Working in Silicon Valley was fun. Now it's just another miserable corporate gig
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Silicon Valley was amazing because you could actually DO things and make an impact, but too much hiring added useless layers to the system. American management theory always tries to do this every tech cycle. That doesn’t work well with technical craft.
There is a cultural component to it, and it travels. People coming from a corporate culture attach value to these titles in a way we traditionally did not in Silicon Valley. The interesting thing is seeing how they then breathe power into those words; I remember one senior-ish person who proceeded to attempt pulling rank on her peers on the back of the new title. In most cases, it didn't work. But in some cases, it did, including with people who were otherwise insensitive to titles.
My broad takeaway is trading titles for money is a deal with the devil. Eventually, the thing you're giving away gains animation.
Big teams need management. Small teams, less so. The largest tech companies are larger today than ever before. And there are more tech companies above virtually any threshold now than there were then. It follows that the average person in tech now works at a larger company than previously.
The number of people in small start-ups may be larger than ever before. But, because of the distribution, they're outnumbered still by those in large organizations that require bureaucracy to stay aligned.
I counted maybe 4-5 managers with some variation of Director/VP of Software/Engineering/SWE/SWEProject and yet more kept getting promoted into that echelon over my time there, with no clear indication of what most of them did. For a 400 person operation that did two giant layoffs.
On my end though, management was worse than useless and did absolutely none of the things that good managers I’ve had previously (or subsequently) have done.
2018-2022 was peak shit eating time for managers. I had to put up with no end of candidates who couldn't pass even the easiest technical exams (and we intentionally made them easy to weed out only the pretenders). Candidates would ghost interviews and after receiving an offer, would lean on it for a higher salary for anyone else. They wanted $250-300k with just five years experience. It was the frothiest and least professional recruiting environment I had seen in 35 years.
Ah I love it, you are pushing them to reach peak human potential.
Financial literacy opens up more than one way for something to be true.
Recruiters also don't dictate layoffs. This is a function of Finance and layoffs are a part of life.
And it is extremely rare for a recruiter to ghost a candidate. I don't recall ever hearing this happen, though I imagine it's possible under rare circumstances.
The obvious low quality candidate that is east to spot is the person that cannot answer the first question i always ask (write me a function, in any language, that takes an array of ints and returns the sum - half don’t ever pass this question the other 25% fail to consider or be able to discuss what might go wrong at runtime), the majority though sound very smart, can code, but put into a team just want to fixate on issues that serve zero value to the end user.
Oh and i should add, when you tell certain developer personas things like: youre not here to decide what problems to solve, youre here to solve the problems the product team wants solved (they think about this all day, let them do their jobs) they get all upset and moody. I always encourage other devs to speak up about solutions and opportunity but we need to let each player in the team do their position, if we try do it all then this stops being a team.
This to me feels like the reason we have a billion js frameworks and why no one wants to hand roll an api, but would rather fight with Apollo for hours. Being a developer has turned into a pseudo academic task, but with no interest in the process behind research.
It’s such a shitfest out there, and frankly, I’m pretty over managing these folks. I’ve been doing contract work for about 12 months now and it’s been a fresh experience that I’m hoping continues for a while to come.
Plug: if i sound like the kind of person you want helping with something feel free to ping me.
For startups, the landscape within a given role tends to vary drastically year over year. Some folks like being employee #10 but don't want to hang around past employee #20. Other folks like being employee #1000 but out of 2000 or 3000 feel overwhelmed. Organizations these days hire, especially where employment is at-will, with the expectation that their staff are fungible (they're not) and can be rearranged at the drop of a hat (which happens often).
One project can be a blast, and if the next one isn't then the grass is indeed often greener on the other side -- at least in our industry.
Some of my best hires have been folks who have never stuck around at previous places for more than 6-9 months over the course of several years. On the whole, it's all a total crapshoot.
Agreed, it’s so hard to tell. I try hire more for personality and general intelligence and assume we can teach process and new tools.
Historically I’ve attempted to tell developers what you said upfront, that some projects will suck but I’ll do my best to make sure you’re not always on the sucky work. I think managers often forget that cycling people in and out of fun roles is important for retention, just as is pay etc.
There is some value in expectation setting around “I’m not going to abandon you in the shit forever, but at times you’ll be in the shit and so will i, and i appreciate you sticking with me and will do everything i can to reward that”
Ted Lasso kinda stuff…but it’s not all worthless even if it doesn’t work 100% of the time.
I've recently seen some managers totally throw folks under the bus -- otherwise very good folks too.
But otherwise I agree. The market has been quick to hire and fire which makes building and retaining talent difficult. The instability of the last several years has really left things in a seemingly universal bad state.
I truly hope your impression isn’t reality but all i can say is in certain settings it’s worked great, in others it’s been meh. I’m subject to the same issues we all experience here.
I'm curious what you mean -- worked great for what aspect? Short-term bottom-line targets for the company at the expense of workers, or long-term culture-supported productivity ones that benefit both company and worker?
I suppose if you have a team of people who treat work as "doing homework for the rest of your life" (and quite a few SWEs never grow out of this mindset) then you can help them stunt their growth and extract whatever you want out of them for the company's sake. It's been my experience that typically the real movers and shakers need more than that to thrive, and they need to feel like they're thriving to stick around. I worked too long in a dessicated environment because the people who were insightful and good at their jobs were told to shut up and grind. They left for places where they could have more agency and feel like part of a team that values their input.
Most of my career has been with early stage tech but I’ve also been in companies of thousands. I think I’m best cast in teams of 5-20 and I’ve found I’ve done well building good culture around working within the limits of what the business needs (realistic costing, time estimates, alignment to product vision) while finding ways to intertwine the quality developers want to see in their own work with the objectives of product and the leadership team.
I think to try put it in simpler terms, the best people want an environment where they can do their best work. The question i encourage people to ask themselves is if they actually know what that environment looks like? Often they have an idea of what’s worked best so far, but not what is optimal. I like having discussions around that as you can go from there to a) learn from their perspective and see if you can include part of that in the environment you’re presently operating under and b) determine if that’s a good near team goal or long term goal for the current environment and set realistic expectations with that individual as to not “bait and switch” them. I really see little point wasting someone’s time with promises of utopia when you’ve got a team that just isn’t working…that’ll end predictably.
I’ve said before my best skill has been building small teams of very bright people, retaining them and out performing larger teams. It’s pretty trivial to out perform larger teams if you can retain people, but to retain them they need to like what they’re doing and how they’re doing it.
Now I work as an IC again at a more top-down place where I work fully remote and only 4 days a week. It's honestly quite nice to not have to talk to anyone and just wake up at 6am, have my task assigned, get it done and then go focus on my hobby projects/go hiking/exercise/spend time with my girlfriend. I don't have to be online 24/7 and I have maybe 2-3 meetings a week. The org sets the direction and we decide how to implement it. It works for me because in many ways I drive the requirements by telling the org what I need to execute properly. I can also still drive infrastructure improvements, and the org. is mature enough to prioritize them. I still grow, just in a different direction than I did as a manager. I get the chance to really focus on the technical parts of a solution.
This is key.
"Good" managers can manage the expectations of the org to enforce this kind of relationship if the org wants to be pushy or micromanage-y. They insulate their team to create a real sense of agency and ownership. It's nice that your org makes your manager's job easy in this regard.
"Bad" managers are the opposite, they just dump the poorly-defined, poorly-justified demands onto their ICs. When they can't figure out why things aren't going well, they call for many hours of meetings with their ICs to hash out in detail how the implementation should proceed, which typically ends up being nothing more than the manager trying different ways of convincing their ICs to do it the way they already imagine it should go.
Please be very up front that you hold this view when recruiting, it will be better for everyone. This may need to be an "agree to disagree" situation, but my experience goes completely the opposite direction of what you're suggesting here.
One of the biggest dysfunctions in tech over the last decade has been the rise of the product role and re-subjugation of engineers. We've recreated all the dysfunctions of the "pointy haired boss" just now with a PM title instead.
The 90s had the trope of incompetent business/managerial class folks being in charge and engineers being expected to do as they were told. Then in the 00s/10s there was a renaissance as engineer-founder companies (Google, Facebook, etc) elevated the status of developers and gave them increased autonomy and influence. This period saw technical innovation, business growth and increased wellness for employees.
In the past few years, the people who couldn't thrive as developers realized they could rebrand themselves as product managers and do all the fun parts of making things while leaving the difficult implementation work to developers. Unsurprisingly, the outcome is worse business behavior, worse customer experience, and burnt out developers who don't want to just be a cog in a machine building someone else's idea.
Open doors, frank discussions, flat hierarchy, hacking culture, planning at the edge, and personal relationships all took a dive. Performance plans, recruiters, mid-level managers, central planning and product management overuse exploded.
Somewhere around 2014-2017 working in a tech company started to be indistinguishable from working in any other Enterprise.
Now a lot of that seems to be the result of all the pioneers leaving the industry and the settlers arriving. There was a point around 2012-13 where Ivy League grads stopped going to McKinsey and started going to the valley, and they brought all their management theory with them.
That's because the definition changed. Silicon Valley used to be tech companies, that meant companies whose product was tech.
That's no longer the case. The so-called tech companies do not sell technology anymore. Sure they use tech internally, but that's every enterprise ever. So working at them is indeed just a boring non-tech enterprise job.
I’m sure the agree to disagree works sometimes but my experience is we need to trust people to do their job, and if we cannot, we need to move on without them.
This isn’t to say we will disagree and not find a way to live with it. I more mean, the ideal outcome is that the mind of developers and product staff are tightly aligned. If they’re not, that’s going to be a constant source of friction that’ll slow down everything about product development.
I personally believe (and maybe bias is showing now) that a lot of the best ideas come out of the people closest to the code. It’s often easy to spot opportunity as a developer, but we need to not discount the work good product people out into user research and market research.
Neither alone is sufficient, but the teams have to work together to get the idealized outcomes.
> Please be very up front that you hold this view when recruiting, it will be better for everyone. This may need to be an "agree to disagree" situation, but my experience goes completely the opposite direction of what you're suggesting here.
Also, there are both types of companies out there! There are places where "engineering" means "implement what the Product Manager dreams up" and other places where it means "you define the product and implementation." Find the company that works best for your expectations. Some people like having a PM do all the ideation and just sit back and program what's in the requirements doc. Others feel put in a box in that environment. Both types of companies exist.
At the end of the day the reason i say i like this model is because i want ownership from a product group, and likewise no development team wants PMs prescribing to them how to structured the database or what language to choose. So ultimately, this division of responsibility is kind of a logical divide, to ensure we see where each other operates and let the developers have input but also their own area of ownership without taking away the ownership the product people bring to the table.
This is absolutely correct. Although your timeline is a bit off.
In the 80s and 90s there was no such thing as a product manager. At least, I never met or heard of one. If any existed, they were rare as hens teeth.
Engineering was driven by engineering. Thus craftsmanship mattered and it was a very fulfilling job. Engineers were expected to define the product and had the authority and responsibility to do it.
The PMs started to appear in the 00s and spread like wildfire in the 2010s. Now they almost outnumber engineering. Engineers own nothing and are expected to like it.
At nearly every company I've worked for, there's usually an "inner-circle" of highly regarded staff engineers whom are considered to be always correct by both management while the rest of engineering are treated by both groups as peons. On first glance, this might seem like a normal dynamic that occurs in any hierarchy based on competency and experience. Indeed, some people will be given more say than others because reasons. That's okay. What's not okay is when the gap between the inner-circle and the peons is so hollowed out that there's virtually no power structure to keep the inner-circle in check. I've seen this first-hand and second-hand when a company chooses its inner-circle based on a combination of nepotism, whomever has been around the longest, and whether an engineer has some kind of name for themselves outside of the company. It's not that these factors can't or shouldn't be a part of the equation, but they lead to rampancy when competency isn't thoroughly checked. Just because a person is vouched for doesn't mean they should be handed the "key to the city", and neither does whether the person stuck around and managed to survive every layoff, or whether they have a well-known blog or are considered a guru in some web framework. By that "key", I mean the metaphorical one they are given that allows them to dictate every level of engineering process, which sometimes goes as far as forcing every engineer to use the same IDE. Maybe they can have that key once they've proven themselves at the present company, but not merely because someone has an existing opinion about them. When a company gives their inner-circle way too much power and makes the rest of their engineers peons, this is where developer experience can decline and the amount of wasted resources increases.
Most of the problems I've seen that make work a nightmare for engineers isn't even caused by management. Management notoriously asks unrealistic things of engineers, and this is a pain to deal with, but I've hardly ever seen this impossible to work with; it's the nature of the beast for engineers, more or less. The breakdown in engineer performance, from what I've seen, comes from the amount of bullshit that inner-circles add to the engineering process in order to solve problems. What the "staff" engineers whom are part of these inner-circles often fail to consider is that every link you add to the chain adds a new opportunity for the chain to break. This is engineering 101, but too many engineers with godlike clout either fail to consider it or pretend that it's not a problem. Maybe it's cognitive dissonance, or maybe it's ego. The rationalization is usually the idea that all of these checks and "standards" will protect the codebase in some way.
Whatever the case, what we get are these humongous toolchains just to build a fucking JavaScript application that runs in a browser. What we get are CI tasks that randomly break because someone believed that a bajillion tests relying on third party services would reduce the amount of bugs. What we get are tests that run incredibly slow and are unpredictable. What we get is outdated documentation because someone in the inner-circle thought it was a great idea to host the documentation as a full website, and of course only they have the knowledge and ability to deploy that thing. What we get are engineers frequently making "mistakes" and holding up code review because there's constantly new "best practices" being silently handed down by inner-circle engineers who want to write code and can't be bothered communicating effectively. What we get are so many lint rules, checks, and pre-commit hooks frequently added and modified that the engineers outside the inner-circle are afforded no creativity and must spend extra time fixing errors that aren't even real errors with the code, but are errors based on someone's opinion.
Ultimately, more time is spent fixing self-inflicted issues and far less time delivering value to customers. And software isn't even better today. I've spotted more glaring problems with both websites and native apps in 2023 than any other year prior. The quality of our output is a joke, but the world has accepted that all software is broken.
The best thing tech companies can do is to break up their inner-circles of genius engineers, separate the wheat from the chaff, hire staff engineers who are averse to adding complexity, and give power back to the rest of their engineers. Engineering shouldn't be a combination of bureaucracy and implementing demands in the form of code; engineering should be about working on real problems. As an example, frequently baffling your engineers with uninformative errors caused by a custom in-house syntax transpiler that only one or two people seem to understand is not solving a real problem. That's called bullshit.
If you want to clean house at your company to improve profitability and productivity, then just go around to every manager in charge of a software project and ask them to show you the code for the e2e test and run it. Anyone who can’t do that doesn’t belong in a leadership position. Manager implies leader implies knowing the fundamentals.
I have no doubt he could learn them. He's a smart guy. But the idea that he could drop into any job at Microsoft and excel on Day One is silly.
No, but they should at least know how to do the job of their SVPs or VPs in their absence. In fact, many times when the SVP departs, their reports are expected to report to the CEO directly.
But even appointing someone new for that role will require the CEO to understand that role very well. They truly can't appoint someone competent in that role without being competent themselves.
I don’t think the original comment was saying that it is crucial for somebody to fill in for their reports (that might be true, but it is a different aspect). Rather, they were saying that the manager’s skill set must include the skill-set of the person being managed, in order to evaluate the latter.
I think there’s some truth to this, but there’s also obviously got to be some attenuation factor going on, otherwise we get this “visit every node” problem.
The suggestion of firing every manager that can’t run the test suite seems like it ignores this attenuation factor. It might be a set of command line scripts with funky in-house flags. But they should be able to draw some some of useful conclusions from the output IMO.
If they're out of touch with the layfolk or can't detect when the people reporting to them are too optimistic/pessimistic, it'll cause issues down the road.
Ol' musky boi has been known to talk to low level engineers and ignore in betweens to understand issues better
Nvidia boss has been known to take reports from people way lower in the chain.
Both have been known to do a decent job in directing these large orgs directions faster than most.
Competition has picked all the low hanging fruit and it’s all more or less become another commodity industry.
There was also the switch from people who were naturally attracted to SW dev., CS and EE, to now people who specifically pursue the industry for the perks and not because they’re into it -I think that’s maturation. I think this started about 2005 or so as things became inflated. The dotcom boom certainly perked the ears of many new college freshmen back then and they eventually entered the workforce.
I was laid off right after 9/11 and I was very lucky that someone I knew who owned a very small company was still doing OK and they hired me; certainly I wasn't getting so much as a nibble anywhere else. (They did end up struggling but I was still there for a decently long time, albeit at an unexceptional salary.)
If you have someone buying the wrong seeds or not ordering fertilizer on time, it makes all the work on the farm a failure.
They don’t need more time behind the keyboard, we as a society need to figure out how to provide middle class lifestyles to people who aren’t good behind the keyboard.
I mean we’re talking about careers that will start building generational wealth, it is not surprising that people will do whatever they need to get in.
Just some advice to those starting a career. You need to build a professional network. After 25 years a new job should be a phone call or cup of coffee away. You should never even have to think about applications after two decades in the industry.
Once you have an internal advocate the entire process is much smoother.
Oh really? What I've seen is the leaders/power brokers you once knew are retired, fired, or even passed away. And the leaders at many companies aren't keen to hire people with more years of experience than they have.
24 yoe
I've lived in the SV bubble for most of my life (my ABCs were Altavista, Brocade, and Compaq) and based on my memory looking at my parent's career experiences, it almost always was a corporate experience.
I vaguely remember older neckbeards at my dad's office complaining about how the 70s and 80s in tech were amazing, and I'm sure their mentors in turn rued for the days of Bell Labs and National Labs in turn.
In 2023, the 90s and 2000s are roughly the same distance that Reagan and Carter were back then.
I think this is a natural way that things tend to go, and if you like the dynamic environment, you have to jump to what you think is the next interesting, new thing.
There's a limit to vandalism and "tech bros fuck off" that people will take, particularly when a huge chunk of "tech bros" are immigrants. You don't see the same animosity in NYC or Austin, so that's where the talent has gone.
I'm on the younger end (20s-early 30s) in SF and I remember stuff like that as a kid (Genentech buses) but haven't seen such stuff in our Gen Z/Millenial bubble. Tbf we mostly live in Mission Bay, Marina, Nob Hill, Richmond, Sunset, Potrero Hill, Dogpatch, Duboce Triangle, etc and the kinds of people who'd say that seem to be "boomers" in the Mission+Potrero+Dogpatch who continue to insist on calling Cesar Chavez "Army St", think grunge and flannels are still hip, and don't have much love for TikTok, KWave, Anime, or Boba.
If you love the former, then there definitely is a place for you in Austin, Denver, ATL, etc.
In 2022, SFBA was still more than 2x the next biggest hub (NYC): https://dealroom.co/guides/usa
EY report for Q1 2023 is even more drastic - https://www.ey.com/en_us/growth/venture-capital/q1-2023-vent.... SFBA has 25B+ investment while the second biggest (NYC) has 3.8B.
I think the difference is that now as a SWE there are more options outside those two cities. NYC, Austin, and Boston taking off as startup hubs is a significant positive change, as well as the rise of Denver, DMV, and Atlanta.
Any diffusion of opportunity is a good problem to have, and doesn't impact the value of the Bay Area as a tech center. I can speak from experience that for some forward facing technologies, it's easier to get traction in the West Coast compared to Central and East.
EY report for Q1 2023 is even more drastic - https://www.ey.com/en_us/growth/venture-capital/q1-2023-vent.... SFBA has 25B+ investment while the second biggest (NYC) has 3.8B.
Capital.
Most angels, pre-seed, and incubators are still in the Bay Area and Seattle (largely a function of FAANG being HQed in those 2 metros).
The handful of those ime in the NYC area tend to aim towards Israeli startups that are semi-established already (eg. Team8).
Also, because plenty of tech companies have a significant presence across Asia or even started there, the Bay Area wins out due to reasonable direct flights to Beijing, Shanghai, Delhi, Bangalore, Singapore.
It's the same reason why most Israeli startups choose Boston and NYC, because you have a large Israeli diaspora there and direct El Al flights every single day excluding Shabbat.
> Garry Tan's twitter feed is full of examples
He brings up some real issues that SF's political establishment ignores, but he's also wading into local politics by funding a friend of his's entrance into SF local politics. Great guy but there is some vested interests going on. Sort of like Ron Conway 10-20 years ago.
> it looked like Chicago about a decade ago
I'd disagree. Chicago has always been more lively. It has the benefit of a younger crowd as it's a college town. SF and the Bay Area in general has professionalized, becoming sort of a Manhattan 2.0.
Also, the kind of cool artsy stuff you'd see 10-15 years ago is happening, but now mostly in Oakland and San Jose, because most people doing artsy stuff in their 20s today are living with their parents.
Alternatively, you might just not be "in" the crowd anymore. People my age don't club as much - we go to raves instead. We don't drink as much either - preferring to get stoned or just wake up early and workout and hike instead. My buddies in SF who moved to NYC mostly moved to club and get laid. Those of us who had the option and stayed weren't big into clubbing or already had relationships.
If you were used to clubbing or drinking culture on Polk St or Castro or Folsom or Mission a decade ago, that era's long dead.
I know plenty of startups in Palo Alto, San Mateo, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, San Jose and Santa Clara. Even in Oakland. I'd say center of gravity for SFBA is again shifting back to SV.
SF's differentiator in the Bay during the 2008-16 period was cheap office space due to the collapse of the "Wall Street of the West" during the GFC.
Otherwise, people would live in SF and commute down to RWC southwards to work. There was a time only 13-15 years ago when major tech companies didn't exist north of the Oracle office in Redwood Shores.
Rent and housing prices only go up. To work at a startup I would expect a 30-50% liquid compensation hit. There goes my dream of raising my children in a decent house.
Edit: that said, I don’t think this sufficiently explains why around the pandemic specifically, my job satisfaction took a hit (like with many others)
Source: I have family close to retirement age that had significant health issues in the past year, and they estimated that their insurance paid probably $200,000 in the last year alone. Works for a BigCo, not in Silicon Valley.
We really really need to divorce healthcare benefits from employment. If we can do that, we'll be so much closer to being able to actually get universal healthcare.
In the past I’ve worked for two “growth stage” startups but neither could pay anywhere near what I earn now.
Also Hackernews: Ever since Corona started, I hate my job. I wonder what changed?
in 2021 when I last changed jobs I specifically only looked for employers offering a workplace in my city(ie hybrid roles, which is what I had pre pandemic). This has not helped my work satisfaction, but the issue could be the myopic execution of RTO in this specific corporation
The gamble being that if it works out your kids in a few years will live in a giant house, and will one day inherit a massive amount of wealth. However, that gamble seems to have decreasing odds as time goes on (though if the past is any indication, the cycle will occur again).
You'd rather give up the clarity that comes from working for a single person who you can ask exactly what they want, get near-instant feedback on whether it makes them happy, so that you can work for some fickle, amorphous, faceless people who you have little control over whether or not they keep paying you in the future, forcing you to constantly hunt for more, even paying large sums of money (i.e. marketing) to find them?
There's lots of great reasons to run your own business, but if your frame of mind is that you're working "for" your customers, that's definitely not one of them. Successful founders fall in love with solving a problem that many potential customers have, not with working for their customers. It's not the same thing.
Obsession with solving some problem experienced by many is a very specific mindset that sets tech startups on the direction of hockey stick growth.
The pizzeria focuses on the taste of the pizza, the decor, and politely refuses people who ask for canned tuna to be put on the toppings menu. The barbershop focuses on ambiance, banter, hot-towel service, and politely shows the door to people who insist on taking phone calls while they get their hair cut. The real estate agent makes sure the house is well-photographed, well-staged, has warm cookies in the kitchen (well known trick that helps people think of the house as home), takes appointments, and refuses to accept appointments at weird hours.
Even the businesses that you'd think are customer-obsessed are usually really product-obsessed. Even Eleven Madison Park, which Will Guidara wrote about in "Unreasonable Hospitality" as being focused on going to outlandish, hyper-personalized extremes for every customer they had at the restaurant, succeeded ultimately because Guidara succeeded at turning empathy itself into a product, from standard perks like putting more quarters into people's parking meters so they wouldn't have to worry about that in the middle of service, to hyper-personalized ones which were still due to standardizing a process of listening and creativity. But their process never allowed customers to dictate to them exactly what they would be served or exactly which favors they would receive.
I’ve done some contract work in the past and I think the trick is getting the right customers. I was hired by mine specifically for my expertise. They didn’t micromanage me or make me subject to my whims, they had a problem and recognised that I had the skills they needed to solve the problem.
Of course they are. After all, great businesses adapt quickly to changing market conditions, and that is reflected in changing priorities, requirements, and expectations. But reasonable managers will not hold the lack of stability against you, understanding that the work you did was, after all, what they had asked for. They will be happy with your output even if it's ultimately not useful to the business.
If your manager is fickle and they hold it against you, well, life is too short to work for bad management. It's usually much easier to find a new manager (i.e. a new job) than it is to find enough customers that pay enough money for you to not only offset your expenses but to afford a decent living.
Then I branched off into https://www.moonlightwork.com which also worked quite well until I found a contract there that essentially became a full time position.
I am still contracting but serve now as CTO for this company.
It does surprise me there’s no political will to change things. Having to provide healthcare is a burden to employers, it prevents workers from pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams… you’d think both sides of the aisle would want change. But alas.
Working for somebody is by definition a tradeoff of freedom of making decisions for stability and not having to worry about attracting capital, labor and customers, which is very hard and often under-appreciated by folks who haven't tried themselves.
We had a reckoning when we laid off half of middle management and got back to work, restructured product to be a little less aggressive and more involved in feedback loops.
Much of the adversarial stuff went away when we removed the two people driving it. The culture was essentially reset, and as an org we are doing much better.
As for the hires that don't read logs, I guess we're stuck with them until they learn or leave. It's tough on your coworkers when you've new people that "have some experience" but clearly zero skill or intuition.
"Hey boss, can I try this new process? It might make our department happy." "No that costs too much."
"Hey boss, can I learn this new programming language? It might making our jobs easier and faster to do." "Nope, there is no budget."
The language spoken from the manager to the team member is "finance speak" which the subordinate employee usually has absolutely no idea how to communicate to the boss. So when a member of the team asks the boss for something interesting to do, the boss just starts saying "no". Every. Single. Time. This effectively trains their teams to never ask to do interesting work. So they stop asking... and the job becomes mundane and boring. And when the job is boring you start losing meaning in the job. And when you don't have meaningful (or fun) work to do, you just don't care anymore and eventually hit apathy. Then the mistakes start happening, and the employee turnover comes.
I do think we need to figure out better ways to run our companies. Profits (while important) _cannot_ be the ONLY goal because it just isn't sustainable for the long-term at all. We all know that balance is needed. Food for thought.
Once you embrace that your primary reason to exist is to enrich shareholders, everything lines up under the CFO. CEO pay packages are now typically weighted to incentivize the CEO to maximize shareholder value too because so much of their compensation is in stock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy#:~:text=Sh....
The valley became (and still is) an echo chamber of fringe and often anti-western ideals. NYC had a little of this too, but the valley was especially egregious. When employees started needing safe spaces and HR department size was disproportionate to engineering staff size in every other domain the valley jumped the shark. It became less about building things and more about coddling employees. They invited all that corporate overhead in. Then there's the forever present techno-elitism that came from SV. So, they can cry me a river.
At times I see X struggle and perhaps they cut a bit too deep on the technical side of things. However, so many companies have some much fluff on the payroll. A lot of evangelists, developer pursuing passion open source projects, conference swag product purchasing experts, assistant to the director of SQL editor tooling, etc.
SV hasn't been about building things since the 2000s. Since then, what we've gotten is: adtech, uber-for-x, platform monopolies, cryptocurrency scams, and now chatGPT for x. And to be sure, there were also a small amount of people working on important innovations, just like today. The culture of work has changed (as always), but the amount of wasted effort and pointlessness in SV hasn't changed for a while. But I'll concede that high interest rates have probably changed the form that it takes.
Also, everything you explained in your second paragraph I've rarely seen first hand, except maybe the techno-elitism. That I saw more with hubris, especially around "changing the world" with solutions looking for problems like blockchain.
As for the rest? If anything I usually saw the opposite, outside of larger companies where people formed varying clubs/support groups, etc. Every time I saw something in the news about it, it was usually a small group within the company agitating via the media and the fringe ideas were just as often top down from people link Musk, Thiel, etc.
One thing I think we'll mostly agree on is that things have changed, but more so via the standard corporate suffocating pressure to "fall in line". How we perceive that pressure is going to depend on where individuals are slapped down (which can hit people across the political and social spectrum). If anything, it's probably more a sign of how the industry has matured. A great example is Google, which has become a product manager driven company. No longer will some (group) of engineers create gmail/maps/whatever on their 20% time; products are top-down driven with revenue targets that if they're not met are canned.
You can treat people well without hiring tons of managers. You can restructure a company without forcing everyone to work weekends, holding visa holders hostage and all the other crazy publicity stunts that were performed.
I agree that the pendulum probably swung too much one way, but what Elon did swung it too much the opposite way while screwing people over for the sake of his memes.
Neither is leisure. Doesn’t mean it can’t be.
True, in a state of nature, we would all have to work to survive, but we also wouldn’t have to obey anyone’s so-called “property rights” either. We could just use our hunting spears on the people trying to block our access to resources. If society expects us to follow rules, as it needs us to do in some fashion, then it should offer basic protection.
Take it up with the creator of the Universe, as those are the rules they've chosen - valueable things, such as food, heat or shelter, do not just materialize in front of people out of thin air. They need to be grown or made, and it requires work.
Also, how is the current scarcity artificial? Are we limiting the output somehow? Could we for example produce much more cheap food, but we don't, in order to keep the proles scared?
He is saying that we limit his inputs. He wants to, for example, be able to produce his own food as to not have to rely on deals made with other people to acquire food, but notes that society carefully controls who has control of the land that is able to support that production, leaving nowhere for him to do so, and leaving him at the mercy of being able to reach agreements with others – others who may not want to make an agreement with him – in order to eat.
He says that without a strong society he could push anyone standing in his way of the land aside (by brutal force, if necessary), but an entire society standing in his way is a force too great. As such, he believes that great force should provide suitable compensation for the restrictions it imposes (e.g. if you aren't permitted access to land to produce your own food, you should be guaranteed access to food by some other means).
You don't have to obey them now either, but don't come crying to us when someone kills you for trying to take it just like they would have if you tried to come in and take over some tribe's land in the past.
The only difference now is that you might get the luxury of just going to court or jail.
if you don’t want a replicator, that’s fine. just get out of the way please. there’s work to be done.
to grit one’s teeth?
you think them unrelated.
This is a silly statement. You might as well say Superman powers ought to be unconditional.
Whose rights get to be trampled to give you this unconditional right to do nothing while receiving "free" stuff? Anyone with your mindset is an out of touch elitist. SOMEONE will still have to provide you food, electricity, medical etc. So, what you're saying is you actually want a slave class that provides YOU the right to not "earn a living".
I often have fun at work, cracking a hard bug for me is fun and yet I would never go in if I weren't paid. And my employer thinks I provide value for them and pays for this indeed.
It started to suck though as the company inverted and became top-down again. Management experimented with "agile" development, required a certain percentage of code coverage with BS unit-tests, code reviews became a thing, teams started insisting on style guidelines....
I was just thinking today that I would not recommend to my daughters to go into the software industry. The Golden Age, as far as I'm concerned, came and went. It was long before Covid though.
I'm genuinely curious: You don't think unit tests are a good thing? Or code reviews? Or style guidelines?
Or is it just a matter of how those things were implemented that rubs you the wrong way?
that tired joke just reinforces the silly notion that individuals should just put up with things for money, and probably even be grateful for it.
laying it all out, that’s quite funny.
Well, yes. If you enjoy doing it then you'll do it for free. No need to pay you.
why do it for free if someone needs the thing done and is willing to pay? they pay you for what they view as work, and you do what you view as play.
is that such a wild notion for you?
You get paid to deliver more value to someone than you cost them (or someone else might cost them!)
Whether or not you have fun has little to do with it.
having fun can actually increase value produced.
so, yes, it very much has something to do with it.
I've experienced both ends of the spectrum: the work is the easiest you could imagine, but excruciating only because of the handful of vile people I worked with, on the other hand I pushed myself up against my limit every day but it was worth it because we were in it together.