Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

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EM = engineering manager.

Re: arguing and why not just avoid it:

During my brief (7 year) sojourn at one place that was not-my-company (Google), you end up with a mix of personalities, and it's very hard to convince people who believe there's a Right Way to do things that there is no Right Way, so you just sort of have to muddle through figuring out how to be productive without irritating people, or as an EM, leaving them thinking you're negligent.

Conversely, theoretically, it's hard to convince people who are slopping through and rushing code to slow down. (in practice, this wasn't a problem at Google, but it's worth mentioning for completeness.)

Case study: 6 person team. 1 EM who ended up doing 20% of the code, 1 me who did 60%, 2 who did 10% each, only do things when directly asked, and they couldn't find an excuse to kick the can down the road due to "ambiguity" that was product/design's fault, and then two who, in all seriousness, never contributed code to this year-long project: 1 who wanted OOP-to-the-max InjectedFoobarManagerFactory, another who definitely didn't want anything like that, but didn't really have an alternate proposal, they just loved explaining endlessly and authoritatively why anything else brought up was bad.

(what did they do if they weren't contributing? the first would write vaguely productive "experiments" for other teams, that obviously wouldn't ship, in the code repo they were used to. took them 18-24 months to make their first code contribution to our actual code repo, the other wandered off to some other random project in the org. EM was new and out 3/4 of the project for new child leave)

To add to this, it feels to me like SWEs have the biggest egos as well without a related checking mechanism. In other engineering disciplines getting something wrong very often comes back to you as the engineer, in SWE it feels like there are so many abstractions people like to point fingers at instead. "It's not my code that's the issue, its X implementation's fault" the amount of times I've heard something similar to this is too often.

100%. I don't know what to call it other than coddling, but there was very, very, very, little true responsibility. Safety in the herd: don't let the people who got the stuff done get too up in their heads about it, via their design had issues at the end of the day, and conversely, if I did deliver something of low quality, it was someone else's design that was the problem.

All the firing BS in from mid-2022 in this industry was poorly motivated, and a lot of the initial wave was used for settling political scores, and there's a lot still there. But I hope in the long run it engenders a stronger sense of needing to have some sort of shared reality and responsibility.

You might be right that SWEs have the biggest egos compared to other engineering disciplines. When I've worked with mechanical and electrical engineers, that was the case.

But where I work now, the biggest egos are easily the people around the SWEs - especially architects and product owners. Is that not the case where you work?

> it's very hard to convince people who believe there's a Right Way to do things that there is no Right Way

I worked with a guy who claimed they'd worked at Google (probably not you, fwiw). They were SO SURE there WAS ONE TRUE WAY, and I'm 90% sure the actual definition was "whatever way this guy [me] wants to do it is not the TRUE WAY."

I almost quit dealing with that guy, but I ended up wandering to some other random project in the org.

Dude was whack though. I'll never forget when we hired a guy and he was saying "if the hiring team thinks he's good enough, he's clearly not because they hired this guy [pointing at me]." Fuck that guy.

I might not be the best coder in any room, but I'm a pretty solid engineer.

In the immortal words of Dell, if you're the best coder in the room, change rooms.

You’re a pretty evil person for putting down a homeless and ruined person. You’re now immortalized for your words and perspective.

I don't think so, I don't know what you're talking about about

In the immortal words of that one guy, "From my perspective, the Jedi are evil!"

You’re a fucking scumbag. You deserve a hard lesson and if we were face to face, you’d receive a hard lesson.

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