It sounds to me like this person is good at getting paid no matter how it goes for the shareholders or the rest of the team.
This post seems the logical conclusion of that. Why spend your time and stress doing work that your boss doesn't appreciate? Just give them what they want, it's their job to align that with greater organizational goals.
All this being said I did not love working at a big company, partially for these exact reasons.
It does often feel like Chinese whispers to the people at the very bottom: the orders make no sense whatsoever due to the distortion coming from the middle management. And, I totally agree with your assessment that OP sounds kind of sarcastic about the whole thing. Also the way they phrase it suggests it: it's not even what your boss wants, it's what's going to make your boss happy (if the boss is an idiot, they might want things that will end up making them feel sad, but that only makes your job harder as now you should also anticipate what would actually make them feel happy rather than dully following their advice.)
I don’t see how you can achieve any meaningful goal without collaborating with people in power.
Depends on how you define meaningful. Raising happy & healthy kids, helping someone in need etc, can be meaningful to many people, but don't require 'collaborating with people in power'.
It’s only a tradeoff if you also want all the convenience of modern society.
Or maybe I just have a gloomy view of what "living off the grid" looks like :] I'll just leave this [1] here, regarding that.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/this-russian-family-l...
That's the thing, the grid covers everyone everywhere now. There is no escape from the planet of the apes.
The problem is that sucks, so people don't actually want to live off grid. They just want to not work but also get the benefits of modern society.
The issue isn't merely that you give up the benefits of modernity, the issue is that industrialized states and corporations have spent the last 200 or so years claiming every resource in the world as their property- that's why you see living off the grid as being in a "mud hut" or something, the resources left unclaimed are the ones that weren't valuable enough for someone to snag them already!
I imagine a motivated individual could find some remote place where they could live undisturbed for a long time but without owning the land there's no guarantee you won't be chased off eventually.
But my main point is that's all kind of irrelevant because no one really wants to live that way. They want a somewhat modern home and access to utilities and vehicles and fuel and medicine and so on. They just don't want to pay taxes. They want to have the cake and eat it too.
even remote and rural they're often still trucking into town weekly for gas and groceries.
source: in laws in rural AB tried homesteading off the grid. all it meant was that their kid was homeschooled and can't do multiplication and they learned how difficult farming is.
You missed this qualifier: "person’s life within a larger social construct."
> Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped. If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship.
> If you ship something users hate and makes no money, but your leadership team is happy, you still shipped. You can feel any way you like about that, but it’s true. If you don’t like it, you should probably go work for companies that really care how happy their users are.
I think that's exactly OP's (and TFA's) point: If you're working in most medium sized to large sized companies, just look at your org chart. Your manager, their manager, their manager's manager, and so on up to the CEO: Those are your customers. They are the ones that decide your comp, they are the ones that set your priorities and goals, they are the ones who are ultimately accountable when you fail or succeed. Your job is to deliver what they want. It's definitely a hard pill to swallow if you still have that idealistic view that you're working for end users.
But then, definition discrepancies are the origin of at least half the disagreements
At some point, a team I worked closely with got unexpectedly fired. The entire team, including manager, just gone one day. Not for financial reasons, but because they were “not performing well.” (There were multiple people on the team who had consistently good performance reviews.)
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why that happened. Obviously if that could happen to them (fired despite good feedback), it could happen to anyone.
As far as I could tell, it’s because the CEO or CTO didn’t think the type of work they were doing was worth doing, and also didn’t think they were making a difference.
It’s good to be a self-starter, to advocate for best practices, and to keep users in mind. But at the end of the day, if that doesn’t fit into what your bosses expect from you, you’re done.
That’s why it’s important to communicate with stakeholders. Your boss needs to understand why spending time on preventative maintenance pays dividends on the long run. You can’t spend 75% of your time on stuff that doesn't look productive (which is subjective) and also not be proactive in being on the same page as your stakeholders about what’s important. At some point, they’ll get confused about what you’re actually doing day to day, and your job’s on the line.
So the CEO/CTO weren't able to express their concerns and priorities and instead just fired the whole team?
If, as you say, there were no financial reasons, then the team could've been re-purposed to do more meaningful (at least in CEO/CTO eyes) work.
Executive backlogs are so deep that purposefully re-fitting whole team to another job will never end up on the top list. You might see sometimes organization will rehire a whole new team with exact same skillset, and set them to do similar tasks. It happens because execs know how to setup things from scratch quickly, but running a re-fit is a custom project that requires problem solving and large amount of exec drive, and exec resources are extremely scarce and expensive.
From the outside this will seem totally irrational and suboptimal, not to mention unfair. But that's how large orgs operate.
Keep the original problem in mind always. Keep your head up looking out for competitor teams who might be solving your problem. Know them, align with them.
If you show up on an exec budget spreadsheet and the exec can't defend your value, then you're toast (or transferred).
In software at least support costs can be decreased by fixing bugs or identifying high support low value features.
So - I would like to see a company that actually got killed by support costs but was doing good from product sales.
Income starts off proportional to number of users and how much they use it.
Support depends on how many people are anywhere between unpleasant and unlawful.
"Unpleasant" is like weeds, if you're not keeping up they take over and keeping up becomes harder.
"Unlawful" can suddenly get a lot more complex when other legal jurisdictions notice you and (sometimes with or without changing the law because of you) remind you that anyone operating in their jurisdiction must follow their laws and not whichever one you put in your T&C — constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech in one country can be constitutionally unlawful speech in another.
The trouble is that your personal influence is remarkably small in most workplaces. Ultimately, you can't change much, and what you can change takes a lot of effort. It often requires being bullish, which can introduce risk to your job.
Sometimes, the choices are as follows: either have the big idea in mind and always strive for the best, sacrificing your mental health, making enemies, and potentially losing your job. Or, keeping your head down and following orders, being a perfect little sailor leading your ship towards the iceberg.