5 ms·

Building new useless shit is the secret to succeeding as a developer. You either build some shit or end up not getting a promotion / new job.

omnicognate 5y ago
You mean the secret to being a developer is... developing?
- ForHackernews 5y ago
  Certainly it's not a career that rewards maintaining legacy systems or cleaning up technical debt.
  - still_grokking 5y ago
    That's for the new hires. The experts who created those things move on.
    - Kye 5y ago
      It sounds like the problem at Google is no one's maintaining things once the person responsible for it moves on.
      - ikiris 5y ago
        Maintaining something at google is basically career suicide.
    - spoonjim 5y ago
      Yes, which is why the least skilled developers maintain the products, which is why they eventually get canned. This is not inevitable in software —- it is specific to Google. At business software companies, for example, maintenance is not career suicide, so you have very senior engineers who work on improving the engineering systems to detect and fix bugs, leading to a more effective long term software maintenance capability.
      - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
        Maintaining and improving core systems is what entire large teams in Google's Ads, Search, Core, etc. teams do, and yes, they get promotion for it. It's often not very sexy work, but it is recognized. It's really the consumer-facing & consumer hardware teams that have this novelty-seeking-promotion problem, IMHO. (I've worked on both)
      - UncleMeat 5y ago
        Promotion rates in Core Dev are higher than normal across the company. The idea that you cannot get promoted writing tooling or making engineers efficient or keeping the codebase clean is simply not supported by data.
        plorkyeran 5y ago
        What it sounds like is that if you're maintaining things it needs to be something important to the business to get promoted, but if you create something new then it doesn't have to be.
        UncleMeat 5y ago
        I'd edit that to say that it is easier to incorrectly believe that something new is important to the business but that you really do need to make the same impact argument in both cases.

omnicognate 5y ago

You mean the secret to being a developer is... developing?

ForHackernews 5y ago
Certainly it's not a career that rewards maintaining legacy systems or cleaning up technical debt.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  That's for the new hires. The experts who created those things move on.
  - Kye 5y ago
    It sounds like the problem at Google is no one's maintaining things once the person responsible for it moves on.
    - ikiris 5y ago
      Maintaining something at google is basically career suicide.
  - spoonjim 5y ago
    Yes, which is why the least skilled developers maintain the products, which is why they eventually get canned. This is not inevitable in software —- it is specific to Google. At business software companies, for example, maintenance is not career suicide, so you have very senior engineers who work on improving the engineering systems to detect and fix bugs, leading to a more effective long term software maintenance capability.
    - cmrdporcupine 5y ago
      Maintaining and improving core systems is what entire large teams in Google's Ads, Search, Core, etc. teams do, and yes, they get promotion for it. It's often not very sexy work, but it is recognized. It's really the consumer-facing & consumer hardware teams that have this novelty-seeking-promotion problem, IMHO. (I've worked on both)
    - UncleMeat 5y ago
      Promotion rates in Core Dev are higher than normal across the company. The idea that you cannot get promoted writing tooling or making engineers efficient or keeping the codebase clean is simply not supported by data.
      - plorkyeran 5y ago
        What it sounds like is that if you're maintaining things it needs to be something important to the business to get promoted, but if you create something new then it doesn't have to be.
        UncleMeat 5y ago
        I'd edit that to say that it is easier to incorrectly believe that something new is important to the business but that you really do need to make the same impact argument in both cases.