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As an Ex-elite person, what you are missing is their performance goals as were given to them by their manager. As a senior person in a big org, you are judge b

As an Ex-elite person, what you are missing is their performance goals as were given to them by their manager. As a senior person in a big org, you are judge by your leadership efforts / cross team efforts, so this is what they tried to do. I bet that if their goals were to write code, you would see them write code.

ryandrake 5y ago
Exactly. Many senior-level people probably do want to write code, create things, and do that "shovel to dirt" work, but their company's performance review process discourages it. So, instead they have to fill their days with all that cross team impact, leadership, architecture, complexity, and process improvement stuff. Everywhere I've worked, "shovel to dirt" work is seen as what's done by the lowest rung on the totem pole. This mentality is all over industry. If you want to get promoted, you need to "create organizational transformation and synergistic thought leadership" instead.
- chii 5y ago
  a possible way out is to tie more of senior's compensation with equity, including senior manager's. you don't automatically get more pay the more senior you become - you get more pay by increasing sales or products or customer retention etc, which increases equity value. If everybody just plans and reviews, equity value will not grow.
  - Nbox9 5y ago
    Let’s say there are two ranks. Senior 1 and Senior 2, with Senior 2 being a higher ranking position. Senior 2 will naturally come with more equity than Senior 1. The fastest way to increase your pay will be to be promoted from Senior 1 to Senior 2. You’re incentive will be to do whatever it takes to move from Senior 1 to Senior 2, which more often than not isn’t putting shovel to dirt. Go to Levels.fyi, and look at how equity increases as you raise the ranks.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    If you're working for a FAANG or any company of similar scale, it's virtually impossible for an individual contributor to move the needle in terms of stock price. So the rational thing to do is plan and review with an eye to your own promotion, and let the busy bees in Ads lift up the stock price by churning out tens of billions in revenue.
ozim 5y ago
Seems that there was no manager and constant "architectural" discussions because everyone wanted only to show off how smart they are. There are companies where no one from business side knows what is going on in development and they are not interested. They just pour money into dev and what they know it is only that "development is expensive and takes a lot of time". I bet the goal was something like "just ship the system" which probably never happened or took a lot of time. Maybe even devs making their own requirements according to what they think is needed. So I think you are too charitable with such interpretation that there were some goals or managers at all.

ryandrake 5y ago

Exactly. Many senior-level people probably do want to write code, create things, and do that "shovel to dirt" work, but their company's performance review process discourages it. So, instead they have to fill their days with all that cross team impact, leadership, architecture, complexity, and process improvement stuff. Everywhere I've worked, "shovel to dirt" work is seen as what's done by the lowest rung on the totem pole. This mentality is all over industry. If you want to get promoted, you need to "create organizational transformation and synergistic thought leadership" instead.

chii 5y ago
a possible way out is to tie more of senior's compensation with equity, including senior manager's. you don't automatically get more pay the more senior you become - you get more pay by increasing sales or products or customer retention etc, which increases equity value. If everybody just plans and reviews, equity value will not grow.
- Nbox9 5y ago
  Let’s say there are two ranks. Senior 1 and Senior 2, with Senior 2 being a higher ranking position. Senior 2 will naturally come with more equity than Senior 1. The fastest way to increase your pay will be to be promoted from Senior 1 to Senior 2. You’re incentive will be to do whatever it takes to move from Senior 1 to Senior 2, which more often than not isn’t putting shovel to dirt. Go to Levels.fyi, and look at how equity increases as you raise the ranks.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  If you're working for a FAANG or any company of similar scale, it's virtually impossible for an individual contributor to move the needle in terms of stock price. So the rational thing to do is plan and review with an eye to your own promotion, and let the busy bees in Ads lift up the stock price by churning out tens of billions in revenue.

ozim 5y ago

Seems that there was no manager and constant "architectural" discussions because everyone wanted only to show off how smart they are. There are companies where no one from business side knows what is going on in development and they are not interested. They just pour money into dev and what they know it is only that "development is expensive and takes a lot of time". I bet the goal was something like "just ship the system" which probably never happened or took a lot of time. Maybe even devs making their own requirements according to what they think is needed. So I think you are too charitable with such interpretation that there were some goals or managers at all.