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Comment by benttoothpaste | Hacker News Reader

I've heard this "soft skills are the only skills that matter" thing throughout my entire career but these days this is indeed greatly amplified.

Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.

These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.

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Even before AI, there was tremendous pressure on developers for NOT going above and beyond.

I have been in far too many situations where a developer had an idea or a prototype it was blocked by a product manager on the grounds of it not being their idea. As a technical manager you then have to burn political capital just to get people to fucking collaborate.

I've also seen way too many situations where developers must do the actual PM gruntwork where the PM wants to pretend they are some kind of svengali tastemaker figure.

Have this for a few years and the psychological safety of any developer is in shambles.

Those environments need to be fucking burned to the ground.

One just needs to survive one layoff round to learn that going above and beyond is useless, everyone gets shown the door regardless of the performance.

That is one reason why companies don't like seniors, we know their tricks.

Companies have forgotten the value of morale. In this particular sense, AI hype has been very successful in demolishing morale, creating burnouts and overall decreasing value of everyone. Now everyone at the company can build everything in 2 hours, or so I am told.

> everyone at the company can build everything in 2 hours

The business teams can build it in two hours, but those lazy developers spend weeks finishing off the so called last 2% that's somehow always left over after a vibe session.

Once upon a time a clever software engineer realized that engineering talent is the fuel which the business relies on to support its revenue growth, and management is for facilitating this process, while the CEO’s purpose is to be blamed when it doesn’t work out. He wrote a small bash script which replaced corporate leadership with a “quote of the day” generator and everyone lived happily ever after.

Two things can be true:

- You can have a horrible CEO that doesn't value their employees and is trying to devalue labor.

- AI coding tools can be incredible exoskeletons in the hands of skilled engineers and enable them to get much more work done.

Perhaps the real "SaaS-killer" is innovation capital [1] realizing it can take advantage of the various forms of arbitrage and changing of the guards happening now, raise venture capital, and take on the old and slow management-driven businesses.

If you've ever had the itch to fire your boss, now's the time. It's a hard path, there are way more hats to wear, but the dry powder is out there waiting to be deployed.

[1] ICs in both senses of the acronym.

It's also the fun path! Although I think we should acknowledge that most don't have the means to do this. For engineers with a high salary I would advise saving as much as possible so you have more agency.

> There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.

Can you share examples? I've never seen something like that.

> Our CEO started sharing screenshots of his xitter/linkedin feeds and most of them contain wisdoms like "Opus 4.5 is better than 90% of talent". There is also longer form business fan fiction. It usually follows this template: there is a hero - a humble manager/sales person, and a villain - a cocky, nerdy software developer. The villain claims that some task is impossible or takes months to complete. Then the humble hero (equipped with Opus 4.5) completes the task in 2 hours. The villain is then humiliated/fired and everyone lives happily ever after.

I do have the impression that many programmers are much more resistant to bullshitting, and love to call out the mistakes when confronted with bullshit. Getting into management, on the other hand, means believing in instead of fighting lots bullshit.

So, of course the mentioned CEO gets lots of such stories in his xitter/linkedin feeds; CEOs are not insanely eager to comment on such stories why the premises are wrong, and by which dirty tricks this manipulates people. Rather, by climbing up the company ranks, they actively had to believe in more and more fairy tables (or bullshit); if they are too resistant to the brainwashing that they have to believe in, they will stop climbing ranks.

> These posts definitely contribute to the declining morale among employees. Nobody goes "above and beyond" anymore - we just strictly doing the tickets and nothing more.

I think those posts exist in a bubble. They only escaped the bubble because someone wanted to use them once over to unite a different group of people against a different set of bad guys, ironically continuing the cycle. This time it’s devs loathing management instead of management loathing devs.

All of the great people I’ve worked with don’t play any of these games at all. They know it’s a sideshow of engagement bait and content generated with a goal of being controversial, not truthful.

I would not go as far to say that they exist in a bubble. I quit my job as an engineer because this exact sentiment from my boss was ruining my life.

Going above and beyond is hardly ever rewarded in my experience, except when it happens in the stupidest way, like producing more technical debt faster.

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