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Comment by vkou | Hacker News Reader

Most of the issues brought up by the author are not ones of priorities, but ones of a select group of mid-level directors (whom you've never heard of, but each of whom wield significant influence over the work output and roadmap for hundreds of engineers) doing a poor job, with nobody above them interested in doing anything about it.

> She treats engineers as commodities in a way that is dehumanising, reassigning people against their will in ways that have no relationship to their skill set

This is an example of that. Highly political, and also highly banal re-orgs, that leave the grunts scratching their heads, and picking up the pieces.

The risk-taking thing (for ICs) only became relevant post-layoffs.

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I think it goes back to org structure ossification, but also keep in mind that in a sufficiently large company, every department is a thorn in someone else's backside. A world where the people you dislike regularly get the boot is also a world where you have to constantly justify your own existence, where you have aggressive stack ranks, and so forth.

It's a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't kind of a deal.

Sure. It's an incentives problem. It's very difficult to align the incentives in any organizations with six levels of reporting chain so that people with the most day-to-day power over the direction of the firm (mid-level directors) are marching in the right direction.

I don't have a silver bullet for this, but I would say that, broadly speaking, managers that don't take feedback from below, as well as above, are probably doing a poor job.

And the degree to having some level of org structure ossification is to have lots of people sort of going off and doing their own thing. Which probably worked at Google for a longer time than is often the case just because they were printing money. So what if they were doing projects and then just killing them, living with duplication, or having a bunch of random activities that led to nowhere.

Even if it's a bit frustrating it can also be more fun to be in an environment where it's more of a make your own adventure sort of thing. Mature companies though mostly have to be very structured about how they operate.

A good manager does not always a good SWE make.

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