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>>The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them. Yeah, right. People who h
by kamaal 9y ago
>>The bar for a senior engineer should be identifying the biggest problems plaguing an organization, and successfully tackling them.
Yeah, right.
People who hold the current power will never let you do it. For one simple reason. No one likes to be promoting their next boss.
In fact in most companies merely talking about 'biggest problems plaguing an organization' can get you fired. No likes to be told that the current bosses aren't up-to their job.
- joshuamorton 9y agoYeah. Right! Organizations that wish to be successful are designed so that you can't promote your next boss. Engineers and management are different things. Engineers can be promoted and do impactful work and identify problems and get promoted some more, without ever threatening to become anyone's boss. Then, your engineers can be rated based on how well they solve engineering problems, and management can be rated based on how well they manage human capital and allocate between the various engineering problems that need to be solved. Certainly there's some politicking based on prioritization, but that's not a bad thing. You don't want to accidently solve problems that no one really needs solved, its a waste of time. Sure shitty organizations exist. That doesn't mean organizations are always shitty.
- lovich 9y agoGod yes. At my current position I have been hired to help rewrite an application and I was literally taken aside and talked to for saying, verbatim, that "the application was built for business needs that no longer exist, and we need to update it for our current requirements", because it upset people by implying that the code they wrote 5 years ago was no longer perfect. It seems like any organization that grows beyond 2 layers of management turns into an organization that spends the majority of it's time posturing rather than attempting to get anything done