westerners. It's also a very nasty problem because everyone believes in it; I too had managers who literally told me to "stop being difficult" when all I did was asking, twice over the course of an entire month, about why aren't we given just a little more bandwidth to deal with a problem that slows down half the company.
But as we know, culture problems are extremely slow to be solved and that's why I don't blame people for coasting on salary and doing the bare minimum.
Tragedy of the commons, Prisoner's dilemma, Peter's principle, we can call it whatever, it's still very sad though.
Which one will kill you if you get it wrong?
Which one does the manufacturer think is important?
Why are those never the same?
Contracts are insufficient here. A contract doesn't prevent my boss from being unhappy with me and making my life miserable. A contract does not ensure promotion. As an employee, there is no upside for risk, making any risk unacceptable.
They can't exactly promise "you will all be here for 5 years, guaranteed, no matter what" too, because for most Homo Sapiens that's a signal to immediately become useless.
My point is similar to yours: that the incentives are indeed not aligned, and that this is quite tragic because even when some people make an honest try to break the vicious cycle they still get treated like everyone else.
It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems.
If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need you?
Too prone to false positives: Any project which is genuinely going really well results in everyone getting fired, and the company absolutely tanks as a result.
I think everyone would agree that yes-people are useless for a team, but if you find yourself surrounded by them you have to ask why. Either you hired poorly, or more likely the way you treat you team and/or company creates a culture of fear and dishonesty.
Look, I don't mind if you write about me, but it didn't have to be so on-the-nose. No chill, these HN people, no chill at all...
I mostly hate the game, and only part of the players.
Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs included.
It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happen.
But actually we live in a world of plenty. Yes, there are hungry people. Yes, there are people who don't have an iPhone.
But what do I mean? I mean that in general it appears to me that almost everything is produced by a very small number of people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to feed 10 people. The same is true for a lot of goods and services. We don't actually need a bunch of people to do many things.
Quite a lot of processes, if you ask someone who works in various industries, are really done by a few people, supported by a cast of extras that outnumbers them. Some of these extras make more money than the people actually doing the useful work. Often these extras are are like you allude to, only there in order to pretend they are part of the process so that they can make a living.
To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on.
What we actually need is to have productive people unimpeded by people who need to scrape a living. We should change our norms so that if you aren't selected to be one of the people who makes iPhones or grow food, you can just be good friend. If you want to be an iPhone maker, study and try to get in there. If you don't make it, you're not a failure. You just go about living while all the robot designers take care of stuff.
Now just to be clear, I'm not saying that bullshit jobs don't exist - they do. And maybe a world with universal basic income would reduce these bullshit jobs and generally make everything nicer.
But the iPhone needs *a lot* of really non-bullshit, totally serious hard work by thousands if not millions of people to exist, many of them getting paid ridiculously low wages and working under what I would consider inhuman conditions (12 hour days, etc... I should mention that I'm French, so perhaps used to slightly cushier worker protections than most people). And I think there are more underpaid, overworked Chinese factory workers than there are are "VPs of corporate happiness".
I hate to tell you this, but you've very much missed your target of "not something that's already been talked about for 200 years."
Who does the selecting? Who says, "You, there! You shall devote your time to programming robots, so your neighbors can 'be good friends' and have meaningful relationships. Buck up, comrade. Look how good it will be for everyone (...else)!"?
This is only true for complex positions, where it's almost impossible for management to suss out individual employee's impact. Vast majority of jobs are not like that - they're driving trucks, stocking shelves, processing paperwork in some government job, driving farm equipment, assemblying smartphones, selling retail financial products etc.
Are you aware of that or you just came up with the same basic idea (a resource-based economy)?
Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.
People are just way too risk-averse. Though I get why the useless managers are like that, they don't want anything shining a light on their team more than absolutely necessary because they know they could be the first ones on the chopping block should an objective analysis ever take place.
That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
> look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
All the Dereks I’ve met over the years (I know terribly anecdotal) are aware of the position they’re in. They are desperately scared of those nosy engineers that can prove with data how bad they are and try hard to put them in positions where that is not possible.
The portrayal of Michael Scott in “The Office” was sometimes too painfully real.
But knowing that, I’ve found its actually possible to use it to your own if not advantage, then at least peace of mind.
The way one does it is to get to know your Derek as a person, become his confidant - a surprisingly large amount of the “stupid jira tickets” those people generate are usually because of of very stupid requirements and policies that they have to follow.
After one understands the deep reasons for the busy work and inefficiencies - be it other bosses and hire ups or inadequate policies, one can work with their Dereks to sideline / fix them. The former being way easier than the latter of course.
Then you can approach the hire ups and understand why they put those policies in the first place, slowly getting a deeper understanding of the bigger picture. Cause there usually are reasons for all the madness, it just takes civility, patience and empathy to get to it.
“Why bother” one would ask? Well in the end you get known by all those people as “the guy to go to, to get shit done” and start being pushed into very interesting and consequential projects. People trust you, at least on a personal level - and even if you don’t manage to solve the political issues that frustrate you, you still have the peace of mind of being productive and friendly with your environment.
It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful. Now that I'm older and in a position with a different perspective, I'm far less likely to find systemic fault. Perhaps I'm just lucky in my career atc? I don't have a blog to go back to, but this author seems insightful and I'd like to see what they think in 5 or 10 years.
Hierarchies are just an organizational pattern, a tool. There are neither a religion or "set in stone" as many think, they create communication choke points, induce unnecessary communication, cause "not our responsibility" mentality that may result in things falling through the cracks, have often the "Chinese whispers" problem to it, and so on. You cannot treat every problem like a nail just because your only tool is a hammer.
I'd say "in evey case". And I'd say this happens whether or not there's an explicit hierarchy. Being articulate, or having knowledge or contacts, will get you more attention. The only way to mitigate this is through explicit processes, which have to be regularly reviewed. Meetings have to be chaired strictly. Everybody has to sign-up to the agreed processes.
These processes are time-consuming, and decisions can be slow. It becomes worse the bigger the organisation. I don't know how non-hierarchical decision-making can work in an enterprise where there are significant assets at stake; I've only ever seen it work in voluntary political associations in which non-hierarchical organisation is one of the prime objectives.
Hierarchies can be time-limited, or democratically limited, it just depends on the legal and organisational framework.
I'm not sure how far you can push a 3-layered organization, but it's absolutely something that exists on some scale, without a phantom organization appearing.
It's been my experience that a lot of an organization's internal messaging is crafted to be a distraction from either really bad stuff that is going on or simply because management can't or doesn't want to do productive work.
From that perspective, any dysfunction in a small team is inconsequential to the organization.
As a younger person that was the sort of stuff I fixated on, until I learned that the various very trusted professional corporate suit folks acting like HQ were doing illegal shit, destroying their families with workplace affairs, bullying everyone around them, and ruining other people's work.
Eg, as an SDE in 2017 you worked on Amazon Device’s econometrics team and were screaming the entire org was in trouble — but the PhD economists and directors ignored you.
We’re at 5 years, a gutted department, billions in losses, etc. Now what?
Or you warned WarnerMedia executives about their internal corporate misandry just before they fired Johnny Depp for being a male victim — and destroyed two tent pole properties in the process.
Or were at Amazon again and warned there’d be financial troubles circa start of 2022 based on unprofessional conduct in FinTech?
…what happens when you’re repeatedly right about multi-billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer just doesn’t care?
I don’t want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,… Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc.
I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders — not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.
If you truly think this, the only moral course of action for you is to immediately leave the company. Otherwise you're "fraudelently" continuing to take shareholder money. If you think the execs of your company give a shit, or will ever give a shit, about what employee #3141991403 thinks about the direction of your company, you're delusional.
If you want my opinion, just shut up and take the money. It's not your problem if shareholders make bad decisions. And besides, if it wasn't you, it'd be someone else.
But it’s also funny that two of the situations you mentioned (Johnny Depp “victim” and Bud Light) are fake stories based on conservative media astroturfing where any judge would be hard pressed to find that there was unreasonable behaviour on the corporate end.
And of course, being a white knight only works if you’re privileged enough to be able to jump ship or fight your social wars and still have something to fall back on. Not everyone here is a US citizen with US resident parents and US college education, earns 6 figures, or has had decades of working experience to accumulate savings and make a CV.
WarnerMedia fired Mr Depp for mere allegations, but retained Ms Heard despite police reports documenting her abusing her girlfriend at an airport.
The sexism shown by WarnerMedia executives is not in the interests of shareholders — and is part of not only why WarnerMedia had to be sold off from ATT for a massive loss, but has failed to recover post merger with Discovery.
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Similarly, Bud Light decided to endorse a controversial spokesman, call their core audience bigots when they objected, denigrated them as “fratty” and “out of touch”… then seemed confused when the people they were openly rude to stopped buying their product.
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What particular facts do you believe I’m wrong about?
I’m curious — and explaining that is much more interesting than Poisoning the Well fallacies, such as calling things you disagree with “astroturf”.
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Finally, that’s excuses: you made up a stereotype about who I am, then decided you can safely ignore my point because that stereotype doesn’t apply to you.
Also like your use of tent-pole.
speaking from my own experience, when I look at my earlier career years I didn't appreciate how resilient organizations can be to disfunction, yes 100 things are broken, but for the most part everything will still be fine.
At my last job, the bosses ignored everything even the smartest employees suggested. Changes only came when customers, news outlets, vendors, or auditors made suggestions. Anyone external had more influence on company direction than the most experienced employees. A person leaving an anonymous review on an app store had more influence.
It was clear that we were ignored because the bosses didn't want to take direction from those they manage. Their arrogance and fragile egos wouldn't allow them to.
That's one reason why people employ consultants. A consultant is someone an organisation employs to tell it what it already knows. Sometimes it doesn't know that it knows it, but more often it already knows what needs to be done, but an external entity gives a veneer of respectability to grasping a difficult nettle.
I’m not sure how to explain this, but often when I find posts on HN linking to an engineer discussing how management is doing it wrong (especially if it’s someone who’s not running a successful company themselves), there’s usually a hyperfocus on really insignificant numbers as evidence of their point.
This company has 8000 employees. And the cost of maintaining those dashboards is about $1mm according to the post.
It only takes someone in management to identify a change which improved employee efficiency by $125 annually to completely pay for the $1mm spent to maintain the dashboard.
Identify a new $125 efficiency improvement every year, and by year 5 your $1mm annual expense is saving you $5mm every year.
What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a core business that generates amounts of money large enough to fund departments that do nothing other than reaffirm that we care about whatever that department is supposed to do. That's totally fine (though I doubt it's a deliberate strategy) unless you waste time thinking they want to make people read the dashboards. It turns out that it's totally irrelevant to anything - they just want to have the team there to say they care about data, and you'll go insane if you try to do your job better.
(Excellent critique though.)
Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which the org does not care about the data. But also there's probably a point where they would care! Being data driven is not about spending all of your energy optimizing for exactly the scenario you have data to optimize for (see: the post-covid logistic crisis).
To me - it seems like you need to "waste" a certain amount of money tracking down problems that don't happen to exist - but you can't know for sure they didn't exist before you tracked them down.
I guess like...do you have the impression the data should drive people in a direction they are not going? Like...if the systems you work on are saying things are ok aren't they ok?
You are however totally correct that some places will have actually valid use cases for this kind of reporting. The article is very much not for those people, as they don't have these kinds of concerns for the most part. This is for people that are watching their organization talk about behaving one way, then acting in a totally different way.
I guess I wasn’t clear: The metrics work isn’t _revealing_ anything new, the data requested is what is produced. The fact that the data is _ignored_ means that it can have serious errors, but then nobody seems worried about correcting it except for our frustrated conscientious developer because producing the reports is a performative act. Nobody really uses the data for anything.
One of the most popular channels is called Trash Taste in an attempt to act like it's all foreign oriental nonsense they're wallowing in.
(Although to be fair, the current anime trend is "guy who hates women gets transported to a fantasy novel where he gets a sex slave", and the previous trend was "incest romance".)
I love game reviews and they give me very different lenses on how to view video games. Even the ones that absolutely hate a game.
I have yet to really find a useful anime reviewer. There are a few videos from a few youtubers that offer some interesting insight, but seasonal anime reviewers are either poor writers/critics or are simply trying to appeal to an audience who wants to hear their opinions regurgitated. So they focus less on insightful interesting anime and more on hating [current anime trend].
>the previous trend was "incest romance"
it's still around in manga/light novels. I think the "issue" is that these days most anime use it as a small trope instead of the entire premise. Heck, even in most of the infamous examples the element wasnt omnipresent.
- 75% of OreImo is not focused at all about the romance of the siblings. In fact, the male lead dates someone else entirely in the 2nd season.
- Kiss X Sis opens up to a more general harem in the middle of the anime and that MC dates the teacher for a while (SPOILERS I guess, for anime only. But that anime is a decade+ out and the manga ended 2 years ago. You're not getting that arc animated).
- Domestic girlfriend is the most recent and probably tamest example. Yes, I guess it's technically incest to date your new 17YO stepsister that you had sex with before you even knew your parents were getting married. We're well past Westermarck effect though.
"Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without viable products in development to validate such dynamic.
That really depends on the business. I worked with a manufacturing client a few years back, and millisecond process improvements could translate into millions of dollars increased annual profits. They manufactured parts that would sell for about $0.75 a piece at razor thin margins.
It eventually occurred to me that we didn't have to, because the team was the mechanism for automating those workloads. They couldn't tell us they weren't that important, so the easiest option was to just talk about automation while paying us a bunch to keep troubleshooting the gross scripts.
Again - that is totally fine, as long as you know what's going on. Then you can make a clear decision around whether you want to stay.
Other possibility: I had a non-programmer friend who worked at BigCo and worked hard for 2 months out of the year, doing nothing the other 10 months. He asked his boss for stuff to do and the boss said "just try to look busy". Seems like a good case for outsourcing, but that 2 months of work was pretty important and in-house employees will generally be more reliable and knowledgeable (about the company specifically). So really they were being paid (not much btw) for the 2 months of work and spend the rest of the time being prepared. This was an extreme and obvious case but I suspect this type of thing is pretty common, just usually people get busy-work (eg "make this BI dashboard") rather than being told "try to look busy".
The flip side of that is the peons are not told the company over-hired and the headcount are being paid "just in case". Which leads to corporate shenanigans where BS work materializes to make people feel busy.
Who believes this?
Although I don't completely disagree, see[2][3] "Another reason to have in-house expertise in various areas is that they easily pay for themselves, which is a special case of the generic argument that large companies should be larger than most people expect because tiny percentage gains are worth a large amount in absolute dollars. If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity, and Twitter’s kernel team has found many such changes."
But then again, at the bottom of [4] "At multiple companies that I've worked for, if you tally up the claimed revenue or user growth wins [of people claiming they improved things X amount per year] and compare them to actual revenue or user growth, you can see that there's some funny business going on since the total claimed wins are much larger than the observed total." which is pretty much my criticism of your comment; people will embellish their claims, especially when nobody can easily prove or disprove a claimed 50cent/day efficiency improvement over 8000 employees.
> "usually a hyperfocus on really insignificant numbers as evidence of their point."
$1M is roughly an average UK household income, after tax, for a lifetime. This just reads like dismissive boasting rather than a useful part of your comment. If it's "really insignificant" why do you then argue that the company will be motivated to save it in a more difficult piecemeal fashion, year after year five times over, if they aren't motivated to save it once in a big lump?
[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-442813/Dragons-Den-...
[2] https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
AI is one of the big things you can see right now.
"Hey we need our chatbot to be AI powered"
"The one that has like 5 users a month and costs far too much money, we should pay an engineer to work on AI for that?"
"Yep that one, X said it's the new trend and will improve our customer relations"
If the thing I am working on doesn't matter because it's a rounding error to the organization, but they keep telling me that it does matter and we should be driving for perfection, bla bla bla, then the original poster is agreeing with me, I think. I'm not arguing about whether it makes sense for the organization, I'm making an argument against believing the organization.
The point isn't whether $1m is significant to an individual employee. It would make a massive difference to almost any employee on a personal level (except maybe for C level in massive companies), but in a company with 8000 employees, $1m is a rounding error. Even looking at the example you quoted for the average UK income (currently £33400), for 8000 employees that's £267m or $323m just in salaries. When you consider all the other costs of running a business on top of that like buildings, light, heating, expenses (generally accepted wisdom is that a salary is about 50% of the overall cost for each employee), then factor in the material costs for whatever the company is doing, that $1m really is insignificant in the grand scheme of things from the company's perspective.
Average US salaries are higher than the UK at around $59k, and tech salaries are obviously higher, and in the US even more disproportionately so, making this $1m saving even less significant to the company.
The middle section of your post "If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity" seems to be arguing a different point. It's not about whether saving the company $1m a year is worth bothering with or not, it's whether paying for a team that might cost $500k per year and can produce $1m per year in savings and/or revenue is worthwhile. Obviously, it is worth keeping the team as the ROI on their work is 100%. However the decision on whether to create that team in the first place is harder to justify because there is probably a more lucrative opportunity for the company to find - if the company is currently making e.g. 7% profit doing what it's doing, it probably makes far more sense to expand production capacity to increase total revenue as that will be be more significant to the bottom line than a small project that saves $1m.
The funding of the kernel team is similar to paying taxes to fund science research ... it's just the more I look around the more I see a vast socialist society we live in that we think is some red in tooth and claw capitalism.
The main value of capitalism seems to be the creative destruction- replacing old inefficient companies with ones newly formed, built differently.
It's just that if we found a way to close down companies after say ten years and forced them to build new, would that solve as many issues as schumpter?
I don’t accept that all of those people intrinsically are lazy morons - maybe some or even most are, but a lot of people get that attitude metaphorically beaten into them by lazy and disengaged coworkers. I know this for a fact because I’ve witnessed it happen to many people as they mature as workers and also noticed it in myself. I can’t prove it’s not related to age, or position in life (eg a young single person eager to prove themselves at work, vs someone who prioritizes family) but I know firsthand that there are at least some experienced workers with families, responsibilities, and hobbies that manage to stay focused and engaged for a long time.
I expect some pushback against this, but I really do think this phenomenon - whatever you want to call it - is the basis for ageism. It frankly is a real, observable thing that life has a way of beating the passion out of people into a point they see their job as clock-in, clock-out. It doesn’t happen to everyone of course. One of the reasons I love working with interns and recent college grads is that, despite their lack of skills or knowledge in many areas, they mostly haven’t gone through that transformation yet.
There are certain very high-paying companies where the above doesn't apply. But they have to pay high salaries to retain staff who _do_ give 100% every day.
I believe, strongly, that this reverses the cause and effect. No one wants to be a cog in a dysfunctional machine; and the sheer density of dysfunctional machines in our society has induced a renaissance of individualism. Its a reasonable response; you can't trust the machine to reliably arrive at the correct outcomes, but you can trust yourself.
The biggest reason why I believe so strongly that this cause and effect is reversed correlates toward human nature, which has always angled toward social organization. Some philosophers would argue that there's nothing more fulfilling than being a part of an organization larger than the individual; taking any form from marriage and starting a family, to organized religion, government service, or capitalistic corporations.
Individualism isn't a symptom of maturity; its a symptom of systemic dysfunction.
The best teams I've worked on were ones where we managed to locally have pride by feeling like a little team who cared about each other's work and occasional sacrifice (being on-call, etc) and it felt like a little family. As soon as further-away managers start reaching in and "fiddling" with it, from their prideless vantage post where everything is just a system to accomplish quarterly goals, the family-feeling fades away and it goes back to soul-crushing pointlessness.
And even despite all that engagement, the "passion" doesn't make you save you from layoffs. Even Epic in all its billions made from Fortnite money decided it didn't care. Nothing is sacred. I don't personally mind some inefficiences and the occasional incompetence (though, in games there's rarely IME intentional incompetence. Of course a designer won't understand performance impacts on a game, and a programmer won't necessarily have the best UX for artist tools in a first pass). But companies some 20 years ago at least pretended to have loyalty and reward tenure and that's all but gone now. Why put your heart into something that you know will break it 2-3 years down the line? or 18[1]?
An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks. Of course the organization doesn't want to make any changes the Expert recommends, but by hiring that person they can claim they are addressing issues. Of course, it also gives management someone to blame and fire if (when) things go south.
Happened to me about 2 years ago, and it was my shortest contract ever. Lasted 3 months.
And it was not my imagination, I was complimented and groomed into thinking they are hiring an expert to help them with difficult problems. Immediately after I made one huge PR (120-ish files diff) that helped them resolve a very thorny problem, and after it was approved by the CTO and several other seniors, and after I was complimented of the quality of my work... I got reassigned to a new project where I was ordered to pull tickets and not even formulate tasks, and to just "do what I am told".
I didn't even last two months when put in that position. Me and the CTO very quickly hated each other and he started acting like he never said the things he did during the interviews, and me leaving was a relief for everyone, myself the most.
The organization, at some level, clearly never wanted me to solve the issues I was supposedly brought in to address, but give them cover to say they hired help. After some reflection, I'm starting to think the project was never really expected to succeed in any significant way. The company claimed they were trying to build an in-house replacement for a third party system the vendor no longer supported, but it's possible they just wanted a stop-gap while they found another turn-key vendor. The interim system didn't have to be all that good, it just had to have enough structural integrity to carry the organization over the gap.
This article is so annoying.
It has some truth to it, e.g. the mismatch between incentives and success, or even the corporate bullshit to avoid saying hard truths are on point. But the second part lacks the proper reasoning needed to establish the self-proclaimed intelligence of it author. Comparing software development’s product building with fencing competitions is so far-fetched, yet most of the arguments of the second part build on this premise. You don’t need amazing individuals to build a great thing, what you need is a great team. That’s why most people try to address the system. It’s hard to do when you factor in individual incentives, but it’s not because everybody is dumb, it’s because everybody (smartly) addresses their own self-interests above the company’s.
Do you have any direct evidence of this or are you merely making an observation.
He probably doesn't work in software. There's hubris in spades in that realm. The worst is when people's ego is significantly bigger than their actual ability.
If everybody in the organization would co-operate and do their best everybody would win. But if some people or some managers decide to look for their own interests and job-security first, the people who do the right thing will lose.
We are all just prisoners here, of our own device
I used to think it was an 80/20 split, and later in my life it goes up to 90%. Now I think it is more like 95%. Where it fits the normal distribution curve.
It is sad, but I am also surprised and inspired how 5% of people are pushing the progress so 95% of people gets to benefits, most likely without them knowing it.
The author said 10 years ago. HN used to discuss a lot of these things pre 2015, and it was mostly gone from 2015 - 2022 because it doesn't fit the general Silicon Valley narrative. But I am glad it is back.
Ha-ha… haaa
Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily.
This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team, and all but one developer literally never even looking at any of: APM, deployment pipeline, log analytics system, issue tracker, or dashboard.
That’s it. And you know what? It was useful.
You can make as many fancy dashboards as you like. But if the data is truly useful operationally, it will likely be a boring list with no graphics.
My experience aligns with the the author of the original blog article.
It's impossible for someone near the bottom of a hierarchy to convince anyone of anything, unless the building is literally on fire and you're the external fire safety consultant.
I'm the proverbial fire safety consultant. I come in, upgrade the suppression systems, hold multiple hour-long training sessions on how to check the figurative "water levels"... and nobody does. If I turn up a year later, it's guaranteed that the system is empty and rusting, and the monitoring panels have cobwebs on them.
I've actually noticed that you can have an emergency situation (a "raging fire"), and then sure, people will listen to you about that particular problem, but if you ask them to pour a glass of water onto something that is "just smouldering" they'll laugh in your face for wasting their time. "Come back later if it's really on fire."
> I saw someone that was working on a few Git branches, twenty years my senior, and they decided to clone the entire repository ten times, then checkout a different branch in each repository clone "because it's easier". > Can you imagine the kind of havoc such a person could wreak upon infrastructure and code if left unchecked?
But I'm very confused, because this is the workflow paradigm of several VCSs that are not named Git. If this is their only concrete complaint, then I have to assume that this person has no idea what they're talking about.
Here's a more concrete thing - I work on a product that took years and a spectacular sum of money to get going on the data space (all it does is land CSVs into S3 and then load them into a database every day, < 10GB per day). The original designers decided that the entire thing should be powered by spreadsheets, so we now have about 10 full-time staff editing spreadsheets that trigger build pipelines, one of which I believe has 400 separate worksheets in it.
However, you are right that, broadly speaking, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I have made peace with this.
Having several copies of a GIT repo for different branches is a viable strategy as long as one does not do force-pushes.
I just always found it cleaner to have several directories on the rare occasion I need to work on several branches almost in parallel.
And let's face it, most of us don't work in a repo that is 100GB or above. Even if it was a 10GB I wouldn't care one bit and can easily have 20 copies of it temporarily.
In any case, I've made a speedy replacement.
Fair enough but if you allow me to suggest you this: don't do it for the readership, do it for your own skills of eloquent and convincing writing. Even if nobody ever reads it, developing proper articulation and being exhaustive in your analysis will only make you smarter and better at what you do.
This is unsolicited advice though, and I apologize if it's misplaced.
I would advise you to instead eliminate class prejudice from your writing. A common type of class prejudicial remark programmers make is sniping at "spreadsheets", i.e., the programming tools of the outgroup not initiated into nonsensical programmer esoterica, aren't those nonprogrammers benighted and silly? But really, spreadsheets are so valuable to them because they're one of the only ways they can tell a computer (a machine that ostensibly serves them) what to do without interacting with the priesthood.
But you shouldn't listen to me either. I'm just some fucking moron on a website. Please understand this.
Your colleague, well, maybe you as well, could instead make use of 'git worktree'
https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree
It allows exactly that, use a single repo yet have parallel checkouts in separate directories.
and anyway git-worktree is basically this workflow wrapped in nicer UX
The rest of the 90% have to deliver value. For managers, that’s getting the product/service/research out the door. For directors, it’s that X N where N is the number of managers, for VP’s the same - Product/Service/Output X Directors X Managers.
Often the more inception you have (higher up you go) the more confusing the management and meetings as everything becomes strategic.
I usually work a bit with the team to prove myself, talk the talk and walk the walk, before I ever ask to lead them. Let me solve a hard problem with you so we both know how we problem solve and I’ll handle “The Business”. I’ve taken my fair share of punches.
What doesn’t help is the black and white thinking that this article is written in. If 98 of 100 dashboards aren’t used or even viewed. Build a grafana dashboard of stuff that is useful and present it as a means for cost cutting Power BI. Build a bunch of widgets they can use if they need it. I’m saying - take a step back and look not at the individuals behavior but at the situation that drives it. How can you, the engineer, provide better tooling so Derek looks like a genius. They clearly know what you’re working on, how production is going. Bob has stuff to sell and people to drink with. You get more time to work on perfecting the art of software engineering.
Stop looking at ineptitude as someone’s failure and start looking at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help those who can’t Rust, rust. Or those who are stuck on C++. Or Brian who keeps committing small revisions to PRs and makes 30-80 commit PRs in a sprint. These are not signs of individual failure, they are symptoms.
Yup. Few people go to work every day to do a bad job.
Like the OC's epiphany about Sturgeon's Law, I chilled (a little bit) once I realized that most people are already playing at their highest level.
> ...start looking at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help...
Back when I was doing proper product development, eg burning CDs and printing manuals, this was a pretty good strategy.
Something changed. And I'm not smart enough to see it.
My best guess is that most dev work is now "IT". Agile. Everything is make believe. Nothing ever really ships or is considered done. Then 18 - 36 elapse and its time for a do over. Any knowledge, culture, or lessons learned sent to /dev/null.
I've been binging the Oxide Computer podcast. They're actually making something. Concrete, real, shippable, useful. That'd be nice.
Organization has option to hire crud and have stuff done where other option is not having done anything at all.
Other option of course is to work best employees to the ground.
He's doing what is best to keep his job. Not what leads to his best work.
But yes, intentions are unrelated to outcomes. There are many things that I do not do professionally because I don't want to make people's lives worse or do a bad job. That said, I'm sympathetic because the world is crazy and I'm sure these people have families to feed. Just, you know, don't get invested in them improving if they don't seem like they want to.
These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles, yet for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state that no one dares to disturb.
It could be a niche product sold out to big orgs or other steady clients. It could be a subsidiary or some other steady org. Either way, there is no market pressure to really push such orgs to adapt.
Thus all this theater and moldy props. These orgs are not expected to improve, they will live, but required to demonstrate an effort.
This reminds me of some shitty restaurants or deserted "boutique" storefronts which stay in business for decades with no suply-demand explanation for such longevity. I guess, these may somehow have low operating costs and some strong funding source.
It was just a particularly protected and ‘calm’ place. Which, unfortunately, made the Dodo bird very susceptible to an outside context problem/sudden upset. But it worked for a very long time!
All signs point to market principles leading directly to this kind of situation. It seems like markets produce ruthless competition but that's a rudimentary and naive extrapolation from the prediction.
Reality gives good evidence to a more sophisticated prediction: that, in times of non-scarcity, markets produce docile mediocrity, because everyone's goal is to keep their job and make enough money and status to survive, rather than to maximize their money or status, and mediocrity attains that.
People keep thinking about markets as some all-knowing relentless optimization machines. But they are just a bunch of distributed computing acting on extremely limited data trying to act over a completely chaotic environment.
Markets are neither all-knowing nor relentless. They are always extremely conservative and risk-adverse. That holds for times of crisis too, they just become a little bit less risk-adverse.
All these managers are paid to do this BS. By the company. And that company is owned by people, who ultimately have the final say how it will be run, and who are paying the price.
There needs to be a lot more discussion around corporate governance with regards to this topic. I.e. how is it allowed to happen.
Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous?
Why do we frequently hear stories like Icahn goes and fires a floor of staff with no effect on operations?
Because it sounds like a huge opportunity in the M&A space. Perhaps new tech can be developed to detect companies like these, to target them for acquisition and then purge them of BS.
"Honey, I did a cost/benefit analysis and found that my role was parasitic value extraction. To maximise the goals of the organisation I have decided to make myself redundant. Further I have decided to give myself 0 days of notice and 0 compensation so that the organisation can use that money to further it's important goals. I'm afraid Christmas is cancelled this year. However, think of the shareholder value I have created."
The mistake OP makes is to assume that the objective of the business is to be a an efficient and productive enterprise.
But that ignores the fact that the business is composed of individuals drawn of the population of human beings who have more prosaic biological needs. From the perspective of management, the enterprise is simply a thing that exists for the purpose of letting them be in charge of it.
This explains several other "paradoxes" such as why wages are low, or why the social security safety net isn't great. Happy, healthy, productive workers, who can speak their minds freely when it comes to problems, even problems created by their superiors, might lead to more efficiency and higher profits. But they also rob management of their social position and the daily experience of being surrounded by people who hold them in very high regard, and treat them with respect and deference. We don't need to do a randomized controlled trial to figure out which of these two alternate universes we're currently residing in.
That is why any political treaty or consensus between management and workers, such as the new-deal or post-war consensus, will eventually be attacked and destroyed by the managers and owners even if it tanks the entire economy with it. The last 40 (and especially the last 10-15) years of US/european history and the destruction of the post-war consensus appears to have borne this theory out.
A well publicised example was the recent takeover of Musk of Twitter. He started by firing everyone at the top first, before moving on to cutting general staff second.
That's usually exactly the way to fix this problem, because BS-ing middle management requires apathetic upper management who're only concerned with milking their positions as long as they can (requiring no-one upset the apple cart). That in turn requires owners who are too dispersed, distant, or incompetent to band together and root out such parasites from the top down.
We've never trained managers. My father used to complain about this. He was an army officer before he went into industry; army officers are trained to manage.
I guess the difference with industry is that a trained manager can switch jobs; a trained army officer has a choice of exactly one employer. So training an officer is a long-term investment for the army, but training a manager just gives him an incentive to jump ship.
The author explains how he copes with the way organisations behave. Without this coping mechanism, he would be less happy and more angry. This coping mechanism could help a lot of unhappy/angry people right now, while solving the root problem requires more time and collaboration. Maybe it is also okay if we make people more happy right now, and work on the root problem in the next article?
They aren't happy people, because they've kind of given up and become cynical at life as a whole.
The article would've been more helpful if it had, say, encouraged people to start their own businesses and do better.
That's how the world used to work, back in the 90s and before.
It doesn't work today, since job mobility is so high. What's the point in training up someone, just for them to jump ship to a competitor for a healthy pay raise?
Pay employees well, give them a dream to catch and make sure they won't die miserable and would you believe they may just decide to stick around.
As of last 3 months I have completely stop working in tech. I will only ever come back to tech as a contractor. I'm rebuilding my personal site to go as a consultant and contractor only from here on. I'm literally pulling down my resume today so that I stop getting harassed by these stupid recruiter Indian call centers.
I will never willing work in a corporate hell scrape again and if I choose to it will be on my terms.
I honestly think if this blog post resonated with you, you should just go work for yourself. It's far more rewarding even if its harder work to be your own boss. Good riddance to complacency and incompetence!
Another related concept is in sociology, back stage vs front stage self: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology)
The “Dereks” of the article are some of the worst members of this corporate incompetence.
Derek was the main reason I left my last job. Systematically failed to manage the entire development department (about 30 teams) and actively hostile to any and all suggestions that weren’t his, even going as far as falsely reporting people to HR if they rightly criticised another dumb decision. Frequently stole the ideas and suggestions people made and claiming them as his own, despite having reported said person to their manager or HR for the very same idea months prior. Absolutely classic “yes man” with a smug and nasty personality.
All of the good devs left, with nothing to show for it. Three years and customers hated the crappy software, that was only pushed for because some CEO type had heard about “digital transformation” and “cloud” - and of course lots of agile bullshit thrown in on top.
the thing these corporations are good at is control and marketing, they're everywhere and people always think first about them when searching for a job etc. they also pay the most, but you'll waste your potential there with endless titles etc. In a startup/your own project you can do everything yourself, learn anything, go into any direction you want to.
All it takes is a mindful shift in thinking, look deeper into what you want, what will fulfill you etc, but seems like most or a large number of people opt for not thinking stuff through and go with the easiest, most popular and obvious choice, it's like going to a factory to stand X hours near the machine...
this resonates.
what i noticed is that managers often hire people that won't outshine them.
so, soon you end up with a team of idiots being managed by an even bigger idiot.
it's just all so tiresome. in the end quiet-quitting or work-to-rule is the only logical result, especially in a bad job market where your options are limited.
1. Improving dashboard engagement through awareness. Maybe through something like periodic email blasts that showcase metrics from the dashboards.
2. Mentoring some of the subpar engineers to help them improve so that future issues ebb and overall quality increases.
But, no, the author is too smart for that nonsense...
> the engineers responsible for it elected to use spreadsheets to control the infrastructure
Can you explain what this means, how would you control infra through spreadsheets? Is it something like terraform... You change a '1' to a '2' in a particular cell and some script queries that XLSX and notice the change and create a new EC2?
In my own experience, I at least once found one slack app that was configured throught spreadsheet. [1] It actually worked quite well.
Although in this context, I assume that by "infrastructure", OP was probably refering to the whole configuration of some Microsoft tools (PowerBI). I don't think it was about provisionning infrastructure. But I'm not familiar with PowerBI so it's only my guess. I would also love to hear more about InfrastructureAsSpreadsheet, if anyone have fun or horror stories to share :)
[0] https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl [1] https://emmti.com/tiny-elf-a-slack-bot-with-google-sheets-an...
The gist of what you suggested is basically right though.
We might wake up tomorrow to a startup marketing just such a detector. It certainly doesn't require AGI to determine who is adding value. Everything is online now, patterns of git commits, slack communications, call transcripts. It's totally feasible that AI can figure out who is good at solving problems before it can solve those problems directly.
Question for the audience: are there places where it isn't like this? Can anyone attest to having worked in places like the one that the author describes, and then escaping to somewhere that isn't like that? If so, are you hiring? Or should I just be content with spending 2 or so years somewhere and then moving on? (2 years seems to be about the natural amount of time it takes for me to fully realize the dysfunction of wherever I'm currently employed)
I haven’t found the solution you’re looking for. I’ve refused to go back to the grindstone for about two years now. Exploring other avenues such as bizdev because I don’t think I’m physically capable of remaining healthy and being an employee software engineer anymore.
I think the prime quality for the vast majority of software developers isn’t technical skill but rather whether you can settle/give up on your ideals and just drive the bus into the wall whenever asked. If you can’t do that (I can’t), pick another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing because it’ll drive you insane and shave years off your life.
I'm sorry to hear that, and that makes me worry about my future in this industry.
However
> If you can’t do that (I can’t), pick another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing because it’ll drive you insane and shave years off your life.
Won't this just apply to any career? Or do you think there's something unique about software that leads to this?
> Exploring other avenues such as bizdev
I don't think I fully understand what this entails, can you elaborate?
Everywhere big seems to trend towards some level of garbage. However, the spectrum is massive. The worst place is many times worse than the average place, and the average place is many, many times worse than the best place.
You don't know the bar charts you need when you make them. Not in a "you didn't do enough research" way (waterfall isn't the solution to everything) but instead in a "until it breaks no one notices" fashion.
Sometimes a chart points to an exact problem. You may only look at that chart once every other year but if 1/10 it avoids an outage that is a win for the chart.
The problem is knowing which charts work like that vs which ones are superfluous.
1) Power corrupts - individuals who acquire power don't concern themselves with the well-being of others. They are blinded by greed.
2)The bureaucratic trap - the idea you can just think really hard and anticipate what all the problems will be and then write rules. It always fails.
People need agency. A smart, careful, considering person or community thinks about the actual situation and how to deal with it in some way. Top down thinking and the belief that you can predict everything and subject it to a process, is flawed.
After all, an organization is ultimately a reflection of its people.
Sometimes people need direction and for that direction having a visionary leadership team and having strong middle managers become extremely necessary.
Natural selection would say that those that can handle change well are the ones whose genes will likely carry on. But that does not mean that they want to handle change.
One striking example of a role requiring deep behavioral and epistemic changes is that of a judge. A judge must learn to edit their memory and learn to not know things. I find this striking because you'd think that, objectively, knowing more is better. But the rules of court have decided this is not true. If you want that job, you will do this. (It's not all bad: any lawyer will tell you of the risk-minimizing bliss of not knowing things.)
The behavioral adjustments - mostly behavioral losses - are usually not so strange. Usually they are a peon to tribal socialization. In a tribe there are rules that aren't 'fair' because they do not reference the details of the specific conflict, who's right or wrong. The rules are simpler than that, making reference only to relationships and "who started it". You don't dis the leader, you don't pick fights, and absolutely never pick a fight with leader-favored members, etc.
The OP hints at the proper viewpoint, but then diverges. They are strange structures with lots of rustling leaves. But he does not perceive the value and origin of these structures on their own terms. One must take the view of a zoologist observing the behavior of a parasite, or a slime-mold. It is a mistake to anthropomorphize them, just as it is a mistake to anthropomorphize human social structures.
> Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't crud at their jobs - you're surrounded by people that are crud.
> In professional settings, approximately all of my time goes into solving problems introduced by people that are just indescribably bad.
Jesus. If this is really the case, consider that your organization might be abnormally bad and that you should leave.
I’ve worked with a few incompetent engineers, but never have I ever worked somewhere where 90% of ICs are so bad that they’re actively making the product worse and burning all of the other 10%’s time on trying to undo the 90%’s work. Of course it’s also not true when an organization claims that everyone there is a “10x ninja rockstar”. Most people I’ve worked with are smart but human. If I worked somewhere where 90% of my peer engineers were as bad as OP’s are, I’d leave ASAP by any means necessary.
The alternate hypothesis, of course, is that I’m part of the 90% but don’t know it!
The thing is, it's not like said engineer didn't actually deliver a useful thing to a customer, so it's not like he did objectively universally bad. But they might not realize that if everybody worked like this, a few years down the line, our entire product would be beyond saving.
This sounds like normal code-rot; code is changed to achieve some particular goal, but budget isn't allocated for the requisite refactoring. I personally prefer that refactoring opportunities are seized whenever they appear; managers with budgets don't usually agree, for understandable reasons. Eventually you end up with a hairball that can't be refactored, and has to be rewritten.
Whether a change should be made at all, whether to go ahead and refactor there and then, or how long to postpone the refactoring, are all business decisions that have to be taken by the person that manages the budget.
60% feels about right - they can get stuff done but I have to intervene because the damage they are causing is just beyond their ability to recognize (and I'm sure I do this too, for harder problems).
Not disappointed at all.
There really is too much stupidity in the world. “Obviously”.
Learning to ignore it is an easy but reasonable response. Accepting it however, and learning that most stupidity can be dispelled with a bit of guidance is much harder.
You can get there if you aren’t stupid. :)
Those Dereks can survive inside companies because the contribution of every single person is so tiny that it's very difficult to measure. Furthermore, most of the times it doesn't influence the success or failure of ambitious managers.
Those Dereks know it, maybe got their fingers burned attempting to be smart in the past, they do only what's needed to get their money on their bank account at the end of the month.
Move some of them in a position where their work makes the difference between losing and winning (software for a racing car team?) and they might undull themselves.
You can of course try to help, but if you find yourself putting energy into the world and not getting results, just stop and do something actually fulfilling.
The problem is that software engineers are then asked to square all the circles - the hacks, the business models that don't work, the illogical policies that have kept the peace between powerful entrenched parties.
Volkswagen found it impossible to build a diesel engine that met California emissions criteria. So they encoded a cheat.
They did not write the cheat in an email, the CTO literally committed a line of code. (wish I could see the repo).
The point is that software demands clarity - it has no vagueness. So if you are going to digitise your business your business processes and model must also be clean and clear.
"Soul cost" is only a problem if you have a soul.
Grinding Gear Games - developers of Path of Exile famously said that they dont use data (probably because they dont know how to interpret it) - explains why their game is very poorly balanced.
On a side note, everyone knows that the game is infested by bots... everyone apart from GGG. There was a post by them, where they noted how it was strange that 15% of players did not make a certain quest... Guess what: bots (at that time) werent advanced enough to make that quest.
Well, they are not experts. They are not even at the level of informed amateurs. But they have the power.
What would you do?
Sure, there are good companies and you can switch until you find one but let's recognize that statistically speaking this absolutely does not scale -- likely maximum 20% of the programmer workforce can do that. Maybe even only 10%.
So again, what would you do?
I have come across so many government teams that say they want to start using version control... as if someone has been stopping them all these years! If they were serious, they'd just do it, so you're better off just looking at what they're doing than talking.
The secret is - and this is wielded a million times a day in a million small ways - of course we do. Lots of people do in lots of jobs, whether intended or not.
You just do the thing. You don't ask about doing the thing, you don't put in a project planning proposal, you don't beg your manager to devote 20% of your time to the thing, you just go and do it because you probably can. And as long as you do it, and it goes well, and nobody really notices until it's working, then it turns out you did have executive powers the whole time.
Just do the thing. Ask forgiveness, not permission.
There’s a trap here which is thinking it’s all crap so I may as well not try. It’s seductive but quite poinsonous to the organization and to the individual.
A few months later he quit.
I hate what Reddit has become. The day they killed third party apps etc, I just deleted my account with “hi spez“ as the reason. Reddit is still running to it’s ruin and I’ve achieved nothing on that front but my sanity is preserved and I got 30–60 minutes a day of my life back.
On the other we might think that people who runs companies are blithering idiots who just got lucky, and their head is so far up their asses that they can't see they are headed to self-destruction.
Reality is somewhere in between.
This is a powerful insight. Very important article.
Also, how do I know that _I'm_ not the one who's wrong?
Small ones, or ones that are very focused on making money.
> How do I select for them when interviewing?
Ask the people who interview you what they work on and why, then avoid the ones where the "why" doesn't connect back to something useful.
> Also, how do I know that _I'm_ not the one who's wrong?
You don't, not immediately. In the end you can only look at the results over the medium/long term.
I love the idea of working for a startup, but I want to be paid well and avoid too much risk.
From what I know, those goals aren't really compatible with startups.
If it's a government agency, or some other organization where it's possible that they're genuinely stunningly incompetent, I usually ask to see a Git repository. It's shocking how many places either literally don't version control code (including me, on my first team out of university) or can't even handle their branching strategy.
I usually ask a few questions about their management philosophy. A lot of people just immediately say crazy stuff around work hours and Agile.
I'll ask to look at their Jira backlog, or whatever they use. If they've got hundreds of cards in there, something has gone wrong (though this is not a dealbreaker by any means).
But for real, if they can keep a clean repository, that's so highly correlated with general competence that I can basically stop asking questions there. It's also nice because it isn't an aggressive question and you don't have to reveal what you're actually looking for.
And finally, I only interview at places through my network these days. Isn't worth the risk of running into a psychopath manager and having them ruins months of my life.
Unfortunately, that sort of person is great at convincing managers that they're the top performing employee in the team, and it's better for the others to just put up with them.
> In professional settings, approximately all of my time goes into solving problems introduced by people that are just indescribably bad
Translation: everyone except me is stupid.
Why do we let people say things like this without calling them out on it?
> Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't crud at their jobs - you're surrounded by people that are crud.
I wish people stopped overusing crud. It kind of dilutes the argument and makes it less clear.
>>> most programmers don't know what an abstraction is, etc, etc. "
So many programmers think they are the next Dijkstra and are upset with LLM's producing crap code, but really over inflate themselves in their own reflection and forget that it is better than 90% of programmers.
Remember in collage, when 1 guy did the group project and the 3 other people on the team coasted and got the A. Well 75% of who you are working with now, are the ones that didn't finish the project, and likely you are one of them.
That's why LLM's are going to cause sweeping changes.
but then of the remaining 20%, 80% of that (16%) will come from 20% of the 80% of other workers.
So just two rounds of this and basically 1/3 of your company produces 96% of the results.
this 1/3-2/3 split weirdly seems to correlate with other sources (see Google as it grew compared to established firms of same revenue)
exactly. And if you want to decide whether you want to work at a company, you can look at the top managers and imagine if they ever have independent thoughts.
Imagine the kind of flexibility an ordinary person has to build into everything else they have going on to make "I'd just move" a viable long term strategy. Buying property immediately becomes way more hassle than it's worth, because you might have to move in 6 months to the next place anyway. Providing a stable schooling situation for your kids just became a lot harder. Want to avoid those issues? Are you willing to pay for rent or a mortgage in a city large enough where you can keep running this strategy, over and over again? What about the situation where the culture is actually fine, but you yourself just want more money or more responsibility than they're willing to pass down to you? It's an interesting example of how when you hold one thing fixed in place, everything else has to orbit around it. Very few people get to have it all without putting in a lot of work to get there first.
Like a lot of societal ills, I think this is one place where remote working is going to make things a lot better for people even while a vocal minority will bemoan how it's all worse than ever. Many, many, many talented people would be thrilled to live in a world where they can live in the same gorgeous small town in the middle of nowhere they call home while also feeling like they aren't running a serious risk of unemployment if they give up the one job they managed to claw out of the aether.
This is the right website to find them