Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

The large companies I’ve worked at (including FAANG) seemed to thrive on kudos via performative actions. Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive while the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal.

Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team.

Anyone else notice this? Not sure if there’s a word for it, but it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers

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What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic.

The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)

Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.

Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.

In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.

Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason.

I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs.

If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.

The quote that I heard was "the purpose of a system is what it does", which was to a degree kind of revelatory.

The example I heard was McDonald's ice cream machines. What is the purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine? To make ice cream? No, they break down all the time, they're actually pretty bad at making ice cream.

The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure support contracts. The company making these machines isn't making bad machines because they're incapable of making good ones, they're making bad machines because bad machines are more profitable in the long term.

It doesn’t hold to reason that McDonalds would publicly and continuously put up with that from a supplier. Much more likely that they have control over the machines and use them for impromptu advertising, to keep calorie per dollar lower, and to starve out local ice cream shops as needed.

> It doesn’t hold to reason that McDonalds would publicly and continuously put up with that from a supplier.

I thought McDonalds is the supplier and the franchisee is the one paying. Either way, that money is transfer-billed out of the country.

>"the purpose of a system is what it does"

thank you, i believe this is closer to, if not exactly, the original wording.

>The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure support contracts

this is spin, but does have truth. i think people dramatize the quote too much towards conspiracy or alternative intent.

I think the best way to interpret the quote is to remove intent and purpose from the system entirely and keep it somewhere above the system. i think it is really meant to undermine any purpose you think a system intrinsically has. it is a collection of tools and processes that have inputs and outputs.

Responsibility for how a system is used and what it accomplishes stays with the people using it. When you know what the consequences of using a system are going to be and you use it anyway, then those consequences are what the purpose of your action is, regardless of what it might seem like the system was initially designed to do.

Therefore the purpose of a system is to support incentives.

in a way, for sure - but the incentive exists outside the system so the system would not know what incentives people have for using it. but it usually has rules, input/outputs, delegated authorities for limited scopes, etc. so the system is just the result of those things which may be a greater or lesser scope than any given incentive. Systems are usually used to manage many different incentives as well, so perfect alignment with all of them is often impossible

For example, we might say the US postal systems intended purpose is to deliver mail legal packages. the unabomber had an incentive to use that system to deliver bombs through the mail and it worked. So it was more true to say the purpose of the us postal system (at that time) was to move any items at all from one location to another, at least with respect to the incentive of wanting stuff moved around.

but having a mailman potentially go to every home every day is also something the system does. exciting dogs is something the system does. Just like how blocking the street is something that the garbage collection system does in its current state, which might have an impact on the hours of the day chosen to send hte trucks to collect. There may not be an incentive for everything the system does, and when framed around purpose you might call them side effects, but it's all the same to the system.

when a person is operating as part of the system and something goes wrong, we try to shift blame to them - and it becomes a grey area. this is often why individuals are not held accountable for their actions on behalf of a system when they hurt someone. if you call the police on your neighbor falsely claiming he is violent, the police show up and are too aggressive, and your neighbor get injured - there is mixed responsibility. Using force is within the scope of the police system, you subjected your neighbor to that system knowing that, and the officers have discretion oso depending on the details may or may not have been acting as reasonable representatives of the police system. Taken to an extreme though, SWAT-ing your neighbor is now seen as a serious crime on your part, as we understand teh system that supports a SWAT team showing up to a location to include damages and a low bar for lethal force. we cant say the purpose of the 'SWAT system' is to attend to threats, its not. it is to act on behalf of information claiming a threat exists, because thats what it does.

okay im yapping again, my bad

And that's why command economies fail. They fail in the same way that firms do, except that because the whole economy is one giant firm, you can't get the you need to remove entrenched bureaucrats until the situation gets so bad that you have a revolution or lose a war.

The whole economy is always one giant firm.

Ray Dalio has been preaching this for awhile now. Mad respect for him spending an non-insignificant amount of time and money to educate the masses (and all the pushback that comes from it).

What does he say

I read this a decade back. Lot of good ideas. Explains lot of different fields and how they operate. I recommend people to read it or use AI to get the gist.

https://dn710707.ca.archive.org/0/items/BridgewaterRayDalioP...

How is failure/success discriminated here and which concrete command economies are assessed?

Makes me think of this timeless and excellent quote by Oscar Wilde:

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

*Commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde. There doesn't appear to be any definitive source for it.

The quote actually reads like a summary of Parkinson's Law, that bureaucracies inherently tend to grow because officials create work for each other another and seek to increase their numbers. But the exact quote doesn't appear in Parkinson's original essay. Quote from that essay:

"Factor 1: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and

Factor 2: Officials make work for each other."

-- https://archive.org/details/parkinsons-law-the-economist

I suggest reading the book if you can get your hands on a copy. It's a short and highly entertaining read:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/parkinsons-law_c-northcote-par...

Great sounding quotes of unclear origin are usually attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, or a few others.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Misquotations

Unfortunately, real-world bureaucratic orgs of any meaningful size or age always include a third type of person - dedicated neither to the org's goals, nor to the org itself.

In general, one should speak more circumspectly about that third type.

> There was a point of equilibrium in any organization’s middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it. Tyren knew from experience that a shrewd official could find this pivot-point within the org chart and, once entrenched, enjoy near-complete autonomy with almost no responsibility.

From "Son of a Liche", by J. Zachary Pike.

Do you think this pivot-middle idea is generalizable to other domains?

What is the logic or context that allows them such latitude and autonomy or to even conceptually exist at all? Are they specialized in such a way that they are qualified and expected to focus on higher-quality problems or difficult to hire for or they maybe dont have to deal directly with people in some sense

How does one become sufficiently shrewd to capitalize or orient oneself towards that Golidlocks zone?

To be clear, the book makes it very clear that Tyren was a bad person, and a bad manager, and that what he is doing is not something people should aspire to.

As far as logic and context? Every system has a place for... maybe "parasite" isn't a particularly good term, but there are places where one could get lost in the basement - hopefully with their favorite stapler.

I saw someone like this just get made redundant - they talked a good game and did enough to cement themselves in the organisation, then ended up reporting into a manager who was already over capacity so didn't have the bandwidth to chase up a guy who wasn't causing him any trouble.

It was a good run then. Now that guy will run in another organization.

In cybernetics, the first kind of people are devoted to System 1, and the others are devoted to Systems 2-5. Any functioning organization has all 5 systems.

Imagine a school with only teachers and no administration. Who hires the teachers, who collects tuition, who schedules classes? Even if the teachers could do those things, now the teachers have to do the administration, which takes away from teaching--and the teachers quickly find (like any new business owner) that most of their time is spent on 'overhead' and very little on teaching itself.

The Iron Law is generally viewed as undesirable, because the 'doers' don't want the 'managers' to control the organization--this is how everything becomes enshittified. At best you have benevolent managers who are extremely sympathetic to the doers and act accordingly, but this is generally short-lived and depends on the organization hiring those benevolent managers. So the big question is, how can we ensure that the values of the organization (System 5) remain aligned with the values of the doers?

The doers can fire the system 5 people.

The doers can't remove the bureaucracy-focused people, because doing so would run counter to Pournelle's Iron Law; it's like crossing the streams. Let's instead replace bureaucrats with AI, since the same pressures that drive bureaucracies toward self-preservation might instead push AI systems toward AGI .

The law doesn’t define behavior. It describes behaviors.

Those behaviors can change by giving the doers more power. If a bureaucrat is trouble, and the doers can cause the bureaucrat to be fired, to doers will have more power.

The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild.

If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide.

But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?

Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week.

The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.

All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.

Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you?

A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.

Yeah, if blockers are coming out in 1-on-1 meetings, that’s a really bad sign

For the company, yes. But not for the manager - who now has insanely actionable stuff.

Usually people clam up and are not vocal during group meetings. I am not one of them but it's super common. 1-1s allow people to be more candid.

I am not against 1 on 1's, but making that a regularly scheduled thing as if that adds value is kind of what I am arguing against. If people don't feel comfortable voicing something unless it is in private to their manager, that suggests to me two things - the manager/leadership is not fostering a collaborative environment, or the person needs to work on that (with the assistance/support of their manager), which I see as a manager's primary value gain, empowering their employees.

Managing via 1 on 1's sounds (to me) like a complete waste of everyone's time and a little bit toxic. It also can create an environment encouraging people to go around each other and backstab rather than collaborate. I have been in a lead position before, I'd be very concerned and probably have a series of chats with any dev that sat on something like a blocker until we spoke one on one, or only felt comfortable speaking one on one.

Some things do need to be spoken privately, and they should feel comfortable doing so/scheduling it, but a regularly scheduled thing as a way of managing, unless I am completely misunderstanding GP comment, is crazy to me. Of course I am speaking strictly manager/lead -> developer. A manager managing managers is probably quite a bit different and does require scheduling 1 on 1's regularly to align and adjust, but I wouldn't really know, because I've never been in that role.

You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment.

You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting.

You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quickly figure out that any ad hoc meeting is going to be a problem for them and then have anxiety about those, even if its going to be a positive meeting for once.

Have you never heard people joke that their boss asked them for a quick chat and they thought they were getting laid off?

> You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters

This is reframing the discussion a little bit. I said up thread, certain things need to be discussed in private, but why would it be on a regular, frequent cadence?

As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for? If someone requires negative feedback on like, a once a week cadence, I'd be very concerned that employee was a good fit or being managed wrong.

The longer the period in between reviews the larger the gap can become between the manager and employees perception of the employees performance.

Personally I don’t think once a week is absolutely necessary but I tailored it to the employees. I let them choose a cadence with a maximum of once a week and a minimum of once a month and had a mixture of choices amongst my team.

Some people also want to feel heard, but I had to balance that out with my other responsibilities and couldn’t guarantee I could drop everything to talk, so I carve out the time on my calendar and also made it clear that we could drop the meeting that week if both parties felt it was unnecessary

> As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for?

Absolutely not, no. The opposite of that. You never want to hear negative feedback for the first time at an annual review.

You don't want to be giving negative feedback every week, sure, but you do want to give feedback as close to the behavior as possible. Otherwise, you're just letting someone fuck up for months when they could be learning

> Why can't it be in a team slack?

Only a few people can adequately explain themselves through slack.

It doesn't help that a lot of managers are _bad_ managers, and don't/can't/don't know how to run a tight 1:1.

the point of the 1:1 is to provide a high bandwidth way of getting worries and steers from employees to management and direction back to employees. if there is nothing to talk about then cut the meeting short.

> Why does this have to take place in a meeting?

Conspiracy theory (which I believe in): because calls or in office meetings are not persistent and they are not recorded, but chat messages are persistent. Anyone can say they didn't say something, it gets harder in writing.

That's not a conspiracy theory, that's intended behavior.

You want your reports to feel safe to tell you things, you (or they) can always shift to written later.

> The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out.

I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to.

At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved quickly. If it needed a meeting you got everyone together as soon as they were available or you messaged your manager to get it in front of the right people quickly. If you saved things up for the next recurring meeting then it was a problem.

When I joined a corporate-style company, that immediate and direct communication style was discouraged. Everyone was so busy with their meeting schedules that you were burdening them by bringing something up out of the regularly scheduled time slot.

The 1:1s had a performative agenda you had to follow with the classic ten minutes of obligatory chit chat or ice breakers before it was acceptable to bring up the work issues that you had been holding on to for 3 days for this scheduled meeting where it was permissible to bring it up.

All of the managers thought it was such a brilliant invention that this 1:1 format was surfacing the “REAL shit” that was “INSANELY actionable”, as if this was the only way to communicate. It seemed so absurd to me, having come from high performing startups where everyone just communicated to get their job done and was coached if they weren’t. Now I had to queue up all the issues and then follow the weekly ritual of chit-chat first, business second before I had a chance to bring it up in the culturally acceptable time slot.

I think these rituals are really comforting and provide a sense of routing and predictability that some people like, but I also think it can become a performative replacement for good communication when it becomes THE acceptable way to surface the real issues.

The thing is, "everybody just communicates" really does break down when the size of the organization grows past some limit. Everything is easy in a ten-person company, but that absolutely does not scale to a 1000-person company.

1:1s are designed for 1000-person communication. They're used by small groups of people like a manager and their team.

I've come to the conclusion that if I ever start my own thing again I will 100% ban all standing recurring meetings. Maybe an exception for projects-in-progress with a firm end date, but I'm on the fence on that one too. Zero high performing teams I've worked within - or led - has had such form of structure.

Standing meetings tend to devolve into performative uselessness. And they add stress, interruptions, etc. And worst of all - they tend to let people have a false sense of accomplishment afterwards.

1:1's I think can be useful for a certain type of employee, but should be 100% at that employee's discretion. The only use I see for them for that type of person that they have a predictable slot held open on their manager's schedule in the event they need to actually execute it. Most of them should be skipped or there are probably other issues in the employee:manager relationship.

I understand I am the odd man out when it comes to "meeting culture" but the more I get stuck in a myriad of standing meetings the more I have ossified my opinion on this subject. Meetings are not productive work. The older and more experienced I get the more useless I think they are.

A random meeting called because there is an issue to discuss and get a decision made on? Totally fine. Those are useful.

Please let me know where to send my CV. :) 10000% agree with this. Not all of us need a weekly reinforcement that everything's okay. And if we actually need something, we can speak up without consulting Google Calendar first and waiting for a scheduled safe space to speak up about it.

> At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately.

1:1s are not about addressing issues, most certainly not any issues that need addressing immediately.

If you have an immediate issue, open an incident or file a top priority bug, or whatever is the process at your company.

Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.

In startups with less than 50 people (and I am being generous on the number), everyone talks to everyone all the time, so there is no need for these moments to extract key info to fix/improve situations, identify topics to push, ...

But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is intermediaries and 1-1s.

[also, being sarcastic is unhelpful.]

But 1 on 1 meetings are not crossing team boundaries, they are always within the team which is pretty much always smaller than 50. There's no reason the team cannot "talk to everyone all the time" just because other teams exist. But instead this communication is replaced by meetings even though the ability to talk hasn't changed.

Beautiful thought but really hard in real life. Do you talk to all members of the family, deeply, every day? Most would say no, so you need to open the spaces to do so.

Managers DO cross team boundaries though, their peers are other managers. I can't talk to the 100 people in my department every week, but my manager can talk to their 9 peers, who each talk to their 10 reports.

Precisely! And this is true not just for managers but also higher-level ICs. Its ok for Senior and below to be team focused, but moving to the next level means broadening scope and that means talking with people, regularly!, outside your immediate team.

And at larger companies, teams and groups are often geographically distributed if only in other buildings and office locations.

But the initial claim was that 1:1 meetings "add value to the team". I can believe that they add value to the manager's manager, but they are not adding value to the team of the person being met with.

Yeah has anyone discovered sociocracy?

https://www.sociocracyforall.org/sociocracy/

Startups don't have as rigidly defined team boundaries. It wouldn't be uncommon for people to take up tasks and responsibilities that would fall under some other team with a different manager.

In larger corporations, teams are insular - members aren't rewarded for doing work outside of their domain, and would be punished for letting another team do their job. Some members are so indoctrinated that they won't respond to any communication outside of their team, unless it's through their own manager.

1:1s don't have to be strictly manager:report

I'm a staff eng and have 1:1s with other managers I don't report to and my peer staff/principle engs in other reporting chains and they are some of the most valuable meetings I have to keep connected with what other teams and the rest of the organization is doing, what's going well, what they might need from me, pain points, initiatives, etc. And of course just to build and maintain rapport across the org, which absolutely pays dividends.

I do these less frequently than with my direct manager, but still on a regular cadence, typically once a month or every other month.

I would hope that people, having dealt with LLMs for a few years would understand that its all about context.

In a 25 person company, context is easy, assuming even half arsed communications. Its possible to hold the state of the entire company in your head.

That scales to about 50. after that it becomes hard. then you start having team meetings and the like.

Even at my old startup we had 1:1s when we were ~25 people. it was a great way to get additional context that was otherwise hidden

And changes happen at pretty much all levels of scale. Even once you get well past startup size the times of structure and processes required for a 10,000 or 20,000 person company is much different from a 1,000 or 2,000 person company.

This is only "Funny" in the sense that it's "funny" that a high-performing startup can run the entire thing on a single huge Postgres instance and that mysteriously stops working after you hit a certain level of scale. Relationship count scales quadratically as you scale headcount. A single poor relationship can sour an entire team or worse. When your team is 5 people, it's trivial for e.g. the CEO to have the state of all relationships in the company in his head. As a company grows larger it gets harder. Once you surpass Dunbar's number it's virtually impossible. The function of 1:1s is to scale this.

How many start ups fail vs how many are successful, again?

nearly all big companies have failed too just on longer horizon

Yeah, but the parent was implying startups are a priori better because of how they do meetings differently.

1:1s add value to a point, but I’ve worked at one company where the fixation on 1:1s started replacing useful communication.

Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

1:1s started as a good way to formalize manager to report communication on a predictable schedule. This is good if the team isn’t regularly talking organically. Some company cultures take it too far and turn it into an excuse to make recurring meetings the focus of all work. I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people.

All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

Middle management was always congratulating themselves on the success of their 1:1s because they said it was when they heard about all of the real issues they didn't know about. They didn't realize that by making themselves unavailable except for the 1:1s they were forcing this result.

It was even worse when the problems involved multiple people or teams, which was almost always the case. Now you had to wait until Thursday to talk to your manager about it, who promised to add it to the agenda for his 1:1 with other team the following Tuesday. Then in that 1:1, the other team lead would say he'd bring it up with his schedule 1:1 with the person the Friday after that. It was like every communication queue only got processed once a week, so each hop added more delay. The managers would always tell is it wasn't supposed to be like that, but trying to direct would get you hit with "Let's talk about this in our next 1:1"

The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

If you haven’t seen calendars stuffed to the gills with performative 1:1s then this is all probably hard to believe, but it happens. Some companies got so fat with middle management that performative meeting rituals were the primary use of everyone’s time and you would be chastised if you tried to break the mold.

> Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.

> I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people. ... All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

Yes, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them. But what you describe does not sound like a 1:1. At most it's a cross-functional meeting, and should have multiple people from both sides.

> The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

It sounds like someone got halfway through the ManagerTools guidance on 1:1s and decided they could improvise a better solution and failed. The purpose of 1:1s is to build and keep relationships, and they encourage this chitchat as relationship building, but the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. If you want to talk about work that's great! The best way to build a relationship is working towards a common goal, and work is pretty much the only expected common goal anyways. And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda -- if a manager wants time on a direct's calendar they can always ask for more, but the reverse is much harder.

> the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_.

How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.

Thats fine, though if you do that forever you'll probably harm your promotion chances. Which, if your goal is just to get by, sounds fine?

But generally speaking, it's a chance for you to speak about your work to the person writing your performance review, and get feedback, which may be in short supply otherwise for various reasons.

I don't know why I'd ever want a promotion, and I haven't ever got one. I did turn one down once. A promotion is like 5% more pay for way more work and a bunch of corporate bullshit along the way. If I want to move up I just change jobs.

My last promotion from level 3 to level 4 was a 50% increase in pay basically, with no change in responsibilities or scope.

That’s because you were already working at the next level. Your promotion was just a recognition of that.

> How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.

Easy, send a message prior to the meeting "Hey, I have no topics to cover this week, so let's skip it and save the time".

Done.

I worked at a place where the manager had, at the height of the organization's growth, five reports. He couldn't handle that many 1:1's so, at one point, he made them into a "group" 1:1. Of course, that made no sense. Eventually his manager reversed the decision. I'm honestly sure what he did all day, but he eventually got laid off.

The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's. Eventually the company was acquired and the practice was "installed" by the acquirer.

> The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's

The problem with this is we will ask, “if you want to talk about career progression, or go over a technical question, or talk about performance feedback, how do you get that from your manager?” And one might say, “just Slack them or ask them for a call.”

And the problem is that you now have created an environment where the voices the manager hears the most are the squeaky wheels, the people who can play politics. You don’t want that as a manager - you want an environment where you can get the best from all your team and everyone has the opportunity to get the benefit of a structured communication cadence with their manager, regardless of who plays politics.

There are some situations where you really don’t need 1-1s but these are rare edge cases (Jensen Huang is famous for not having them… but the people that report to him are senior enough to report to the CEO of the worlds largest company. So they don’t need much supervision.)

If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings.

Second, scheduled 1:1 is not a mechanism to avoid politics. People who can play politics better are as much advantaged as they are without it. They will simply know better what to say and do in those 1:1.

> If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings.

With this approach, I hope you are not a manager.

What do you mean? Even at companies with strong 1:1 cultures it’s bad practice to save technical questions for 1:1s (shouldn’t be delaying them until the weekly slot) and performance reviews are scheduled separately from 1:1s because it shouldn’t take the place of normal communications. It’s an additional meeting with separate agendas.

> performance reviews are scheduled separately from 1:1s

The performative annual review meetings can be separate, sure. But managers should be discussing with their directs in 1:1s sufficiently that no criticism or praise contained within is heard for the first time.

"Annual reviews" are another joke. They're, more often than not, a huge time waster for everyone involved. I've seen performance evaluation forms with such convoluted questions, they were obviously the result of insanely muddled group think.

As a manager, it’s your responsibility to give your people feedback on a regular basis to help them grow, and follow up. You need a regular place to talk about these things.

Performance conversations are not once a year, they’re regular and routine.

On the flip side, if someone is not meeting performance expectations, you have to be having those conversations early, coaching / supporting so nothing is a surprise at review time, or worse… if you have to fire someone, they deserve the opportunity to fix the issue first so you want to be telling them where they stand and why.

On technical questions, sure - don’t save them for a 1-1, but I am able to be a sounding bound for my engineers when they mention what they’re working on, and I give them guidance. Sometimes they go, “oh yeah I’ve already thought of that, it won’t work for this reason.” And sometimes they go, “huh, I didn’t think of that. I’ll look into it”

I will agree 1:1's can potentially be useful, however, having them on a weekly basis often is way too frequent. I can count on one hand the number of useful 1:1's I've had over the past 10 years.

You don’t need a meeting scheduled every single week just in case the person might want to talk about career progression that week.

Many teams can and do function well without rigid weekly 1:1s. The best performing companies I’ve worked for didn’t have anything resembling scheduled 1:1s. Everyone talked to their managers during their work and managers were available for conversations if you asked.

It’s interesting to hear from people who have only experienced these rigidly structured 1:1 situations who can’t understand how anyone could communicate without scheduled 1:1s.

> Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.

I agree wholeheartedly, but this company culture had different ideas than you and I.

Their idea of a 1:1 was that it was the formal and correct way to synchronize people. It wasn’t limited to managers and their reports.

This shows up a lot in companies with matrix-style org charts. You end up with product managers and designers assigned to 3 different teams and setting up 1:1s with their managers and certain ICs to sync. Then their managers set up 1:1s with the managers of the other teams. Instead of being a tree it turns into a giant graph with edges everywhere.

> And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda

Now imagine this multiplied by 10 1:1s. That’s almost two hours of a manager keeping people captive on Zoom repeating stories from their weekend. Now imagine this practice was semi-standardized as the ideal way to run 1:1s at this company, so each employee had to spend the first 10m of every 1:1 with their manager, their product manager, their design lead, their team lead, and other people following the template listening to their weekend plans. Now imagine that you get pressured to reciprocate because after they spend all that time talking about themselves they need to ask about your weekend and pull a response out so they don’t feel awkward.

Sounds insane? It was! I almost wouldn’t have believed it until I experienced it. I couldn’t believe how many people at the company acted like it was normal and good.

> es, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them.

I was in a manager role at the company I’m describing. I got reprimanded on my performance review for not having enough 1:1s and for declining 1:1s with people who were not my reports (they tried to claim I was shutting them out and preventing them from doing their job)

Trust me, the problem was not a lack of managers. It was the giant interconnected graph of too many managers trying to set up recurring meetings with each other because that was the expectation.

If I had not witnessed something similar myself, I wouldn't believe it either. How many "sync" meetings do you possibly need? How does anyone get any actual work done with all this going on?

> Sounds insane? It was!

Well yes, it sounds insane.

It is good to connect at a personal level. Talk about your weekend, family, hobbies. This might happen naturally in an office setting, but with everyone remote on zoom, it's helpful to make it a habit. For most people these human connections are super supportive.

You can't force it though. Some people don't work that way. A manager must adapt to each style. I have employees who like to talk for hours about everything, so I'm happy to do it. I also have one employee who is very matter of fact, only brings up a specific issue if they need me to do something about it and that's it. I know nothing about their life outside work but that's their preference so that's ok too. They are one of the highest performers in the team, it's just their style.

1:1 adds value if the managers spends most of the time actually managing and 1:1 is a place where he gets part of input for that. 1:1 with lead that spends most of the time doing 1:1 is pointless

> what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?

Actually managing. The listening to devs and sitting on meetings is pointless if you are not actively using those meetings to organize, prioritize, plan and execute parts of plan.

With most of my managers 1:1 have always been a way for them to catch up with what I’ve been working on, despite doing a standup every single day so that the team knows what each other is doing.

I have standup every day so my manager knows what I am doing so my 1:1s are:

- General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team.

- Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my manager wants to join in on or promote to a bigger effort.

- About our lives and what's going on.

So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them

That's assuming an awful lot, mainly about how we no longer need human connection or context with other people to be able to succeed as a team. When I took over as an engineering manager, it took a couple of 1:1s per person but actually being interested in them as fellow humans made a huge difference. One of my reports, a former teammate who I really liked and got along well with, was carrying serious depression around every day. Learning that gave me a chance to help him out, discuss my experience so he knew he wasn't alone and let me make space for him to breathe.

Which made him a more productive cog in the machine fellow human-bot!

Nothing says human connection as much as scheduled meeting and necessity to have scheduled meeting to get or provide context.

If the general mussings about a company, causual fun project and a little small talk about life require scheduled meething, you dont have those human connections with the team.

Did you considered that people understand difference between human connection, relationship and being one of mandatory duties/meeting with someone who is actually apart and disconnected?

>Nothing says human connection as much as scheduled meeting and necessity to have scheduled meeting to get or provide context.

I understand your point, but that also describes a date.

I dated only people I already had human connection with. I did not went to dates because company process said I should or I thought it will make my partner more performing, but because I wanted to be with that person.

We also did quite a lot of spontaneous unplanned stuff.

Nothing quite says “guy that weirds out his coworkers but doesn’t know it” quite like this. Solid statement.

Depends on the size of the company and/or where you fit in the organization. If your manager is also the owner then there is something to be said about keeping a friendly relationship. If it is some middle manager several layers deep who doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, then yeah, it's a waste. That time would be far better spent speaking to the CEO or board of directors.

It's beneficial to have someone to bounce things off of, to provide feedback, or to share a degree of personal information; it can be helpful for my manager to know that I have a lot of family stuff going on this week so I may be intermittently available, less productive, or working different hours.

It's also an opportunity to get on the same page about stuff or clarify things that might be a bit too long-form for a daily standup.

My 1:1s with my team lead vary between three minutes and 45 minutes; if there's a lot to cover, we cover it, if there's only one thing we discuss it and hop off. If there's nothing or if one of us is busy we just skip it.

I think the real benefit is that that time in my team lead's calendar is always blocked off for me if I need to use it for something so I don't have to wriggle around other meetings, appointments, etc. to get a slice of face-to-face time about something that doesn't feel 'important enough' to schedule a meeting for but which wouldn't get discussed otherwise.

No there are topics that are not important enough to bring up (yet) so they don’t warrant their own meeting, so you need a soft place to bring them up with low expectations.

A 1:1 is like asking to get lunch with someone — you don’t have anything specific to talk about but it puts you two together to talk about random things.

Unless you meet new people by exchanging printed lists of your interests and activities and marking which ones you are interested in, but the rest of us don’t tick like that.

> So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them

Back in the day of 5 days in the office, this kind of connection happened through osmosis, not really necessary to schedule.

In this day of everyone remote, if you don't intentionally schedule time to just connect, it'll never happen.

I used to be a believer in daily standup plus bi-weekly sprint planning, but lost faith with the (possibly cargo cult) methodology I was trying to follow. Adding 1:1 in with that would be far too frequent, and probably far too little real content in each meeting.

Did productivity actually change dispensing with those meetings? Probably not by much, it's hard to say empirically because task estimation was always a wildcard.

Qualitatively, I think a good balance is twice-weekly standup, bi-weekly long form. It adds some structure and regular communication, I think it helps people feel better and have a bit more relationship. But I supplement this with frequent invitations to talk about product ad-hoc, talk about tasking ad-hoc if you feel you're not productive, and schedule more pointed meetings with me whenever I'm free. Which is almost all the time, because I need to not be in meetings in order to get work done or spend time thinking.

Honestly, I don't begrudge anyone a job. If people want to do SWE as a performative role, I'll detect that fairly quickly and let it be, even people under me if I were to climb the org chart beyond the first rung. They actually do serve some benefits to the company and to society, as long as they are amicable and respond positively to requests. I'm eventually going to tune them out for serious/urgent development work, and no one can make any guarantees about protection from layoffs, period. C'est la vie.

If people are driven to achieve more, love engineering products, and enjoy working with technology, it's going to be obvious. We will end up working together to solve problems like gravity creates stable orbits. But I can't realistically only hire those people, or run even a medium size company with only the vital few on payroll. It's statistically unlikely, that's why a unicorn startup is a unicorn. Statistically most SWE roles exist outside of that... right? Like after IPO, in big companies where some amount of bureaucracy is just a fact of the size of the machine.

EDIT: twice weekly standup, although I guess bi-weekly can mean both every other week and twice a week?

The general academic lab model is still the best I've seen and experienced. People sign up to present at the weekly lab meeting if they have something to present, 1 person per meeting. There's maybe 10 mins of quick bringing things up at the beginning of lab meeting before the presenter starts, if you have something short to share or general announcements. Specific project groups will have their own direct meetings on their own schedule that makes sense to them with the pace of incoming results to discuss.

When you do daily standups or mandatory everyone says something type stuff, it does something damaging psychologically. You end up scrambling to get things together for the standup to not look like you are a fumbling idiot, when it would have been better to take a few more days with a clearer head, less cortisol in your blood, and output and share better work.

Going directly from a research lab with a healthy and collaborative culture to an agile scrum factory in the private sector was one of the most jarring experiences of my life.

Everytime I speak to an academic who is trying to make the same leap this is something I always warn them about.

> When you do daily standups or mandatory everyone says something type stuff, it does something damaging psychologically.

Yes, very much. The most stressful times I've had at jobs were when I felt necessary to have an update every day at a silly standup. I'd have a panic attack most late afternoons about having enough "content" for tomorrow morning standup. That is super toxic.

I'm ok with daily standups, as long as it is clear it's just a moment to mention anything you want the team to know or rant about something that's annoying you, but it's perfectly ok to say "nothing to update" most of the time.

Currently I manage a team and we do daily standups. I'd rather cancel them, but the team wants to do them so we do. I often say I have no updates partly because it's true but also to set the example so the team members don't feel any pressure to give updates unless there is a specific detail they want to share.

That’s an anti pattern of management - the 1-1 shouldn’t be a status update. There are times you want to brief your boss on things that are important to them, but if you’re just going over your tickets, that’s a waste of time (unless you’re using that time to get technical guidance on your tickets).

There are lots of lousy managers out there, and you can’t control that - but you can set the agenda of your 1-1 yourself if they don’t have one. It’s your 45 minutes with the person who signs your checks, use it to your advantage.

Search the net for questions / topics to manage up in 1-1s.

I often ask my manager for feedback, ask about expectations for promotion, career opportunities, ask advice on problems I have, ask how I can get my thing prioritized, brief her on something I think she should be aware of and what I need from her, etc.

Don’t let your manager turn your 45 minutes into a waste of time.

I lead teams of Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and Platform Engineers. My direct reports drive their 1:1s; from the need to have them in the first place to the agenda when we do.

We have standups for our team as well as the larger team and we are in constant contact with one another throughout each day via IM. Why would we need to repeat the same shit in a 1:1?

I consider their 1:1s THEIR meeting. If they want it, I'm there; if they don't and want to work, great.

As such, we almost never have 1:1s and my team continually leads the organization w/the highest overall as well as manager satisfaction. It's been this way at each and every company I've worked for and is likely why all but one inherited direct report has worked with me at multiple companies before.

> if they don't and want to work, great.

Interesting thought, I had never considered cancelling if they don’t have anything. Thanks for that.

My thought was always, “I want to give everyone that time no matter what, and if they don’t have anything, then I go to a list of questions I have for every 1-1 if we have time. Stuff like, “how are you feeling with ${latest_company_happenings}?” or “how do you think the team is doing?” or “are you interested in the work these days, or burnt out?” or ask them about some problem I’m trying to solve for the team and how they’d approach it.

Ala: https://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-update-the-vent-and-t...

Empowerment of your team is the single most impactful thing you can do for them. This is one small way of making them feel that they truly have autonomy.

>“how are you feeling with ${latest_company_happenings}?” or “how do you think the team is doing?” or “are you interested in the work these days, or burnt out?”

That is the worst questions to ask to the experienced people. You cannot share your negative feelings, so the answer should be socially acceptable bullshit.

Are you burnt out? Yes? Sorry to hear that! I'll put a high attrition risk to your name in the system.

Like asking during the job interview the question: Why do you want to work here? I need money and you have an open position! But you cannot answer that to pass the gatekeeper.

> That is the worst questions to ask to the experienced people.

God what a know-it-all. This is just a vent without substance by someone that I can safely assume hates his job and his manager.

This very much depends on the place and the level of maturity in how you share the negativity. Good managers will try to understand and help you, that's a large part of their job.

Also, if you are a high performer then being an attrition risk isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's in the companies best interest to try keep people who are important.

This is such good common sense that it’s foreign to so many people.

The 1:1 is great when needed. It’s a waste of time if everyone is already communicating everything. The most efficient teams communicate effectively without having to force it into recurring, pre-determined time slots. Topics like performance reviews and career progression are better discussed in quarterly meetings dedicated to that topic, not a weekly time slot with a fluid agenda.

I would love practical advice on how to say to a manager "I'm not deriving any value from this recurring 1x1 meeting, can we move it to on-demand?"

My 30+ year career has not revealed a way to achieve that yet without repurcussions. However much I'd prefer it.

I realize I’m different than many leaders out there; I came up through the ranks and do everything the way I wished it had been rather than the way it was.

As such, I’m entirely open to any and all feedback from my team. I certainly wouldn’t be offended if you just asked; I’d do my best to accommodate it.

What’s the worst that can happen? They say no?

Worst that happens is they get silently offended, while being political to you at the same time and secretly undermine your performance reviews during calibration meetings without you even knowing or just not standing up for you that much during this time will be enough due to stack ranking etc.

This - I've had a manager who was pretty ineffective, and if he wasn't doing 1:1s he'd feel like he was failing at managing. Easier to just talk in circles with him.

The meeting isn't for you. If it were, you'd have been the one scheduling it.

First place to start is to determine what value the other party is deriving from the meeting. Zero in on exactly why they want to have the meeting. From there, you can put your problem solving skills in action to determine if there is a better way to deliver equivalent value.

However, keep in mind that it is likely that the value you are delivering is your company during that time. A lot of hiring happens because the people involved want to have 'friends' around them.

> The meeting isn't for you.

Wild how many different definitions of a 1:1 are in this thread.

Most of the other commenters are emphatically saying that the 1:1 is for the employee, not the manager.

The fact that nobody can agree on what the 1:1 is supposed to be is emblematic of all the problems that have been rolled up into the way that 1:1s are being cargo culted in modern business enivronments.

Employees talking to managers is good. The way we've turned it into a cargo cult performance where nobody can agree on what it's supposed to be but people will attack you for suggesting alternatives (see some of the weird comments shaming people in this thread) is why they've become so hated.

It's starting to remind me of the way Agile went from a human-first light touch philosophy to becoming a heavy, process-first ideology that starts replacing good planning with a bunch of rituals.

I only see one definition, which is the same definition it has always had: One person talking to one other person. Hence one to one for short.

There is no disagreement about that. The only difference in your case, as opposed to experiences others have had, is the dynamic between those two people. You are not seeking a meeting or want to have a meeting, thus the meeting is being called only for the benefit of the other person.

Let's simplify this: Nobody calls a meeting they don't find any value in. If someone is asking you to join a meeting, it is for them. It might also be for you if you both can see value, but that was said to not be the case in your case. When only the other party finds value, you are going to struggle to cut them off without some pushback, but this is where you can determine what value they are trying to get out of the meeting and see if there is a better way to deliver it.

> Search the net for questions / topics to manage up in 1-1s.

This is why so many people find themselves in performative 1 on 1s: It's assumed that the time must be spent, so managers and reports alike start searching for things to fill up that time.

The best 1 on 1 formats I've had were quick and to the point. We cancelled or ended early if there was nothing to discuss that hadn't already been discussed.

The worst were a game of finding things to talk about for 50 minutes because some manager read a few management books and decided they must fill up the time to bond with employees. So we'd go through silly questions from lists from books or do bonding exercises while I had to pretend to smile and enjoy it.

It is totally acceptable to use a list of questions to give you ideas for what to talk about. You might learn something you didn’t know if you didn’t ask.

For example, most managers aren’t having “career” convos with their people regularly. It’s fine to use a question bank if it helps you kick this convo off and get to the heart of the matter.

If your 1-1s have been performative, I guess shame on either the manager, you, or both.

If you’re scheduling meetings without an idea of what to talk about, that’s a problem.

Looking up ideas to discuss with your manager is a good idea. If you are being scheduled for time slots and have to search for ideas to fill it every week, that’s a symptom of a broken meeting that should be reduced in time, frequency, or both.

> I guess shame on either the manager, you, or both.

This culture of shaming people who aren’t doing the performative thing of filling up the meeting time is why so many of us are so tired of this rigid 1:1 dogma. Business and communication practices should meet the team’s needs, not be a game of following steps you found on the Internet about what to talk about in meetings.

Schedule meetings when communication is needed. Stop wasting everyone’s time by searching the internet for conversation ideas for arbitrary meetings.

question bank ?! lol, no wonder people complain about being performative.

If you have nothing to talk about, cancel it

I have had multiple managers and the thing is I wouldn't expect a truly honest answer from my manager ever, so to me it is also just all performative ritual that I have to go through and would rather avoid. So it does feel like waste of time to me. And I also feel like I have to be careful, because honesty has most of the time just yielded me useless work in the long term. It is easier to pretend everything is good, than to point out issues as it will i variably lead to a rabbit hole of nonsensical work.

> because honesty has most of the time just yielded me useless work in the long term

Are you sure it's useless work, or growth opportunities?

A good manager will be handing growth opportunities to you often. I had one employee once who for every new opportunity just rolled their eyes and asked if they have to do it? I'd tell them the work was not strictly required for their current role, but if they wanted to grow their visibility in the company and thus promotion support, it could be a good opportunity. They never wanted to do any of it so never did, never got any visibility and thus never any promotions. Up or out, so eventually they were out.

I feel like I have got promoted fast enough. More than what is considered a "terminal level". I do say yes to high value growth opportunities so that is not the case. In fact I think because of how I act during 1 on 1s is helping me with that, because I am causing no headaches to my manager with honesty.

Basically I am just trying to figure out how I can cause no extra work to anyone and being optimistic to my manager about everything while really I am not.

But it means that I am brainstorming bulletpoints that I think are best to achieve that beforehand, and it is performative.

That’s you, cool no problem I would like chatting with you just to catch a breath.

But there is Mallory who will tell on everyone on the team some dirty stuff.

There is Karen that is trying to undermine Louise because she has bigger boobs than her - yeah she won’t tell it outright but each one on one she would try to indicate she is not doing great job.

There is Henry who thinks he is a fucking rockstar genius implementing features 10X faster than all the pleb and demands rise every freaking one on one but you know that every feature he did had to be scrapped and replaced.

Oh did I mention you cannot just fire them but you have to kind of like of make them continue working. Maybe you can shift someone to other projects, maybe after 3 months or 6 months of documenting them being an asshole you can fire them.

Obviously you can’t offend any of them because ten you will get fired much faster.

The problem you're talking about isn't 1:1 meetings, it's having a toxic and dysfunctional team of assholes at a shitty company. In that kind of environment every interaction with people is awful, 1:1 or not.

Any good thing can be done wrong, and if it can be done wrong, the it will be done wrong.

I have a fraught relationship with 1:1s. Some days I curse the MBA who came up with this. Some days I'm rather ambivalent. Doesn't help that I'm naturally introverted and 1:1s is just a leech on my limited social battery. It's rather telling that IME 1:1s are the first meetings to be cancelled when the schedule tightens up.

I'm not outright saying they are useless but 1:1s won't make a bad manager good and they're a nice bonus when your manager is competent. In the latter I actually get career and professional guidance.

Really depends on the team etc. I don't think every team needs to have 1-1, certainly not weekly as a mandate.

The best cultures I worked at didn't have 1-1 series by default

> Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive

This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent.

I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.

It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.

Many are not doing anything obviously meaningful and useful. However that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful or useful, only that you don't know.

When an organization reaches a certain size it starts behaving more like an insect colony than individuals at most levels. There is a lot of exploration that occurs, much of it is unfruitful, yet still enough future resources are discovered for it to continue and expand.

Alternative ways of working

But I do. Often based on direct personal experience.

Indeed, and the third party may be someone who thinks the entire SWE department is useless. Most people have an equivalent understanding of what SWEs and high level managers actually do all day.

Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.

> This is arrogant thinking typical of developers.

Also very typical of hn. Prevailing sense of anyone not physically coding adding no value

> This is arrogant thinking typical of developers

typical for a lot of knowledge workers. "engineer's disease"

i am good at solving problems in X domain, and believe that carries over to all domains. it's just so simple, they're so dumb, etc.

these guys get to management and then crash out.

Working at FAANG, acutally the stuff I was doing was mostly bollocks. Nothing of real value, apart from a few projects was delivered.

You've never had a task in a job where it is obvious the task is entirely useless and stupid and a waste of time and exists solely because of process that no one in the chain of being involved has the authority to rip out and replace with something sensible? You guys hiring?

I feel like you've maybe had the benefit of working in teams where this didn't happen.

I've seen it first hand, people cotton on to EM's latest buzz word, find some space to shove it into and then show it off. EM is blown away despite the result being over engineered or poor fit for the solution.

Last time I saw this was a system decomposed to events when tight orchestration was necessary. 10 months later a single function app was dropped in place to replace it. Dev who did the original work got a promotion for their gift of technical debt.

Twitter had laid off like 75%+ of staff and everyone, including on this site, was convinced it would crash and burn, yet it's still working. Explain?

Twitter had been around for a long time and could very well be considered feature complete and run with a skeleton crew.

They don't own any mission critical software and in the days it went down after Elon started pulling the plugs, the only thing that changed was the people going to reddit to complain about stability.

sure but there are tons of products from faang and other large companies that can be considered feature complete

Twitter was also effectively wrecked in a variety of ways and nothing really came in to replace it. Which may well have been OK. But it was the reality.

None of the exTwitter people thought that if you talked to them.

Sometimes, people talk about what they hope will come true. I dunno what to tell you.

Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?

If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.

Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.

Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.

There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail...

Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.

> Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?

> If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.

I've been involved in a few projects where the value appeared clear at the beginning, but by the end there was little value.

In one case the project failed due to incompetence and mismanagement: Basically, the project dragged on and on until it missed its market window. (What stinks is it was basically a port of a Visual Basic sales tool to a more modern v2.)

In another case I was hired into a machine learning project in a company where everyone spent a lot of time justifying their jobs. The project ultimately didn't "improve" over the non-machine-learning approach, and devolved into a "solution in search of a problem".

---

As far as why the company held onto the people involved? (I left after both projects.) That's harder to explain, but I like to think of an analogy to a king holding on to a standing army: It's there when you need it, and your soldiers aren't helping the rival kingdom.

A different way to say it: One of the downsides to working in a large company is that a lot of the people there are "warm butts on seats." The company could function without them. Many of the people you work with have competence issues. You're probably a "warm butt on a seat" too, and may have some competence issues. That's why I like working for smaller companies: they can't afford to be fat.

It is a property of any large bureaucracy that a large proportion of the bureaucracy exists to serve itself. And it's not BS, it's a natural consequence of growth. Imagine you start in the mode of "moving fast and breaking stuff". Eventually, you break enough stuff that someone says "enough". So you develop some launch standards and guidelines. Then hire a team to enforce them. Then someone to build a launch tool. Then you realize you also need to manage legal risks, have standardized UIs, make sure that production services have backups and redundancy, and all of sudden, you have ten review processes. And then, it gets so difficult to navigate the process that teams hire PMs just to coordinate. And on, and on.

And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off.

I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?

> Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?

1. that the existence of such very "chill" roles often leads to hiring of more mediocre people and diminishes the value of working at such a company (at least psychologically)

2. That little gets done / built with all these people and resources, which is seen as a waste of potential.

3. That bureaucracy itself may be more exhausting than doing real work.

Being the rockstar doing all the technical work can also be performative. I'm currently working on a CTO team that is supposed to "disrupt" a big org. There's a lot of emphasis on demoing and sketching things out a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's some merit to it but a lot of it is kayfabe.

Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.

Kayfabe is the best way to describe it.

New word for me, I love it.

It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked on projects with 50 programmers and it seemed many did nothing and a few did negative work.

We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved.

He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done.

I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative.

That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.”

I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.

There's that, and then there's the other kind of negative work, whereby a rockstar engineer develops something that works but only he understands, completely failing to document it well. When this engineer leaves, the project is unmaintainable by virtue of being incomprehensible. In both cases, the management has been clueless.

Good point. There’s lots of kinds of negative work.

I was thinking more of people burning stuff down.

There’s also people burning the furniture for immediate warmth.

And there’s people you mention who are doing things that look good but have time bombs inside them.

I work almost exclusively in small (<100 employees) firms, usually no more than 20 developers, and it’s a complete mix here too.

One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care

It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.

My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.

Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.

The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.

The most shocking thing about entering Software as a career was the enormous number of "Brillant Paula Beans"[1] that are out there silently working, doing meetings, participating in all the software rituals, but producing useless and ultimately scrapped work product.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean

Yeah, the second one is really the most bitter pill - work for a year or more, see that the PMF or the actual product isn't going to meet the needs; raise red flags, nobody cares (or worse, people actively fight you and torpedo you) and then you get to see it literally do nothing in production.

I have seen this a lot in the mid sized business (<300 employees usually) and its the "we have enough money and no accountability and terrible processes to even understand the world" but my favorite one is my friend spent six months building a product offshoot from a core product, got pulled into meetings with directors to tell him to shut up about how it wasn't going to work for the target market, and when he finished they sold 4 units.

4 units.

I’ve been in such a work context for the better part of two years, as a contractor, and by God it is soul crushing to give your best to do a good job, and to see it ultimately ends up in the bin.

I quit weeks ago, and they are already begging me back because I was good at what I was doing, to work on yet another hallucination from the higher ups that will be scrapped in 6 months.

The good money doesn’t make up for the existential pain. Maybe I’m too old for this shit. (20 year career and a burnout that made me reassess the value of my time on earth)

I think this dynamic is not specific to SWE and as old as time. As organizations grow, so does the aspect of work that's more "seeing and being seen", and rightfully so.

There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy.

But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged.

That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business.

But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists.

But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.

It doesn't help shareholders or customers in any way however so we should not celebrate it or even simply accept that this is "the way things are". It is an error to be corrected.

Yes, agreed. But it's not a binary. It's not like you can either wrestle with hard engineering problems until an eventual breakthrough or exclusively pretend to be working.

Sure, on one extreme is the purely value-extractive person whose only work product is calling recurring meetings to talk about how great things are going (while having contributed little). In that case, it's an error to be corrected.

But there are different types of useful work. Let's use engineering as an example.

You could build a set of new filter options on in-product analytics that customers have been asking for. Assuming this doesn't require net-new data sources or whatnot, this is usually not a complex engineering challenge, but will be loved by customers.

Then you have types who refactor an obscure caching function to reduce its memory use 15% when performance wasn't an issue, but it was a fun engineering puzzle that made the code more elegant.

Clearly both create value, but one will be more useful to customers, although it's not as fun to solve.

My point isn't that we should treat corporate bureaucracy, performative work, and freeloading as "the way things are" (they're toxic to any work culture). I'm saying that "deeper engineering challenge" doesn't equal "more important work".

Also, I don't necessarily like this! Deep problem-solving and focused work on tricky challenges are the most fulfilling things to me and to most people I know. But this is the dynamic we're in.

(and yes you can argue that having the most efficient code possible prevents future performance issues and whatnot and is thus long-term more valuable than analytics options, but at least in the startup world, limited resources mean you tend to solve things when they become problems, not because they could one day become problems)

Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work.

This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

> as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?

If that one person is the CEO or owner then yes, haha.

No, but would you want this? People who contribute more should be paid more, but mapping compensation to contribution exactly isn't easy and comes with downsides.

No, those are the shareholders who don’t produce anything.

You think stock dividends pay out 4x the amount of money that the company pays for salaries?

Round your "~15%" up to 20%, and you've just discovered the Pareto Princlple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle, aka "The 80/20 rule".

I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money.

YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.

In my experience, actual producing impact/value and being able to demonstrate that you've produced impact/value are pretty loosely coupled to each, and it is often possible to do one without the other (in both directions). And time spent on one often directly competes with time spent on another.

I'd imagine it's the people who are better at "demonstrating value" than actually producing it that are the target of the original post.

There’s quite a bit of this but the big orgs have created a machine where they can capture (1+x) times the value of what they pay someone. If you’ve made such a machine, the best way to make more money is to put as much input into the machine as possible.

And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking.

Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”

> Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team.

Depending on the manager and on the team, 1:1s with people can be very valuable for all involved.

The dynamic I saw at a FAANG-adjacent company when I worked there was wild between the contractors and FTEs. If an FTE could get one or two contractors reporting to them, they'd hand over all the work, put their feet up and take it easy, make fun of the contractors, and then if there were any good results jump in to take credit for those at meetings with upper management which the contractors were not invited to.

So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.

Those companies still make money though. I think there are two levels to an organization

1. The level of "this is an arrangement of labor/capital in order to produce money"

and

2. This is an enterprise where thousands of people spend 1/3 of their time and takes up a huge mental space, so they arrange it in a way that affirms their internal sense of purpose

Organizations, especially large corporations which have passed a few "too big to fail barriers" gradually become a "purpose factory" where their product partially becomes imbuing their higher level employees a sense of importance and justification for spending years there.

A company is like a bridge. The job of a bridge is to support the weight of what crosses it. But if a particular deck or arch or beam or joint or bearing fails to do its own job, the bridge can fail and will catastrophically. Perhaps some beams hold more weights than others, but can any bridge be composed entirely of decks or entirely of arches or entirely of beams? Perhaps, but we do not see many of them. It is always possible to innovate in the design of bridges, but if most of the great bridges in the world all have a mix of decks and arches and beams and joints and bearings, instead of simply being composed of solely beams or solely joints, then we might begin to wonder if this composition is not accidental to the proper functioning of a great bridge, but essential to it, even if we are not particularly interested in or proficient in the Art of Being Another Part of the Whole.

You're both criticizing management for not knowing who's doing important work, and also for spending time talking to engineers to understand what's going on.

Most solutions to understand what's going on, in detail, are naturally going to be quite time consuming.

The one time I worked at a large corporate, my time was split between failing to find useful projects that I was allowed to work on, and failing to deliver much on the useless projects I was given because I didn't understand that it would e.g. take six weeks and two review meetings to provision an extra half a terabyte of storage on a db cluster.

I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.

Sometimes teams get a req to hire someone and it’s use it or lose it. They’d rather get someone in the seat that will hopefully be useful at some point, and simply retain or grow the team size, than to give it up and be short staffed down the road.

Price's Law says that the square root of the total number of items or participants contributes to at least half of the results[0].

I've found this to be true in almost everything in life, including work and business.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law

Thanks for posting that, I'd never heard of it. I thought of n(n-1)/2 and coordination issues initially but nah.

That’s the first time I have heard this one. Feels something like Pareto principle

As a (former) team-lead and engineering manager (now back to working as an IC), I can say, to paraphrase Edward Gibbon, that management is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions in which it is almost superfluous.

You can analyze a company in different ways, like as a machine or organism. All images are valid, but some are more appropriate. If you fixate on one, like treating an organization as a machine of interlocking parts with defined purposes, then you may be overly surprised that people aren't adding value and start to expect either some deeper purpose or a "correction": imminent layoffs. If you try to understand large businesses as a kind of welfare system to keep the middle class satiated, then the behavior of your boss and coworkers makes sense. They're doing an acceptable amount of work to justify their salaries.

Instead of being demoralized, shouldn't you be happy that you have a nice financial buffer, smart coworkers, and the choice to either effect change internally or compartmentalize work and create a more meaningful life outside of it? I'm not saying you should keep working there, but if you want to play hardball you can always step up or out.

I don't love this idea that software engineering is performative. It's become so prevalent that people instantly think my role is too. It's rather frustrating when you can point to dollar amounts related to the work you've been doing at corporate and then people ask if you do anything there. If you feel this way in your team, perhaps you can engage those who you think are being performative instead of criticize your own coworkers publicly.

It's become so bad that people don't realize what's not performative.

Also, just because I make things look easy or do things quickly, doesn't mean I didn't do anything at all.

I much prefer the label "coder" than software engineer because of this. It signals that the label isn't doing the heavy lifting.

It has always been super difficult in tech to know who does what exactly. You can look at PRs or # LoC but we all know they are not very representative.

Plenty of people have realized that and played the visibility/politics game. Especially in the last decade where tech has tried to be more inclusive and less about hard metrics. Now the narrative is the key component of your performance review. It's vibes all the way essentially

Then you introduce a layer of line managers that are blurring the signal even more, to the point where the narrative about someone is way more powerful than facts. Their whole job is to play politics and pushing a narrative to other managers/ICs during 1:1s.

This was my experience mostly in my 10 years at Google at a certain level.

But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it.

Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cautious development cycle where multiple levels of review covered everything. OWNERS, "readability", very uptight code review. And in order to survive in this environment you had to have a pile of code reviews all running concurrently because making progress on any single one could take days and days to get through review.

But that was kind of the point because pushing the wrong thing and breaking the money printing machine is far worse than moving slow.

But IMHO this didn't scale past 30k, 40k engineers. And inside Google, the culture shifted from one that was SWE/SRE driven to one that was PM driven. And the perf/promo culture for them had really perverse incentives.

Also I have a theory about Google in particular -- its founders and all its initial strong hires all came from academia not industry. And so its internal culture became biased towards a "publish or perish" structure, and "perf" performance reviews honestly looked more like a thesis defense committee for someone's masters/PHD than anything I'd encountered in the software industry before.

What did you see as the perverse incentives for the PMs there? Schedule optimization like cutting out testing? Cost cutting by under-hiring?

My perspective is that promotion especially for PMs (and SWEs to some extent) involves pushing novelty / "demonstrating impact".

IMHO this in large part responsible for Google's ADHD around project cancellations/replacements.

Not restricted to PMs but it is especially pernicious when product direction gets pushed this way.

Cost cutting and underhiring were never a problem while I Was there. More the opposite. They overhired and then there was no good throughput on projects because every chef was in the kitchen at once.

If I recall, the turndown on e.g. Google Reader was more about finding it difficult to get SWEs who wanted to work on it. I think it would have been increasingly difficult to survive the performance review cycle if you were stuck on a "backwater" project like that.

> Anyone else notice this?

This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc.

Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.

That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done.

Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.

This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity.

I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.

> Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff

This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.

There is always some form of social loafing going on in any large group of people doing work.

"The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases."

There is evidence of this in simple tug of war games.

But I think there is also truth in realizing work is mostly performative: the pareto principle seems to apply. 20% of the workforce sustains the other 80%. That's purely anecdotal, I doubt the numbers align that way. But it does always seem there are a few all-stars carrying others.

Large companies are incredibly unproductive and inefficient.

That said the unevenness of contribution isn't strictly a large company phenomena. Small companies have the same uneven distribution. I've worked at two startups with about 4 people total and people were not equally productive.

That said, this is not necessarily the goal and productivity is also very hard to measure. It's doubly hard to measure across different types of work. One person can code up a greenfield back-end for something in 3 days while another can spend a week fixing some elusive infrastructure problem.

Not everyone is as good at everything. So we do have engineers who truly are much better than average. And in large companies most are average. But that is just one factor here.

1:1's can add value or they can not add value. Large companies can't just be flat so someone needs to manage people. A good manager adds value, a bad manager might subtract value, but that's orthogonal.

Is it demoralizing to work for a big and inefficient company? Sure. Is it more demoralizing for people who are motivated to get things done and are good at it? I think so. Go start your own company?

Yes, and being completely sincere here: This is why most big companies have incredibly low velocity and do almost nothing of any actual value, and seem to make almost no progress at all.

The only parts of these companies that actually do real work at any acceptable rate are skunkworks, and they are created precisely because the rest of the company's structure doesn't actually function for getting anything done.

You can get incredible value out of 1-on-1s with capable managers. Insight about where the organization and product is going that you would otherwise miss, you’ll get to rubber duck about your high-level problems with someone who understands them, and its your time to influence decision making. But it does require a capable and motivated manager and an organization that gives the manager actual agency

After some more experience at various types of workplaces, you'll discover that this hyperfocus on "productivity" is a mind virus trying to destroy all stability and long term value.

Trying to be a rockstar every day is the fastest way to burning out and making bad decisions. It ensures that you will be left holding the bag. How is that not more performative, if it's in the name?

This is one of the main reasons why I left the corporate software world. I love programming too much to spend my life climbing that ladder. I'm fortunate enough not to have to work right now, but if I ever go back to an organization I'm going to be very picky about finding one where the leaders are themselves technical contributors and they hold the team to a high standard.

I don’t know that this is something specific to workplaces. I think anywhere you have a hierarchy and incentives you’ll see people perform to those incentives. But, I am not a behavioral psychologist, so maybe there is something special to “corporations”. It could be that corporations have a lot more incentive to perform for.

Work is performance art

I wish my manager's calendar was purely 1:1s.

I switched to a large company from a series of startups (including my own), it is definitely a big change, and "efficiency" is not the thing anymore.

Now I can spend days fighting with some gnarly IT security problem to load an internal Python package cross-org with a Managed Identity token issued to Build Pipeline that is scoped to a Service Principal with a wrong checkbox, or something equally cryptic and useless. Nothing of it would be even remotely possible in a startup. Is it "performative"?.. I think not. Is it efficient or necessary? Probably not, but who knows. Chesterton's Fence and all that.

In my experience a lot of companies try really hard to be data oriented and try to find objective metrics for impact, sometimes it’s good, often it’s bad. Like LOC count, PR count, time in meetings or time spent at the office.

Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.

on the flip side, try to get an open source maintainer to define what the criteria are for merging a pull request, or what a bug report needs in order to be fixed. they all say one thing and it is always another. it feels like pulling your hair out.

You forgot the gigachad gif.

"Doesn't merge PRs."

"Doesn't fix issues."

"1m downloads."

> it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers

Why is the meaning of your own life derived from your perception of the lives of others? Or rather, why is it that when you judge others’ lives as inauthentic you find your own to be so too?

Yes, everyone in the know knows it. That flaw is the edge start ups have. Fat, red tape, and bureaucracy is cut.

Replaced with a new set of problems of course. Like no money. And if the startup is successful it will eventually morph into a big fat corporate culture. The circle of life.

TBH, large companies deliver tuned, complex products for long-term use by customers. The problem is not producing them, but getting it right all the time, because development costs are a tiny percentage of reliance costs by the customer.

Most of what you call performative is likely real, but even if it were purely performative, it would surface people who were not on board and possibly unreliable.

Similarly, a 1:1 with no apparent content could serve its purpose of looking you in the eye to see if you're of sound mind.

I think your concern is better framed as whether people are pulling their weight. The solution for that is to make them deliver something hard on their own every so often, and cycling people through teams to avoid free riders.

Yeah, this is 100% the case - while not a FAANG I worked at a moderately large tech company in the UK and it was astonishing how slow everything moved, but people were always getting promoted. I eventually left because every project took about 10x the effort it should have.

The stock price went down 20% during the time I was there, and I could see why - it took months to ship a tiny button.

I work with a lot of ex-FAANG now and they haven't had much of a chance to do impactful things. I've heard a lot of "I was responsible for the reporting function on this dashboard that's 10 clicks deep on Google Play"

I do think Layoffs, while obviously very sad for those involved, were needed.

I worked at Amazon and I do think that more than anything we were overhired with little meaningful work. A lot of compliance goal chasing. Not that it’s performative to the top brass, but the work was very little and not usually very technical.

Feels like taking an Uber to a battlefield, fully prepared for a bloody fight, and then realizing you're the only one there and nobody showed up. All those advertised slogans and inked cultural standards, and for what? I never worked for a FAANG company, but I had the pleasure of being interviewed by most of them. I met engineers dedicated to the vision, running in circles, hardly any of their hard work ever merged in production. I never understood it, and I think it's a real problem, how does an engineer build a track record if they spend years writing code that never reached a single real user.

All corporate jobs are performative, in the sense that there are many useless rituals one has to observe merely for appearances' sake and not because it benefits the company or accomplishes the work.

Pretty much anything coming out of middle management or "org leadership" is performative. Line managers and their reports are generally actually building products and keeping the lights on.

You can choose to be as charitable as you want with your lense on this. Incentives within all organizations lead to a certain class of worker taking over. From the "getting things done" perspective I like the lense of insurgents vs. gatekeepers from this interview:

https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transc...

The stuff you think is performative and useless is most likely the consequence of letting a couple "all stars" do what they want for years.

> Anyone else notice this? This is not just the big MNCs but this is happening throughout all organisation irrespecitive of SWE or not. I know its really heartbreaking and there is still not a KPI to measure productivity/performance in a right way? Did anybody come across any intressting KPI they were measured against?

This is why I spent most of my career in startups. I did work at big companies twice for a few years, and it strongly reinforced that decision.

Startup life has it's own problems. Primarily that the company may cease to exist at any time. it's not for everyone, but I adapted after my first big layoff.

> the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal

Consider yourself lucky. This part is missing in some places.

“The Work Is Mysterious And Important.” - Mark S. To Helly (Severance, AppleTV) https://www.thegamer.com/severance-most-memorable-quotes/

After a certain size, one of my favorite Civilization quotes kicks in:

"The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.

Agreed, but the small-company-doing-meaningful-work is also hard to find though.

Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders.

ironically i posted the exact same quote before seeing your post. I've found that whatever work that can be counted as meaningful often also signifies a certain amount of agency that does not exist in a larger bureaucratic system.

there is a lot to pull apart here

there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more positive tone, make the information concise in a bottom-line up-front style, use a deeper voice (told to me by my wife and women colleagues), and pace the information in a way that lets people ask follow up questions iff needed. no one should _have_ to do all this, but it does change people's perception of how competent you are. I've seen both sides of this coin - amazing engineers that get no promo because they can't communicate, and mediocre engineers that get promoted quickly due to their ability to communicate. I'd almost even argue that this is how should be - as you climb the corporate ladder, communication becomes a lot more important than technical skills and ability

to your point about 1:1s: if you're not getting anything out of your 1:1s, that's a skill issue and is on you IMHO. even when I had bad managers, I was able to effectively communicate my needs, goals, updates, thoughts, as well as give feedback back; in doing so, I've been able to turn horrible manager-team dynamics into a positive experiences. and I'd always argue it came down to the fact that the people perceive you directly correlates with how serious they'll take your word

at the same time, I can empathize with the idea that some middle managers are just bodies that get in the way - everyone's had their fair share of that. but if you're actually good at your job and communicating , you should almost always be able to get around them when it's really necessary

EDIT: and this is coming from a person who is and will always want to stay as an IC engineer

Thanks. This was a valuable read for me

Playing the game of nines, 99.9995% uptime, on-call rotations, and retaining all those certifications requires a lot of excess capacity. They're filling space until shit hits the fan. Might as well let them cosplay in the meantime.

Yes, very much so, although I've come believe that the corporate jobs outside of SWE might be even more performative. It also seems like something that has become way worse since the late 2010s, in tech specifically at least.

Yeah it exists all over. Talk to your friends who were business majors in school what they are doing now. It is shocking what some of them actually do day in day out and they know full well it's bullshit jobs sort of stuff that just pays the bills.

Imo it's a symptom and the cause of the entire incentive structure of a hierarchical company; success in that system is defined as doing exactly what one layer above you expects, no matter how rational or connected to output it is. Most people just accept the smaller ways this manifests as a fact of life because it's easy and it's how they get rewarded.

For example, generally you'll be fired if you're not on time, regardless of whether "on time" is meaningful or connected to any real constraint. If there isn't a hard deadline, someone will pick an arbitrary one and decide that's what they need to be mad about that week. It could be that you just weren't on Slack at the moment they said "hey".

If it's not immediate, they'll note it down and weaponize it later. There's seemingly always someone like this in charge and there are only limited, temporary, or lucky ways around it.

If it's not specifically time, it's some other aspect of visibility that's never sufficient. Controlling people and organizations are built on an insidious lack of trust and the pursuit of measurability. This is why, imho, it's rarely worth doing more than the bare minimum, because you need 100x positive extra credits to compensate for even one petty mistake. Not being available in the middle of the night to fix a bug in the system gets you a negative mark in a performance review, while staying late to fix the bug gets you 0.01 positive marks.

I think 50 to 60% off all the work that is done is actually wastage there's lot of things that are done for the sake of doing things but really doesn't add any value or doesn't add any output performance

The "true work" is sporadic. A business will need an engineer to work hard for long hours for a few weeks, then they won't need him at all for weeks more except to be on hand if something goes wrong. Then maybe some more work, and even longer lulls.

But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse).

Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).

There is something to be said for having your own startup and keeping it lean, implying that everyone on the payroll must be a cofounder. It's a prerequisite for but not a guarantee of staying mission focused.

Good PMs really carry teams, clearing politics and bureaucracy on your behalf. It's just that these people aren't the majority of the populace

Scrum and agile are performative and most 1:1s are a waste of time, they are just a way to stay in people's good graces and keep up appearances.

"including FAANG"

What would make them less vulnerable to this?

I'd say they have people who have been doing software for as long as 30 years, and also all the human resources and billions of dollars to fix this problem if it was something that could be fixed with human resources and money.

And still ... there's a lot of this.

Another way of thinking about this, is by thinking about who defines what is productive or what produces value. I tend to be a little old fashioned, I think that doing the right thing for customers produces value. (That's what my self-worth is based on anyway.) For other people, it's doing the thing that gets them the next raise or promotion.

Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?

The only place where the work I did was performative was government contracting. Not technically waste, but certainly useless.

part of the universal scalability law: the cost of coherence scales quadratically as workers are added.

everything else is downstream of that

ITT: "What is "coordination", and why is it bullshit?"

The lack of humility among tech folk is astounding. Why dont you ask yourself why the 10x'ers/doers/high-impact people aren't setting up their 3-trillion dollar company if they are so darn effective by themselves? Perhaps becaus they'll need the "bureaucracy" to interface woth the rest of the world to get things like "money" and "contracts" and deal with the legal system...as well as ensuring their work is aligned and cohesive.

Depends on where you are within those companies. These companies are not monocultures.

Promo-driven culture. Engineers and managers optimize for promotable work.

Jeff Bezos covered these grounds well here already, with his mandate on how meetings must run, and about "day one". Check him out.

So sad that with the right incentive structure his work would be of immense value to society, instead of his current Wall-E prologue side quest.

I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies.

At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.

</rant>

IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.

Lean, fast, agile (not in that way, in the real definition of the word) start ups hiring people who are fleeing a FAANG, only to have those FAANGers implement exactly what they left will always seem strange to me

Saw it happen at a company I worked at. Company had flat org structure that took it very far, and worked well. Leadership rolled over, bunch of new manager blood came in, from FAANG, talked about how nice our systems were, and then proceeded to upset the applecart by implementing all the level systems and such, in such a way that the engineers who had been at the company before were never above an L4, and all the "staff" and "platform" were new blood. They then did one or two token promotions, and were astonished when half the legacy seniors quit within the year

Most corporate jobs are performative, period.

Are most corporations preformative? (yes)

You are so naive you don’t get it yet?

All of “adult” life is performative . Life is a game, a performance, a little play you put on for the benefit of all.

Consider this: if management thinks something is impressive, well that makes it impressive. Managers, by definition, manage people, and having 1:1 meetings helps with that. Are you supposing managers also make the same exact effort and contribution as ICs? Would they still be managers?

Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?

To add:

This entire post rubs me so wrong. It just feels so naive, so foolish. I feel I’ve been baited into anger.

You really think the work you do matters and is not performative?

Meta, OpenAI, etc. could disappear overnight and I think most people would say good riddance (apart from those needing jobs).

I do not think that. I mistakenly responded to myself -- so you're responding to my own echo. :)

My personal thoughts on the matter are: we should burn this society to the ground and begin anew. Life will grow from the ashes of the Capitalists.

This response is naive.

I don't think it's either black or white. That said, I wanted to highlight that some adults do have some neurodivergence, which, in a way, makes them a bit naive and unable to navigate the game you mention. There is no need to be condescending.

When I was working in a small company (3-4 devs), we used to build stuff that clients needed. We built billing systems, JS widgets (back when widgets were a thing), analytics, and full on CRM. As long as it helped our customers. We ran all this on VPSs.

When I joined big tech, I understood that most of work is going around and “proposing” solutions or “solving inter team blockers”. People who did the actual job, got very little recognition. People who did peacocking were promoted.

At that time I realized how fucked up corporate is.

Atleast not at Amazon

The reason why I distant myself from software even before AI is because of all the shenanigans the software people do, primarily silicon valley but it echoes quickly beyond that where other companies try to copy cat it. It feels like a cult, with all sort of weird rituals, if you are an individualist it’s hard to maintain it there.

like with most things, these things are both overrated and underrated.

are there performative jobs|tasks|employees|cultures? yes.

are most of the things that engineers think are performative and useless actually so? nope.

some examples:

* managers managing upward - feels useless - is actually the most impactful bang-for-buck for managers to give their teams space to operate without micromanaging

* sales and marketing. The best software in the world won't get known, bought, or used, without good sales/marketing. There is no meritocracy on quality. Almost no business succeeds through technical credibility alone.

* 1on1s. They may not add any value to you, but 1) you'd miss them when they're gone, 2) i don't know how else you expect managers to stay on top of employee concerns - just know "inately"? 3) they may matter A LOT for your teammates, and them being happy means your team will be happy

There are other things like that.

Yeah, there is a famous book on that called "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber

I guess it depends on the company and the project. If you really think your work or your project isn't useful to the company, or it feels performative, maybe you should try to hop to another project or company.

Yes

Please read the book "Bullshit Jobs"

Most SWEs are a mix of Duct tapers and Box tickers, and their managers are Taskmasters.

I think Elon noticed it.

I think Elon pretended to notice it. Instead of taking his time and doing it right, he was performative in his own actions causing unnecessary problems. In doing so got rid of the important pieces as well as the bloat.

It is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?

You must have forgotten about how bad Twitter was after the takeover/purge.

December 2022 - https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fi...

February 2023 - https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cos...

March 2023 - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286

And yet, it's up NOW.

It's obviously hard to say how accurate these numbers[1] are, but it looks like Twitter has doubled their workforce from its lowest following their mass layoffs. It might be stable again now because they hired the workforce required to actually keep it running.

[1] https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-employees/

Ok? But it's still like 1/3.

Yes, which would allude to sentences 2 and 3 in my original comment.

Because it does not take 7500 employees to keep a website online. It never did and it still doesn't and Twitter is not special in this regard.

Why does everyone focus on this aspect? Why is this surprising? Do people think that 100% or even 20% of Twitter employees were SREs? Do you think that most large applications are kept alive by constant manual toil from SREs? (ok, ok some are - but still!)

What's funny is that Twitter SRE used to be horrible and the app probably would have collapsed entirely (rather than the little bit that it did) without hundreds of manual operators, but in the few years leading up to the "acquisition," massively improved to the point that they literally automated themselves out of a job.

Anyway, Twitter had thousands of engineers, salespeople, support people, and so on. They were working on tens of new products in an attempt to find more revenue (everything from clones of every single social media app you can imagine to becoming a sports TV network), and on the other side (Goldbird), selling and supporting ads, the thing that made Twitter money.

The metric to look at isn't uptime, it makes no sense that people keep parading this metric. The metrics are revenue and revenue growth and surprise! by most available metrics, the Elon strategy torpedoed those.

Twitter was, like almost every "web" company in ~2020, a very "fat" company because they were re-investing free ZIRP money in future growth investment. Elon turned it into a KTLO operation, and didn't even manage to succeed at the standard PE style "fat" company slim-down (where you chop growth initiatives and keep the revenue, like everyone else is doing now), because he also chopped the revenue side.

Is it really that shocking to you? Twitter is a very narrow company compared to Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Apple. The system was already up and running, they probably kept the employees that built or knew the system deeply and fired the others. Apparently it had around 7,500 employees at its peak. To me that seems excessive for something like Twitter.

things tend not to break in new ways when you don't change them.

maybe theres some scaling limit where twitter will have difficulty running, but its a fairly straightforward piece of software?

on the other hand, it likely has a bunch of security holes from not updating dependencies and so on

Possibly more holes if Grok has been vibe coding much of it for years now.

I watched (most of) this video on YouTube, an interview with a former VP at Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc

The TL;DR about promotions seems to be that:

1. There are guidelines on what you need to do to reach each level

2. Your direct supervisor will work with you on how they can game the system to get you the promotion

For example, they might propose a re-org that will take a product or feature (and therefore some direct reports) from another team and put them on your team so that you have enough direct reports to qualify for getting the promotion you want. They pitch that re-org to other people to get buy-in, either by being straight ("I want this so that my direct report can get promoted") or by justifying it business-wise ("bringing this feature over to our team will reduce overhead by allowing these two groups to communicate more directly"). In some cases, you just bring them over for six months until the promotion goes through and then you give them back; in others, you just cannibalize that team for good.

In other words, it's a zero-sum game where you're taking away the ability for other teams to accomplish their goals so that someone can reach an arbitrary milestone for promotion that their team's current situation doesn't allow for.

I was talking to a CEO of a small/mid-sized startup recently who was interviewing for an exec position and someone from Facebook was intervewing; CEO asked directly "why are you applying for this position? We can't pay anything remotely close to what you're getting at Facebook, surely you know that". His reply was that working at Facebook was so toxic, so stressful, that he just couldn't do it anymore. He was willing to cut his pay by 50-75% just to not have to deal with the constant toxic back-and-forth necessary to get anything done there (and/or to keep your job in the first place).

People ask why I don't go apply for Google or Facebook or Amazon; part of it is that I don't know that my experience would get me in the door, to be honest, but part of it is also that working at those places sounds so stressful and toxic that the pay isn't worth it, at least not at my age.

These companies do some marvelous engineering work, but it seems that the engineering skills get you in, while the political skills get you through performance reviews. There should be a FAANG-like acronym that encompasses great companies that aren't toxic.

It’s basically bullshit jobs — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

The compensation can be high, but the psychological cost is real. Over time, that tradeoff isn’t always worth it: someone might earn more in the short term, yet pay for it with chronic stress, declining mental health, and even a shorter lifespan compared to a lower-paid role that’s more meaningful and less draining.

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