You have to know how to drive the car | Hacker News Reader

You have to know how to drive the car

seangoedecke.com

> You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success.

Notice that the author didn't write "getting good at delivering value." They wrote "getting good at shipping projects" because

> Shipping is a social construct within a company.

Delivering solid software that helps people get work done is a platonic ideal. Unfortunately there are many companies that value whipping stuff out the door more highly. As corny as this sounds the iron triangle ("good, fast, cheap - pick two") is a thing for a reason. Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving others to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and chaotic on-call isn't something to be rewarded but it's how many companies seem to work.

>Shipping is a social construct within a company.

Thanks for flagging this, this was an epiphany for me today, so for anyone else struck by it I'm linking directly to the article it's from (same author, and linked from the article in the context the parent mentions, just not linked directly in their post above):

"How I ship projects at big tech companies" https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/

Also the HN comments on it from when it was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111031

> Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving somebody else to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and violent on-call isn't something to be rewarded IMO.

Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG

> FAANG

And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.

There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.

It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.

That’s because FAANGs are successful due to monopolization and network effects. Not by the quality of their work.

This is especially true for Meta.

How did they get there?

By being in the right place and right time once, making it impossible for users to leave, and buying up all their competition before they become a serious threat.

Also, they typically started with much more of a high quality culture when they were small and people's contributions were legible.

Once it turns into a giant bureaucracy with people you've never met judging a promo packet by rubrics, while they're unfamiliar with your whole org.. the incentives get diffierent.

People succeed in spite of these systems. They have resources, tremendous network advantages, and the people at the very top crust of engineers are indeed quite good at their job.

nothing says its the people getting promotions that are making the value.

there's still plenty of people not on that grind trying to make whatever thing nearby them work, or have other career goals than promotion or money

that promo option getting people who want to build a bunch of junk out of the way and into positions where they arent building stuff might be relevant to why those companies are succeeding

Because big companies can crush competition, either via lobbying for government regulations, acquiring the competitors, or driving the competition out of business by offering something comparable but cheaper or free.

It's the old Microsoft playbook of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but with more finesse.

It is also why their acquisitions tend to just die, because once the big company inefficiencies get integrated, the acquired startups just cannot function.

This is my every day, and I’m not at a FAANG. It is horrifying and infuriating at how much could be improved, and how much cost could be cut like that if there wasn’t an absurd amount of internal politics, and we had a high-trust environment.

And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.

... after Nvidia.

> Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving others to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and chaotic on-call isn't something to be rewarded but it's how many companies seem to work.

Engineers who do this leave nothing but ashes in their wake even if they keep getting promoted for it.

> “… value whipping stuff out the door more highly.”

Could we also call this making “improvements” for the sake of making improvements? Because it’s expected (else why are we paying you so much money—sort of thing?)

I guess users can’t know for sure why a change is underway. I suspect some change is tacking away from tech-debt, trends in the workforce, adjustments to the tech stack.

Nevertheless I can’t help but feel baffled by some changes (what’s this SaaS trend making UIs swimming in white space, five rows of visible data when the real estate used to show 2-2.5x more data on screen??)

> Crapping something out as quickly as possible…

I suppose that makes AI Taco Bell for companies.

Driving the car is surprisingly easy.

If there's a single hack for your career it is simply telling your manager when things happen. Shipped something? Tell them. Broke something? Tell them. Blocked on something? Keep that quiet. No, wait, tell them! Made a breakthrough on something? Tell them. Hit a milestone? Tell them. Got some bad news? Tell them, as early as you can, so they have time to fix things. And so on, for everything. Clear, open communication about the state of things is critical. Embrace stand-ups. Email people first. Put updates in Slack. Write docs. It doesn't matter how you do it so long as you do it.

If you get a reputation for being someone who communicates when things happen you can practically choose your own career path. Every manager will want you on their team. You can boost your way up the org chart or languish in a role so you have time with your kids, and any competent manager will happily and readily support you to do that.

As a manager, this is 100% the answer. The people who do this are incredibly valuable.

At every performance review I tell all the people who don't do this that they need to do it more. None of them ever do.

For all I can tell, it's an immutable characteristic that 90% of people will never bring something up unless you ask them.

I have never liked the word "manager" because it's rarely useful in practice, the best managers are actually doers who can cut through the performative transparency and "DDoS attack" of constant updates to see when communication is being used to manipulate or mask failure rather than report progress, because the last thing you want is for your employees to become politicians

Perhaps oversimplified. The manager might not want you tethered to his/her in-box like a puppy on a leash.

"When things happen", sounds risky. You don't want to be drip-feeding emails about individual things as they happen. Perhaps this is obvious, but you'd keep your own notes and try to condense into a nice little list for discussion when you next catch-up.

It takes some judgement for sure, but that comes with experience. It's far better to over-communicate than under-communicate until you can gauge it yourself so I'd always recommend sharing everything when it happens.

If it's too much your manager can tell you. That's how you get that experience.

What exactly is the point of a manager if they’re just passively receiving information from their reports?

I long for a flat org structure.

What exactly is the point of a manager if they’re just passively receiving information from their reports?

The only thing I've said here is that you shouldn't be waiting for your manager to ask for updates. If you read that as me suggesting managers should passively sit around doing nothing except receive reports then you didn't think about it for very long.

Do you ever get tired of playing this “visibility,” “impact,” “promo politics” game and think, “I came into this industry because I like computers, not… whatever this is”?

All the time, my friend: all the damn time.

I've been all the way up to CTO in a mid-size company (650ish people), and I've felt like this in every role I've had at different times. Some places more than others. Where I was CTO wasn't too bad but that came at the cost of me not touching code at the company for several years because, at that level, and in the kind of company it was, you just really can't - not without finding yourself becoming a blocker anyway.

But I've worked in a couple of larger organisations - one of them, probably 90k employees, although it wasn't a tech company - and these issues are rife there as well. To some extent, I think it's just big company behaviour, not specific only to big tech companies.

Yeah. I’m not saying software work needs to happen in a silo, but man, the politics at large companies - where a certain group of people are constantly trying to get "ahead" of everyone else by yapping and backstabbing - get really tiring after a few years.

> get really tiring after a few years.

Yeah, completely exhausting. I get quickly worn out by environments where performatism (if that's a word) is too highly valued.

For me, I tend to work at my best when I've got a clear remit, and space to operate freely within that remit with my team without having to constantly seek approval and validation.

Whereas the need to perform/show off/be visible in order to deal with every tiny issue - which I've absolutely seen in one or two organisations - is just... no. No. That might work for some people but it is absolutely no way to get the best out of me.

At most organizational sizes, the hard problems are that of coordinating people and not software. It’s a hard decision, but ultimately if you want to scale the size of your impact - you have to make these tradeoffs.

Some folks want to scale impact. Some want to be bespoke crafters. Both are okay, you just have to accept they are mutually exclusive.

He somewhat addresses that at the end. Maybe soon enough we can replace management with AI and just download Pliny's latest promotion jailbreak.

I dearly hope so. Not that I am saying software development shouldn't be a social activity, but does it have to be this performative & toxic?

That already makes you an exception. Most people come into this industry because they like shiny rocks.

promo politics generate legions oflickspittles when managers don't have the chops to evaluate the work and are just looking for "wins"

Yes, absolutely yes. But it's the price of playing in the big leagues. In exchange, you get to work on cutting edge tech used by millions.

Every fucking day

I've read the author's articles before and they really are quite cynical. It reminds me of all those 90s shows and movies where all the white-collar work was considered soul sucking and the people who did it were corporate stooges. As if a person should feel shame for working a job and paying bills.

As much as a person may choose to belittle the bureaucracy at companies, it exists for a reason, and often that reason is fairly sensible. It is also simple to avoid bureaucracy if you dislike bureaucracy: just go work at companies where it hasn't had a chance to build up or the company has intentionally kept its bureaucracy in check.

Regarding promotions in bureaucratic companies:

> "You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success"

Whats interesting is that all sorts of companies evaluate performance differently. The better companies will tell you how they are evaluating you - so if you want to get promoted, do the things they say you should do to get promoted. Glue work, crushing jira tickets, making the world a better place... are actually things that a company might positively evaluate you on... or maybe all they care about is shipping and you should just do that. The path to promotion is doing the things that a company is willing to promote you for ("If you want to be loved, be lovable").

For what its worth at Wells Fargo during the account scams your path to promotion was doing illegal stuff. So you know, maybe don't do that stuff and avoid promotion even if you can't leave your job right now.

This is the second time I’ve seen Goedecke criticized as cynical and honestly it quite baffles me, I see it almost completely the opposite. His writing acknowledges the common cynical views of working at large companies but then works to rationalize them, in a pragmatic way.

I have also read them before and I wish I had read these articles 5 yrs ago

I don't think I agree with this article. I thought "drive the car" was a metaphor for writing software, but no it's not. It's a metaphor for politics/visibility stuff.

And truth be told, you don't have to do politics/visibility stuff. It's true that thinking about that all the time probably increases your odds of getting promoted. But also, what if you obsess about optics/your boss's boss's opinions/crunching/visibility etc etc for 3 years and you end up not getting promoted anyways?

I feel like a certain type of content tries to invoke fomo in you in order to get you hooked on their promise of their content. Fundamentally I believe that you'll be happiest in your life if you work at a company that is small, has a good gender balance, has a good balance of personalities (i.e. not all competitive high-functioning spectrumy nerds), and doesn't obsess over hype-cycles.

I spent many years trying to get promoted and if I could do it over I wouldn't have, I'd just let it inevitably happen with years in the industry.

I left a large tech company for a startup partly because of this. The politics of shipping were exhausting. At a certain scale, what gets rewarded isn't always what's valuable.

But I'd push back on the idea that all tech companies work this way. Smaller companies and startups can be different. The feedback loops are shorter, you're closer to customers, and it's harder to hide behind the appearance of shipping.

The trick is finding places where the incentives actually align with the work.

There are two things that drive your value (aka salary):

1. Do people like working with you 2. What would a competitor pay to hire you

The driving factor in the first is your UI, the second your skills.

I can't dispute anything the author says. In fact I'm pretty sure he's right in almost all his articles.

But man, big tech is a joyless place to work right now.

The first two thoughts that came into my head were: 'Yep, learn the machine and you can climb' and 'I always want to ride a bike and not drive a car'.

I think the author nails a lot about different career paths but left out one, the gambler which I think a lot of people have an aspect of. The gambler is the person that is throwing crazy at every problem and the thing is that sometimes it actually pays off, but like a lotto scratcher the overall payoff is pretty low for most (unless you are this guy [1]. Like I said, most).

I think this is different from their person that 'wants to deliver real value'. This is a person that loves the idea, and that it could be the next big thing. That or I just -really- liked the name 'the gambler' and filled in the rest of the details for the fun of it. Really, who doesn't want to be the gambler? Honestly.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/01/cracking-the-scratch-lottery-c...

After a decade or so at startup/smaller companies, I moved to a big company in 2024 for the first time.

It amazes me how much low hanging fruit there is to grab to work on. At least things I felt would have had a truly positive impact on the customer and my own organisation.

The only way you get to work on it is if you don't ask for permission, but directly show some progress.

Now I'm switching to a different team within the same organisation that "wants to move like a start up". Let's see how things will move...

The more I read these kinds of things, the more I agree with

> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether.

I've done plenty of really fun, engaging and interesting work in smaller companies. If you're able to be involved in open source work, what you do can still be something that many people appreciate, beyond the customers of your company,

> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether.

This is perhaps what I find somewhat odd about Sean's writing. It sometimes reads to me like a scathing critique of the dysfunctional bureaucratic dynamics of big tech companies, but that isn't really his conclusion!

The key point is at the end of the OP. The dysfunction and bureaucracy are annoying, even to the people who make a career out of it, there's no level of enlightenment where it stops being so. It's just an inevitable consequence of doing some kinds of things and making some kinds of decisions. If you're faced with an important decision affecting 10,000 employees or a million users, there's no perfectly good way to make it, only a least bad way.

glue work is real work and a lot of projects get stalled or blocked because there was no glue; especially in SOA where you have different teams with differing roadmaps integrating with each other. It's not just about communication/socialization, but also how code interacts and how the contract is defined.

Yes, but you don't have to drive the car well. If you live in sunny California, you can get by with either Waymo or Tesla FSD most of the time.

Correction..how dysfunctional companies work..

Actual title: You Have to Know How to Drive the Car.

Actual theme: LARGE tech companies suck.

Declared subject: you have to know how tech companies work

Actually subject: you have to know how large-and-or-disfunctional-and-or-sales-or-finance-bro-led-companies work.

Tagging @dang re title.

Thanks, we updated the title

How many large tech companies has the author worked for? I don't see how general lessons can be drawn from the stuff on their LinkedIn.

He has built a successful brand by drawing sweepingly cynical conclusions from some rather limited experience (along with clickbait titles), to appeal to cynical audiences like HN.

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