Comment by snapetom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snapetom | Hacker News Reader

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Totally believe in this in my current company. It’s allegedly tech but it’s in a blue collar field and led my domain people, not tech people. Since its inception, the company was subsidized by the parent company. Now that PE owns it and there’s a mandate to make money, it can’t.

A major, major problem are engineers that have zero vision of the big picture. I get a ticket, I work on it, I go home. My most senior engineer on the team never met a deadline in his life. I own an integration product and found out last week two other products I integrate with were about to ship without testing my product. They tested on laptops. I dove in to an analysts ticket with him to figure out why he blew the timeline he committed to. Turns out he was trying to reverse engineer a database instead of just asking another team. “You think I’m going to get any answers from those fuckers?” He asked me when I drilled him.

All these people are still, to this day, protected be the President. He views domain knowledge as being more important than shipping products.

> A major, major problem are engineers that have zero vision of the big picture. I get a ticket, I work on it, I go home.

I don't disagree with you, and ... isn't that true for most employees, in whatever technical or non-technical role, in all industries?

In my experience, it is. Even if the rare rank-and-file employee wanted to think about the big picture, they are never rewarded for doing so, and would be smacked down for acting in support of the big picture if it involved disobeying their chain of command. After a few years of this, you can see why they prefer to stick to the assigned job description.

In your last line, "President" presumably refers to the head of your company. But think about US Federal employees today - should they act in service of the Constitution, or obey Trump's orders? (If they don't obey Trump's orders, they will be fired.)

I agree, this is true of every employee.

It is leadership’s responsibility to make sure the labor they’re allocating is going towards the big picture. If it’s going straight into the trash, that’s not the labors fault - they do what they’re told.

You hit the nail on the head, it’s a problem of incentives. Software engineers don’t HAVE a career. There’s little to no mobility and they understand they will be struck down as soon as the company can. Often even if the company is pulling revenue.

Do that across the entire industry for two decades and the labor catches on. People job hop because every company ever has told them to job hop. Not explicitly told them, but told them via their actions.

This can be changed but the reality is the leadership doesn’t give two fucks about engineers. They don’t want their opinions, they want code monkeys. So, code monkeys they get.

> My most senior engineer on the team never met a deadline in his life.

I went over this sentence a few times before it started making sense. Noting this for others who run into it.

What's meant is that the most senior engineer fails to complete tasks on time, as opposed to never having to deal with deadlines (cf. "I never met a problem I couldn't solve").

Deadlines is always about time, or i'm missing something? Did you maybe confuse with dead end?

I initially read "has never met a deadline in his life" as meaning they had never had a task with a deadline. I'm assuming they also read it that way at first, so they're clarifying for anyone else who did the same.

It's both.

He has deadlines. He just chooses to ignore them and has never faced any consequences.

Can you clarify, are you sympathetic of the person who thinks they wouldn't get an answer from the other team, or are you saying the person was wrong to not just ask the other team?

Asking since I've been in the situation many a time where the other team is too busy to reply in a timely fashion, and/or they don't even know the answers to my question, so I end up having to reverse engineer it.

I mean, he called the other engineers "those fuckers." I was definitely not sympathetic. I was pretty livid, however, context is necessary.

This person didn't even try. Engineers at this company rarely ask for help from other teams or collaborate. Management has talked the talked, but there is no walk to actually take down these silos. I pointed him at product and BA people that offered to help, but he didn't ask them, either. Instead, he thought he could reverse engineer it, which probably took 3x longer than it should.

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