Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexjplant | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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

... after Nvidia.

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

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.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com