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> I will now point out that whether X makes it to production can become disconnected from the notion of whether X actually belongs in production. ... is the cr

> I will now point out that whether X makes it to production can become disconnected from the notion of whether X actually belongs in production. ... is the crux of her point. So, um, who decides what belongs in production? I generally like her essays but this has a weird senseless negative tone to it. Look... I get it. We've all come across bozos. A lot of these bozos aren't the derpy clowns we (hope? wish?) they would be. No - they're usually very confident, very aggressive, and very very goal oriented. Yes it's absolutely infuriating watching them somehow gain the confidence of the C-level folks, obtain a lot of resources, and burn everything to the ground all while claiming plausible deniability. Wishing that they'd get filtered out by the hiring process is <insert idiom of improbability>. The real culprit is your director of engineering. That person is making terrible decisions but is so good at avoiding accountability that you place your blame on the bozo. Hot take: if your company keeps hiring bozos then your executives are doo-doo. Leave the company. Oh, you can't because you're making 300k base + 2 years away from 800k in RSUs? Congrats. You're part of the problem (it's not your fault). The same reason why you won't leave your company is the same reason Mr. Bozo gets a crack at "innovating" at that same company. People like Rachael (who obviously love this work at their very core) are doomed to end up a jaded curmudgeon unless they 1) start their own company 2) join a tiny company. Big tech is hell. Make your money and GTFO.

fuzzfactor 5y ago
end up a jaded curmudgeon? Success is not guaranteed, but that can be a well-earned element that at least greatly reduces the odds of failure when they start their own company.
rvba 5y ago
> So, um, who decides what belongs in production? Product Owner, or just management? On a side note: in "mature" markets a bricklayer nor an architect, nor constructor can really build anything they want without anyone looking.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  I'm confused why anyone would think this is about optics and not about performance. If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. As for mature markets - useless and/or broken buildings happen all the time. Sometimes this is because a starchitect is good at making buildings that look incredible but bad at making buildings that don't have problems. (Calatrava, Frank Lloyd Wright, many more.) Sometimes it's because the project is extractive and the goal is money at the expense of quality - or even usability. (Many housing estates and not a few McMansions.) Both of these are different to a tech co hiring the equivalent of a minor starchitect to Make A Thing Happen, but getting something non-performant and/or impossible to maintain. The difference is that unless it's a greenfield startup Thing is likely to be easy to define and its performance should be easy to measure objectively with simple metrics like uptime, throughput, and so on.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. Half of the companies would have died if they followed this -- including Twitter (which had to cron-restart Rails to get it to run for more than a day in its early years, Facebook, ...)
- Jetrel 5y ago
  They can look, but as you go up the scale of complexity, at a certain point, only the master tradesmen will have a clue whether the work is good or not. Any high-skill industry has huge amounts of problems with this — rarely outright fraud, but lots of problems with "confidence men" pitching mediocre solutions to problems, and conning their way into running the full lifecycle of contracts based on this. Generally they'll deliver something, but it's usually something pretty mediocre that only kind of does the job. The further a thing is from a company's core competency (and thus, the likelihood that the executives have subject-matter expertise), the more likely this problem is. People can raise objections all they want, but there's so much "poor faith" lying done in our world, that, as a boss, it's almost impossible to tell which things are libel, and which things are a desperate attempt to warn you something's wrong. Rigorous "professional bodies" like doctor's associations help immensely. These problems are at their worst in fields where things like that don't exist (such as software).
tda 5y ago
> Yes it's absolutely infuriating watching them somehow gain the confidence of the C-level folks, obtain a lot of resources, and burn everything to the ground all while claiming plausible deniability. Thanks for summarizing my biggest gripe with my current employer so clearly! It is going on, and all the senior all the engineers see it and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. Only make sure you stay away from whatever these bozo's fancy, as someone will have to clean up or take the blame when everything falls apart. Anyone know an alternative GTFO? After a few years of complain/ignore/avoid if feel that is my only option.
- baybal2 5y ago
  Buy the company?
- nanis 5y ago
  Completely imaginary conversation ... > Look Mr. C-level, I built this amazing tool. Look at the graphs it produces. It allows _the_ user to customize parameters, track new things, and basically makes unicorns excrete rainbows. > OMG, I don't know the first thing about how computers work, but I love colorful pictures and unicorns. You are amazing. And, this is the first time you tried this stuff? > Yes, but these jerks over there, they won't put it on the web! They say it is insecure, risks revealing confidential data to the whole world, and can be used to infiltrate the company network. > But these are the best colorful pictures I've seen. Off with their heads!
  - tda 5y ago
    And now how I imagine it would go: > Look Mr. C-level, I built this amazing tool that makes unicorns excrete rainbows. It is a PoC built in my own time cause I don't have time/money or a project. > Wow, great! We need this, it fit right into our strategy for Digital! Just go talk to Mr. Bozo, our head of Digital Innovation Strategy Management. > O, so you have an idea and want budget. Please write a two page memo describing how you can add value, who the internal client will be. Make sure you get steering council approval too and approval from our CISO. If you succeed I will present this to the board as something cool I am personally responsible for! O, and please ask the internal clients for funding, cause you are providing value right? They will be happy to put you in their year plan. The plans for 2022 have already been sent to the board for approval, but this can be the first thing for 2023! In the meantime I will buy an off the shelf solution with <big vendor> and pay a fortune to let them customize it so it doesn't work anymore. Before anyone realizes what a waste of money that was I'll be long gone, haha. Off to the <big vendor> sky box, they invited me to come watch the Super Bowl again.
makach 5y ago
I agree. The article feels weird. To me the topic is complex. Absolutely you can do it yourself, but that is also a common pitfall. The belief that something can just be built in x amount of seconds by yourself comes with several risks. Building is easy, committing to a lifecycle is hard and managing the technical debt is an important part of the job. I'm trying not to build a house of cards.
Dave3of5 5y ago
> Oh, you can't because you're making 300k base + 2 years away from 800k in RSUs I'm working in a semi big tech company and not making anywhere near that (in UK) should I cry myself to sleep ?
- flyinglizard 5y ago
  Most engineers don’t, but many do.
- donpott 5y ago
  Friendly reminder that salaries in the US are substantially bigger than in the UK/Europe. For context, making GBP175000/year or over would put you in the 99th percentile for the UK. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...
  - simonbarker87 5y ago
    Yep, UK is the US for dev costs what India is to UK. I assume there are companies in the US out sourcing to a UK company that is the out source to an Indian company and the US companies have no idea.
    - htrp 5y ago
      It's re-sellers all the way down
  - deergomoo 5y ago
    I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone that makes even £100,000 to be honest. I make £50k and I’m the highest paid person in my family by a long way. Then again, I do live about 250 miles north of London, so that no doubt skews things somewhat.
    - sumtechguy 5y ago
      In the US that really depends where you live and where you are at in your career. If you just started a year or two ago that would not be out the realm of possibility in the US, in what many affectionally call 'the fly over states'. Depending on where you live it can be a lot less or more. If you have 10+ years 100k+ US (90k UK) is not unreasonable at all. You see very large comp packages here as that is what the VC companies talk. They also usually include in the comp package things like parking, your desk, the building you work in, health insurance (usually at least 12k per year), the nice dual screen computer, any 401k contributions, RSU that has not matured yet. Basically anything to make that number seem huge. One company I worked at they were saying I had a comp package of 250k yet I took home closer to 110. But take home base pay is usually in line with whatever area your are living in and the amount of exp you have. Everything else is bonus. That bonus is usually bandied about in interviews but sometimes never materializes.
1cvmask 5y ago
It seems that you have insider knowledge of the workings of Intel.
stayux 5y ago
>People like Rachael (who obviously love this work at their very core) are doomed to end up a jaded curmudgeon unless they 1) start their own company 2) join a tiny company. Big tech is hell. Make your money and GTFO. Absolutely correct. This reflects perfectly with my professional career. In the early 2000s I worked at a place which started hiring "bozos" in frightening rate. They killed an internal project for CMS (I was the PM) and proceed to hire external agency for content management, because - "Nobody of our clients is willing to do this complicated technical stuff". After a heated "debate" with the "bozos", management and CEO of the company, I quitted my well payed job. I created my own company and hired all of my team. For the next 10 years most of my ex company clients came to me by simple word of mouth marketing.
Ensorceled 5y ago
> So, um, who decides what belongs in production? All the customers who leave when your product/service goes to shit because that thing actually didn't belong in production? > ... is the crux of her point. No, the crux of her point is that the company is now suffering. If 'X' did belong in production, the company would now be blossoming.
coldtea 5y ago
>Oh, you can't because you're making 300k base + 2 years away from 800k in RSUs? Congrats. You're part of the problem (it's not your fault). What problem? Sounds more like a solution.
Spooky23 5y ago
“Building” is fun. Projects are fun. Governance and sustainment are not fun for builders and as an organization grows, you need more than builders. It’s kind of a universal theme in any endeavor. I work in a very different place and have similar experiences. As a founding member of a “startup” within a massive bureaucracy, we grew from 4 people to 4,000. Remember that people are different. My wife is a finance/auditor by trade - digging through balance sheets and controls to audit stuff is awesome work for her. Conversely, some of the details of how the sausage is made when you build a growing service just seems “wrong” based on her training/profession.
- boringg 5y ago
  I think there is something important there that all people are different and have different goals/experiences/skills etc. I would say that many companies corporate hierarchy enables/rewards people with political goals to end up in positions of power which slowly corrode the company. It also allows for "bozos" per OP language to propel up the ladder and espouse their ideas without any pragmatic experience or understanding to really solve the problems. People who present well and can play the political game but can't translate to execution. The worst people for that are the finance people who are sometimes good at numbers, models, they think they understand everything (I.e. MBAs) and somehow accrue power. Once you company has a lot of those at the top level of leadership you are about to enter builder hell.
  - Spooky23 5y ago
    True. But the worst people are the family dynasty types in a private company. End of the day everything has a lifecycle. If Alcoa acted like a startup, they wouldn’t be around for long.
    - boringg 5y ago
      Oh right, don't have experience with that sort. Seems like they would be tough.
cloverich 5y ago
Actually I thought the way it ended was the best point. You can use the interview process itself to understand if you are about to work for one of these companies, which lines up with my experience well. Leet code grind? Expect a shit show on the inside. Which is fine if you are joining for money / friends (who work there) / prestige. But quality shop that knows what they are doing? Probably gonna ask things other than leet code questions.

fuzzfactor 5y ago

end up a jaded curmudgeon? Success is not guaranteed, but that can be a well-earned element that at least greatly reduces the odds of failure when they start their own company.

rvba 5y ago

> So, um, who decides what belongs in production? Product Owner, or just management? On a side note: in "mature" markets a bricklayer nor an architect, nor constructor can really build anything they want without anyone looking.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
I'm confused why anyone would think this is about optics and not about performance. If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. As for mature markets - useless and/or broken buildings happen all the time. Sometimes this is because a starchitect is good at making buildings that look incredible but bad at making buildings that don't have problems. (Calatrava, Frank Lloyd Wright, many more.) Sometimes it's because the project is extractive and the goal is money at the expense of quality - or even usability. (Many housing estates and not a few McMansions.) Both of these are different to a tech co hiring the equivalent of a minor starchitect to Make A Thing Happen, but getting something non-performant and/or impossible to maintain. The difference is that unless it's a greenfield startup Thing is likely to be easy to define and its performance should be easy to measure objectively with simple metrics like uptime, throughput, and so on.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >If something Does Not Work Reliably - when it has no reasonable reason for not doing so - then it Does Not Belong In Production. Half of the companies would have died if they followed this -- including Twitter (which had to cron-restart Rails to get it to run for more than a day in its early years, Facebook, ...)
Jetrel 5y ago
They can look, but as you go up the scale of complexity, at a certain point, only the master tradesmen will have a clue whether the work is good or not. Any high-skill industry has huge amounts of problems with this — rarely outright fraud, but lots of problems with "confidence men" pitching mediocre solutions to problems, and conning their way into running the full lifecycle of contracts based on this. Generally they'll deliver something, but it's usually something pretty mediocre that only kind of does the job. The further a thing is from a company's core competency (and thus, the likelihood that the executives have subject-matter expertise), the more likely this problem is. People can raise objections all they want, but there's so much "poor faith" lying done in our world, that, as a boss, it's almost impossible to tell which things are libel, and which things are a desperate attempt to warn you something's wrong. Rigorous "professional bodies" like doctor's associations help immensely. These problems are at their worst in fields where things like that don't exist (such as software).

tda 5y ago

> Yes it's absolutely infuriating watching them somehow gain the confidence of the C-level folks, obtain a lot of resources, and burn everything to the ground all while claiming plausible deniability. Thanks for summarizing my biggest gripe with my current employer so clearly! It is going on, and all the senior all the engineers see it and there is nothing you can do to prevent it. Only make sure you stay away from whatever these bozo's fancy, as someone will have to clean up or take the blame when everything falls apart. Anyone know an alternative GTFO? After a few years of complain/ignore/avoid if feel that is my only option.

baybal2 5y ago
Buy the company?
nanis 5y ago
Completely imaginary conversation ... > Look Mr. C-level, I built this amazing tool. Look at the graphs it produces. It allows _the_ user to customize parameters, track new things, and basically makes unicorns excrete rainbows. > OMG, I don't know the first thing about how computers work, but I love colorful pictures and unicorns. You are amazing. And, this is the first time you tried this stuff? > Yes, but these jerks over there, they won't put it on the web! They say it is insecure, risks revealing confidential data to the whole world, and can be used to infiltrate the company network. > But these are the best colorful pictures I've seen. Off with their heads!
- tda 5y ago
  And now how I imagine it would go: > Look Mr. C-level, I built this amazing tool that makes unicorns excrete rainbows. It is a PoC built in my own time cause I don't have time/money or a project. > Wow, great! We need this, it fit right into our strategy for Digital! Just go talk to Mr. Bozo, our head of Digital Innovation Strategy Management. > O, so you have an idea and want budget. Please write a two page memo describing how you can add value, who the internal client will be. Make sure you get steering council approval too and approval from our CISO. If you succeed I will present this to the board as something cool I am personally responsible for! O, and please ask the internal clients for funding, cause you are providing value right? They will be happy to put you in their year plan. The plans for 2022 have already been sent to the board for approval, but this can be the first thing for 2023! In the meantime I will buy an off the shelf solution with <big vendor> and pay a fortune to let them customize it so it doesn't work anymore. Before anyone realizes what a waste of money that was I'll be long gone, haha. Off to the <big vendor> sky box, they invited me to come watch the Super Bowl again.

makach 5y ago

I agree. The article feels weird. To me the topic is complex. Absolutely you can do it yourself, but that is also a common pitfall. The belief that something can just be built in x amount of seconds by yourself comes with several risks. Building is easy, committing to a lifecycle is hard and managing the technical debt is an important part of the job. I'm trying not to build a house of cards.

Dave3of5 5y ago

> Oh, you can't because you're making 300k base + 2 years away from 800k in RSUs I'm working in a semi big tech company and not making anywhere near that (in UK) should I cry myself to sleep ?

flyinglizard 5y ago
Most engineers don’t, but many do.
donpott 5y ago
Friendly reminder that salaries in the US are substantially bigger than in the UK/Europe. For context, making GBP175000/year or over would put you in the 99th percentile for the UK. Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-f...
- simonbarker87 5y ago
  Yep, UK is the US for dev costs what India is to UK. I assume there are companies in the US out sourcing to a UK company that is the out source to an Indian company and the US companies have no idea.
  - htrp 5y ago
    It's re-sellers all the way down
- deergomoo 5y ago
  I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone that makes even £100,000 to be honest. I make £50k and I’m the highest paid person in my family by a long way. Then again, I do live about 250 miles north of London, so that no doubt skews things somewhat.
  - sumtechguy 5y ago
    In the US that really depends where you live and where you are at in your career. If you just started a year or two ago that would not be out the realm of possibility in the US, in what many affectionally call 'the fly over states'. Depending on where you live it can be a lot less or more. If you have 10+ years 100k+ US (90k UK) is not unreasonable at all. You see very large comp packages here as that is what the VC companies talk. They also usually include in the comp package things like parking, your desk, the building you work in, health insurance (usually at least 12k per year), the nice dual screen computer, any 401k contributions, RSU that has not matured yet. Basically anything to make that number seem huge. One company I worked at they were saying I had a comp package of 250k yet I took home closer to 110. But take home base pay is usually in line with whatever area your are living in and the amount of exp you have. Everything else is bonus. That bonus is usually bandied about in interviews but sometimes never materializes.

1cvmask 5y ago

It seems that you have insider knowledge of the workings of Intel.

stayux 5y ago

>People like Rachael (who obviously love this work at their very core) are doomed to end up a jaded curmudgeon unless they 1) start their own company 2) join a tiny company. Big tech is hell. Make your money and GTFO. Absolutely correct. This reflects perfectly with my professional career. In the early 2000s I worked at a place which started hiring "bozos" in frightening rate. They killed an internal project for CMS (I was the PM) and proceed to hire external agency for content management, because - "Nobody of our clients is willing to do this complicated technical stuff". After a heated "debate" with the "bozos", management and CEO of the company, I quitted my well payed job. I created my own company and hired all of my team. For the next 10 years most of my ex company clients came to me by simple word of mouth marketing.

Ensorceled 5y ago

> So, um, who decides what belongs in production? All the customers who leave when your product/service goes to shit because that thing actually didn't belong in production? > ... is the crux of her point. No, the crux of her point is that the company is now suffering. If 'X' did belong in production, the company would now be blossoming.

coldtea 5y ago

>Oh, you can't because you're making 300k base + 2 years away from 800k in RSUs? Congrats. You're part of the problem (it's not your fault). What problem? Sounds more like a solution.

Spooky23 5y ago

“Building” is fun. Projects are fun. Governance and sustainment are not fun for builders and as an organization grows, you need more than builders. It’s kind of a universal theme in any endeavor. I work in a very different place and have similar experiences. As a founding member of a “startup” within a massive bureaucracy, we grew from 4 people to 4,000. Remember that people are different. My wife is a finance/auditor by trade - digging through balance sheets and controls to audit stuff is awesome work for her. Conversely, some of the details of how the sausage is made when you build a growing service just seems “wrong” based on her training/profession.

boringg 5y ago
I think there is something important there that all people are different and have different goals/experiences/skills etc. I would say that many companies corporate hierarchy enables/rewards people with political goals to end up in positions of power which slowly corrode the company. It also allows for "bozos" per OP language to propel up the ladder and espouse their ideas without any pragmatic experience or understanding to really solve the problems. People who present well and can play the political game but can't translate to execution. The worst people for that are the finance people who are sometimes good at numbers, models, they think they understand everything (I.e. MBAs) and somehow accrue power. Once you company has a lot of those at the top level of leadership you are about to enter builder hell.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  True. But the worst people are the family dynasty types in a private company. End of the day everything has a lifecycle. If Alcoa acted like a startup, they wouldn’t be around for long.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Oh right, don't have experience with that sort. Seems like they would be tough.

cloverich 5y ago

Actually I thought the way it ended was the best point. You can use the interview process itself to understand if you are about to work for one of these companies, which lines up with my experience well. Leet code grind? Expect a shit show on the inside. Which is fine if you are joining for money / friends (who work there) / prestige. But quality shop that knows what they are doing? Probably gonna ask things other than leet code questions.