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I work at a company you’ve all heard of that prides itself as a place where everyone writes and everyone reads. A lot. I’m an individual contributor. In theory
by ekfNsPsoQp 5y ago
I work at a company you’ve all heard of that prides itself as a place where everyone writes and everyone reads. A lot.
I’m an individual contributor. In theory, my job is to build stuff, which - again, in theory - involves writing code, debugging, solving deep technical problems, and so on. Unfortunately, due to the culture of writing and reading I spend most of my time mired in documents. Every breath we take produces a wall of text that must be reviewed and commented on. At this point it’s been about three weeks since I’ve written code.
Not every question deserves the dreaded one-pager. Not every potential code change must be foreshadowed by an exhaustive treatment in a peer reviewed design doc. Not every potential failure mode must be imagined and written up in detail, including all hypothetical gory details.
And don’t you dare protest! You’ll be labeled not a team player, poor communicator, a lone wolf. You’ll get a negative performance rating in the next cycle and then “managed out” for non-compliance with prevailing culture.
Oh, performance reviews are a special kind of joy. For a few weeks each year the economy of writing traffics mostly in documents written by employees who must openly brag about work they did over the past year. It’s a kind of literary hunger games in a corporate setting.
Oh, and this Kafkaesque machine has feelings too. It’s weird about “tone”: disagree with someone’s writing and they see a personal attack. Sickly sweet praise is the name of the game, whereas legitimate critique of another’s writing must be circumspect and formed such that it cannot be “taken the wrong way” or else!
I’m so done.
- polkaz 5y agoThis is classic "optimization of x destroys the rest of the alphabet." I wish more businesses employed some sort of systems thinking and realized that rules are coordination mechanisms that carry the capacity to destroy value. They're absolutely great when they create predictability and coordination at minimal cost, but they can destroy your company if all they do is impede activities that generate the value your business actually earns profit from.
- fghfghfghfghfgh 5y ago“… rules are coordination mechanisms that carry the capacity to destroy value” Excellent phrasing :)
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoIn my experience, most businesses with these kind of over-documentation practices are conscious of the value loss. The executives just believe, rightly or wrongly, that the issues being averted would themselves destroy the company if they happened.
- sdoering 5y agoThis is one of the most concise formulations of the topic I stumbled across in my time on this planet. Thanks. Already added it to my notes regarding systems, processes, system thinking and rules.
- turtle_ 5y agoSounds like Google. Perf is the engine that powers the bizarre internal meat machine. Fuel are the artifacts: docs and code. More the better.
- hobo_mark 5y agoSounds like Stripe to me :)
- froh 5y agoWhy don't you leave?
- ekfNsPsoQp 5y agoGolden handcuffs.
- sdoering 5y agoIt sounds like at least the pain money is high enough to expose yourself to it every day.
- igetspam 5y agoYou're not being very Googley. Report for reeducation. Non compliance will result in 2x the number of peer reviews during the next perf cycle and failure to complete them on time will get you a PIP. Shortly thereafter, you will be exited. You have been warned.
- hunter321 5y agoWell it's not Amazon. I genuinely feel that we've got a great doc writing culture. We obviously write a ton of docs but only when we need to. Personally I code 60% of the time as an IC L5 (software engineer)
- pipingdog 5y agoThis sentiment is why software developers should not be called engineers.
- jjav 5y ago> Not every question deserves the dreaded one-pager. Since I have no context on your company or their process, can't say anything specific. You're totally right that not every thing requires the full process. Processes must be flexible to accomodate the simple cases as well as the complex ones. That said.. most of my experience is that developers do like to complain about following documentation process even for many cases where it is very much necessary.
- midrus 5y agoI also work for a company where everyone writes and reads and we have almost no meetings at all, no scrum, etc, and I didn't notice any of these problems. It's the best place I've worked at and I'm already > 20 years into this. To me the problem you describe is orthogonal to the fact you have a writing culture or not. I bet if you didn't have that writing culture you would still have all those problems and just a ton more meetings and conversations with managers. I've been at places like that in the past and the best solution for me was to quit, I just couldn't stand it. For example, promotions: I've been in that hunger games you mention where you have to promote yourself to death to have a promotion, and I hated it. Agree with you it was a real problem, specially for people that don't like to do marketing of themselves. At my current company your team lead is ultimately responsible of the output of the team, so with consideration of the team's opinions, he ultimately decides if you get a raise each year or not. If he wants you in the team you get a raise, if he doesn't you get a lower one or none at all. You can look for another team within the company or you can leave, up to you. Leads are professional enough like to not promote just friends, because they're also accountable in the same way up the chain. And that's it. At the end of the day your team, the 6 or 10 people you work with every day, they know very clearly if they want you or not, no need for 100 page essays about your awesomeness.