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Comment by marcinzm | Hacker News Reader

As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.

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That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.

So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.

It isn't entirely that.

Somewhat, sure.

It's also managers who tell you you're being laid off, but good news, not for three months. And, oh, by the way, if you leave early no severance.

And why are you being laid off?

Your duties are being offshored.

_You_ aren't being offshored because they need three people to replace you, but your duties are.

Ostensibly this saves money.

Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.

FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already.

I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one.

(Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)

Never put it this way before, but it's exactly why I started blogging. I was fed up with how bad Python content was online.

I've never thought about it this way but now that you mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.

Do I go soul searching now or start a blog?

what do we do now?

Why does having different values imply intolerance?

I do think there can be element of snobbishness around it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is measured by hiring and expansion more than product delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still need technical skills, but they are somewhat less important, there are many more competing incentives than there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs, written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of corporate existence that the two have more or less completely merged.

For me it isn't much intolerance, it's more of a lack of patience for the careerists.

Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.

This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.

On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.

Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.

I feel divided. I do love my career (computer science/engineering) and I dedicate a lot of my free time to it (reading tech books, doing side projects, HN, etc.). But at the same time, I don't give a damn about my company. I hate the leaders, C-level execs, ... I cannot stand them, and it's not just my company, it's almost every tech company out there; so I work for the money, and take pride of my skills when working on open source and the like.

Fortunately there is a gold rush at the moment with consumer apps and social media marketing (methods which are called "organic" and "UGC") that is allowing many of us to escape the grind of working under ownership that doesn't care and doesn't share the value we create

I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.

Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.

I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?

But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.

I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.

I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money

imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.

You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer - mostly on the front-end side.

I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.

All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.

Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.

> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".

I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.

"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.

This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.

It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.

We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)

They have it right. Goals are short term, jobs are ephemeral. Hell, maybe careers are ephemeral now as well.

If the individual's focus is on short term income or career growth, then they align with the company's goals.

Solid engineering practices and product quality don't matter anymore (except in FOSS), and will likely be viewed as antagonistic to the KPIs, OKRs, or whatever metrics measure what is considered success.

Stated as someone who has been in various forms of IT since 1985, and has experienced most of software engineering turned into an MBA value extraction mindset. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I'm very much not an experienced engineer but I lean that way. I think the modern profit-above-all-else attitude of modern engineers comes from the whole "learn to code" movement and promises of a good paying job. These people aren't motivated by their passion for the craft but instead because it was seen as easy money

Hard not to be motivated by money when simply being alive requires so much of it. It's easy to be principled when your bills are paid.

I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions, not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs - it's not if there's another, it's when.

Well, it's hard to do anything else when management doesn't let you, and when your entire life is on the line. Nobody's going to risk homelessness (or worse: a lack of health insurance) on principles that are simply not rewarded anymore. There is an entire generation of programmers who wouldn't recognize software quality if it bit them on the Electron app. It's not their fault, but it's the way things are now. Unless and until this relentless obsession with hoarding wealth changes, we will continue to get the software we deserve. Selah.

If this were good for stock go up 9/10 startups wouldn't fail. While cutting corners can be needed at times doing the wrong thing doesn't. Eventually the wrong thing also pisses off the market and turns your company into a joke with a bad reputation.

company into a joke with a bad reputation

... which doesn't really matter anymore either as long as it's profitable, see Facebook, Twitter, Boeing...

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