azanar

This is really presumptuous, and makes a leap from correlative to causal on the back of a couple of blanket assumptions.

The first is that there are better things to do than blog: based on what? If someone feels the itch to write about something they really care about, and doesn't want to bother with more formal methods of publication, I think that blogging is one of the best things they can do with their time. It is not like they are producing nothing; they are producing something that will -- hopefully -- propagate ideas and critical thinking. This sounds like a very good thing. Not all problems that are looking for an answer will have that answer found in a block of code; sometimes the wetware needs to be refactored.

The second is that people who blog more than infrequently are apt to be technically rusty, and should be subject of suspicion. This make me suspicious of those who would assert that. Again, based on what assumption? I agree with the claim that if they blog more they have less time for other things besides blogging; rollover minutes only work on some cellphones. But to claim that because they blog more they know less; this is quite an extraordinary claim. It wants to lump everyone who blogs a lot in with the blowhards. What if someone has a lot to say, and thinks it is important to get those ideas out? It sounds like you would tell that person to shut up and get back to work. I worry about the consequences of this.

You have stated this twice, but the reason why this should invoke worry seems to have been left as an exercise to the reader. Perhaps there is some sort of underlying assumption you make about someone pimping their SO score that I am not making?

Help me understand why this should worry me. There are plenty of good questions and good discussion that I've seen on SO, and the reputation people have earned has seem more often deserved than not. I don't think a good SO reputation deserving quite the heated bandwagon snarking this article produced.

The question is whether "Pythonic," as the community defines it today, is optimal in all cases. As an analogue, there have been enough talks about things the Java community considers to be stylistically optimal that look really horrible compared to implementations in other languages -- like Python. :-) Pythonic style should be a guide, not an edict, and should be deviated from or redefined when it makes sense. The examples riobard provided already show the syntax weighing things down, a situation where syntax should give way to a more functional style approach.

As for it creating a cleaner language, I try to approach this, as with all things, from the perspective of being an language-agnostic programmer. From that perspective, I do like the python syntax for simple things like what you defined, but under heavier weight mapping and filtering operations, the map/filter function call syntax seems a lot cleaner. There's nothing wrong with syntactic sugar, but I would assert that it will tend to suck when it is all you have.

It depends on what you define as power, and how wide of a continuum you are willing to presume that it runs.

Named functions add two levels of clutter.

The first is to the actual code, because you have to add a name to something that never wanted one, and it has to be defined apart from where it is used. You could give it a fluff name, but that is worse than no name at all. The reader is left wondering what the function is for, which requires carrying unnecessary mental baggage. It would seem more powerful to me that you just define a function where it is used, and not worry about having to carry around that extra mental information for later on; the less state you need to keep the better. But I may only say that because I, like you, tend to think functionally.

The second is to the namespace, because now there is a symbol in the environment that doesn't need to be there. It's not a huge deal, but it is just another bit of extraneous fluff.

Anyway, not meaning to turn this into a language war. Just a couple of thoughts that popped into my head when I read your first paragraph.

how did you finally know you were good enough?

I agree with mattm, but want to understand a little bit more about ''why'' you think you are not good enough to start applying, so I and others can comment better on if you have a legitimate concern or if you are underestimating your own abilities.

FWIW, it is a pretty common trend for especially good programmers to underestimate how good they are. Borrowing from pg, to echo my own observations: "I've found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent." It's anecdotal, but it is what I've found as well; the people I respect don't project the attitude that I owe them my respect. The more

But I will state a sentiment that hasn't been mentioned on here yet; your first derivative of ability is way more important most of the time. What you need to be able to do is almost never constant, especially at the places this article is discussing. You need to be sufficiently motivated and curious to be continuously finding better ways, better libraries, better frameworks that help you do a good job faster. The best way to develop a good ability differential is to give a damn; it sounds like you are already there.

As far as being objectively good enough, that is an extremely tough call for anyone to make about themselves, because you have biases; if you're really good, you can account some for those, but true objectivity is nigh-impossible. It's even hard for other people to know, for the same reason, and because they have incomplete information.

The way I deal with this is to err on assuming I'm not good enough yet. Not in the sense that I get down on myself, and assume I never can be, but in the sense that I shouldn't try to drown out my curiosity because whatever effort I will expend is futile. If I'm right, then I'll be doing what I need to do to become good enough; if I'm wrong, then I've still learned something, and haven't just settled with good enough being enough. Wherever I am, there is always better, and approaching that regardless of whatever arbitrary finish-line others might lay in my path is way more important to me.

Anyway, enough rambling. :-) Given your thoughts in this post, I'd say you have the right attitude; don't lose that, it's really what will get you the respect and attention of those you respect and look up to.

It is possible that this person is being interviewed by Google as a result of a referral by another employee within the Google, or even a referral from the hiring manager themselves.

Unless what you mean is that a hiring manager only consider people whom he and every other potential interviewer already know before the interview process even begins. The odds of ending up with such an arrangement at a place the size of Google, or even a place 1/100th the size of Google, seem insanely remote.

Someone on an interview loop at a large organization is bound to not know you from every other candidate who walks in the door. Even with phone interviews, odds are they call people based on factors entirely other than "do they know this person?" The best he may know about you is that some other person in the organization referred you, but it is not obvious whether they'll appreciate knowing this or be pissed off that their objectivity is now screwed. Some interviewers really prize trying to be as objective as possible in interviews, because interviews have a habit of being horribly imprecise anyway. But then, so do referral from J. Random Employee ("I have this cousin who's really good with computers; he helped me setup Outlook and everything. We should hire him a as software engineer.")

But then, maybe that is your point. If a company ends up at a size where they can't rely on connections, they're too big already.

Totally agree. But these values are so often a societal default, and so often never thought about except in how to extrapolate with those values as a basis.

Making a point like this can result in one of three things: the reader already though of this, and acknowledges it as such; the reader discards the insight as irrelevant or wrong; or, the reader feels a sense of cognitive dissonance, and starts to analyze the statement in the context of their core values.

The statement itself was just matter of fact. I didn't pick up any sense of judgment; more of making the point that A implies B, and that the original commenter should make sure he's comfortable accepting both premises. I don't see anything wrong with making sure that people are consciously aware of what their values imply.

I agree with your take on happiness; it is fundamentally a matter of frame of mind.

However, the inputs to one's frame of mind evaluates can have a significant effect on happiness. It depends partly on how your brain was/is wired, and a significant amount on deciding which inputs to take seriously and how to relatively weight them.

I haven't spent a full week at a strength in quiet deep uninterrupted thought, but I probably do over the course of a year or two (approximately, I don't really keep track of time when I'm thinking). Part of this thinking is looking into my frame of mind, seeing how things are wired together based on snap judgments I've made in the past, and seeing if there are places where I am weighting things wrong, or even places where I should just start discarding input entirely. I guess, in a sense, you could say I'm performing back-propagation on my mind. :-)

kids have a way of totally ignoring the bullshit they're supposed to see, and just seeing instead.

My wife is the same way, and it is absolutely wonderful. She's a great source of insight when my frequent introspection runs into a difficult, deep problem. That she does the same sort of mental self-analysis often means she and I have non-overlapping insights about things. It helps me spend less time in a state of confusion.

Really good advice overall, though. Kudos.

It's not just a matter of pride; for my sake is a certain amount of skepticism in what all has been pathologized. Regardless of what motives, or who's, you might believe is a result of this, we seem hasty in pinning on conditions and prescribing meds. That behaviors may be off the norm seems a priori evidence that they are bad behaviors, and need to be corrected, and our triggering deviation from the norm seems to be narrowing. But then, this could be because I tend to become friends with all of the outliers, and I have a sampling bias. :-)

I have thought about chatting with one or two mental professionals myself, but more out of a sense of curiosity than a sense that I need to be chemically renormalized. I'd like to first figure out what I might potentially be diagnosed with, and then begin the much more interesting discussion of where it becomes a problem, and whether it matters as more than just a label I could potentially exploit for preferential treatment.

It's more a matter of perceived fragility, both in the physical sense (safety hysteria) and the emotional and psychological sense (provider hysteria). This is constantly reinforced by other people behaving as though their children are fragile, and falling into the hysteria themselves.

No one wants to be at the bottom of this pile. It would be the same, in a coarse sense, as being at the bottom of the pile in a high school or in a clique of society wifes. Social ostracism, harassment with and by child protective services, and honest to goodness psychological damage of everyone involves can result from such petty bullshit. That you have to deal with such pettiness is a sign not that you should try to win harder, but that perhaps you should just stop playing the game.

In all of this squabbling, it is possible that, in an absolute sense, the child's life could be awesome. They could be comfortable, psychologically stable, and totally happy with life. But it doesn't matter, because all of this social in-fighting is a local phenomena, and being on the bottom in any locality makes you a "bad parent" almost by axiom.

BTW, not arguing at you so much as using your thoughts as a basis for my own. :-)

As I've commented on here before, I and a lot of the people I know seem to have gone through childhoods where the parents believed this trade-off was really binary. I got it less than many people, but I still would have liked to see my parents, and their parents as well, not suffer through existence so much because of "needs" they thought we had. The only reason they thought we had those needs is because all the other parents in the neighborhood reinforced that children have those needs by catering to their own children thusly. It almost seems like the same force that drives parents to obsess about the safety of their children. They don't want to seem like the parent who cares the least.

The problem is that the goalposts you allude to in a higher-level comment are defined by this mechanism. I agree that goals will change -- any life change will result in resetting of goals --, but I think we absolutely suck as a collective on evaluating where those goals ought to reset to, and just let blind oneupmanship against other families guide us to local maxima.

Perhaps it is sampling error, but the companies that have downsized that I've known people at have largely said this same thing. There was some financial pain, and economically forced separations mixed in, but for the most part the recession seems to have provided a good political scapegoat to prune net-negative employees without the stigma or guilt of firing someone.

A change of submission title might be in order here.

I don't think it does, though, and hopefully I can argue my way through this without stepping on any traps.

The argument of the author seems to rest largely upon the function of the amygdala. Because it lights up when exposed to stimuli where the recipient has a memory of that stimuli associated with some undesirable outcome, her assertion seems to be that amygdala must be the basis behind our reaction to all things our memory has build intuitive associations of outcomes around. I think this is a conclusion we can't yet draw. Because these research subjects are able to isolate important photos in a series based upon some intuition of a prior exposure, this doesn't mean I will always build an intuitive order of things based upon my own prior recollections about my emotional state of mind. As Mz points out as well, it makes a tremendous assumption about memory.

This almost reads like she wants this to be true. If this is the case, she is not the only one. I've had a number of discussions about this with other people who seem emotionally reactive toward things, who have expressed a desire for similar findings, because then they can declare that the emotional snap judgments they had which resulted in very bad outcomes were as good as they could've possibly done. Based on anecdotes from people in my life, this seems wrong; hence, my intuitive sense that this author's conclusions are faulty doesn't seem entirely out of line. Both intuition and experience are feeling confused.

The minimalistic approach he takes is one I follow to a degree myself, but for radically different reasons than he does. I've found that having extraneous things don't make me any happier. Actively rejecting them as part of a radical lifestyle doesn't make me happier either. I am happy because I don't notice them missing, because I don't need them and don't have anyone around reminding me that I should or shouldn't.

The reason I define his lifestyle as radical is because of this.

"I hate civilization as much as anyone, but in these last few years before it crashes, we should appreciate and use what it offers."

Civilization is not going to fail any more than every time prior where it was purportedly on the brink. If you are using this as an excuse for anything, please stop now. You are actively contributing to problems that, if civilization could fail, might cause it to do so. As romantic of a notion as this might be, it will suck beyond belief if it actually happens.

The other notion, that somehow our economy must either be Utopian or negatively-amortizing itself into oblivion, is stated as truth with nothing more than sneering toward idiots, elites, and robber barons as the perpetrators. I normally try to be more cool-headed than this, but this claim is bullshit. There are other options, and given incentives and perspective, people will pursue them. And the incentives are there, for them and everyone else, if people would knock off all of these various scorched earth policies.

The perspective this author offers will keep them from pursuing those options, if people listen to him. I want to liken him to a reader of tea leaves, who's motives may not be less than wholesome; is the tasseographer offering a vision into your future, or are they merely attempting to influence your frame of mind for their own benefit?

It is that frame of mind which determines whether or not you think doing hard work that you love for money is possible or desirable. I think it is possible; I've seen people do it. The author would like me to believe these people are living a lie, and are probably depressed and putting on an fake image for me. I wonder if he believes any of the depressed people are faking it?

As to whether it is desirable, this depends on one's frame of mind. Do you believe that a difficult problem you solve today will matter tomorrow? Do you believe that, if someone pays you to solve that difficult problem, it will matter less than one you solved for free? Do you believe that your work will benefit both yourself and society in some tangible and sustainable way? Do you believe that some impending catastrophe will render all of your work irrelevant? How much of this is passive believe, and how much of what you believe dictates your actions and the influence you have over the eventual outcome?

This really comes down to frame of mind, which seem more and more like matters of faith. You might think civilization sucks; you might think money sucks; you might think doing anything but the bare minimum amount of work to survive another day sucks. I would disagree with all of these claims, but how would I have a reasonable discussion about this? How do you change someone's frame of mind when the validation they've been seeking for years might finally come to pass tomorrow? In a way, I think the first step is realizing that our frames of mind are not without consequence.

The frequency at which I've seen comments paraphrased as "So you hate your work; welcome to life, now shut up and get back to it," is disheartening. I am surprised the number of people, even on HN, who see this mutual antagonism as not just a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one that can and will sustain itself indefinitely.

I honestly don't think it will. In fact, I think it already failed some time ago, and we are feeling the effects of it right now.

The article brings up the number of people who are, or at least feel that they are, stagnating at their current jobs. It also draws the connection between the feeling stagnation and a reduction in productivity and competitiveness. But stagnation isn't typically a temporally local phenomenon; a person does not usually become redundant or stagnant overnight. However, their realization that they are redundant or stagnating can occur overnight, often after ignoring the warning signs for as long as they consciously can.

But productivity isn't just affected by the feeling of stagnation and vulnerability; it is affected by the actual stagnation that an expectation of mutual loyalty causes. The worker can become lazy with the expectation that the employer will keep them on anyway, provided they aren't completely incompetent. This is a considerable threat if the worker doesn't give a damn about their work past the paycheck; what incentive do they have to be anything but as lazy as possible. They were clinging on to their jobs before, but the recession made them acutely aware that they were doing so and how tenuous their grip has now become.

This apathy also negatively affects productivity and competitiveness. But no one notices, because it is business as usual; at least it was. But now employers have started to notice, but they are solving the wrong problem; they assume the problem is one of insufficient data or insufficient supervision. They never assume that one or more of their underlying assumptions about their workforce, and what makes them most effective, might not be true and might never have been true.

I hope that people wake up to the larger lesson this turmoil is wanting to teach all of us. Unproductive people working in what are effectively sinecures are not a sustainable way to run an economy based on the production and distribution of wealth. Eventually, someone will ask where all this wealth is, and won't abide a waffling, noncommittal answer.

The first, that programmer hacking on their own projects, I agree is a very positive indicator. If they don't, it may or may not be a negative indicator, depending on the circumstances. However, I've found the combination of someone who really has the itch to hack in their own time, and that same someone who honestly can't find the time is rare. More often, after enough prodding, they'll admit they just aren't that interested, and that it is "just a job like any other".

The second, that selecting candidates based upon social connections is an optimal strategy, I approach with some caution. This is not to say that it isn't the best way for raganwald to do things, but I have seen people develop insurmountable confirmation biases simply because someone they know gave a candidate the thumbs up. A lackluster interview performance wasn't enough to overcome this; poor performance once hired wasn't enough either. The trust the hirer puts in their network to suggest the right people must be for the right reasons. This, in a person's profession network, is rather rare. More often, two people knowing one another is the basis for a referral, rather than what the two people know about one another. This works ok in situations where the primary goal is to find a good social fit, but it is like throwing dice when determining if the candidate is capable of performing the required duties. In a lot of cases, both parties just don't care; the referral is a social, not economic or professional, transaction. Luckily for both parties, many companies don't care that much either. Mediocrity is not really affected by the introduction of more mediocrity, so neither party ends up with a tarnished image. This sort of politicing sucks.

My perspective on this is much the same as Joel Spolsky's -- or at least the perspective he used to have. If a particular candidate comes pre-recommended by someone, I'm really hesitant to know that. If I'm the person doing the recommending, I always wonder whether I'm doing it because this person is a genuinely good fit, or if I am just feeling the pressure to be a good friend. If I was both introduced to him and one of the one's vetting him, I'd be really concerned that my bias is way too strong for me to make an honest, objective decision. Hiring people based on a blind resume submission sucks, too, and I don't know of any other alternatives. But I worry we have a blind spot to the biases of this method of finding candidates, simply because we want to believe the best in everyone we know.

I think this is completely wrong. See my reply to edw519 for my reasoning why, but the abstract is that I don't think potential is a constant across the population, or even a subset of the population -- like programmers. Aptitude = effort + potential. A good teacher can help, but won't overcome an incapable student, as much as the student may want to please the teacher.

Attitude is a lot harder to change than skill.

This has been said by a couple of others, and my first thought is really that it depends on exactly what people mean by changing a person's attitude. The theme seems to be that candidate A types are just antagonistic pricks who either want it their way or no way at all.

From the perspective I've gained, it's rarely that simple. When an employee gets branded as having an attitude problem, I'll see as often a problem manager as I will a problem employee.

In the cases of the problem manager, what I'll find is a manager who believes that the hierarchy is as hard as stone, and that employees have absolutely no place to question their judgement or the judgement of those above them. Any employee who might offer any sort of commentary or criticism are immediately branded as an attitude problem, and threatened into submission. The subsequent rebellion may take multiple forms, including them just going off into the weeds without listening to anyone about anything. Immature, perhaps, but in a pot and kettle sense. If you find disrespect going in one direction in a relationship, it's worth seeing if that same disrespect flows in the other direction.

Asserting more absolute authority, which seems to be the most common response, will only make this worse. Not everyone's value judgments are subject to overridding by fear and a desire to please others; I don't think we would want them to be, either.

You have taken candidate B and idealized him much more than I think is fair. You have made him into a fledging version of A, by assuming he can be taught to the roughly same level eventually, but without the attitude. You then offer a backhanded jab by saying if B is unteachable to nearly the level of A, it is the teacher's fault. This is an unfair conclusion to jump to.

A positive attitude and a brilliant teacher aren't all that is needed for training to be successful; you also need a capable and curious student. They have to be able to learn this stuff, and they want learn it for reasons other than pleasing the teacher. Where these qualities aligns, the student is bound to do some learning on their own; unless they elect to learn the exact same things as everyone else, they are bound to have something to teach others. That the OP mentioned no one really learns anything from candidate B suggests he doesn't have the drive and curiosity; these are warning signs.

Furthermore, you can't teach creativity. You can't provide someone with a list of steps to follow every time they want to create something new. The list represents the creative product, and the list is just someone following by rote.

What you can do is sow the seeds of creativity; you can inspire. You can ask questions to help guide someone's thinking, and get them past mental roadblocks. You can throw in ideas and expose flaws. But you can't teach someone to be inspired and come up with new ideas. You can't draw them a map, and then expect that with that training alone they'll be able to draw the next one. You have to rely on their brain's capability to form new connections on its own.

So a little reasoning why I am put off by both:

Candidate A has a huge ego. He knows enough about what he is good at to think that he knows enough to be good at everything. Whenever he finds he is mistaken, it will likely be very expensive to you, because he's more likely to go off into the weeds for months than ask someone else for the knowledge he is missing. You may get something brilliant on the other end, but the odds aren't wonderful that it solves the problem you have -- just the problem he thinks you have. Whatever impeccable domain knowledge he does have won't rub off of anyone else, because he's never talking to anyone else. You also run the risk of him becoming extremely bored and leaving. This sounds like a bad deal.

Candidate B is everything candidate A is not, both good and bad; candidate B sounds like a doormat, but a friendly and gregarious one. He sounds like the typical career programmer: learns what they need to know to stay hired, but not much else; does what they need to do to stay hired, but not much else; and makes sure people would feel like they are firing a friend if they ever need to fire him. If all you need is someone to bang out acceptable code according to someone else's specification, and otherwise shut up and keep ideas outside of his specific title to himself (or just not have those ideas, since they're not his business anyway), this might be your guy. However, if you want someone who will be thinking and throwing around ideas outside of his specific set of duties, this candidate may be a drag on the team.

One thing you didn't clarify in your definition of B: when he gives his input, does it contribute anything useful to the discussion?

But yeah, neither sound wonderful. But which concerns are a bigger deal depends on what role the person will fill. It's probable that one or the other will look more attractive once you start thinking more specifically to the position being hired for, and less about the generic cookie cutter programming position.

Was there something significant about the linked section of this article?

People make this choice because they have convinced themselves they never had a choice. They remain there because they are convinced they still don't have a choice.

The explanation is usually a story of falling or being forced into a position followed by stating the tautology of it being a job. They are willing to take a painful known quantity over an unknown quantity elsewhere -- which is assumed to be at least as painful --, all the while saying to themselves repeatedly "I need to be stronger than the pain for the people who rely on me." Sometimes this will become even more self-fulfilling, and they will assume they have no other options, painful or not.

Along with this, they will provide rationalizations about how, even if they had a choice, it really would not matter. The purpose of a job is money. Full stop. If you make it anything else, you are martyring yourself to your employer. Thus, it doesn't matter where you work, so long as you are. Any desire you have to make those hours of your day more meaningful need to be bottled away, because they never will be. Those who don't accept this are ignorant of the facts of life, which are assumed to be true by means of circular logic and a desire to rationalize one's own rut in life.

Humans are amazingly good at rationalization, even when it starts from the usually faulty premise that where they are now is the best things can possibly get.

Hope this provides some insight about your question.

I agree with the other comments so far that this shows a certain degree of passive-aggression which isn't particularly appetizing.

However, I will strongly disagree with the point in a couple of the other comments that the acceptable alternatives are: shut up, do as your told, and detach from your job as much as you possibly can while still performing it; part ways politely without indicating anything was ever other than you expected it. These take an adversarial stance that you and your employer have nothing more to offer one another than what was strictly agreed to as the job duties and wage, and that any such attempt at offering will only result in bad outcomes for the weaker party.

When did we get so fucking bitter and jaded? And when did we decide that this outlook was optimal? I honestly wonder if this sort of attitude contributes to polemics like this, because we insist that people have an seemingly infinite ability to remain stoic and bottle their frustration. The alternative of trying to separate emotionally from a job never, ever works. Doing bullshit for eight hours a day to fund eight hours of "recovery time" is not zero-sum; the effects are real, as much as people want to blame those effects on the mere state of being alive. You are not preprogrammed to be depressed; this is not a least-energy state!

The other option is to quit, but employees usually don't until the get to the polemic-spewing boiling-point of their frustration. It sneaks up on them, because they've been bottling it so long. Writing it and then deleting it is therapeutic, but doesn't accomplish anything. The next job will likely be the same, like a self-perpetuating prophecy, because a lot of employers suck, because a lot of employees within are trying every day to convince themselves they don't care. This is least-energy for the employer, not the employee.

If you really want to step off this cycle, perhaps it is time to admit what you've known all along: you do care what you are doing 8 hours a day, and who you are doing it for.

Right. I'm not saying become paralyzed due to the risks. And I'm not saying do dumb things that mitigate a risk with an even bigger risk. What I'm saying is don't assume your conclusions. Things that other people might argue are important might not seem that important to you, given whatever perspective you have at the time. It is possible part of the reason they argue for using a certain practice is because they, too, didn't see it as important until they got burned hard for their presumption.

This is not to say they are important. It might be that people are just squawking to sell books or consulting hours or seats at a conference. But, to use a really dumb metaphor, if that many hens are squawking about the same thing, it might be time to look in the barn and see what all the noise is about.

Might have been better spent. Might have. Say that it was better spent is just begging the question.

That he didn't get the pump can be blamed as much on poor risk mitigation as it can be on avoiding unnecessary expenses. Having a cavalier and dismissive attitude toward mitigating future risks can result in a demonstration of exactly how faulty one's prioritizations really were.

Don't fall into the trap of assuming just because things were done out of assumed necessity, they were the right things to do.

Another possibility is that it is important, possibly even more important than the other things they are working on, but isn't getting prioritized for other reasons. They've succeeded thus far with the way they have prioritized things, but that doesn't mean that they made all the right choices, it just means they made enough right choices to survive to this point. The future may prove tdavis painfully right in his concern about not having test cases. Another company that may not have made enough other choices correctly may be able to cling to having tests and deployment automated as the thing that saves them. I don't think you can draw any real correlation except that it might not be that important, and only time will tell.

A company managed this way is a company that will have little left but a sales and marketing force eventually, because the executive staff will have pruned everyone else as being redundant. Arguably, this could happen even in a shrinkwrapped software company, where the software isn't just a vital part of the business, it is the only part.

Hire someone incompetent, or see someone incompetent get hired above you, you may find you'll be made "redundant" even if you are the last developer hacking on the product. It is employment at the will of your employer, and nothing says they can't terminate you due to their own incompetence.

In the cases where you can't rely on that happening, then that means no one else gives a damn about what you are doing. This would be very odd in a multi-tiered organization, since often times development projects are decreed onto the programming staff by strategic direction committees. If no one cares, the project is make-work; warning. Either it is going to contribute next to no value to the organization, or no one has a clue what value it is going to contribute. Either way, you'll be hard pressed to convince everyone who needs to be convinced what you are doing is that valuable.

To borrow a PG idea, to everyone above you in the management hierarchy, you are represented -- as an aggregate of the rest of your group -- by either your lead or manager. A lot of the interaction between your group and the rest of the company will be done by them. They need to be your advocate; if they're not doing that, then your entire group is getting shafted, and need to find a better advocate.