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Comment by wpietri | Hacker News Reader

I fundamentally object to any notion of done-ness that is solely focused on pleasing the few people who happen to be in positions of power.

Are we all embedded in absurd structures of primate dominance? Sure. Primates gonna prime. But that is no more the root of what's going on than being able to mark something done in Jira, or getting a compiler to stop complaining. Proximate hurdles are not ultimate goals.

Nobody gets to the end of a technical career and says, "Welp, that was 40 years well spent making a rotating series of bosses and grandbosses happy."

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I don't know. I'm 30 years into those 40 and, while I can list plenty of "achievements" ... that's not what got me promoted. There _is_ value in making bosses & grandbosses happy.

I don't think it's good for you to be a cynic(because there's more to life than "promotion!"), but I think it's good to know/be well aware of the cynical viewpoint, because there's often a lot of truth in it.

We agree: There is value in making the compiler happy. There's value in getting tasks done. There's value in pleasing bosses. They are necessary means to an end.

However, my point is that one's analysis of the purpose can't stop with any of those. That focusing only on any one of those is ultimately shallow.

And in particular, my critique of this article is that he's just shifting focus from one proximate goal to another. Is pleasing the bosses necessary? Under our current dominant theories of work, yes. Is it the point? No. Always and forever: no.

Agreed - the better take is "getting promoted in large tech companies requires marketing" (and even that is only true for the senior roles, in the junior roles, being good at your trade is typically enough to get promoted to "less junior").

But people have different ways of expressing this same idea, because it gets tiring to see/read it in only one form.... so I guess one has to get a bit provocative in order to draw attention :)

(and to be fair, given how distasteful many programmers find the "marketing" part, it's somewhat useful to have many different ways to tell them that it's needed).

Agreed, and as I tried to say in another comment, the real purpose is to help the company make money (and achieve its other goals). Ideally your management knows what those goals are and pleasing them is a proxy for that. Not always true, but in that case you have another problem, and its good to know that.

> that was 40 years well spent making a rotating series of bosses and grandbosses happy

Isn't that the definition of being employed? pleasing the persons who pay you to do what they ask?

The golden rule. He (or she) who has the gold makes the rules.

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