Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them.
It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo.
At no point does this article, or most articles like it, do any effort to realize that things are not always like this. Even if there is some unavoidable law that huge companies inevitably fill their ranks with idiots, like this article suggests, you do not need to work at a huge company.
Most people do not work at huge companies. There’s lots of amazing tech companies with fulfilling jobs and they want you, now. But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”.
There’s some weird kind of suffer porn going on here that’s just unnecessary. If you choose to trade your sanity for a high salary then go right ahead but don’t act like you had no choice.
If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would fully agree with you.
But it is.
I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.
So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice.
Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win like being an early employee in a unicorn startup is not a real plan. It's wishful thinking.
I hate this is the world we live in and my soul dies a bit every day I have to waste my talents writing useless software, but there's no real choice.
> I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.
I work from home for a mid-sized company for <=40 hours a week. I turn off my computer at 5pm and don't think about work until 9am the next morning. I work with people I like and we get stuff done. And in spite of all that, we're hardly impoverished—my current forecast is I can retire 10 years early at this rate. Tech salaries are good everywhere in the US, they're just not as insane as they are in Silicon Valley.
I could probably retire even earlier if I were willing to enter the rat race, but I'd rather be there for my kids' childhoods than resurface from the grind just in time to send them off to college.
In other words, it's absolutely possible to choose to avoid it, and it doesn't even require much sacrifice.
For context outside of tech. I have a super flexible job with amazing benefits. I haven't missed a single thing my kids have done, unless I chose to.
And I'll work until I'm 75.
I say this not out of being bitter, but for the context that many (probably most) people who do what they love to do don't get the massive paychecks even mid-tier tech jobs get. Context is everything.
To be honest it vastly depends on what you expect to need in retirement. Based on my current salary and estimated retirement payment (which some online calculator calculated at ~2/3rds my income) I'm still slightly below what I should be saving for that. But by then I will both need more money to take care of family (hopefully) and less money since I should have long paid off my house and car by then.
My salary is much higher than household average but far from unheard of in tech. There are definitely some scrappy college grads getting offers higher than it. and I have 3+ decades to increase it.
If you’re lucky. Modern medicine still has yet to solve most major disabilities for people in their sixties. It will be hard to work if you’re suffering any of the innumerable disabling diseases. What will you do then?
Too bad by that time, someone will have figured out how to look up everything you've ever posted online to dig up insurance-invalidating comments like this one.
Hard disagree. Have never worked for "terrible big company" (though some mediocre medium companies!) But outside of the super high cost of living areas like NYC and San Francisco, it's trivially simple (if not easy) to live on $50-60K USD each year (adjust this number for inflation as needed) while still enjoying yourself, having high performance technology, doing some travel, etc. You can't buy every damn thing you want or live like a millionaire, but you can live a great life.
How many software / engineering jobs in the U.S., excluding terrible big tech companies, pay more than $60k USD per year?
Almost all of them. In fact, it's not hard to make well over $100k. And live on half that. So you don't have to work forever just because you're not making $500k USD each year at some huge terrible tech company.
$60-100k salary is not enough to support a family and retire; it's probably not enough for a single person to make meaningful progress towards retirement because at that level of pay home ownership is constantly out of reach and inflation outpaces wage growth. It's sacrificing your life so someone else can get rich.
In today's environment, home prices really seem to be getting nuts.
As I said, anyone in software is likely making over $100K. A $500K house with 20% down would have a P&I payment of $2,715 / month (at 7.2%, plus taxes/insurance.) That's less than $33K / year. (I bought my first house for $155K making $55K / year, and my second house for $390K making $100K.) If you're making over $100K, and spending under a third of it on housing, you should be able to afford to live, unless you're careless with your money.
I don't think I'm making any sacrifices in my life, because I don't think of the things you can overspend on as sacrifices. As I said, I eat well (at home and at restaurants), I travel, I have great technology / toys. And at 44 I have a 7 figure net worth. Because I'm still spending under $65K USD / year, I could likely live off investments in a few more years, though being in software, it's easy to continue contracting on my own terms and having extra money.
$100k for a down payment - how many years of saving does that take and what happens to that $500k price tag during those years of saving? One hardship like a medical issue, a setback in employment, or a child you weren't ready for, then what? And I'm not sure you could find a one bedroom, one bathroom for $500k in a city with tech jobs.
In places where houses are $500K, rent is probably $2000 / month. (More like $1200 - 5000 / month, but depending on the size, location, amenities, luxuriousness of fixtures, etc.) If you make barely $100K, and are spending $24K on rent, let's say you spend half of the rest on living. That leaves you with $38K savings per year. So it takes you 32 months to save up $100K for a down payment.
The secret is don't spend all of the money you make. Well it's not a secret, but it's also not "normal." It's culturally normal to spend all of your money, and then wonder why you can't build up savings. But if you're a software engineer with an income of 6 figures, you really should be able to figure out how to live a good life without spending every last dollar.
You forgot taxes. $38k - $27k in taxes = $11k savings. So 9 years to save up, by which time housing inflation will have taken the price to ~$700k. You are then $40k short for the down payment.
There are many people in software that are making under $100k
Anyone working in in a government position, or for a state university, or for a nonprofit is probably not earning $100k except maybe in high COL areas or those with quite senior positions.
Don't you think it's interesting that taxes dramatically skew the example?
Think about people earning $50k - $100k. 37 million households in the US. Another 34 million households earn less. 128 million households in America total.[1]
12, give or take 2, years into professional life, you sign a 30-year note and cash out all of your savings. Wages and cost of living won't be constant, but that's basically the optimistic case. Working 42 years to retire by owning one basic shelter.
To be sure if we want an example with someone making $80k after tax, we should really not be looking at houses above $400k. Yes, home prices are nuts, as I observed, but no one should be spending 5x gross income and 6.25x net income on housing.
In my own life, I spent about 2.5x gross income for both of my home purchases. And they were arguably more home than I needed. When I bought my first house, I was single, and I rented out the two other bedrooms. My spouse and I bought a house together, but ultimately could not have children, so the house is too big. (We also live on an acre and have a lot to maintain.) Now I know these Philly suburbs are nothing compared to California real estate, but it's still a medium to high cost of living area compared to the rest of the country, where we're minutes away from any kind of shopping or entertainment we'd want, and 45 minutes from the large international airport.
For sure the rising housing costs make it even harder for households making less than the median. I never argued otherwise. My point was about that which started this thread, that there is "no option" but to work for a big, awful tech company. I disagree, and elevated housing costs don't change that.
It took me about five years to save my down payment. I lived very frugally, don't have a wife, don't have a kid, I paid less than $20k on note for each of my cars, and do not have college debt. I'd say it's fairly difficult if you start moving any of the knobs I minimized or set to zero above. Even then, after my down payment money was tight for the first year because it was everything I had.
I got a mortgage similar to what OP mentioned but I have a veterans home loan. Most people I know don't have one of those, so their mortgage that was gotten at the same time as mine is closer to $4k/m.
>I eat well (at home and at restaurants), I travel, I have great technology / toys. And at 44 I have a 7 figure net worth.
You clearly don't have kids. and/or a spouse that depends on your income. The former drains your money very quickly, especially if you need services like daycare (if your spouse isn't a full time parent... so we're back to one income to support a family of 3+) or perhaps invest in private school. I wouldn't call either of those "overspending" depending on the area. And nowadays you may need to invest in a 529 for that kid's college...
It's already hard raising a kid badly. Raising one well is expensive.
>A $500K house with 20% down
how are you saving 100k on a 100k salary, on top of other savings for rainy days? do you just save for 5-10 years by throwing 20% into a savings account, on top of rent/utilities and other stuff?
Even then, the hard part is getting approved for the sale. The market right now is just absurd. Even if you can comfortably pay mortgage you may be outbid by some family or other person who simply buys the house in cash. You really can't keep up.
Home rates are closer to 8%. The redfin calculator puts a $490k home near me at just under $3200/mo with 20% down.
So over $36k a year. I'm in Washington, so no income tax. Let's say $100k income, single person. No pre tax deductions and you'll be bringing home $6200/mo. So over 50% of your take home goes to mortgage alone.
In your example, your home prices were roughly 3x-4x your annual income. Compared to your example of prices being 5x.
>Why on earth would a single person buy a 490k house?
I'm in California, so that's pretty much the bare minimum. Maybe if I go way out to the high desert area (we're talking 70+ miles from downtown LA), I see more 300-400k houses for 2 bed/bath. In my area (which is still pretty far from Downtown) it's 600k minimum.
70 miles from the downtown of a major city is still generally considered part of that city’s metropolitan area and prices reflect that. Still though getting a 1br condo in LA for 150-300k is more reflective of what it actually costs to get an affordable place as a single person in that area. Yes you have condo fees, but maintain a house comes with serious costs as well.
That’s the thing, if it’s a trivial expense then who cares, but when there’s more affordable options it’s hard to imagine why stretching yourself buying a house at that price would be a good idea.
255k for a 1,952 square foot place in Harrisonburg, VA 22802 is far more representative of most of the US’s housing prices. It’s a modest 50k population university town 130 miles from DC so not in the middle of nowhere but still cheap. https://www.redfin.com/VA/Harrisonburg/1036-Meadowlark-Dr-22... Plenty of places listed for less than that or far more, but in general there’s still a lot of options under 300k.
>getting a 1br condo in LA for 150-300k is more reflective of what it actually costs to get an affordable place as a single person in that area.
A house is a multi decade investment. Why would I buy a single shack if I want to perhaps have a family one day? Especially in this market? I don't want to own a house for the sake of ownership.
And yes, like anything else in life, you have super cheap deals and super expensive. I was using a very rough median pricing. Especially since the lowest cost houses likely mean you need to do the most work on it. I'm not a carpenter nor a house flipper, so that's not of interest to me (and I imagine many other people in tech).
Median pricing downtown is 1m for 2 Bed/bath. I feel the cost going down to 40-50% for going beyond what is considered LA county (which is huge, but not a 70 mile radius) seems to make sense. I suppose you can keep looking northeast towards Death Valley and find something at 200-300k, but you're legitimately getting towards food desert[1] area at that point. The high desert area is already pretty rural as is, unless you are a true hermit (or a stargazer) I can't imagine going further out and making it a 20+ mile drive to any and everything.
That phrase only refers to the distance from you to a grocery store. So, no you don’t need to enter food desert territory when you buy a house in one of the many smaller CA cities/towns.
Anyway, buying a house can be an investment but living in a larger one than you need is wasting a productive asset. If you have a 4 bedroom house you can rent out for 4k/month then living in it is costing you 4k/month the same way renting a place for 4k would be. There’s nothing inherently wrong with buying an investment house, but you shouldn’t be out anywhere close to the full monthly cost.
>you don’t need to enter food desert territory when you buy a house in one of the many smaller CA cities/towns.
You don't, but I'm talking about a very specific area of a very specific state (one larger than some countries) in a very specific location. One where I was in fact raised. You are free to instead go directly North to Bakersfield where prices rise slightly, or west to Thousand Oaks where prices go back to LA prices. I simply don't recommend East/NE of the high desert unless you are a huge fan of tumbleweeds and dust storms.
>buying a house can be an investment but living in a larger one than you need is wasting a productive asset
I don't really consider an extra room a waste. Even if I end up alone I can use that room as a gym or an office or just as storage (storage costs are also way out of whack these days. Owning an extra room is legitimately cheaper).
There's also the fact that half the rooms isn't equal to half the cost. It's more cost effective to add an extra room if you anticipate a family.
By waste I simply mean it’s consumptive. It’s obvious when you’re spending well above the norm on rent, but it doesn’t slap you in the face in the same way when buying a larger house.
If you bought in the past, you made it. That doesn't help the current generation.
Hundred year-old teardowns are two million in our neighborhood. 60+ y-o condos are $800k. Redfin est payment/mo: $5,974. Just the property tax and HOA fee is over $1,000 a month.
Middle class has been and continues to being squished and crushed, things are getting worse and worse if you haven’t noticed. And it’s not just in the US, but also other western economies such as Germany, France, UK, etc.
« Retire early » is the main part you’re missing from their argument, that implies saving large portions of disposable income. I always feel sad when people have high paying jobs they hate just so that « retire early » though, in a field like software engineering you can find a happy medium I feel like.
The happy medium for me would be working less than 20 hours per week. It's not about the work but about how much time it consumes. And part time software engineering jobs don't seem to exist... I would happily live on half my income for half my hours. But if retiring early is more realistic than that (and it seems to be), I'll take it.
It's possible much later in career when you establish yourself in a certain domain. You become valuable enough that you working half the time (or even just consulting) is more valuable than 2 other employees.
But people who can do that are also probably in positions to retire early already. Either with PhD's and 10+ years working on some now-extremely-valuable tech (think AI if you worked on it in the 2010's, or data science in the 00's) or some otherwise reputable name in their industry.
I live in Toronto. The lowest I've seen for a job listing at a tech-oriented small company was 90k on the low end(the job listing was 90k-120k), and this was for someone with 2 years experience. I've never seen a tech or tech-adjacent company offer 60k for even new grads. Most small companies I've seen offer for someone with 5+ years of solid experience a minimum of 120k USD. These are for remote jobs.
Well, not being able to retire at 60-100k is such an US problem... It is enough to easily retirely at whatever the legal retirement age is, earlier if I include all tue benefits my boring big corp job and collectively bargained salary provide.
As I've never raised my standard of living to spending over $100K / year, I don't exactly know what I'm missing.
I think more to your point, yes there is a choice - to make $500K at a "big bad tech company" and then spend like there's no tomorrow on things that you feel are worth spending all that money on, hoping that it makes up for the 40 hours you spend working (and maybe hating?) Or you enjoy your 40 hour job, make less, spend less. But spending money doesn't have a direct and equal correlation with life satisfaction. I spend about $65K / year (for two people, no kids), and I feel like I have an amazing life, and spending a bunch more money would, at best, have small incremental returns on life satisfaction.
I have also never raised my spending to anything close to that. Nor I have the choice of making $500k (I wish).
When I mention standard of living I don't mean spending like crazy. I mean not having to constantly worry that if you lose your job you can't make your mortgage in a few months.
I save around 50% of my salary and I'd save even more if I didn't have a kid and wasn't the sole provider in my home right now. Not because I wouldn't love to be living like a king, but because for me that's the only option I have to afford a life long term.
What if I die? What if I get hurt and can't work anymore? What if me or my wife gets sick and we can't treat it with the limited free healthcare we have access to?
Even barring that. I absolutely hate that I have to give away the prime hours of my day to ensure me and my family can simply survive. I don't want to do that forever. I'd much rather use all I know to build software that actually makes a difference. Read more, experience life more. Travel at least once in my life. Enjoy life while I'm not declining physically and mentally.
I could definitely earn less and live a less stressful life in a better company if I wanted to. But that's the kind of decision that will most likely come back to haunt me and my family in the long term.
Maybe I get very lucky and none of those things happen, and all the time I suffered through those soulless jobs was not needed. But in my view that's a risk I'm willing to take.
To your point, if you are talking about simply getting all that extra money and spend it all without a care, I agree. That's a choice but one I don't have the same sympathy for.
Living below your means is separated from your standard of living.
In a better world everyone should be able to live well without having to sacrifice as much.
Somehow we've convinced ourselves that it's always the individual's fault when they have to live with a worse standard of living to maybe retire one day.
I agree with you regarding the means of living but that's not what I said.
Accepting that you will have to work until you die is lowering your standard of living.
So is accepting that any emergency can bankrupt you or that you will never be able to travel, and so on.
For some reason people are conflating standards of living with irresponsible spending.
> I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.
I find it funny that the internet exaggerations have convinced non-US people that:
1. Doing a couple LeetCode problems is the only thing interviewers look for
2. Everyone here automatically gets a high paying FAANG-like job if they can memorize enough LeetCode problems
3. All of these jobs just write useless software all day and never really do anything productive
and
4. LeetCode problems are impossibly difficult and it’s a tragedy that anyone would be asked to code during a coding interview.
I struggle to read these threads any more because everything seems so stretched out of proportion from the real world. If your view of what US development or interviewing culture is like comes from HN threads, you’d probably be pleasantly surprised by what it’s actually like here most of the time. The weird catastrophizing that happens on HN and Reddit is hyperbole.
I haven't had a job interview without leetcode bullshit in about 15 years. And years before that.
Basically since Joel's posts in the early 2000s. He promoted a reasonable idea-that programmers should know how to program. Then B and C players rushed to make that happen!
Similar to how agile became the complete opposite of what it meant originally.
I was an interviewer at [FAANG]. I did 300+ interviews. At the beginning I asked tough questions since I didn't know better, but I quickly realized I was not getting the signal I wanted. So I changed and just asked simple questions that included writing some code. There was no gotcha, no need to know sophisticated data structures. Leetcode practice would not have helped much.
You may be focusing on the leetcode label, and not the rest of the fail-fast zingers that are ubiquitous. Only a subset are actual leetcode.
The first mistake and you're done, due to the high number of applicants.
If you've got networking to let you bypass the BS, that's great. But most interviews (by number) are "cold" interviews that conduct these almost exclusively. Due to lack of trust and extreme fear of failure.
The only offer I've received in years was because, while they did this type of test as well, they didn't take the results too seriously. One out of maybe a hundred attempts that year.
> I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.
> So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice.
Literally hundreds of millions of Americans retire on much less than than BigCo compensation.
> Are they retiring with the same standard of living they had before?
This is a strong indicator that choice is a factor, despite your protests to the contrary. But what exactly do you mean by "standard of living"? For example, when you're employed, you have to live where the jobs are, no matter how expensive, unless you can get remote work. Whereas when you're retired you can live anywhere, perhaps a place that is both less expensive and warmer.
Retired people seem less obsessed with collecting more material goods (which are often "labor saving" devices, of little relevance to those who aren't laboring) and focused more on enjoying life, traveling, spending time with family, etc. Is that a "worse" standard of living? And the children are presumably living on their own, so there's less need for bigger homes. (Who wants to spend a bunch of time, effort, and money maintaining a big house when you're older and also traveling quite a bit?)
> Can they sustain a medical emergency?
Have you heard of Medicare?
> But I'm pretty sure most can't.
Based on what? Do you have economic statistics to back up your belief?
10x? Financial independence is normally at least 20x, more like 30x.
> How is your nationality relevant to reading stats? If you don't want to, then just say that.
Sorry maybe I wasn't clear, but that's exactly what I meant. I won't dig into stats for the US because it's of no interest to me. That's why I mentioned I'm not from the US.
I know that for my country that's absolutely not the case and I'm pretty sure it's the same for most of the world.
> 10x? Financial independence is normally at least 20x, more like 30x.
You appear to be overlooking Social Security, which is a crucial source of income that all US workers pay into their entire careers. It's not just savings.
> I won't dig into stats for the US because it's of no interest to me.
Yet it's interesting enough to you to make baseless empirical claims about the US.
> I know that for my country that's absolutely not the case and I'm pretty sure it's the same for most of the world.
Since you're so adamant I had a quick search and it turns out I'm right.
>43.09% of American adults had no retirement savings
>23.15% of American adults had no (or negative) retirement savings even including the extended assets
> Since you're so adamant I had a quick search and it turns out I'm right.
No, you changed the subject. You said:
> You're telling me most retired Americans have more than hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings?
To which the answer is no, but you don't need a million dollars to retire.
Whereas your link is not about retired Americans, it's about UN-retired Americans: "Statistics are for households headed by adults aged 32-61 at the time of the survey".
I'm done with this conversation. Your games and lack of good faith interest are becoming very tedious to me.
Read the article. It's about people that will retire. Unless you're trying to be facetious and say they'll never retire, which I guess will be true for many.
> Read the article. It's about people that will retire.
Yes, and the point that everyone is trying to explain to you, which you refuse to acknowledge, is that in general, software developers in the US are doing fine. They don't need to "grind all the leetcode" and work for a BigCo. It's a choice not a financial mandate. Software developers, even outside of BigCos, are in the upper income brackets in the US.
I'm not saying that everyone in the US is doing fine as far as retirement is concerned, but the idea that software developers have to work for BigCos is absurd. I've never worked for a BigCo, and I'm doing fine.
Well now you're moving the goalpost. Your original comment mentioned hundreds of millions of Americans so it can't be only about software developers. That's why the focus changed to everyone.
Anyways, yes you have the choice of not working on big corps. My point is that it's not a real choice unless you want to accept all of the consequences of leaving all that money on the table. You have to accept the risk that you might be a few emergencies away from bankruptcy.
> yes you have the choice of not working on big corps.
Finally admitting the truth.
> You have to accept the risk that you might be a few emergencies away from bankruptcy.
Working for a BigCo doesn't magically protect you from emergencies. Accumulating $millions might protect you, but you don't just walk in the door of a BigCo and pick up your treasure chest. You have to work there for many years. In the meantime, you're subject to the same risks as everyone else. For example, lot of BigCos have been doing layoffs recently, which would put a big dent in the "for many years" plan. Also, if you suffer some kind of disability that prevents you from continuing to work, then you're screwed regardless.
Anyway, what makes you think you would be BigCo material? Not everyone is. The number of jobs is limited, and the competition is fierce. You might be able to get in the door by grinding leetcode, but once you're in the door you still need to make management happy in order to keep your job and win pay raises. The grind doesn't end.
God the amount of unnecessary hostility coming from you is absurd. From my original comment:
> So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice.
From the very beginning I said it's not really a choice, but I always acknowledged it. Whatever, your pedantry wins.
> Anyway, what makes you think you would be BigCo material?
I can't really know since I'm automatically excluded from it simply because of I don't live there (and I would never work with a visa, having a corporation ruling over my life). But it's very possible I wouldn't make the cut, or if I did I'd likely be another one writing blog posts like this one - assuming reality is how they portray it.
Technically I know I can hold my own, but that's not really what work is all about in my experience (barring few exceptions). Connections, ivy leagues, kissing ass, leetcode and other aspects that shouldn't matter are valued more than actually getting shit done.
But I'd sure as hell try because even though it's not a guarantee of protection, it's as close as we can get to it in a capitalist society. Money is, unfortunately, crucial.
>You appear to be overlooking Social Security, which is a crucial source of income that all US workers pay into their entire careers. It's not just savings.
I certainly am. I was taught as early as grade school (mid 00's) that Social Security would run out before I retire. I take that strongly to heart.
>Says you, but you apparently aspire to live and work here, so it's different enough.
Never said that. It's just where tech salaries are bigger.
>Have you checked North Korea?
What does this have to do with anything? Unless you're writing from North Korea, this is childish.
Apparently I hit a nerve and that was not my intention. My point was never specifically about the US but you keep insisting on it and have a bone to grind. That doesn't add to the conversation though.
> My point was never specifically about the US but you keep insisting on it and have a bone to grind.
You said: "I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37809983
> For example, when you're employed, you have to live where the jobs are.... Whereas when you're retired you can live... [in] a place that is both less expensive and warmer.
I think that it may be just the opposite. From what I've observed, access to good public transportation is a major contributor to quality of life in old age. In the US, that requires someone to live in a much higher cost of living location.
At least you have talents. Imagine being in your 30s with a family to support and no real career future - bad reviews, bad organizations structure, shitty technology/systems, and no skills to move elsewhere.
> If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important...
Money being important is not part of the world, it's part of you. You even say so a few lines later:
> ... I don't want to work forever.
So yes, you indeed have no choice but to treat money as important because... you've chosen to treat money as important.
I'm offering this in the hopes that you can stand back and look at your need from a distance. What are other ways to satisfy this need without you writing useless software _and_ without money being the main constraint? Get creative!
Money is kind of important, though, at least to those of us who don't want to depend on a soup kitchen.
Look, money isn't everything. This isn't a video game, where the highest score wins, and you chase points just for points. But money lets you buy things, and some of those things are important - food for yourself and those who depend on you, shelter, healthcare. (But there's a bunch of stuff that money can buy that isn't important, and learning to let go of those things is really healthy.)
So: Money is important, because some of the stuff it can buy is important. That's not going to change any time soon.
>So yes, you indeed have no choice but to treat money as important because... you've chosen to treat money as important.
yes, I have chosen to treat the ability to have a roof over my head as important. Rent in my area is 2000+ minimum so I at the very least am recommended to make 60k+ in salary to support that.
add on basic utilities (water, electricity, inernet), food above rice and beans, and maybe a little bit of premium entertainment and we're talking more around 70k+ a year. And this is all for supporting myself. If I ever want kids I either require a working spouse or to make even more money to support a full time parent. So yes, I'm talking more around 130k+ minimum. Not unreasonable in tech, but it sure does start to exceed the salary of many other industries
>What are other ways to satisfy this need without you writing useless software _and_ without money being the main constraint? Get creative!
With my current skillset? I suppose I embrace hustle culture and try to make a side income with my talents. try to make some small apps or games that give some continual income. Could also find an angle as a content creator. Both basically eat into my time since this is in tandem with full time work, so it doesn't really fix the problem.
Despite all the obsession with FAANG, I find it harder getting responses from small studios writing not-useless software. They want very experienced personell both for branding (how many new startups have you seen with pitches of "with talent from Apple, Blizzard, Deloitte, etc.") and the fact that they need someone who can architect a project from the ground up.
As much as people pretend, it is in fact not easy to just uproot your family and move across the country to work at a challenging startup. So there are good engineers that get stuck in BigCorp Jobs that do suck your soul, just like these online rants depict.
Even stepping back and forgetting the ranting. All big human organizations, eventually become bureaucratic, and locked into hierarchies, and have a difficult time making decisions. And all of these things make IT and writing software very difficult.
And, because of individual constraints on geography, family, etc.. good engineers do get stuck in these big organizations, and tend to suffer.
Of course it is. Taking leetcode job because you don't want to work forever is buying a lottery ticket. Maybe it's your ticket to financial independence, but maybe not.
The alternative, of taking a more normal job that affords you a higher day-to-day happiness level but doesn't pay as much is a legitimate other option. Plus, doing that doesn't exclude being able to achieve financial independence.
There's no right or wrong choice here. It all depends on your personal attitudes, goals, and tolerances. But there is a choice.
> But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”.
Behind all such writing is an unspoken piece of context: those terrible huge companies pay software devs better than small ones. It's not that they can't work at a smaller company - it's just that it means taking a hit to your take-home pay, so it's Not An Option.
You're saying if you can't maximize your pay, it's not an option?
I cannot wrap my head around it. Being happy with your life is not a one-to-one correlation with income. You can make less money than "maximum" and still have a great life.
It's not necessarily maximizing money, but maintaining lifestyle. It's extremely common for people to increase their standard of living as their means increase, and reducing that requires significant effort in some cases (e.g., people tend to buy as much house as they can afford, so any significant salary reduction could necessitate selling the house and uprooting your family). It's a minimal sacrifice in the face of having to work a job you hate, IMO, but it's still a powerful barrier for many.
> extremely common for people to increase their standard of living
That was a choice. But the opposite is "not a choice"? You choose to spend so much money that you are forced into work you may despise to support the spending choices you make, so there's no option to... not make those spending choices?
I'm unsure why you've quoted "not a choice", as I never said any such thing. I said it's difficult for many to decide to change their lifestyle to afford a less lucrative but more enjoyable job.
You've also got the cause and effect backward. You do the work you can be employed to do with the promise of (in your opinion, and relative to your skill and responsibility) competitive compensation. Years go by, you get used to living with that salary (plus yearly raises), and then you realize your job sucks. Now what do you do? Soldier on at BigCo1, switch companies to an effectively isomorphic position at BigCo2, or spend low 5 figures moving to and outfitting a new house for a 20% pay cut and a job you love? All three are choices, but #3 has the highest barrier to decision.
Choices aren't made equal. Some are easier to make, even unconsciously, than others. For example, choosing immediate pleasure is easier than immediate discomfort. A series of small, incremental choices over time is easier than one large step. Etc.
>You can make less money than "maximum" and still have a great life.
I think the bigger assumption here is "all companies are bad, so even if I change I'm simply choosing another poison".
What alternatives do you have in mind? trying to join a startup? That means having the money/idea for yourself and pitching to investors or being experienced enough that other founders want you on the ground floor with them (i.e. going back to spending 10+ years at "not an option" BigCo).
Agree! In fact, while you wrote this I made an edit (last sentence) to address that. It was supposed to be my core point but I had somehow left it implicit.
Those companies tend to attract type As, and it’s similarly easy for non type As to feel implicit peer pressure. You don’t have to work a ton to succeed.
If you prefer to maintain a 9-5 schedule at these companies, it's extremely possible as long as you:
1) genuinely stick to a 9-5 work routine (some individuals I saw struggling were actually working something like 11-4).
2) are comfortable with the possibility of not experiencing rapid career advancement, potentially reaching a plateau at the first terminal level.
FAANG are megacorps pretending to be startups to young developers, and treat them accordingly. There are other megacorps doing tech that behave like proper megacorps, and pay accordingly.
The people who tend to work extra hours are the ones who choose to in my experience. If you don't work extra hours now you won't after switching to one of those companies either. You might witness folks who do, but you can usually tell they are more self motivated than they are forced into it.
Depends on the company. My stints with BigCorp life were full of 6-7PM meeting times and expectations to keep up with Slack and email even during vacations and holidays.
I have friends at Amazon who have started to miss our Saturday events because they’re feverishly working to avoid being caught in the next round of layoffs.
I also have friends at some FAANG companies who seem like they’re barely working (their own admission) so it varies wildly. Can’t really generalize.
I think it depends how you look at it. For me, it's a pretty small price to pay to look at Slack here and there, whether over the weekend or on vacation, to get paid significantly more. Rarely do I have to actually put in more than an hour or two during these times, and I can very easily take that time off during the work week.
>It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo,
People are bad at understanding risk. When a company pays significantly more for the same job than another, there is always an economic reason:
* The job is undesirable because of how people are treated, and as a result the only way to attract and retain people is to overpay. The extra pay mitigates flight risk when the inevitable bad day or week happens for the hire.
* Management is likely to or has a history of sudden lay offs and firings often indiscriminately. The extra pay mitigates the risk of sudden loss of income to the employee.
* Poor reputation/employment brand requires paying more to get people to avoid the risk of associating with that bad employer brand.
The extra money is being paid not because the employer wants to. It is exactly because they have to in order to hire and retain people that can do the job. The whole "we're better and pay a premium because you are the best developers in the world" is really management self-justifying having to overpay due to risk.
When you look at compensation, ask yourself and the interviewer why is the company over-paying? You'll often save yourself years of misery.
This is true, but it got very temporarily skewed in recent years at some companies that had a lot of cash flow. There really were companies hiring a lot of highly qualified people mostly to have large teams of highly qualified people.
The rubber band is snapping back, though. Layoffs are hitting all of these companies and expectations are rising quickly. Inevitably, companies paying a lot of money for people will expect to get their money’s worth out of them.
> This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.
This is what I term the “dirty secret of BI” - for most organisations, most dashboards are unused, except by the teams creating them.
This is because reports need to be useful to be used, and most are not. In my opinion useful means one of:
1) Aiding people with actual decision making power to make decisions
2) Improving the ability of “front line” staff to complete their day to day tasks better
PowerBI and similar tools are poorly suited to the above because 1) requires mgmt to understand the data they are looking at, which is difficult without context in a grid of charts, and 2) requires a thoughtfully designed, fast UX that is basically impossible to deliver in a dashboard.
I’m now working on an open source BI tool, Evidence.dev (https://github.com/evidence-dev/evidence) which is targeted at these two use cases. It enables you to add context to data inline, design the UX for the use case, and is just fast.
This has nothing to do with the comment you replied to. Even the quote at the top of your comment is a quote from the article, and not from the parent.
2) BigCo is not a bad place for most people. Management should just shut up about efficiency and data driven. No one believes them, not even themselves.
Yeah, at this point in my career I'm tired of the bullshit that management spouts. I know they don't believe one bit of what they are saying except as a method to get product out quicker. We aren't even necessarily labour bound, but management doesn't accept that 9 women can't make a baby in a month.
I'm all for looking at processes periodically to make sure we are doing the right things to get everything released, but when you come at it from a hitting ever tighter arbitrary KPIs you just make everyone angry or apathetic to your words.
The audience for the management statements, such as investors and analysts, might just want to hear certain things. These things will have certain fads and fashions as to what needs to be uttered.
I'm with you here. I don't like this hand-wringing suffer porn (great label btw!) about how something is wrong with the world.
We only have to consider that building and maintaining an organization is not a clear science. To think otherwise is to indulge in utopian thinking. So there will always be wasted effort in any organization, whether it's BigCo or SmallCo or Boy Scouts or the local Church. It's like, if you build any machine, that machine will produce waste. Heck, if you undertake any venture, such as cooking a meal or writing a book or running a 5k, you will produce waste: wasted food scraps, wasted words (that the editor will remove), wasted trainings (when you werent really focused, eg.)
A person being unhappy about an organization happens because of a single reason: they are placed in a position in that organization that makes them unhappy. They can change their position or the organization. Or they can recalibrate their mind to make themselves happy.
And this is what happens: people move around or change jobs or reflect and discover a new purpose.
I have no idea who Zippia is, but according to them 1/3rd of software engineers in the US work at companies >10,000 people. And 2/3rds of software engineers work at companies still > 1,000 people.
So I'd argue, working at a small shop, while not rare, also isn't as predominant as you're portraying.
While I meant globally, and I’m not sure that these stats generalize beyond the US (but they very much might), I’m surprised! I had expected 2/3rd to work at companies under 1000 employees simply because there’s so extremely many of those and many of them need devs.
EDIT woa that page says there’s 320k software engineers in the US. That’s one entire percent of the population! That’s a lot, could that really be true?
Which is even more surprising on 'hacker' news. Maybe the average (US-centric) 'hacker' nowadays is just a corporate worker dreaming.
I recently joined a megacorp after decades of small companies and I'm having quite enough fun on the project side and everything. Corporate bureaucracy is nothing after you dealt with actual international bureaucracy. Only downside is that pay is /too low/.
Look for owner-managed companies without middle management, or where middle management consists of engineers and not MBAs. Look for small(ish) companies that work on topics you find interesting. Connect with people who are looking for the same. You might not find the fulfilling job in a sane company on the first try, but if you keep looking and talking to people, you’re likely to find one.
For starters, HN has a monthly "Who's hiring?" thread with a lot of cool companies posting. Personally I find a lot more of the posts there to make me go "hey that sounds like a cool place to work" than eg a search on job sites or Stack Overflow career ads. In a broad sense I mean, eg there's tiny startups, healthy profitable SMBs, and VC-fueled unicorn rocket ships posting there, but they all seem above-average cool for their category to me.
As an employer, I find that the inverse holds too - applicants that find us via the "Who's hiring?" thread are much more often a potential fit than those who find us via other routes.
"It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo."
I don't know, it sounds like you think people actually like their jobs. Seems like for most of us, we do work at shitty BigCos. Plenty of small shitty companies too. That's just how life goes.
Agreed. It takes constant effort and a lot of luck to land at a small company with competent people and good, sane culture.
I scored that once by accident. We all keep in touch, people from every department, and recount how it was the best job we ever had.
It was acquired by a medium company of limited competence and everyone was scattered to the wind in a frenzy of empire building by the managers in that company.
I have been consulting/contracting and visiting megacorps since then. Traumatizing, to say the least.
Not to forget the inevitable techbro complaining about being unable to support a family and buy a house at anything below 500k per year. Or being able to retire...
Every time I see these articles I'm amazed at how at odds it is with my experience. I work for a tiny company of ~30 people and it's awesome. I'm super well taken care of in pay, benefits, and work/life balance. I could make a bit more at a large corp, but I get some pretty stellar benefits here. Also if it's anything like what I read on here then there's no way it's worth it.
I work in games and that already risky to begin with. Finding a small game studio that can pay decently is pretty much like finding a needle in a hay stack.
The smallest studio I worked at was still 100+ people, and grew to 200+ by the time I left.
That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it.
The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow themselves be dragged into endless meetings and they know the script (that the OP author is referring to several times) and they recite it by heart. Because if they don't, their manager is going to think they are useless and will inevitably fire them.
People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.
At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men.
Quite tragic really. All of this is a collective delusion.
I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...
Part of the problem has to be that as an individual in an organization it seems like a better ROI for your effort to grow your share of the pie than the entire pie itself.
Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than try to fix the social and political structure of your organization. Mostly because even if you succeed, the organization wouldn't be sophisticated enough to understand and credit you for the work.
The effects of my work strategy and behavior on the company's revenue, profit, vision, products are zero.
On the contrary, the effects of my work strategy and behavior on my salary and position can be quite pronounced.
My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of.
It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.
> My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of.
I don't think is very good comparison, generally. Some other company could offer you a job and you can leave any time. Depending on your tasks, the company might have very difficult time finding replacement personnel. This could be very significant (relative) cost for the company.
Personally I have always lived in countries where employee protection laws are very employee-friendly. Companies can't just fire people at will, they need good reasons. There might be significant fines for misfiring for wrong reasons.
It is a very good comparison (I work in California, at-will contracts).
The effect of me leaving my company and the effect of my company leaving me, for the one who is getting dropped, are not even remotely comparable.
The negative effects of my leaving or being laid off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left my group and other groups I worked in and, invariably, the escapees were barely remembered a few weeks after leaving. The cemetery is full of indispensable people, and I was never told that I was indispensable.
The negative effects of my dismissal by the company on me range from almost zero (I wanted to leave anyway, I have ten other jobs lined up, they offer me more money) to very substantial (I didn't want to leave, I can't pay my mortgage, my partner sees me as a failure).
I respect the company I work for and my colleagues. But if I have to choose between advancing my cause and advancing the cause of the company (assuming the two causes are somewhat misaligned and assuming I am not doing anything considered "wrong"), I choose myself every day of the week and twice on Sunday
> The negative effects of my leaving or being laid off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left my group and other groups I worked in and, invariably, the escapees were barely remembered a few weeks after leaving. The cemetery is full of indispensable people, and I was never told that I was indispensable.
In fact, I'd go as far as to say that having "indispensable people" at all is a management failure. Large corporations that have been around for decades have survived because they don't have indispensable people.
This is why you don't get more money even if you outcode everyone on your team. The company doesn't want a rockstar developer, it much prefers having 4 average devs (where "average" obviously varies a lot based on the company and how much they pay etc.) It's simple risk management: the company knows it can recruit another average dev if it needs to.
You are right that it makes perfect business sense to not have indispensable people. At the same time, trying to make everyone inter-replaceable has never worked and never will.
It is important to recognize that some people are heavier hitters than others.
Their risk management goes too far is what I am saying. They should relax it a little bit and they'll get better results.
It is not black and white, both morally and in terms of the way I work.
Let's say that certain choices, strongly supported by my boss, who is ultimately responsible for my career in the short term (and the short term career consequences of my actions then inform my career even further down the line), are seen by me as not particularly brilliant, maybe even "dumb." If I say nothing and nothing happens, the product we are developing may not work as well as it could, perhaps the company's revenue will drop by a 50th of a percent. But should I risk my career to tell my boss that their ideas are not brilliant?
Years ago, when I was younger and more idealistic, I would have expressed my opinion on the choices made, even forcefully so. After I got fired at one of my previous jobs, I tend to side with the boss, strategically.
And before anyone, legitimately, thinks I am a coward or a "bloodsucker," let me make it clear that I was not the one who put my boss in the position they are in, the company is not mine, and the company can fire me tomorrow for any reason, even for no reason. Then, maybe at some point it will be too much to handle and I will decide to leave, but as I wrote, it is not black and white.
I think you just gave words to something I'd noticed about myself but had never been able to articulate, which is the reason I can't operate in large companies. Every time a company gets past its first thousand employees, I have to find another job, because it starts to become as you describe and it feels like it grinds my soul to dust.
I'm convinced there do need to be big companies, therefore I'm glad so many people can work in them and I appreciate the difficulty of it. This is not meant as a criticism in any way.
It just helped me understand why my career has consisted largely of startup-hopping every couple years as the companies finally reach a point where I have more than three layers of management, a majority of whom have no idea how to do my job effectively, but have to prove they're "doing something" by telling me what to do.
It's not that I'm "flaky" or "have commitment issues." It's that there's something that happens to companies when they get large that turns a work environment I enjoyed into one that's really (intolerably) unpleasant for me.
If I were interested in doing the work I am able to do, and if my life satisfaction depended on this fulfillment, I would never work where I work. That would be intolerably frustrating.
But I see my work as a means to other ends, and I am fine with my current situation.
This actually corresponds to another thing I've only recently admitted to myself, namely that I put a lot more pressure on my job for meaning and satisfaction because I'm compensating for perceived deficits in other areas of my life, like not having a spouse or children, even though those are important to me (not just a societal pressure).
I do have friends and activities that are important to me, but nothing within an order of magnitude the time devoted to my job.
If I had another important full-time role that applied whether or not I was working, I think I would have an easier time seeing my job as a means to that end, and I have a lot of respect for people whose lives are ordered that way.
Years ago, when I was doing academic research, I was working for more than 60 hours a week, often on weekends. On the whole it was enjoyable, but then I realized that I was spending an enormous amount of time writing papers that ten people, if I was lucky, would cite, for a far-from-guaranteed professional future in academia, setting aside my romantic and social life because, in the end, overcoming the inertia there seemed more challenging and tiresome than simply occupying my time trying to develop a fairly useless but potentially-perceived-as-novel algorithm.
Then, gradually at first, and then suddenly, my life made a critical and abrupt transition, and now my professional life has to fit into my life full of interests, occasional romance, family, sports, and all the other things that can make life more interesting.
> Years ago, when I was younger and more idealistic, I would have expressed my opinion on the choices made, even forcefully so. After I got fired at one of my previous jobs, I tend to side with the boss, strategically.
Perhaps I'm a natural-born sycophant, but I always understood that my primary role in the company is to serve/help my boss, and, most notably, making him look good in from of his boss.
Incidentally, I'm already financially independent and retired at 42 yo.
It is mostly a matter of personality. I consider myself very competent, after decades of study, and brilliant, and silencing my competence in order to achieve "labor peace" has been a tough sandwich to swallow.
Today, I see my competence as a tool that has allowed me to be in the position I am in, which is enough.
The choice is not between licking the boots of your boss or instead doing meaningful work; it is not between earning a lot of money and doing boring work or instead earning not as much and doing entertaining work; not between eating like a pig or maniacally counting calories and macros.
Most of the time, the choice is between not saying something to your team or boss that will probably not be in your favor when you submit your promo package, or being one of those heroes who metaphorically dies in a battle that no one actually cares about.
It is between skipping the pack of Oreos for today in favor of some chicken and rice, not between being full or starving.
>It is not hard to guess where I spend most of my efforts and thinking.
Hope it's in a savings buffer. Everyone should have "fuck you" money[1] for this exact reason, but the next best thing is 3-6 months in immediate savings for rainy days. coporate shutting you down shouldn't be the immediate end of the world, especially not at the salaries tech is paid at.
Yes, I have plenty of savings. But in any case, having a lot of savings does not make me lean toward starting crusades at work to use Julia instead of Python or a random forest instead of a neural network. When you see the corporate world for what it is, there is no turning back.
I am a professional well aware that I am the most important person in my life and a cog in the machine when I have my badge around my neck or on my belt like the gunslingers once carried their Colts.
Sure. It's more to protect you against when work wants to cut your pay, force you back into office, or you simply fall into office politics by someone climbing the corporate ladder. 6 months savings isn't "fuck you" money, and I'm guessing me and you both wouldn't be working for BigCo if. We had that money.
Wisdom is realizing that fixing the social and political structure of the org is often against the interests of enough people, or at least troublesome enough, that ultimately a lot of people will fight to maintain a pathological status quo, and actively subvert reform, instead.
As for "being difficult", yeah, that's a huge culture problem of many Westerners. It's also a very nasty problem because everyone believes in it; I too had managers who literally told me to "stop being difficult" when all I did was asking, twice over the course of an entire month, about why aren't we given just a little more bandwidth to deal with a problem that slows down half the company.
But as we know, culture problems are extremely slow to be solved and that's why I don't blame people for coasting on salary and doing the bare minimum.
Tragedy of the commons, Prisoner's dilemma, Peter's principle, we can call it whatever, it's still very sad though.
Yeah perverse financial incentives describe 99% of the stupidity we put up with daily. Like, why when you look at the labeling of a bottle of Tylenol do you find a description of the trademarks, a non-discrimination clause, and several paragraphs regarding liability in imaginary scenarios written in impenetrable legalese? But, it’s impossible to find the actual dosage chart?
Which one will kill you if you get it wrong?
Which one does the manufacturer think is important?
I'm 100% sure my Tylenol bottles have dosage charts on them, not only because it's so easy to fatally overdose on it but also because manufacturing it is extremely regulated and nobody cares what the manufacturers think about anything.
They used to be easy to find, but some years back they redesigned seemingly all pill bottles to hide the instructions. It’s a frustration and makes me wish ill on whoever is behind it, every single time I need to use such a medicine.
> At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men.
Contracts are insufficient here. A contract doesn't prevent my boss from being unhappy with me and making my life miserable. A contract does not ensure promotion. As an employee, there is no upside for risk, making any risk unacceptable.
Yep, I get that, but what should an open-minded company owner do?
They can't exactly promise "you will all be here for 5 years, guaranteed, no matter what" too, because for most Homo Sapiens that's a signal to immediately become useless.
My point is similar to yours: that the incentives are indeed not aligned, and that this is quite tragic because even when some people make an honest try to break the vicious cycle they still get treated like everyone else.
> I've known a few company owners long time ago who ... swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news
It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems.
If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need you?
Too easy to game: People are just going to gauge for themselves what management considers "not a bullshit problem" and report that, making sure that the blame rests on unpopular people or third parties.
Too prone to false positives: Any project which is genuinely going really well results in everyone getting fired, and the company absolutely tanks as a result.
Exactly, an effective CEO / Executive is going to be developing systems of accountability that align with company goals. It can't be based entirely on a set of gameable metrics. However this starts at the top. An incompetent board / CEO is going to create misaligned incentives which will cascade through the organization.
It seems to me that if you want to be a CEO that wants to stay connected at the ground level, then you have to actually do that: you have to know each engineer, and understand the work they’re doing on any given day. Naturally, this tightly constrains the possible size of the company. If you want to grow beyond that size you must accept that you will become disconnected and out of touch and all of the bs being discussed here will inevitably creep in.
Long ago I worked in places where the CEO did exactly that. "Management by walking around" (it even had the abbreviation MBWA) has fallen out of favor, though. People just don't walk any more.
If the culture of the company is checked-out people doing some nonsense to get a paycheck, you’re not going to fix that by tough love unless you will actually fire 80% of the company.
What really happens is you fire some useless people but who made someone’s life at work easier or more fun and now everyone who is somewhat competent will start looking for a better job.
Teams can actually function well and have no problems for periods of time. I those cases you would almost certainly break that by firing the manager.
I think everyone would agree that yes-people are useless for a team, but if you find yourself surrounded by them you have to ask why. Either you hired poorly, or more likely the way you treat you team and/or company creates a culture of fear and dishonesty.
I was just assuming you were talking about managers not independent contributors. The "you" would be the person with the authority to fire though, as a working programmer would have absolutely no power to fire anyone saying there are no problems.
> People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice.
Look, I don't mind if you write about me, but it didn't have to be so on-the-nose. No chill, these HN people, no chill at all...
You can make improvements, but it ends up being small things that you can showcase to leaders to demonstrate that progress is happening, but it's nothing of actual material value. It's a lot like public political discourse where a policy solution is touted, all the ooh's and ahh's, but then nothing really changes.
Yep, I have found the same over my career. It's better than nothing, I agree on that, but it still ends up being infuriating because it's so damned slow.
Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs included.
This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism, not communism, not anything that's already been talked about for 200 years.
It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happen.
But actually we live in a world of plenty. Yes, there are hungry people. Yes, there are people who don't have an iPhone.
But what do I mean? I mean that in general it appears to me that almost everything is produced by a very small number of people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to feed 10 people. The same is true for a lot of goods and services. We don't actually need a bunch of people to do many things.
Quite a lot of processes, if you ask someone who works in various industries, are really done by a few people, supported by a cast of extras that outnumbers them. Some of these extras make more money than the people actually doing the useful work. Often these extras are are like you allude to, only there in order to pretend they are part of the process so that they can make a living.
To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on.
What we actually need is to have productive people unimpeded by people who need to scrape a living. We should change our norms so that if you aren't selected to be one of the people who makes iPhones or grow food, you can just be good friend. If you want to be an iPhone maker, study and try to get in there. If you don't make it, you're not a failure. You just go about living while all the robot designers take care of stuff.
uh iPhones aren't just made by well dressed Stanford educated designers and engineers in California, you know. The number of people needed to mine the metal/silicon for them, to make the circuits (and to build the factories which make the circuits), and to actually assemble them (for example [0]), the global supply chain of container ships and port personnel and police forces to fight piracy... it's a lot of people. I think they outnumber the bullshit KPR middle managers that get demonized here.
Now just to be clear, I'm not saying that bullshit jobs don't exist - they do. And maybe a world with universal basic income would reduce these bullshit jobs and generally make everything nicer.
But the iPhone needs *a lot* of really non-bullshit, totally serious hard work by thousands if not millions of people to exist, many of them getting paid ridiculously low wages and working under what I would consider inhuman conditions (12 hour days, etc... I should mention that I'm French, so perhaps used to slightly cushier worker protections than most people). And I think there are more underpaid, overworked Chinese factory workers than there are are "VPs of corporate happiness".
The fact that there's a lot of real jobs making iPhones just means there's a lot of BS jobs that will hang onto them.
Of course it's true, you need a LOT of specialists to make iPhones.
I would also wager that a lot of real jobs are lost because there's a tradeoff between gunning for such a job and just settling for a moocher job. Some of those real jobs would consist of automating away the assembly line jobs. It's just that we don't have that society yet, so the manager who doesn't know how to do the automation hires miners and assembly workers, who are obliged to do something in order to make a living.
I'm really skeptical that it's easy to automate those assembly line jobs away, or to automate mining. For one thing, robots are expensive to build. For another, while it's possible to make robots do tasks like that, there's a good chance they'll be less efficient at them than humans. And of course, if you're profit driven, given the choice between paying foreign sweatshop workers starvation wages on a high margin product and blowing billions on a risky R&D project that has a 50% chance of not working and a 50% chance of being copied by all your competitors if it does (assuming you develop something that's actually cheaper than cheap wage slave labor, which is far from a given) is pretty obvious...
that said, if you can actually build an iPhone factory that doesn't need workers, I'm believe there are many big companies willing to pay you a small fortune for that.
>> I'm really skeptical that it's easy to automate those assembly line jobs away
I think most people here on HN does not see this because they tend to do software related work, but this is happening faster that you may think.
When I last time spoke with middle level manager of building company that specializes in constructing factories in Central Europe he said that change over last 20 years is almost magical - factory built at the start of millenium required hundreds people to operate. Projects finished two decades laters can easily operate with 20 people or less.
And this is East/Central Europe - probably least automated part of developed world.
So "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"?
I hate to tell you this, but you've very much missed your target of "not something that's already been talked about for 200 years."
Who does the selecting? Who says, "You, there! You shall devote your time to programming robots, so your neighbors can 'be good friends' and have meaningful relationships. Buck up, comrade. Look how good it will be for everyone (...else)!"?
I'll admit this isn't fully fleshed out. I've yet to design the gulags.
But the core of it is a change of focus away from "everyone must contribute as much as they can" which the lefties also support. It's more the recognition that actually we could (maybe!) get more done if we didn't insist on everyone doing something.
Doing that means you used to get the medieval and renaissance guild systems.
However, we already have countries that ignore copyright/patent/trademark (China). The new solution is to remove features from devices, and to tie them into some cloudshit.
We get some dog-and-pony show that cloud means we get new features, but in reality, it's just an anti-cloning tactic.
See also: "in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8116796-for-as-soon-as-the-...
> To make things worse, there actually is a class of people who have no job at all, which creates a kind of fear among the hangers-on.
Is a rephrasing of Marx's idea of the reserve army of labor. They are the lumpen who _could_ be used as replacements but mostly aren't.
I do mostly agree with GP's main point. The skill floor for meaningful work—even before this recent round of AI hullabaloo—has increased to the point where there are many people unemployable at any wage.
> I mean that in general it appears to me that almost everything is produced by a very small number of people. We're no longer living in a world where you need 9 people to feed 10 people.
This is only true for complex positions, where it's almost impossible for management to suss out individual employee's impact. Vast majority of jobs are not like that - they're driving trucks, stocking shelves, processing paperwork in some government job, driving farm equipment, assemblying smartphones, selling retail financial products etc.
The shareholders are uninformed and disorganized. They might take their money out but that will take a long time. Meanwhile, management and the board control the flow of information and can take decisions together.
In theory reality and theory are the same. In reality they are not. In my org there are a lot of pms who don’t do very much and somehow just happen to be friends and former room-mates of the org head.
The concept of a voting shareholder is a myth. Most shares are owned/managed by funds so they are the true voters. They just vote to make sure the that the boat isn’t rocked too much.
The modern system favors executives as opposed to owners. The executive class has figured out how to extract a significant chuck from to owners share for their own coffers.
I am sure shareholders are demanding that in many places but they are demanding it from the people who provide no value themselves and who are perfectly positioned to inflate their importance and perceived value-add.
That's like asking the corrupt politicians to uproot corruption. Obviously it will never work.
So the shareholders get bulshitted exactly by the people who are very likely superfluous.
Those lovely market forces largely stop applying at corporation boundaries.
Besides, information is so wildly far from perfect in all spheres that we rarely see anything particularly close to the extremes of efficient behavior predicted by spherical-cow market fairy tales anyway, even when market forces are fully in-play.
That sounds like a lovely version of capitalism, but the one I've experienced is anything but optimized. There can be incentives to keeping around unproductive jobs, the size and stability of an org can often be used as a basic sign of health.
That's why I am a fan of democracy, even in economic sphere (aka socialism or cooperatives). Giving everybody the same single vote (same power) about the organization (and making it into an unchangeable fact) removes lots of these incentives that prevent improving the organization. But lot of people are blindly accepting capitalism, because.. well it's incidentally also explained in the article, why.
It's interesting then how cooperatives aren't more popular or more successful. You'd think that if they were significantly more efficient than the typical dictatorship companies then they'd outcompete them, but as far as I'm aware that doesn't happen.
Skimmed the first report and it seems like employee-owned companies perform better up until around 75 employees, after which there's no benefit? That would explain why they aren't outcompeting the larger companies - their advantage disappears when they grow.
I’d wager that’s more to do with raising finance than organisational productivity, but I’m not aware of any actual research on something of that scale or even how to accurately study those effects without it turning into more of a qualitative theory.
Still, it’s quite an interesting possibility worth pursuing in my opinion. (Full disclosure, I work for a small nominally employee-owned company, and have mixed thoughts about how it works in practice).
I think there's often an issue of how you measure success. Co-ops seem to have much lower tendency to try and take over the world than corporations inevitably seem to display at scale - quite content to return comfortable salaries year-after-year to their employee-owners, rather than reap profits at all costs.
As a concrete example, Mondragon has been operating very successfully for ~70 years, but barely anyone from outside the region registers its existence.
Right, and if this was the enforced model there would be a lot better spread of risk and a lot more competition. But it's Socialism!!!!
Instead we are almost down to one or two grocery chains and the government is left with the impossible task of regulating the consolidation to mitigate risk and screwed prices.
I guess misconceptions like these are why theorists abandoned the term 'communism' in favor of 'communalism' to explain what they meant.
This isn't even a no-true-scotsman argument, but if all that comes to mind when communism comes up is Soviet dictatorship, the cold war propaganda worked.
For what it's worth, I understood the parent post to specifically be referring to instances like Stalinism, Maoism, etc. since it says specifically "communist dictatorship".
Something along the lines of:
A socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need.
I guess the point of the poster above is that the word communism just confuses things in the initial statement — it’s just a dictatorship. Socialists and communists fairly uniquely believe in workplace democracy.
A rule of thumb that makes sense to me is that communism generally differs from socialism in that it advocates one or more of the following:
- People actually living and working in communes.
- Abolition of private property (note: this is not the same as personal property).
- Extreme redistribution and/or equality in wealth/income.
I'm sure that this isn't a perfect heuristic; however, I think it's often useful for detecting when someone is trying to describe something as communism in order to make it look bad.
Communism builds walls to prevent you from leaving and put you in labor camps if you refuse to do the work assigned to you. So they are not very comparable at all, consent makes a huge difference.
Playing devils advocate here - how this is inherent to communism?
I would rather guess that this is emerged behaviour of any human system that is facing collapse and has no preventions build in.
I could probably find a few not so great capitalistic systems results (even American flavoured ones) that had tendencies dangerously close to those you describe (ever heard about company stores ? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_store).
The other answer is risk: large, poorly reversible changes can go wrong and there will be blame. Even if there is golden parachute, within the respective social group that matters - and to regulators where applicable.
Well, thicker skin is one option. I have no problem admitting fault when I thought I can help but ended up harming something. However, that also happened extremely rarely.
People are just way too risk-averse. Though I get why the useless managers are like that, they don't want anything shining a light on their team more than absolutely necessary because they know they could be the first ones on the chopping block should an objective analysis ever take place.
Someone just managing a team isn't really in any way "management". Usually would have very limited power for anything as a team leader. Lower than divisional leadership is often much more administrative than anything of "executive" function.
And, btw., things like delayering are fairly typical efficiency drives. So these "management" positions might not be that stable to start with.
What you say is true but doesn't help the working programmers, sadly.
I have once exclaimed to one team lead / project lead during a call with 20+ other programmers: "Why are we even talking to you if you can't make any difference? I want to talk to somebody who will understand our problems and try to help".
Longest awkward silence ever. Needless to say, I left shortly after.
What you are describing is also known as “The Peter Principle” which holds that everyone will eventually be promoted to their level of incompetence. Smart companies know this and make sure it doesn’t cripple their business.
At this point, I am mostly preferring what the great apes of our age have in terms of a social structure... At least there is some merit there, not just who screams the loudest and packs the hardest punch.
I’m curious now which article you’re referring to at the end of your comment. I know “Bullshit Jobs” only from the book by David Graeber, which is definitely worth a read for anyone interested in the topic.
> I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...
That idea is fake, Graeber is a moron, and it's rude to look at other people's work and conclude that it's useless just because you don't personally watch them all day.
Those people were harmlessly bullshitting (or maybe demonstrating the concept of revealed preferences), but you're still doing it when you take them too seriously and proclaim it's a society wide trend.
I dunno man, a manager taking home $500K a year when all they ever did was draw charts that NOBODY looked at (not even the CEO or the CFO, not once, I asked them; and not any of the other managers too) and just to ask us every now and then how are things going, seems quite opposite to harmless bullshitting.
That guy could have been fired and we would have just elected one of us to keep track of several tickets once a week and we'd have been better off.
People get assigned to high-paid bullshit jobs all the time, and most of them are aware of it and do their best to hold on to them. Nothing really complex, it's all perverse incentives all the way down.
There must be bubbles at play. Like some folks just don’t closely know enough people in enough parts of the economy to see what the other bubble sees, so assumes they’re wrong or exaggerating just to have a laugh or something.
There are definitely bullshit jobs, and jobs that are mostly bullshit.
Sad to see you downvoted here because I completely agree. Graeber's book is among if not the worst I've ever read. It saddens me that people here take the idea seriously.
But the main evidence for this is that he's an anarchist. Graeber is not around to defend this position seeing as he's not alive, but anarchists are all very happy to talk about their philosophy, they will answer any question you give them, and their answers instantly disprove it and show they shouldn't be trusted to implement any of it. Like if you ask where insulin comes from they'll just say doctors will make it in their backyards as a hobby.
Recent example of this is Seattle's CHAZ where the police went away for a few weeks, they posted some anarchist guards, and they instantly shot and killed a black teenager because they thought he was a criminal.
That's a pretty big caricature of anarchists. I'd expect an anarchist to say something to the effect of businesses creating insulin if there's enough market demand for it.
You seem to assume that businesses, markets, and innovation are tied to governments and couldn't exist without the powerful hand of authority making them exist. Governments can help all of these things, but they can also hurt them, and government absolutely didn't invent any of them.
The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen. There was absolutely no plan or expectation that it'd be anything other than a stunt trying to make a point. You don't cut off a handful of blocks in a landlocked and largely residential area and call it a government free zone while being completely dependent on the government-controlled area around you.
> That's a pretty big caricature of anarchists. I'd expect an anarchist to say something to the effect of businesses creating insulin if there's enough market demand for it.
You'd expect anarchists to support a business? Not left-anarchists, and I don't think I've ever met a "centrist anarchist". Ancaps maybe, but they're kind of bad for other obvious reasons.
Anyway, it is not, their answer is literally to shrug and say "people will do it".
Either way, nobody has realized that supply chains exist. When they say "people", they don't mean businesses, because they don't believe in management or capital assets.
> The Chop wasn't any real attempt at anarchy. It was a protest that took a weird turn and a city that let it happen.
But that makes it even worse that their murder rate was so much worse than the rest of the country!
Of course, that's not the usual problem with an anarchist collective. The usual problem is what happens when the more charismatic members sexually assault the less charismatic members. (Hint: they get ejected for trying to go to the police and it gets covered up.)
I'm personally a big fan of his books, but I've read on various internet sources that some people will accuse him of not being academically rigorous enough. I honestly don't have enough expertise or energy to really judge.
I’ve yet to see a comprehensive critique of either Debt or Bullshit Jobs that was both damning taken at face value, and demonstrated good reading comprehension.
The author seems to be doing the classic mistake of thinking how to use technical means to solve what amounts to political problems.
All the Dereks I’ve met over the years (I know terribly anecdotal) are aware of the position they’re in. They are desperately scared of those nosy engineers that can prove with data how bad they are and try hard to put them in positions where that is not possible.
The portrayal of Michael Scott in “The Office” was sometimes too painfully real.
But knowing that, I’ve found its actually possible to use it to your own if not advantage, then at least peace of mind.
The way one does it is to get to know your Derek as a person, become his confidant - a surprisingly large amount of the “stupid jira tickets” those people generate are usually because of of very stupid requirements and policies that they have to follow.
After one understands the deep reasons for the busy work and inefficiencies - be it other bosses and hire ups or inadequate policies, one can work with their Dereks to sideline / fix them. The former being way easier than the latter of course.
Then you can approach the hire ups and understand why they put those policies in the first place, slowly getting a deeper understanding of the bigger picture. Cause there usually are reasons for all the madness, it just takes civility, patience and empathy to get to it.
“Why bother” one would ask? Well in the end you get known by all those people as “the guy to go to, to get shit done” and start being pushed into very interesting and consequential projects. People trust you, at least on a personal level - and even if you don’t manage to solve the political issues that frustrate you, you still have the peace of mind of being productive and friendly with your environment.
I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right or not.
It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful. Now that I'm older and in a position with a different perspective, I'm far less likely to find systemic fault. Perhaps I'm just lucky in my career atc? I don't have a blog to go back to, but this author seems insightful and I'd like to see what they think in 5 or 10 years.
There is systemic fault. It starts with hierarchical structuring. It doesn't mean that hierarchies are inherently bad, but there are consequences from that and the additional things that people usually imply that come with it. This can seriously hamper productivity, for example, even in the small scale. Once you start to think that through you will also see how far reaching the agile manifesto truly is and that the content in there is nothing short of "nuclear" for typical corpo structuring and processes that are developed around it.
Question is then, why do you have both? Where does this implicit "hierarchy" come from? It is simple: As soon as you have multiple people working on a problem there are communication requirements. You can organize things in a way that they support these requirements or you can just let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more efficient?
Hierarchies are just an organizational pattern, a tool. There are neither a religion or "set in stone" as many think, they create communication choke points, induce unnecessary communication, cause "not our responsibility" mentality that may result in things falling through the cracks, have often the "Chinese whispers" problem to it, and so on. You cannot treat every problem like a nail just because your only tool is a hammer.
> You can organize things in a way that they support these requirements or you can just let them figure out how to adapt their needs around some existing hierarchy. Now which one do you think is more efficient?
I think this is a pretty great statement of the converse of Conway's Law[1].
I'd say "in evey case". And I'd say this happens whether or not there's an explicit hierarchy. Being articulate, or having knowledge or contacts, will get you more attention. The only way to mitigate this is through explicit processes, which have to be regularly reviewed. Meetings have to be chaired strictly. Everybody has to sign-up to the agreed processes.
These processes are time-consuming, and decisions can be slow. It becomes worse the bigger the organisation. I don't know how non-hierarchical decision-making can work in an enterprise where there are significant assets at stake; I've only ever seen it work in voluntary political associations in which non-hierarchical organisation is one of the prime objectives.
Those things become inevitable when a 3rd layer of management appears (for a total of 4 layers).
I'm not sure how far you can push a 3-layered organization, but it's absolutely something that exists on some scale, without a phantom organization appearing.
What happens to be wrong is all relative to everything else wrong in the larger organization.
It's been my experience that a lot of an organization's internal messaging is crafted to be a distraction from either really bad stuff that is going on or simply because management can't or doesn't want to do productive work.
From that perspective, any dysfunction in a small team is inconsequential to the organization.
As a younger person that was the sort of stuff I fixated on, until I learned that the various very trusted professional corporate suit folks acting like HQ were doing illegal shit, destroying their families with workplace affairs, bullying everyone around them, and ruining other people's work.
Eg, as an SDE in 2017 you worked on Amazon Device’s econometrics team and were screaming the entire org was in trouble — but the PhD economists and directors ignored you.
We’re at 5 years, a gutted department, billions in losses, etc. Now what?
Or you warned WarnerMedia executives about their internal corporate misandry just before they fired Johnny Depp for being a male victim — and destroyed two tent pole properties in the process.
Or were at Amazon again and warned there’d be financial troubles circa start of 2022 based on unprofessional conduct in FinTech?
…what happens when you’re repeatedly right about multi-billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer just doesn’t care?
I don’t want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,… Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc.
I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders — not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.
> …what happens when you’re repeatedly right about multi-billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer just doesn’t care?
>
> I don’t want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,… Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc.
>
> I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders — not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.
If you truly think this, the only moral course of action for you is to immediately leave the company. Otherwise you're "fraudelently" continuing to take shareholder money. If you think the execs of your company give a shit, or will ever give a shit, about what employee #3141991403 thinks about the direction of your company, you're delusional.
If you want my opinion, just shut up and take the money. It's not your problem if shareholders make bad decisions. And besides, if it wasn't you, it'd be someone else.
I think you’re right in the aggregate and the abstract.
But it’s also funny that two of the situations you mentioned (Johnny Depp “victim” and Bud Light) are fake stories based on conservative media astroturfing where any judge would be hard pressed to find that there was unreasonable behaviour on the corporate end.
And of course, being a white knight only works if you’re privileged enough to be able to jump ship or fight your social wars and still have something to fall back on. Not everyone here is a US citizen with US resident parents and US college education, earns 6 figures, or has had decades of working experience to accumulate savings and make a CV.
WarnerMedia fired Johnny Depp based on unsubstantiated allegations from a woman who herself has a history of domestic violence and Mr Depp was subsequently found to have been defamed and awarded damages for that lost work.
WarnerMedia fired Mr Depp for mere allegations, but retained Ms Heard despite police reports documenting her abusing her girlfriend at an airport.
The sexism shown by WarnerMedia executives is not in the interests of shareholders — and is part of not only why WarnerMedia had to be sold off from ATT for a massive loss, but has failed to recover post merger with Discovery.
- - - - -
Similarly, Bud Light decided to endorse a controversial spokesman, call their core audience bigots when they objected, denigrated them as “fratty” and “out of touch”… then seemed confused when the people they were openly rude to stopped buying their product.
- - - - -
What particular facts do you believe I’m wrong about?
I’m curious — and explaining that is much more interesting than Poisoning the Well fallacies, such as calling things you disagree with “astroturf”.
- - - - -
Finally, that’s excuses: you made up a stereotype about who I am, then decided you can safely ignore my point because that stereotype doesn’t apply to you.
maybe I've read too many Taleb books, but can you put yourself in a position to bet against the stupidity? For example, take a short position on WarnerMedia/Amazon stock?
> It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful.
speaking from my own experience, when I look at my earlier career years I didn't appreciate how resilient organizations can be to disfunction, yes 100 things are broken, but for the most part everything will still be fine.
Not to mention how incredibly challenging it is to build an organization that is highly functioning. I've had the pleasure of working at a few different companies and I feel the most internally mature were the companies that had been around the longest. Sure, they had issues, but fundamentally they had insulated themselves from a large class of problems that the startups were constantly fighting through.
There must now be projects like the one the author describes that are at least 5-10 years old now, I’d love to see a comparison of ones that delivered their promises and ones that keep delusionally lumbering on.
Of course the organization doesn't want to improve things. The bosses would have to be humble enough to receive feedback. Most people can't take feedback, let alone the bosses who feel that those under their management are beneath them.
At my last job, the bosses ignored everything even the smartest employees suggested. Changes only came when customers, news outlets, vendors, or auditors made suggestions. Anyone external had more influence on company direction than the most experienced employees. A person leaving an anonymous review on an app store had more influence.
It was clear that we were ignored because the bosses didn't want to take direction from those they manage. Their arrogance and fragile egos wouldn't allow them to.
> Anyone external had more influence on company direction than the most experienced employees.
That's one reason why people employ consultants. A consultant is someone an organisation employs to tell it what it already knows. Sometimes it doesn't know that it knows it, but more often it already knows what needs to be done, but an external entity gives a veneer of respectability to grasping a difficult nettle.
> My current organization has 8000 staff members, and I used to glance over the usage metrics of the dashboards my old team produced. I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day. I'd estimate the cost of maintaining our team was approximately $1,000,000, for an organization that supposedly can't afford to waste that money.
I’m not sure how to explain this, but often when I find posts on HN linking to an engineer discussing how management is doing it wrong (especially if it’s someone who’s not running a successful company themselves), there’s usually a hyperfocus on really insignificant numbers as evidence of their point.
This company has 8000 employees. And the cost of maintaining those dashboards is about $1mm according to the post.
It only takes someone in management to identify a change which improved employee efficiency by $125 annually to completely pay for the $1mm spent to maintain the dashboard.
Identify a new $125 efficiency improvement every year, and by year 5 your $1mm annual expense is saving you $5mm every year.
It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we wouldn't be wasting that money.
What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a core business that generates amounts of money large enough to fund departments that do nothing other than reaffirm that we care about whatever that department is supposed to do. That's totally fine (though I doubt it's a deliberate strategy) unless you waste time thinking they want to make people read the dashboards. It turns out that it's totally irrelevant to anything - they just want to have the team there to say they care about data, and you'll go insane if you try to do your job better.
But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc)....
Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which the org does not care about the data. But also there's probably a point where they would care! Being data driven is not about spending all of your energy optimizing for exactly the scenario you have data to optimize for (see: the post-covid logistic crisis).
To me - it seems like you need to "waste" a certain amount of money tracking down problems that don't happen to exist - but you can't know for sure they didn't exist before you tracked them down.
I guess like...do you have the impression the data should drive people in a direction they are not going? Like...if the systems you work on are saying things are ok aren't they ok?
Author here once again. I have the worst possible answer for this - most data teams that I've seen (and my network is large enough through my own socialising + my blog to be reasonably confident on this) are working on dashboards that could not conceivably be acted upon. As in, the nature of the thing they are reporting on is not susceptible to top-down intervention.
You are however totally correct that some places will have actually valid use cases for this kind of reporting. The article is very much not for those people, as they don't have these kinds of concerns for the most part. This is for people that are watching their organization talk about behaving one way, then acting in a totally different way.
This. It's like arguing that we are wasting time with application logs because 99% of devs aren't reading them. They aren't there for your pleasure, they are there because, the one time you actually need them, you'll be sorry they aren't there.
I think this highlights the big difference between being Data Driven versus Data Reactive. If a dashboard surfaces a strategy problem; you're reacting to data. If you're forming strategy based on a dashboard; you're being driven by data.
That’s true from a top-down corporate perspective, but this blog post is addressing the perspective of an individual on the team, who is repeatedly told that the company really cares about data, and then can’t seem to understand why serious problems with the data are just ignored.
I don't think that's actually what it says though! The blog post talks about how no one looks at the data (implying that the data is not used) and it separately talks about the inconsistent and disconnected ways that companies allocate funds. It does not, that I could tell, actually say the metrics work has revealed data the company is ignoring. Obviously if they are that's different from what I said!
> It does not, that I could tell, actually say the metrics work has revealed data the company is ignoring.
I guess I wasn’t clear: The metrics work isn’t _revealing_ anything new, the data requested is what is produced. The fact that the data is _ignored_ means that it can have serious errors, but then nobody seems worried about correcting it except for our frustrated conscientious developer because producing the reports is a performative act. Nobody really uses the data for anything.
Are you hiring? I'm looking for a job that will allow me to explore my passions. My passions are: video games, anime, and watching youtube videos about video games and anime.
If you enjoy anime I can't think you'd get much enjoyment out of the horrifying low quality of anime YouTubers. They certainly don't seem to like it much.
One of the most popular channels is called Trash Taste in an attempt to act like it's all foreign oriental nonsense they're wallowing in.
(Although to be fair, the current anime trend is "guy who hates women gets transported to a fantasy novel where he gets a sex slave", and the previous trend was "incest romance".)
>I can't think you'd get much enjoyment out of the horrifying low quality of anime YouTubers. They certainly don't seem to like it much.
I love game reviews and they give me very different lenses on how to view video games. Even the ones that absolutely hate a game.
I have yet to really find a useful anime reviewer. There are a few videos from a few youtubers that offer some interesting insight, but seasonal anime reviewers are either poor writers/critics or are simply trying to appeal to an audience who wants to hear their opinions regurgitated. So they focus less on insightful interesting anime and more on hating [current anime trend].
>the previous trend was "incest romance"
it's still around in manga/light novels. I think the "issue" is that these days most anime use it as a small trope instead of the entire premise. Heck, even in most of the infamous examples the element wasnt omnipresent.
- 75% of OreImo is not focused at all about the romance of the siblings. In fact, the male lead dates someone else entirely in the 2nd season.
- Kiss X Sis opens up to a more general harem in the middle of the anime and that MC dates the teacher for a while (SPOILERS I guess, for anime only. But that anime is a decade+ out and the manga ended 2 years ago. You're not getting that arc animated).
- Domestic girlfriend is the most recent and probably tamest example. Yes, I guess it's technically incest to date your new 17YO stepsister that you had sex with before you even knew your parents were getting married. We're well past Westermarck effect though.
It only takes someone in management to realize that you increase the revenue by selling more of an existing product or raising its price. You reduce your costs by firing people or renegotiating the prices with suppliers.
"Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without viable products in development to validate such dynamic.
> "Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without viable products in development to validate such dynamic.
That really depends on the business. I worked with a manufacturing client a few years back, and millisecond process improvements could translate into millions of dollars increased annual profits. They manufactured parts that would sell for about $0.75 a piece at razor thin margins.
I once worked at a place where management kept going on and on about reducing toil, but wouldn't let us use something to automate a bunch of extremely manual workloads.
It eventually occurred to me that we didn't have to, because the team was the mechanism for automating those workloads. They couldn't tell us they weren't that important, so the easiest option was to just talk about automation while paying us a bunch to keep troubleshooting the gross scripts.
Again - that is totally fine, as long as you know what's going on. Then you can make a clear decision around whether you want to stay.
Or increase sales from $1B to $1.001B, or increase efficiency of 1,000 of those employees by $1,000. If literally nobody is viewing a dashboard then it's probably useless, but even a small number of views could have very high value.
Other possibility: I had a non-programmer friend who worked at BigCo and worked hard for 2 months out of the year, doing nothing the other 10 months. He asked his boss for stuff to do and the boss said "just try to look busy". Seems like a good case for outsourcing, but that 2 months of work was pretty important and in-house employees will generally be more reliable and knowledgeable (about the company specifically). So really they were being paid (not much btw) for the 2 months of work and spend the rest of the time being prepared. This was an extreme and obvious case but I suspect this type of thing is pretty common, just usually people get busy-work (eg "make this BI dashboard") rather than being told "try to look busy".
I think there is something to be said for having sufficient staff to handle peak capacity. If you run a lean ship, you are likely to run into situations where existing resources cannot handle the demand and/or headcount attrition leaves you with a gap. It takes months to onboard someone and make them productive.
The flip side of that is the peons are not told the company over-hired and the headcount are being paid "just in case". Which leads to corporate shenanigans where BS work materializes to make people feel busy.
Can anyone here look at "identify a change which improved employee efficiency by $125 annually" and think it isn't going to be complete bullshit? That's in the region of 50c/day. "I told employees to reuse paperclips which I predict will save the company $1M per year"[1] PR/marketing/self-promotion - surely nobody believes it?. And that saving 50 cents per day is supposed to come from a manager who can influence all 8000 employees, but who doesn't think to axe the useless reporting department to save $1M/year in one go? And then the company which keeps a $1M department just to sound good is going to identify $1M in piecemeal efficiency improvements year on year, every year?
Who believes this?
Although I don't completely disagree, see[2][3] "Another reason to have in-house expertise in various areas is that they easily pay for themselves, which is a special case of the generic argument that large companies should be larger than most people expect because tiny percentage gains are worth a large amount in absolute dollars. If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity, and Twitter’s kernel team has found many such changes."
But then again, at the bottom of [4] "At multiple companies that I've worked for, if you tally up the claimed revenue or user growth wins [of people claiming they improved things X amount per year] and compare them to actual revenue or user growth, you can see that there's some funny business going on since the total claimed wins are much larger than the observed total." which is pretty much my criticism of your comment; people will embellish their claims, especially when nobody can easily prove or disprove a claimed 50cent/day efficiency improvement over 8000 employees.
> "usually a hyperfocus on really insignificant numbers as evidence of their point."
$1M is roughly an average UK household income, after tax, for a lifetime. This just reads like dismissive boasting rather than a useful part of your comment. If it's "really insignificant" why do you then argue that the company will be motivated to save it in a more difficult piecemeal fashion, year after year five times over, if they aren't motivated to save it once in a big lump?
Firstly, I absolutely agree, the argument you're responding to gave me pause for a moment, then I realized it's probably nonsense in most cases and it also isn't disagreeing with me at all.
If the thing I am working on doesn't matter because it's a rounding error to the organization, but they keep telling me that it does matter and we should be driving for perfection, bla bla bla, then the original poster is agreeing with me, I think. I'm not arguing about whether it makes sense for the organization, I'm making an argument against believing the organization.
EDIT: actually, re-reading the parent post after posting this, I'm now not sure if I'm agreeing with him in arguing with the GP or disagreeing with him. But either way, I'll leave my comment here to try to explain the thinking behind $1m being insignificant to a company.
The point isn't whether $1m is significant to an individual employee. It would make a massive difference to almost any employee on a personal level (except maybe for C level in massive companies), but in a company with 8000 employees, $1m is a rounding error. Even looking at the example you quoted for the average UK income (currently £33400), for 8000 employees that's £267m or $323m just in salaries. When you consider all the other costs of running a business on top of that like buildings, light, heating, expenses (generally accepted wisdom is that a salary is about 50% of the overall cost for each employee), then factor in the material costs for whatever the company is doing, that $1m really is insignificant in the grand scheme of things from the company's perspective.
Average US salaries are higher than the UK at around $59k, and tech salaries are obviously higher, and in the US even more disproportionately so, making this $1m saving even less significant to the company.
The middle section of your post "If, in the lifetime of the specialist team like the kernel team, a single person found something that persistently reduced TCO by 0.5%, that would pay for the team in perpetuity" seems to be arguing a different point. It's not about whether saving the company $1m a year is worth bothering with or not, it's whether paying for a team that might cost $500k per year and can produce $1m per year in savings and/or revenue is worthwhile. Obviously, it is worth keeping the team as the ROI on their work is 100%. However the decision on whether to create that team in the first place is harder to justify because there is probably a more lucrative opportunity for the company to find - if the company is currently making e.g. 7% profit doing what it's doing, it probably makes far more sense to expand production capacity to increase total revenue as that will be be more significant to the bottom line than a small project that saves $1m.
I agree with pretty much everything you say here. But a thought hits me on the dan luu kernel issue - let's say we fund a team of kernel devs and they reduce TCO by .5% - the nature of FOSS means that the reduction in cost is illusory - all their competitors get the same TCO.
The funding of the kernel team is similar to paying taxes to fund science research ... it's just the more I look around the more I see a vast socialist society we live in that we think is some red in tooth and claw capitalism.
The main value of capitalism seems to be the creative destruction- replacing old inefficient companies with ones newly formed, built
differently.
It's just that if we found a way to close down companies after say ten years and forced them to build new, would that solve as many issues as schumpter?
The most jarring thing about entering the workforce to me, and it seems to the author as well, is the nigh-pathological lack of pride (or “passion”, which I think is a loathsome term) most people put into their jobs.
I don’t accept that all of those people intrinsically are lazy morons - maybe some or even most are, but a lot of people get that attitude metaphorically beaten into them by lazy and disengaged coworkers. I know this for a fact because I’ve witnessed it happen to many people as they mature as workers and also noticed it in myself. I can’t prove it’s not related to age, or position in life (eg a young single person eager to prove themselves at work, vs someone who prioritizes family) but I know firsthand that there are at least some experienced workers with families, responsibilities, and hobbies that manage to stay focused and engaged for a long time.
I expect some pushback against this, but I really do think this phenomenon - whatever you want to call it - is the basis for ageism. It frankly is a real, observable thing that life has a way of beating the passion out of people into a point they see their job as clock-in, clock-out. It doesn’t happen to everyone of course. One of the reasons I love working with interns and recent college grads is that, despite their lack of skills or knowledge in many areas, they mostly haven’t gone through that transformation yet.
I think this is mostly just growing up and realising that your own life is worth more than being a cog in a machine at some corporation. Not only that, but in most cases, giving 100% every single day actually doesn't matter that much for career progression, at least not within most companies. You can coast by quite smoothly.
There are certain very high-paying companies where the above doesn't apply. But they have to pay high salaries to retain staff who _do_ give 100% every day.
I think its interesting how takes like this are always stated so matter-of-factly. Growing up, inevitable maturation, leads to the discovery of individualism and the desire for something more than being a cog in a machine.
I believe, strongly, that this reverses the cause and effect. No one wants to be a cog in a dysfunctional machine; and the sheer density of dysfunctional machines in our society has induced a renaissance of individualism. Its a reasonable response; you can't trust the machine to reliably arrive at the correct outcomes, but you can trust yourself.
The biggest reason why I believe so strongly that this cause and effect is reversed correlates toward human nature, which has always angled toward social organization. Some philosophers would argue that there's nothing more fulfilling than being a part of an organization larger than the individual; taking any form from marriage and starting a family, to organized religion, government service, or capitalistic corporations.
Individualism isn't a symptom of maturity; its a symptom of systemic dysfunction.
I think it's basically circular. If you try to have pride in your job, your pride gets destroyed by the frustration of it all and you either quit or give up on the pride. So what deserves is pride-less work, which causes the frustration.
The best teams I've worked on were ones where we managed to locally have pride by feeling like a little team who cared about each other's work and occasional sacrifice (being on-call, etc) and it felt like a little family. As soon as further-away managers start reaching in and "fiddling" with it, from their prideless vantage post where everything is just a system to accomplish quarterly goals, the family-feeling fades away and it goes back to soul-crushing pointlessness.
Yeah, this is what I’ve also experienced. You can have a great team, and a lot of influence in that team context. Scaling up that common feeling from 5-10 people gets harder. Realizing this, I’m not really interested in working in larger organizations anymore. All the overhead that bogs down speed just sucks the life out of me.
If you want "passion" look no farther than the game industry. that "passion" lets them pay workers less and work more, despite being overall more engaged and working across multiple disciplines to ship a product.
And even despite all that engagement, the "passion" doesn't make you save you from layoffs. Even Epic in all its billions made from Fortnite money decided it didn't care. Nothing is sacred. I don't personally mind some inefficiences and the occasional incompetence (though, in games there's rarely IME intentional incompetence. Of course a designer won't understand performance impacts on a game, and a programmer won't necessarily have the best UX for artist tools in a first pass). But companies some 20 years ago at least pretended to have loyalty and reward tenure and that's all but gone now. Why put your heart into something that you know will break it 2-3 years down the line? or 18[1]?
I found the ability for experienced colleagues to achieve the "clock in clock out" mentality so relieving, liberating. It tells me that A) their life doesn't revolve around work, and B) they have the emotional fortitude to mentally flip the "I dont give a shit" switch on/off in their brain when necessary. That's a sign of maturity and of someone who can successfully adapt, to me.
Working at a medium-size government org, 6 years into a reorg, with projects being cancelled after two years because nobody actually needs it, dropping rebuilds because they might overrun, not hiring anybody who actually has a background relevant to the original system so that it can be maintained, not allotting any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey to automate things, then assigning a senior to be that code monkey, security having all the clout and no thought for just how miserable they make everybody's lives, [omitted for brevity]. Yep, dysfunctional is about right.
> not hiring anybody who actually has a background relevant to the original system so that it can be maintained, not allotting any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey to automate things, then assigning a senior to be that code monkey
An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks. Of course the organization doesn't want to make any changes the Expert recommends, but by hiring that person they can claim they are addressing issues. Of course, it also gives management someone to blame and fire if (when) things go south.
> An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks.
Happened to me about 2 years ago, and it was my shortest contract ever. Lasted 3 months.
And it was not my imagination, I was complimented and groomed into thinking they are hiring an expert to help them with difficult problems. Immediately after I made one huge PR (120-ish files diff) that helped them resolve a very thorny problem, and after it was approved by the CTO and several other seniors, and after I was complimented of the quality of my work... I got reassigned to a new project where I was ordered to pull tickets and not even formulate tasks, and to just "do what I am told".
I didn't even last two months when put in that position. Me and the CTO very quickly hated each other and he started acting like he never said the things he did during the interviews, and me leaving was a relief for everyone, myself the most.
Exactly what happened to me, but lasted 6 months. If the middle of the contract hadn't fallen over the US holiday season, when everyone kind of went into a holding pattern because some industries are just that way, it's entirely possible the contract would have been just 3 months.
The organization, at some level, clearly never wanted me to solve the issues I was supposedly brought in to address, but give them cover to say they hired help. After some reflection, I'm starting to think the project was never really expected to succeed in any significant way. The company claimed they were trying to build an in-house replacement for a third party system the vendor no longer supported, but it's possible they just wanted a stop-gap while they found another turn-key vendor. The interim system didn't have to be all that good, it just had to have enough structural integrity to carry the organization over the gap.
I thought of that and tried to reflect myself but in the end I couldn't decipher their motivation. It was either (1) I solved a big problem they wanted quicker than they thought and they had no idea what to do with me after, or (2) they lied to me that I did well, concluded I am no good and funneled me to a team where I was managed like an intern.
No clue either way but it was not okay to not communicate. It seems they still needed the manpower so they figured they will not say anything at all and hope that I will stay. Well, it didn't work for them. I was happy to leave, lol.
And sorry it happened to you as well. The motivations of companies when hiring are still foreign to me and I have to catch up there and learn a lot because I hate being blindsided like that.
I can’t imagine the infosec, security department puts a moment of thought into the lived experience of dealing with all the security. And I get it, it is important, but I often think to myself that it seems like they don’t want me to get any work done and that must be why they put all these security hoops in front of me. I must spend an hour+ a day logging in and out of things, and then another hour waiting for security checks on a deploys.
Smart people don’t consider themselves better than people around them.
This article is so annoying.
It has some truth to it, e.g. the mismatch between incentives and success, or even the corporate bullshit to avoid saying hard truths are on point.
But the second part lacks the proper reasoning needed to establish the self-proclaimed intelligence of it author.
Comparing software development’s product building with fencing competitions is so far-fetched, yet most of the arguments of the second part build on this premise.
You don’t need amazing individuals to build a great thing, what you need is a great team. That’s why most people try to address the system. It’s hard to do when you factor in individual incentives, but it’s not because everybody is dumb, it’s because everybody (smartly) addresses their own self-interests above the company’s.
>Smart people don’t consider themselves better than people around them.
He probably doesn't work in software. There's hubris in spades in that realm. The worst is when people's ego is significantly bigger than their actual ability.
I think this is a manifestation of Prisoner's Dilemma.
If everybody in the organization would co-operate and do their best everybody would win. But if some people or some managers decide to look for their own interests and job-security first, the people who do the right thing will lose.
>Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crud, and that explains almost everything.
I used to think it was an 80/20 split, and later in my life it goes up to 90%. Now I think it is more like 95%. Where it fits the normal distribution curve.
It is sad, but I am also surprised and inspired how 5% of people are pushing the progress so 95% of people gets to benefits, most likely without them knowing it.
The author said 10 years ago. HN used to discuss a lot of these things pre 2015, and it was mostly gone from 2015 - 2022 because it doesn't fit the general Silicon Valley narrative. But I am glad it is back.
> “This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.”
Ha-ha… haaa
Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily.
This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team, and all but one developer literally never even looking at any of: APM, deployment pipeline, log analytics system, issue tracker, or dashboard.
I work at a school, and hop boy do the students damage their laptops a lot. When we hit the point where we refused to loan out laptops for stupid shit like the kid punched the laptop screen, we found that the year coordinators actually needed a very simple daily report with the name of the student and how long the laptop has been in for repair.
That’s it. And you know what? It was useful.
You can make as many fancy dashboards as you like. But if the data is truly useful operationally, it will likely be a boring list with no graphics.
IDK, but a possible counterargument to some of your observation is that you could have a team where every day/week they have a meeting to look at the dashboards, and it's always Sam who opens the dashboard and shares on the big monitor/group call.
Replace Sam with me, the person that built the thing.
My experience aligns with the the author of the original blog article.
It's impossible for someone near the bottom of a hierarchy to convince anyone of anything, unless the building is literally on fire and you're the external fire safety consultant.
I'm the proverbial fire safety consultant. I come in, upgrade the suppression systems, hold multiple hour-long training sessions on how to check the figurative "water levels"... and nobody does. If I turn up a year later, it's guaranteed that the system is empty and rusting, and the monitoring panels have cobwebs on them.
I've actually noticed that you can have an emergency situation (a "raging fire"), and then sure, people will listen to you about that particular problem, but if you ask them to pour a glass of water onto something that is "just smouldering" they'll laugh in your face for wasting their time. "Come back later if it's really on fire."
i think tech folks like us often fail on this front of "change management". We can build/buy/integrate amazing tools that can actually solve (or prevent) problems, but we suck at changing organization behavior to adopt them and extract the value. Then we all look around like: why are we still operating in hard mode? because we havent made the case for change, and convinced folks to implement it. changing human behavior is tough
In this long rant, there is only one concrete thing named that is supposedly bad:
> I saw someone that was working on a few Git branches, twenty years my senior, and they decided to clone the entire repository ten times, then checkout a different branch in each repository clone "because it's easier".
> Can you imagine the kind of havoc such a person could wreak upon infrastructure and code if left unchecked?
But I'm very confused, because this is the workflow paradigm of several VCSs that are not named Git. If this is their only concrete complaint, then I have to assume that this person has no idea what they're talking about.
Hello, hello, I am the original poster. I had surmised why this person was doing this, but didn't want to spend ages venting about a particular person, especially in a way that might actually cause that person to realize they're reading about themselves one day. Suffice it to say that there are other serious issues.
Here's a more concrete thing - I work on a product that took years and a spectacular sum of money to get going on the data space (all it does is land CSVs into S3 and then load them into a database every day, < 10GB per day). The original designers decided that the entire thing should be powered by spreadsheets, so we now have about 10 full-time staff editing spreadsheets that trigger build pipelines, one of which I believe has 400 separate worksheets in it.
However, you are right that, broadly speaking, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I have made peace with this.
Truth be told, I liked your article a lot but that particular example definitely should have been replaced with something more concrete and a bit more convincing.
Having several copies of a GIT repo for different branches is a viable strategy as long as one does not do force-pushes.
Yeah I do this on a daily basis. Sometimes I want to have two different branches open simultaneously. Maybe there’s some fancy git hackery to have two open workspaces from the same .git local repository. But you know what? My time to figure that out is worth more than the measly megabytes of saved disk space.
It's not even only that, when you switch to another worktree you catch your language server with its pants down, and some tooling e.g. test watchers are bugging out as well.
I just always found it cleaner to have several directories on the rare occasion I need to work on several branches almost in parallel.
And let's face it, most of us don't work in a repo that is 100GB or above. Even if it was a 10GB I wouldn't care one bit and can easily have 20 copies of it temporarily.
Lookup git worktrees. They are very easy to use and save you time since no matter how many you make you only need to fetch once. As an added bonus, someday you might be working on a project with 100gb repo and find that it makes a big difference.
Thank you for the feedback - I hammered this out over an hour this morning, and wasn't really expecting much readership but should have been more careful. As noted elsewhere on my blog, I'm young enough that I've only used Git, so it's good to know that the original example was not good. I read much too far into it given the other dysfunction I've seen from the same people.
> wasn't really expecting much readership but should have been more careful.
Fair enough but if you allow me to suggest you this: don't do it for the readership, do it for your own skills of eloquent and convincing writing. Even if nobody ever reads it, developing proper articulation and being exhaustive in your analysis will only make you smarter and better at what you do.
This is unsolicited advice though, and I apologize if it's misplaced.
This is a good example of why you shouldn't listen to the Hacker News peanut gallery, because it is about as silly as you originally implied it was; a tiny bit of documentation reading will let you know you can check out as many worktrees into different directories as you like.
I would advise you to instead eliminate class prejudice from your writing. A common type of class prejudicial remark programmers make is sniping at "spreadsheets", i.e., the programming tools of the outgroup not initiated into nonsensical programmer esoterica, aren't those nonprogrammers benighted and silly? But really, spreadsheets are so valuable to them because they're one of the only ways they can tell a computer (a machine that ostensibly serves them) what to do without interacting with the priesthood.
But you shouldn't listen to me either. I'm just some fucking moron on a website. Please understand this.
I think that is besides the point. If there is no adequate enough training in the work flow or basic tooling concepts for employees such that this is what people are doing with git, there are probably serious problems afoot with best practices and productivity.
While I don’t disagree, I think labeling and calling people “bad” is wrong. Derek is doing the best he can. He hired you to help make the company better, more profitable, etc etc. He’s trying anything to get you to understand that you need to deliver value, a product, a service, research output, something so the Bob’s have something to sell/offer/justify grant money. I’ve met a lot of engineers that think they were hired to perfect the art of software engineering. Not the case, not unless that is your mantra and you work at FAANG or Big Blue.
The rest of the 90% have to deliver value. For managers, that’s getting the product/service/research out the door. For directors, it’s that X N where N is the number of managers, for VP’s the same - Product/Service/Output X Directors X Managers.
Often the more inception you have (higher up you go) the more confusing the management and meetings as everything becomes strategic.
I usually work a bit with the team to prove myself, talk the talk and walk the walk, before I ever ask to lead them. Let me solve a hard problem with you so we both know how we problem solve and I’ll handle “The Business”. I’ve taken my fair share of punches.
What doesn’t help is the black and white thinking that this article is written in. If 98 of 100 dashboards aren’t used or even viewed. Build a grafana dashboard of stuff that is useful and present it as a means for cost cutting Power BI. Build a bunch of widgets they can use if they need it. I’m saying - take a step back and look not at the individuals behavior but at the situation that drives it. How can you, the engineer, provide better tooling so Derek looks like a genius. They clearly know what you’re working on, how production is going. Bob has stuff to sell and people to drink with. You get more time to work on perfecting the art of software engineering.
Stop looking at ineptitude as someone’s failure and start looking at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help those who can’t Rust, rust. Or those who are stuck on C++. Or Brian who keeps committing small revisions to PRs and makes 30-80 commit PRs in a sprint. These are not signs of individual failure, they are symptoms.
Yup. Few people go to work every day to do a bad job.
Like the OC's epiphany about Sturgeon's Law, I chilled (a little bit) once I realized that most people are already playing at their highest level.
> ...start looking at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help...
Back when I was doing proper product development, eg burning CDs and printing manuals, this was a pretty good strategy.
Something changed. And I'm not smart enough to see it.
My best guess is that most dev work is now "IT". Agile. Everything is make believe. Nothing ever really ships or is considered done. Then 18 - 36 elapse and its time for a do over. Any knowledge, culture, or lessons learned sent to /dev/null.
I've been binging the Oxide Computer podcast. They're actually making something. Concrete, real, shippable, useful. That'd be nice.
A few people really fixated on "bad", even though I'd never endorse calling a non-fictional person bad right to their face, if only because I don't think work is a good reason to make anyone feel bad (unless they're interfering with something important like lifesaving work and it's necessary).
But yes, intentions are unrelated to outcomes. There are many things that I do not do professionally because I don't want to make people's lives worse or do a bad job. That said, I'm sympathetic because the world is crazy and I'm sure these people have families to feed. Just, you know, don't get invested in them improving if they don't seem like they want to.
It's obviously a rant-inspired introspection about a specific kind of organisations.
These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles, yet for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state that no one dares to disturb.
It could be a niche product sold out to big orgs or other steady clients. It could be a subsidiary or some other steady org. Either way, there is no market pressure to really push such orgs to adapt.
Thus all this theater and moldy props. These orgs are not expected to improve, they will live, but required to demonstrate an effort.
This reminds me of some shitty restaurants or deserted "boutique" storefronts which stay in business for decades with no suply-demand explanation for such longevity. I guess, these may somehow have low operating costs and some strong funding source.
They’re still functioning per market principles, just like the Dodo bird was still functioning in an evolutionary environment!
It was just a particularly protected and ‘calm’ place. Which, unfortunately, made the Dodo bird very susceptible to an outside context problem/sudden upset. But it worked for a very long time!
> These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles, yet for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state that no one dares to disturb.
All signs point to market principles leading directly to this kind of situation. It seems like markets produce ruthless competition but that's a rudimentary and naive extrapolation from the prediction.
Reality gives good evidence to a more sophisticated prediction: that, in times of non-scarcity, markets produce docile mediocrity, because everyone's goal is to keep their job and make enough money and status to survive, rather than to maximize their money or status, and mediocrity attains that.
People keep thinking about markets as some all-knowing relentless optimization machines. But they are just a bunch of distributed computing acting on extremely limited data trying to act over a completely chaotic environment.
Markets are neither all-knowing nor relentless. They are always extremely conservative and risk-adverse. That holds for times of crisis too, they just become a little bit less risk-adverse.
This is feelgood venting, but without addressing the root of the problem.
All these managers are paid to do this BS. By the company. And that company is owned by people, who ultimately have the final say how it will be run, and who are paying the price.
There needs to be a lot more discussion around corporate governance with regards to this topic. I.e. how is it allowed to happen.
Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous?
Why do we frequently hear stories like Icahn goes and fires a floor of staff with no effect on operations?
Because it sounds like a huge opportunity in the M&A space. Perhaps new tech can be developed to detect companies like these, to target them for acquisition and then purge them of BS.
It reminds me of every layoff ever. It's a remarkable feature of layoffs that the people organizing them never have to lay themselves off. Think of the awkward conversations they would have had to have with their family...
"Honey, I did a cost/benefit analysis and found that my role was parasitic value extraction. To maximise the goals of the organisation I have decided to make myself redundant. Further I have decided to give myself 0 days of notice and 0 compensation so that the organisation can use that money to further it's important goals. I'm afraid Christmas is cancelled this year. However, think of the shareholder value I have created."
The mistake OP makes is to assume that the objective of the business is to be a an efficient and productive enterprise.
But that ignores the fact that the business is composed of individuals drawn of the population of human beings who have more prosaic biological needs. From the perspective of management, the enterprise is simply a thing that exists for the purpose of letting them be in charge of it.
This explains several other "paradoxes" such as why wages are low, or why the social security safety net isn't great. Happy, healthy, productive workers, who can speak their minds freely when it comes to problems, even problems created by their superiors, might lead to more efficiency and higher profits. But they also rob management of their social position and the daily experience of being surrounded by people who hold them in very high regard, and treat them with respect and deference. We don't need to do a randomized controlled trial to figure out which of these two alternate universes we're currently residing in.
That is why any political treaty or consensus between management and workers, such as the new-deal or post-war consensus, will eventually be attacked and destroyed by the managers and owners even if it tanks the entire economy with it. The last 40 (and especially the last 10-15) years of US/european history and the destruction of the post-war consensus appears to have borne this theory out.
The point of takeover layoffs is that problem you describe in the first paragraph is nullified.
A well publicised example was the recent takeover of Musk of Twitter. He started by firing everyone at the top first, before moving on to cutting general staff second.
That's usually exactly the way to fix this problem, because BS-ing middle management requires apathetic upper management who're only concerned with milking their positions as long as they can (requiring no-one upset the apple cart). That in turn requires owners who are too dispersed, distant, or incompetent to band together and root out such parasites from the top down.
> Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers
We've never trained managers. My father used to complain about this. He was an army officer before he went into industry; army officers are trained to manage.
I guess the difference with industry is that a trained manager can switch jobs; a trained army officer has a choice of exactly one employer. So training an officer is a long-term investment for the army, but training a manager just gives him an incentive to jump ship.
Is the article not valuable without address the root of the problem?
The author explains how he copes with the way organisations behave. Without this coping mechanism, he would be less happy and more angry. This coping mechanism could help a lot of unhappy/angry people right now, while solving the root problem requires more time and collaboration. Maybe it is also okay if we make people more happy right now, and work on the root problem in the next article?
I've written elsewhere on this. I actually did drastically reduce my work hours and begin exploring other careers, plus starting my own business. However, it didn't seem like it was my place to tell people what they should do, and decided to stick to commenting on what might be a waste of time instead. Everyone's on their own journey, etc, etc.
I've been much happier, but for hopefully understandable reasons, do not wish to bore my long-term readers by repeating myself re: all that history. After all, most of my posts are read fifty times tops by the same people.
> Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous?
That's how the world used to work, back in the 90s and before.
It doesn't work today, since job mobility is so high. What's the point in training up someone, just for them to jump ship to a competitor for a healthy pay raise?
A skilled acquirer would've interviewed engineering before moving forward, ostensibly on the grounds of "knowing what they're buying". They'd then know who to give bonuses and promotions to, vs those to kick out, from day one.
The upside to all of this is that large monopolistic corporations in an industry can be utterly vanquished by much smaller competitors who focus on hiring productive, capable people who work really well with one another. And it doesn't take a lot of them, because the org. described in this post is often getting in its own way, and is unable to deliver a sustained defense on quality or efficiency. So they often try to sue - but that's often blood in the water, and equally a sign to keep striking that weak spot as it is a serious deterrence.
I remember in one episode of Silicon Valley, Gavin was lecturing Richard on a similar topic along the line of “so you don’t want your startup to be an big corporation, and what’s next for you? Taking vc money? going Ipo? And then becoming a big corp?”
My career in house started at around 2011.
I did only contracting before that starting at around 2004.
I used to hate contract work because at the time I was very new and was heavily invested in academics.
I really just wanted to work in a team environment.
I had a strong desire to work directly with my peers so that I could learn the trade.
After I got my first real in house job I loved it for about the first 5 years.
Then I kept growing in my career and moving to larger companies where "scrum master" was a title.
I hated everything about programming from there on because the job became about constantly trying to measure something useless while also doing it differently every new try...
As of last 3 months I have completely stop working in tech.
I will only ever come back to tech as a contractor.
I'm rebuilding my personal site to go as a consultant and contractor only from here on.
I'm literally pulling down my resume today so that I stop getting harassed by these stupid recruiter Indian call centers.
I will never willing work in a corporate hell scrape again and if I choose to it will be on my terms.
I honestly think if this blog post resonated with you, you should just go work for yourself.
It's far more rewarding even if its harder work to be your own boss.
Good riddance to complacency and incompetence!
> It was sparked by reference to a concept called the honne-tatemae divide, which are Japanese concepts related to the true feelings of an individual and the front they present in public
This was honestly cathartic and a completely refreshing read. Lots of articles rightly criticise the vast and widespread incompetence management and organisations. But this article comes at it from a different angle and I really enjoyed the read.
The “Dereks” of the article are some of the worst members of this corporate incompetence.
Derek was the main reason I left my last job. Systematically failed to manage the entire development department (about 30 teams) and actively hostile to any and all suggestions that weren’t his, even going as far as falsely reporting people to HR if they rightly criticised another dumb decision. Frequently stole the ideas and suggestions people made and claiming them as his own, despite having reported said person to their manager or HR for the very same idea months prior. Absolutely classic “yes man” with a smug and nasty personality.
All of the good devs left, with nothing to show for it. Three years and customers hated the crappy software, that was only pushed for because some CEO type had heard about “digital transformation” and “cloud” - and of course lots of agile bullshit thrown in on top.
They really don't, for a programmer there are million opportunities todo something at a smaller scale, on your own etc. If you're a product manager than the job itself only exists in inefficient corporations. corporations don't take risks, they're slow etc. look at google, how many exciting things did they push out over the last decade? and how many do we use today?
the thing these corporations are good at is control and marketing, they're everywhere and people always think first about them when searching for a job etc. they also pay the most, but you'll waste your potential there with endless titles etc. In a startup/your own project you can do everything yourself, learn anything, go into any direction you want to.
All it takes is a mindful shift in thinking, look deeper into what you want, what will fulfill you etc, but seems like most or a large number of people opt for not thinking stuff through and go with the easiest, most popular and obvious choice, it's like going to a factory to stand X hours near the machine...
> "Reward people for staying, and I'll know you're serious about valuing people."
this resonates.
what i noticed is that managers often hire people that won't outshine them.
so, soon you end up with a team of idiots being managed by an even bigger idiot.
it's just all so tiresome. in the end quiet-quitting or work-to-rule is the only logical result, especially in a bad job market where your options are limited.
There's only so much one person can do for 'awareness'. At my workplace new projects usually trickle down from leadership, thru management, and eventually to the engineers. Leadership, in an effort to meet some OKR to be 'more data driven', had the engineers make an intake process for new work. After months of email blasts 'Please submit new project requests thru the form' across the org the grand total of project requests received was one (1). Even the leadership that demanded this process be implemented didn't use it.
I am intrigued by the spreadsheet to control infrastructure bit.
> the engineers responsible for it elected to use spreadsheets to control the infrastructure
Can you explain what this means, how would you control infra through spreadsheets? Is it something like terraform... You change a '1' to a '2' in a particular cell and some script queries that XLSX and notice the change and create a new EC2?
Not OP, but shokingly, what you describe _does_ exist. Or at least something similar for managing kubernetes. [0]
In my own experience, I at least once found one slack app that was configured throught spreadsheet. [1] It actually worked quite well.
Although in this context, I assume that by "infrastructure", OP was probably refering to the whole configuration of some Microsoft tools (PowerBI). I don't think it was about provisionning infrastructure. But I'm not familiar with PowerBI so it's only my guess.
I would also love to hear more about InfrastructureAsSpreadsheet, if anyone have fun or horror stories to share :)
I can't go into a lot of detail for reasons of anonymity, but suffice it to say, this involves handing out spreadsheets to stakeholders, uploading them to Git repositories, then performing some truly unholy rites to create stuff in AWS and a database.
The gist of what you suggested is basically right though.
I often think about the huge amount of economic displacement that would occur if organizations had a detector which could determine who was in the 80 vs the 20.
I don't think the world knows what to do with all the imposters in tech alone, let alone white collar jobs broadly.
We might wake up tomorrow to a startup marketing just such a detector. It certainly doesn't require AGI to determine who is adding value. Everything is online now, patterns of git commits, slack communications, call transcripts. It's totally feasible that AI can figure out who is good at solving problems before it can solve those problems directly.
Not all benefit is quantifiable. There's that anecdote about the guy who wasn't a superstar by metrics but sat with all the high performers at lunch and gave them useful info and asked the right questions to help them achieve great things. I think it was Nyquist at Bell Labs?
Brilliant post. Yes, I agree with 99% of it. I do however think you should start your own business and be your own boss, to see if you can be any better. I used to complain about management all the time, and then I became management, and i was even WORSE than they had been! (But I was able to recognise that I was worse)
So true, haha. One of the engineers I look up to the most told me the same thing - he became a manager and was awful at it... which is why I didn't get into management. I suspect I'd recognize I was worse, but I'm much happier just doing an okay job (not trying to "fix" the organization) and clocking out on a part-time schedule.
Thanks for writing this, it's incredibly cathartic to know that I'm not alone in feeling this way.
Question for the audience: are there places where it isn't like this? Can anyone attest to having worked in places like the one that the author describes, and then escaping to somewhere that isn't like that? If so, are you hiring? Or should I just be content with spending 2 or so years somewhere and then moving on? (2 years seems to be about the natural amount of time it takes for me to fully realize the dysfunction of wherever I'm currently employed)
I feel the same way, been in that occupation for over a decade now, have worked with over a dozen companies in that timeframe (consulting or full time)… I have never experienced a sane environment where a psychopath isn’t in charge. I sincerely don’t think it exists.
I haven’t found the solution you’re looking for. I’ve refused to go back to the grindstone for about two years now. Exploring other avenues such as bizdev because I don’t think I’m physically capable of remaining healthy and being an employee software engineer anymore.
I think the prime quality for the vast majority of software developers isn’t technical skill but rather whether you can settle/give up on your ideals and just drive the bus into the wall whenever asked. If you can’t do that (I can’t), pick another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing because it’ll drive you insane and shave years off your life.
> I don’t think I’m physically capable of remaining healthy and being an employee software engineer anymore
I'm sorry to hear that, and that makes me worry about my future in this industry.
However
> If you can’t do that (I can’t), pick another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing because it’ll drive you insane and shave years off your life.
Won't this just apply to any career? Or do you think there's something unique about software that leads to this?
> Exploring other avenues such as bizdev
I don't think I fully understand what this entails, can you elaborate?
To some extent, yes. I think SE is a little special in the sense that our job is very taxing mentally but we get very little respect for it. We are considered and managed like assembly line workers, expected to hit absurd deadlines or objectives while being given absolutely no control over the factors influencing these (must work fast, quality be damned; strategy and roadmaps are decided for us instead of with us; we tend to be pushovers and not stand for ourselves). We’re also expected to work like cogs in noisy open space environments with interruptions all day when our work requires intense focus.
Most of us (at least on here) wanted to become SE because we enjoy writing code, finding elegant solutions to difficult problems, and delivering reasonably robust software. The big mismatch is that it’s not what the industry wants: instead the industry wants cheap and fast, nevermind the resulting dumpster fire and constant panic. As a SE you’re at the bottom of the food chain, anything that goes wrong is your responsibility but you’re not allowed to address the root cause for it not to reoccur.
We basically do a very abstract, intellectual job but are managed and considered as if we were just laying bricks in an assembly line.
The cognitive dissonance and low grade permanent stress is what makes so many of us burnt out so badly after 10–15 years in the industry.
Of course this is a generalization. You can be insanely lucky and have amazing management, at a company that’s not so dysfunctional, and have a happy 30–40 years career. But that’s very very rare in my experience. I’ve worked across North America and Europe, had many jobs at many companies, and I’ve never come across such a work environment. However, I have dozens of burnt out SEs in my network of all skill levels, backgrounds, company size, etc.
> bizdev
This is more sales oriented. The earning potential is high because it’s partly commission based so the more you sell the more you make as the company makes 10x more. Having a technical background helps because you can talk shop with technical people on the client’s side and better understand what they need and if your company can provide it at all.
I’m sure it has downsides as well, but the thought of being a salaried SE again makes me physically sick and I don’t want to throw away my decade + of tech experience. So that’s the avenue I’m exploring at the moment to see if it suits me better.
Overall, and whatever you end up doing, know that burn out is prevalent in our industry. Keep your costs very low so you can save 70–80% of your paycheck and retire early and/or afford to not work for a long while if you need to.
I have had the good fortune of many, many blog readers with years of life experience writing in to me, and there are indeed places that aren't like this. They tend to be extremely small and have awesome owners.
Everywhere big seems to trend towards some level of garbage. However, the spectrum is massive. The worst place is many times worse than the average place, and the average place is many, many times worse than the best place.
I agree with the core point of the article but the bit about unused bar charts reminded me of a weird reality.
You don't know the bar charts you need when you make them. Not in a "you didn't do enough research" way (waterfall isn't the solution to everything) but instead in a "until it breaks no one notices" fashion.
Sometimes a chart points to an exact problem. You may only look at that chart once every other year but if 1/10 it avoids an outage that is a win for the chart.
The problem is knowing which charts work like that vs which ones are superfluous.
1) Power corrupts - individuals who acquire power don't concern themselves with the well-being of others. They are blinded by greed.
2)The bureaucratic trap - the idea you can just think really hard and anticipate what all the problems will be and then write rules. It always fails.
People need agency. A smart, careful, considering person or community thinks about the actual situation and how to deal with it in some way. Top down thinking and the belief that you can predict everything and subject it to a process, is flawed.
I believe the issue isn't necessarily with the organization itself, but rather with the inherent nature of most individuals who may not actively seek improvement or introspection. Many people tend to gravitate towards comfort and familiarity, resisting change even when it's beneficial
After all, an organization is ultimately a reflection of its people.
Sometimes people need direction and for that direction having a visionary leadership team and having strong middle managers become extremely necessary.
This is my thinking, people hate change. It explains so much of human behavior.
Natural selection would say that those that can handle change well are the ones whose genes will likely carry on. But that does not mean that they want to handle change.
While I share some of the same frustrations as the author, I have a really hard time getting on board with the tone of most of these kinds of posts. It seems like they've gotten so far into frustration with work that it's crazy to me they wouldn't make a change. Personally if I were feeling even 50% or 25% as frustrated, I'd seek to quit, or at least a leave of absence or another role in the company.
People are naturally strangely shaped. When they join a large organization, they must fit into a Voronoi diagram[1]. Shape is a metaphor for both degrees-of-freedom and for knowledge. This is also, funnily enough, a good way to describe cell packing in plants, incl. trees.
One striking example of a role requiring deep behavioral and epistemic changes is that of a judge. A judge must learn to edit their memory and learn to not know things. I find this striking because you'd think that, objectively, knowing more is better. But the rules of court have decided this is not true. If you want that job, you will do this. (It's not all bad: any lawyer will tell you of the risk-minimizing bliss of not knowing things.)
The behavioral adjustments - mostly behavioral losses - are usually not so strange. Usually they are a peon to tribal socialization. In a tribe there are rules that aren't 'fair' because they do not reference the details of the specific conflict, who's right or wrong. The rules are simpler than that, making reference only to relationships and "who started it". You don't dis the leader, you don't pick fights, and absolutely never pick a fight with leader-favored members, etc.
The OP hints at the proper viewpoint, but then diverges. They are strange structures with lots of rustling leaves. But he does not perceive the value and origin of these structures on their own terms. One must take the view of a zoologist observing the behavior of a parasite, or a slime-mold. It is a mistake to anthropomorphize them, just as it is a mistake to anthropomorphize human social structures.
There’s some worthwhile stuff here about how perverse incentives lead to pathological outcomes in large organizations, but…
> Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't crud at their jobs - you're surrounded by people that are crud.
> In professional settings, approximately all of my time goes into solving problems introduced by people that are just indescribably bad.
Jesus. If this is really the case, consider that your organization might be abnormally bad and that you should leave.
I’ve worked with a few incompetent engineers, but never have I ever worked somewhere where 90% of ICs are so bad that they’re actively making the product worse and burning all of the other 10%’s time on trying to undo the 90%’s work. Of course it’s also not true when an organization claims that everyone there is a “10x ninja rockstar”. Most people I’ve worked with are smart but human. If I worked somewhere where 90% of my peer engineers were as bad as OP’s are, I’d leave ASAP by any means necessary.
The alternate hypothesis, of course, is that I’m part of the 90% but don’t know it!
The thing is, there isn't one singular measure of value in terms of how the product can be "bad" or "good". I've very often seen less experienced engineers make stuff that helps a specific customer (good), but makes the app just a little less organized and understandable in the long run (bad). I often have to step in and fix the damage done that might not be visible at first glance for a lot of my coworkers. I wouldn't say it's 90%, but maybe 60%.
The thing is, it's not like said engineer didn't actually deliver a useful thing to a customer, so it's not like he did objectively universally bad. But they might not realize that if everybody worked like this, a few years down the line, our entire product would be beyond saving.
> but makes the app just a little less organized and understandable in the long run (bad)
This sounds like normal code-rot; code is changed to achieve some particular goal, but budget isn't allocated for the requisite refactoring. I personally prefer that refactoring opportunities are seized whenever they appear; managers with budgets don't usually agree, for understandable reasons. Eventually you end up with a hairball that can't be refactored, and has to be rewritten.
Whether a change should be made at all, whether to go ahead and refactor there and then, or how long to postpone the refactoring, are all business decisions that have to be taken by the person that manages the budget.
It all depends on your personal standards. This is a much more measured take than what I wrote above, and probably more accurate. Of course, Sturgeon's Law is obviously not literally true in every domain. 90% of people can successfully fry an egg, etc.
60% feels about right - they can get stuff done but I have to intervene because the damage they are causing is just beyond their ability to recognize (and I'm sure I do this too, for harder problems).
Sturgeon’s law really does apply. It applies to doctors, plumbers, therapists, programmers, managers, x.
There really is too much stupidity in the world. “Obviously”.
Learning to ignore it is an easy but reasonable response. Accepting it however, and learning that most stupidity can be dispelled with a bit of guidance is much harder.
I'm sure that the author understands the difference between a clearcut fencing competition and the messy competition between companies and between the very people inside those companies. Yet there is little or nothing about that in the article.
Those Dereks can survive inside companies because the contribution of every single person is so tiny that it's very difficult to measure. Furthermore, most of the times it doesn't influence the success or failure of ambitious managers.
Those Dereks know it, maybe got their fingers burned attempting to be smart in the past, they do only what's needed to get their money on their bank account at the end of the month.
Move some of them in a position where their work makes the difference between losing and winning (software for a racing car team?) and they might undull themselves.
Very fair critique. I just thought it was very obvious, but perhaps I should have elaborated. The article is not confused about why Derek exists (I feel bad for anyone named Derek now!), it is about why Derek is not incentivized to change, and likely never will.
You can of course try to help, but if you find yourself putting energy into the world and not getting results, just stop and do something actually fulfilling.
The problem with software engineering in large companies is that the large companies are encoding themselves in software - it's the natural endpoint of software eating the world.
The problem is that software engineers are then asked to square all the circles - the hacks, the business models that don't work, the illogical policies that have kept the peace between powerful entrenched parties.
Volkswagen found it impossible to build a diesel engine that met California emissions criteria. So they encoded a cheat.
They did not write the cheat in an email, the CTO literally committed a line of code. (wish I could see the repo).
The point is that software demands clarity - it has no vagueness. So if you are going to digitise your business your business processes and model must also be clean and clear.
> This means they will inevitably become promoted over time, because unlike the rest of us who have to put in effort and pay what a friend of mine terms soul cost to act like a sycophant, they believe it sincerely.
> I have never met a single manager at any large company that has not said they want to be data driven.
Grinding Gear Games - developers of Path of Exile famously said that they dont use data (probably because they dont know how to interpret it) - explains why their game is very poorly balanced.
On a side note, everyone knows that the game is infested by bots... everyone apart from GGG. There was a post by them, where they noted how it was strange that 15% of players did not make a certain quest... Guess what: bots (at that time) werent advanced enough to make that quest.
This is a painfully cynical take and beyond that I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. If it’s all crap, make it better. Do something, don’t just complain!
How? Programmers don't have executive powers. You are very often told that this is not your job and you should be doing yours and leave the "experts" to theirs.
Well, they are not experts. They are not even at the level of informed amateurs. But they have the power.
What would you do?
Sure, there are good companies and you can switch until you find one but let's recognize that statistically speaking this absolutely does not scale -- likely maximum 20% of the programmer workforce can do that. Maybe even only 10%.
Hello! I am the author, and you've saved me writing this out. The whole point is that you actually can't do something (and that's okay! I don't complain anymore either!). Burnout comes from believing what people are saying in corporate contexts without looking at what they're actually doing.
I have come across so many government teams that say they want to start using version control... as if someone has been stopping them all these years! If they were serious, they'd just do it, so you're better off just looking at what they're doing than talking.
The secret is - and this is wielded a million times a day in a million small ways - of course we do. Lots of people do in lots of jobs, whether intended or not.
You just do the thing. You don't ask about doing the thing, you don't put in a project planning proposal, you don't beg your manager to devote 20% of your time to the thing, you just go and do it because you probably can. And as long as you do it, and it goes well, and nobody really notices until it's working, then it turns out you did have executive powers the whole time.
Just do the thing. Ask forgiveness, not permission.
The best case, if you're lucky, no-one notices. More likely you're marked as a troublemaker and pushed out. You're literally better off slacking off for that 20%.
the best case is that you make the firm a lot of money, and you were successful justifying your contribution and your deserved commiseration.
the least bad case is that you realize why nobody wanted to go ahead with your proposal in the first place but you caused no harm other than wasting several months of your own effort.
the worst case obviously is that you caused a huge amount of problems for the firm and people are aware of where those problems came from.
Yeah, that's the only thing that ever worked. I still don't recommend it because people do notice, it's just that many don't care. But when they do, you're in trouble.
Yes, this is important. Most people seem to self-sabotage their power. But many managers at least profess to look for "self-guided" people.
I do this so regularly it is kind of a second nature to me. Sometimes is backfires, but if you really know what you are doing, mostly you will be fine. Might even get rewarded or promoted.
Just start right away. But first you need to understand where you are and what will bring the most value for your effort. Start with the immediate issues.
For example, is there some process improvement such as getting more data, new monitoring tool or logging solution that would reduce time spent in firefighting? Something that would immediately help you solve the next issue more easily? Do it while working the issue.
Can you rewrite the tickets so they are no longer poorly planned, making them easier and quicker to implement? Do it while working on one ticket. Depending on the organization, you can probably rewrite the tickets even if it is not your job, but that may cause waves. If that is too risky, another alternative is to create sub-tasks for the high-level issue that are better planned. If you need another high-level ticket, just ask for it.
When work is not optimal due to time pressure, there are probably costs related with that. Saving time and resources requires longer-term perspective and making some investment. But often there are things that require only smallish investment, and that is what you can very likely do.
When you save time for your company, re-invest that time into some other improvements that bring bigger results but might require a little bit more effort.
The lesson is that you have more flexibility than you realize, because your manager probably does not understand what you are doing. If you get good results, you may be eventually granted more flexibility. But that will most likely take time if you are working in an environment that is constantly fighting fires.
In no particular order:
1. Use your powers of persuasion to drive better decisions
2. Recruit some good people
3. Suggest and execute some positive changes—“there’s this thing called source control and it’s great…” or, “seems like the reports we built aren’t that useful—how can we make this better”
There’s a trap here which is thinking it’s all crap so I may as well not try. It’s seductive but quite poinsonous to the organization and to the individual.
In a big enough organization, it is a complex system with unpredictable outcome. Pouring your soul into it may lead to unexpected consequences as opposed to simpler environments where your contribution actually make a relative difference.
True, that's why if I get to work for a big organization again I'll not even entertain the idea of trying to make a difference in improving processes. I'll just gulp the salary and never stick my nose out of my direct responsibilities as written in the contract.
Making a difference can only happen in small tight-knit teams.
Either develop a better intuition for when people are lying and how ti read between the lines, or use friends, family, and associates you can trust who can do so.
To be clear, I mean that when you apply for jobs, try to convey these trusted people in your life as much as you can about the role - conversations you've had, things you saw on a site visit, public info about the company, and ask whether they see any red flags, esp. as relate to your incompatibilities. Not that you use them as actual connections to find a job.
I once worked with a guy who had standards and a good handle on the disappointing gap between concept and reality and even he said to me “that’s your problem John, you’re always trying to change things”.
That doesn't make sense. People who aren't in a position to change things shouldn't have to hold their opinions back. I have opinions about how my country is run, what trending with people, and reddit's latest decision making. I have limited to no control over each. It does not mean I need to be quiet though, that's how nothing happens.
I believe as you get older and value your own sanity more (maybe because you have less energy to expand overall?) that’s exactly what you do: nothing.
I hate what Reddit has become. The day they killed third party apps etc, I just deleted my account with “hi spez“ as the reason. Reddit is still running to it’s ruin and I’ve achieved nothing on that front but my sanity is preserved and I got 30–60 minutes a day of my life back.
On one side we have things like the efficient market hypothesis, that says that people are rational, they make logical decisions, and there is no room for inefficiencies.
On the other we might think that people who runs companies are blithering idiots who just got lucky, and their head is so far up their asses that they can't see they are headed to self-destruction.
If it's a government agency, or some other organization where it's possible that they're genuinely stunningly incompetent, I usually ask to see a Git repository. It's shocking how many places either literally don't version control code (including me, on my first team out of university) or can't even handle their branching strategy.
I usually ask a few questions about their management philosophy. A lot of people just immediately say crazy stuff around work hours and Agile.
I'll ask to look at their Jira backlog, or whatever they use. If they've got hundreds of cards in there, something has gone wrong (though this is not a dealbreaker by any means).
But for real, if they can keep a clean repository, that's so highly correlated with general competence that I can basically stop asking questions there. It's also nice because it isn't an aggressive question and you don't have to reveal what you're actually looking for.
And finally, I only interview at places through my network these days. Isn't worth the risk of running into a psychopath manager and having them ruins months of my life.
>Actually remove the staff that no one works to work with or who terrorize their subordinates and I'll know you're serious about performance.
Unfortunately, that sort of person is great at convincing managers that they're the top performing employee in the team, and it's better for the others to just put up with them.
>>"Most managers have never had an independent thought on how to manage people effectively (hence the Agile parroting),
>>> most programmers don't know what an abstraction is, etc, etc. "
So many programmers think they are the next Dijkstra and are upset with LLM's producing crap code, but really over inflate themselves in their own reflection and forget that it is better than 90% of programmers.
Remember in collage, when 1 guy did the group project and the 3 other people on the team coasted and got the A. Well 75% of who you are working with now, are the ones that didn't finish the project, and likely you are one of them.
That's why LLM's are going to cause sweeping changes.
I have a new heuristic on this sort of stuff. Assume the rule of 80/20 is accurate. 80% of profits come from 20% of customers, 80 % of usefulwork comes from 20% of employees etc.
but then of the remaining 20%, 80% of that (16%) will come from 20% of the 80% of other workers.
So just two rounds of this and basically 1/3 of your company produces 96% of the results.
this 1/3-2/3 split weirdly seems to correlate with other sources (see Google as it grew compared to established firms of same revenue)
Oh I love it when people say “we’re an agile shop”. Meaningless. No you’re not, I know this because you signed a contract that says that in two years you’re going to deliver a specific pre-agreed set of features. But I guess if you say you’re “agile” you’ll get brownie points with the next level up? Who knows. Doesn’t matter, I suppose.
> Most managers have never had an independent thought on how to manage people effectively (hence the Agile parroting)
exactly. And if you want to decide whether you want to work at a company, you can look at the top managers and imagine if they ever have independent thoughts.
I would like to know what initiatives at systemic change the author has participated in, and what the outcomes where. There are plenty of case studies of action research and appreciative inquiry leading to more effective and fulfilling organisations.
I would love to have a look at your favourite reading material on this topic. I must admit that, while I've seen many attempts at improving things across numerous organizations (and the contacts through my blog give me a lot of vicarious experience), I've never seen a large organization take a serious attempt at a change, guided by sound theory, common sense, and appetite for risk.
I think it's getting better, but slowly, like all social change. You read books about corporate culture from 50 years ago and it's all jock stuff and personal loyalty. Now there's at least some sense of the job being actually doing the job right, even if at the moment that mostly cashes out as saying the right buzzwords.
I suspect the organization gets too big, and the communication overhead + politics takes over everything else. That is, I think it is theoretically not possible at a large organization, except in very rare circumstances where you've lucked into the right people and incentive structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So TL/DR, the author works for a large org with a less than perfect culture? I’d simply move. Even in keeping to companies of similar scale, there are definitely highly successful enterprises out there that wouldn’t entertain entire departments doing meaningless work, and have a generally good culture of accountability and feedback. This before even considering smaller businesses and startups where there’s simply no room to have these sorts of inefficiencies.
I feel this is one of the most interesting tradeoffs of the modern day. No, seriously.
Imagine the kind of flexibility an ordinary person has to build into everything else they have going on to make "I'd just move" a viable long term strategy. Buying property immediately becomes way more hassle than it's worth, because you might have to move in 6 months to the next place anyway. Providing a stable schooling situation for your kids just became a lot harder. Want to avoid those issues? Are you willing to pay for rent or a mortgage in a city large enough where you can keep running this strategy, over and over again? What about the situation where the culture is actually fine, but you yourself just want more money or more responsibility than they're willing to pass down to you? It's an interesting example of how when you hold one thing fixed in place, everything else has to orbit around it. Very few people get to have it all without putting in a lot of work to get there first.
Like a lot of societal ills, I think this is one place where remote working is going to make things a lot better for people even while a vocal minority will bemoan how it's all worse than ever. Many, many, many talented people would be thrilled to live in a world where they can live in the same gorgeous small town in the middle of nowhere they call home while also feeling like they aren't running a serious risk of unemployment if they give up the one job they managed to claw out of the aether.
Unreadable. Organize your thoughts, write concisely. You believe you have something to say; we would love to hear it. But we aren’t willing to wade through a sewage of words.
Agreed. Author is a pretentious moron, and it's people like him that ruin companies for everyone else. Absolutely toxic. I just wish he'd keep these opinions to himself instead of spreading them around the internet, lowering our collective IQs.
It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo.
At no point does this article, or most articles like it, do any effort to realize that things are not always like this. Even if there is some unavoidable law that huge companies inevitably fill their ranks with idiots, like this article suggests, you do not need to work at a huge company.
Most people do not work at huge companies. There’s lots of amazing tech companies with fulfilling jobs and they want you, now. But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”.
There’s some weird kind of suffer porn going on here that’s just unnecessary. If you choose to trade your sanity for a high salary then go right ahead but don’t act like you had no choice.