19 ms·

As a consultant, I come around a bit. I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In f

by fefe23 4y ago

As a consultant, I come around a bit. I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done! Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem. And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building.

hef19898 4y ago
Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out once the problem was understood, people tend to build upon those not fit for purpose things...
- toss1 4y ago
  YES!! Even coming from an attitude of being big on abstractions and generalized/scaled solutions, I cannot overstate the importance of writing a throw-away version at the outset. Hit the highlights, write it fast & dirty, use it, extend it a bit as you start to understand the system — then throw it away. Use that knowledge to design and build your real system, from scratch, but informed by your earned knowledge. >>agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. And to this in the GP post, I think he identified a fundamental problem with Agile. Its entire bias is to write code fast, when the bias should be to avoid writing code — code is slow and habitat for bugs. Obviously everything requires code, but it should be minimized, not maximized. Of course, writing code quickly and seeing it run is satisfying, but developers' dopamine hits shouldn't be the primary driver of design & mgt - end performance should be, and that takes careful thought of what can be eliminated, and basing that thought on knowledge of a throw-away-version-1 is very useful, and pays benefits to both the dev team and to users for years.
  - beachy 4y ago
    > The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
  - cassianoleal 4y ago
    Code is Liability, the Less the Better https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/less-code-is-better/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/less-code-is-better/
  - jimjimjim 4y ago
    replacing the prototype is important, but you need enough power in your org to be able to throw it away. 'nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution'
  - ok123456 4y ago
    Until your boss doesn't understand this concept and thinks your prototype is a finished system, even after explaining the fact it's just a demo that you made to help gather requirements time-and-time-again.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Also goes the other way, developers believing something is good while totally ignoring user feedback stating otherwise. Admittesly so, you example so much more frequent.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  Some of the most valuable work I've ever done was spending a month creating something, throwing every byte away, and then spending two weeks creating the same thing, much improved. The key to rework like this is you have to actually be able to finish it and get rid of the old, instead of spending months or years maintaining two half-baked versions of something instead of just one.
  - stouset 4y ago
    Almost every single thing I build I throw away at least one of them, sometimes two. The finished projects tend to stick around forever and, if they need maintenance, it’s adding a feature or two or updating dependencies. I do backend work so this kind of workflow probably doesn’t work for customer-facing projects that need to iterate on finding traction. But for something where the problem is generally well defined and not likely to change drastically in the short or medium term, it’s amazing. I have multiple projects I’ve written that run on virtually every machine (server and workstation) at my company (former unicorn, current Fortune 500) that are effectively “done” and only need to be redeployed a couple times a year for dependency updates and preventing bitrot in general. Having worked like this, I can confidently say I will never again remain on a team where this isn’t the normal state of affairs.
harpiaharpyja 4y ago
I thought the point of iterating early is that sometimes writing code is the best way to gain understanding of the problem (depending on the kind of problem). You're supposed to throw that stuff away... it's iteration...
codegeek 4y ago
"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE to do something meaningful but are stuck with red tape. I was one of those and quit my high paying Investment Bank Tech Job to start my own thing. I was getting paid big as a consultant and once my main project finished, they just wanted me around because traders loved me. I literally had to find things to do every day otherwise it was soooo boring unless something broke.
- lujim 4y ago
  I disagree with this. An entire business day is a long time to do nothing. I've always loved jobs where there was enough strategic direction to know what to focus on but enough latitude where you could actually do it. I can't think of anyone (not suffering from pure burnout) that didn't devour meaningful work that had well written requirements.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important". I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.
  - granshaw 4y ago
    Yeah it’s the “pretending to work” part that’s soul crushing. If you could be explicit that “this is what I need to do this week, it’ll only take 4 hours. The rest of the time I’ll be available but I won’t do make-work”, that’d be awesome. Also a lot of people don’t realize that being available for questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely limits what you can do with that time even if working remotely. So were you near your computer 9-5 today and could respond on short notice? Well then you worked 8 hours basically. And that availability itself is hugely valuable to employers.
devwastaken 4y ago
Large corps are propped up by intellectual property law and economies of scale. They do not hold their market positions on their own merit. If we remove IP laws, we will have another golden age of tech innovation tomorrow.
- diordiderot 4y ago
  Yeah but then no one would invent anything because that's the only reason anyone does anything! _glances nervously at FOSS, science, art, & philosophy_
PKop 4y ago
>Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. Of course this isn't true.
abledon 4y ago
> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. Have you worked in Government? edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an example
- matsemann 4y ago
  I hate this take of "gobernment bad, capitalism good". As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    I completely agree -- but it is remarkable how many Americans have bought into this idea that "government is bad".
    - just_steve_h 4y ago
      We'll, it is true that our "ownership class" and its media and political mouthpieces have spent the better part of the last two generations drilling this notion into people's skulls will all the considerable power at their disposal.
      - BuckRogers 4y ago
        I’ve held a job ever since I was 12 years old. And I worked before that under the table to pay for my things as a child. I’ve worked at many multinationals now that I’m middle aged. Yes, I’m American. And my view on this is completely contrary to conventional wisdom. Private enterprise is not only less efficient than government, it’s destructive. Private enterprise doesn’t care about doing a good job or delivering quality product. It only cares about making money. It’s a perverse incentive that drives everything down to the bottom almost every time. The only way to circumvent that perverse incentive system is to have someone in charge that cares about something other than profits. And there just are not enough Steve Jobs or similar characters out there that cared about quality and legacy enough to make blind participation as a buyer in your favor. Of course someone will say, that’s how you make money is by delivering quality. But that’s not true. You deliver money by monopolizing, putting in barriers to entry, or simply by cutting costs. By definition, if something you buy was cheaper to produce than the price you paid, you’re getting a bad deal. People just don’t see this because they have no other choice. Now all that said, I also believe that it is the worst system, except for all the others. I think with sensible regulation to counterbalance abuse, the system is as good of one as I’ve seen.
hcarvalhoalves 4y ago
> The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem. I've seen this increase proportional to the number of employees. People start trying to worry more about perception of progress by tracking proxy metrics, because the large the company, the harder it is to prove how each one contributes directly to the bottom line.
- wsc981 4y ago
  Managers also seem to love these proxy metrics, so delivering these metrics to management (as a dev) can be a good way to get noticed.
dleslie 4y ago
> It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done! IMHO, if you're a developer and have more than 8h of meetings a week then you are no longer a developer. In the worst case, you are a body to fill a seat in a meeting to fluff the self-importance of your management. In the best case, you're on track to being management yourself.
g051051 4y ago
> The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. Well said!
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  As Dilbert says: "our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late".
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
commandlinefan 4y ago
> company calendar is 80% filled with meetings The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.
- daviddever23box 4y ago
  Except that's not a reasonable ask when you have a global presence and meetings into the evening. Saying no to an over-scheduled calendar is the mechanism by which you gain control of your life. My measure of a meeting's worth is: if you were shackled to a chair for the scheduled duration of this meeting, would you get anything useful done, from a discussion perspective? If not, simply decline the invite; your brain is not important enough to have been productive in that context.
- ryneandal 4y ago
  Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule.
  - zhengyi13 4y ago
    When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical work) is done outside 9-5. Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.
    - treis 4y ago
      A former coworker called these people professional meeters. Had an EM like that. Either he was in a meeting or he was walking around and talking the ear off of whichever unfortunate soul he bumped into. Tangible output was basically 0.
    - icedchai 4y ago
      Incredible. I haven't seen a PM that does technical work in years, maybe well over a decade.
rajeshp1986 4y ago
What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects or project features which never get released. One of my co-workers was working on a feature which was shelved after working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as clueless and lazy as engineers.
- lazyasciiart 4y ago
  ah, yes...six years at MSFT, only one year working on code that eventually shipped
  - goodpoint 4y ago
    MSFT is hardly a FAANG
    - Der_Einzige 4y ago
      Why? Their stock performs just as well, and they pay better than Amazon, better benefits, all with a reputation for legendary good WLB. Amazon is hardly a FAANG
      - ruraljuror 4y ago
        Better pay? Not for new hires. Most recent reports I have seen (blind, levels.fyi) and my own experiences have shown Amazon skyrocket to the top paying FAANG, with the first two years heavily skewed toward cash and backloading RSUs. I am surprised out of all the FAANGs you picked the generally lowest paying one as the counter example.
      - goodpoint 4y ago
        I always understood FAANGS to be defined by their engineering culture and the innovative approach to problems, not just salary. Hence the selection of companies.
    - 4y ago
asdjjsvnn 4y ago
Part of the problem is also the incentives and performance axes that are defined to evaluate work/productivity. At a higher experience level, you are expected not just to churn out code but also to demonstrate performance on axes such as influence, scope, leadership etc. In fact, if you just churn out code and not perform on other axes, you are under performing under other axes. So, I could solve a particular problem for my team quickly with no dependencies with other teams/people, but I am now forced to go to other teams and look if they have similar problems to solve and then work on getting alignment on a common solution which would work as a common framework for both team's use cases. While this in theory is good to have one generic solution for a set of similar problems, once a huge company has incentivized this, lot of people are trying to build the next standard/framework and as you'd expect adoption becomes a problem because everyone is trying to evangelize their own framework. The end result, you suddenly have to work with x number of people and let everyone align with what you are doing, that takes time, then you implement something and now have to convince others to use your framework, which again takes time. Add these dependencies and you have what you currently have, a mechanism that moves slowly with most people involved feel helpless and think if it was just up to them they would have it all done in a few days.
barrenko 4y ago
The exact point of a big company is that nothing gets done.
bogota 4y ago
I just know of at least 20 people left my previous company because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your manager or in some cases your managers manager. But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no right to be managing or running a business. Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for depression and burnout. No one wants that.
- data-ottawa 4y ago
  The biggest lie I ever got told at work was "all teams have equal opportunity for impact". They don't, and team+org is about 80% of your potential performance. At the time my org had a "mission & building" group and a "maintenance & operations" group. I was placed in the maintenance group. Every single project in the maintenance group went the same: good idea, planning & initial prototype, gets noticed by management, you get permanently blocked or management pilfers your star players and you start again or scope down. All our projects were tiny or failures. Meanwhile the people in the mission group got showered with raises and promotions. It was soul crushing, I had never been so unhappy. I had no (opportunity for) impact on the business, so my reviews were always that I was technically strong but didn't demonstrate impact. You can get stuck in a real feedback loop there, you get burned out at constant failure. I'm sure we all looked lazy from above, I certainly felt lazy, but the org structure simply quashed any attempts at progress and we were all powerless against it. I ended up leaving that role, it gave me a strong focus on impact only roles which was the best career move I ever made.
  - YZF 4y ago
    That sounds like a dysfunctional organization and a good example why trying to measure "impact" in the sense you're describing is not a good idea. Let's say you're on an internal tools team that's building tools that others in the organization rely on to build whatever products your company is making money of. You might say your direct "impact" [edit: is small/zero] but your indirect impact is definitely not. In a well run company those people would be highly valued for their indirect contribution. You're absolutely right that how a company is organized, and its culture, is directly linked to those outcomes. The ability of individuals to make impact is also very related to their being in the right position to utilize their strengths aka role fit. In a well run company managers try to optimize for all these things. Ofcourse the best intentioned managers can't always place everyone in the perfect spot and lots of projects have work that isn't super shiny but is still important. Sounds like you made the right decision in leaving.
dboreham 4y ago
> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.
- weard_beard 4y ago
  I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.
  - bcrosby95 4y ago
    This isn't anything like how a place like Google or Facebook works. I would guess that the vast majority of developers (I daresay 100% of them) posting on HN would not like to work at a place like that.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      I think it's a mix of both - I'd kill for anyone at my current job to spend more than a bare minimum of time on their acceptance criterion so I don't just feel like I'm writing code and hoping it does vaguely what the person wants. What the GP is describing feels a bit too far in the other direction, but I'd almost rather it trend towards having an over-prescriptive ticket I can push back on then playing telephone with another department because they gave me 3 sentences of writeup for a month/quarter long project.
      - closeparen 4y ago
        At a product company, the lead engineer(s) and the product manager, who is a direct everyday member of the engineering team, collectively own what the product is supposed to be. There’s not someone else two departments away who is a more legitimate authority on what to build.
osigurdson 4y ago
The sad part about excessive meetings is often they are not enough on their own. In between all of the the pointless meetings, smaller, less formal, often unscheduled, real meetings where actual decisions are made still need to happen.
999900000999 4y ago
>But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done! As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing. I've been reprimanded before , when I took the initiative to try and start building out a framework. I literally had nothing else to do, but I was later told I should have waited until a committee could be formed. Even if you barely do anything, at least you're not causing trouble. In my career. I've worked with several abrasive angry people, I've seen folks confront C level employees. Developers who cry about having to use a PC to write some.net code and throw a temper tantrum. Threaten to just walk out because some legacy code needed updating and they're so used to having a precious Mac to code on. That said, I actually really like him how limited social interactions are with remote work. I don't need to know your political beliefs, I don't need to be your friend, I don't want to get drinks with you, I want to do what is necessary for my job. Corporate fluff plays a role. I imagine Google develops products that will never be profitable just so they can look at their shareholders and say, looky we do stuff aside from search.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago
  I was with you until that part. Having to write .NET and on Windows is just too much.
- smeagull 4y ago
  > As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing. Longer if you're CEO.
coffeeisyummy 4y ago
This iteration through pseudo productivity comes from management's real world problem of demonstrating progress on their projects. The promises of visibility on your development team's productivity always turns Agile into a steaming pile of burn-downs and story points. "No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real world, no one uses Agile in an ideal environment free of pressures like deadlines or budgets.
- jimjimjim 4y ago
  exactly. the sales department has targets for the quarter and they won't give 2 damns about how many story points your team got through this sprint. They want on this date or else.
- spc476 4y ago
  I think my department was Agile, doing the stuff on the left (good) side of the Agile Manifesto [1], even as we didn't think we were doing Agile. We made deadlines, had smooth deployments, and any bugs in production were not that bad. Then new management came in (company was bought) and started pushing "Agile" on us, which is doing the stuff on the right [bad] side of the Agile Manifesto. Now we've missed deadlines, rarely have a smooth deployment, and are now constantly finding bugs in production. When pressed, upper management has stated that "Agile" is to make it possible to work faster than we were. Yeah. [1] https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/
rubiquity 4y ago
I'm surprised to see this is the top voted comment because it is completely off the mark in this case and anyone that has spent any amount of time reading Blind (a website dedicated to... I'm not sure what exactly) knows it. While Facebook/Meta, Google, and others have always paid comparatively well, in the past 2-3 years the pay shot up even higher and the only price of admission is supreme obedience to "grinding LeetCode." This hysteria created an entire culture of pay chasers that congregate on that Blind website with little regard for anyhing other than compensation. These people, who I consider to be among the most toxic people in tech, have a singular focus on pay and it is not at all surprising that when put in minimal supervision environments they choose to merely exist and collect said paycheck. CEOs lamenting this are merely reaping what they sow.
- jerglingu 4y ago
  Blind is interesting. I'm grateful for the insights into total compensation it granted me, and Blind combined with a managerial stint gave me a very solid feel for both industry and company-specific bands. I also got notice of an impending reorg that was coming my way, and started early in looking for another home. On the other hand, it only exacerbated the cynicism and burnout covid and WFH brought. Trolls are rewarded with attention through "engagement" with their incendiary posts, misinformation and speculation passed as dogma are rampant, and as you mentioned the collective priority in "the community" is this egocentric worship of money. It reminds me of the subreddit /r/relationships, where the number one piece of advice is to obviously break up or divorce because you're getting screwed over. Blind's number one piece of advice is to obviously grind leetcode and start interviewing because you're getting screwed over.
- rr888 4y ago
  TC or GTFO. Honestly I've been in markets where this worked out. You pay a lot of money to get someone good who's motivated and does great work. Tech recently though has been a game where you get a high paying job and you just spend a year trying to get the next one rather than working.
- closeparen 4y ago
  Blind is full of people from the Bay Area, where if you are the very best in the world at wringing the corporate ladder for everything it’s worth, you might just maybe be able to buy a home for your family one day. One thing remote work might bring us is a little more chill about compensation, as people live in regions where people not optimizing for TC can be comfortable and secure.
goodpoint 4y ago
> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity In most companies agile/scrum meetings are make-believe work.
- geekbird 4y ago
  And, IMO, a total waste of time for a bunch of cargo cult nonsense. Scrum is waterfall micromanagement dressed in the verbiage of worker empowerment, and merely shortens the time between death marches.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
cm2187 4y ago
It's not just meetings. I spend 80% of my energy fighting internal resistance, in the form of moronic decision, moronic policies, short signtedness and incompetence. It's not even bad will or people deliberately sabotaging the business. Just frictions grinding the organisation to a quasi standstill, people taking principled approaches to cover their own ass irrespective of the consequences, or being so far remote from the ground that they have no idea of the consequences of their decisions. And in the middle of that you have some courgageous busy bees trying to make things happen despite this internal resistance. Many have given up. I am somewhere in the middle.
gonzo41 4y ago
I've seen companies where the leaders will only trust the opinions of the consultants. Even if they are the same conclusions of existing employees. Hired talent isn't magical but for some businesses the consultant workers have an glow about them. The result is the business effectively making their own workforce redundant because they fear relying on them. And then morale tanks, and people leave.
icedchai 4y ago
I worked at a company where I'd have at least 2 or 3 days a week where we had 4 hours of meetings. It was pure hell. Half the time I wouldn't even pay attention. I'd be browsing reddit or HN. You hit the nail on the head with agile. I remember writing some code only to have the whole thing ripped out "next sprint" because nobody bothered to think a couple weeks ahead. Or starting an integration project with a third party, only to find out they're not ready, so we have no API that actually works. So we waste time mocking it out, only to find out the docs they gave us don't match reality.
2muchcoffeeman 4y ago
I'm not sure why you needed to come around. Leadership signs off on hiring. Leadership signs off on installing far reaching processes that inhibit devs from making contributions. I'm sure some people try to find ways to cheat the system. But I find it hard to believe that it's a wide spread problem. Even people doing the minimum work possible probably have a ton of other interests or ideas and would rather be engaged with their work somewhat and learning things than idling.
rr888 4y ago
> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight I read loads of blogs and posts where people are loving WFH, doing very little and openly recommending tech career to others because its so great. They might not think they're a dead weight, they just think thats what modern working is like.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  There were coffee-mug-carriers and hall-wanderers back in the office as well. I don’t think it’s new in WFH, but at least now they bother fewer people with their “checking in”. I swear one guy must have gotten 15K steps/day in just wandering around the building.
  - geekbird 4y ago
    Seriously. One job I was at had four of us working in one room. A guy from a completely different department would wander in with his cup of whatever and talk at us for at least an hour. He was both dodging actual work and interrupting us. Since he didn't report to our manager there was nothing we could do. His boss was a piece of work as well. It's these useless people that make open plans so toxic. It's bad enough that the general noise and visual distraction decreases your ability to concentrate and get anything done, but the wandering trolls of gossip and sports talk just add an extra booger icing on the shit cake.
adolph 4y ago
Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work—from what Daniel Yankelovich called an “instrumental” view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, where people seek the “intrinsic” benefits of work. “Our grandfathers worked six days a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon,” says Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. “The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man’s higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging.” Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle Edition.
giantg2 4y ago
Some company cultures will punish people for taking the initiative too.
pojzon 4y ago
I really have trouble understanding why ppl should dream about labor / fulfilment at work. There are so many ways to find a real meaning. Be a great person, help others, read a book, do yoga, help kids with homework, plant a tree, build something with own hands, grow food, clean-up trash. So many things to keep you busy. Work is just a necessity to do something that actually matters in the longer run (for majority at least). Ppl that deeply care about the company and product are such a tiny minority.
- shanusmagnus 4y ago
  I assume because you literally spend most of your life there, and if it doesn't mean something, that is ... awful? I mean, there have been times / places in history where you work so that you have enough money to not die; and you enjoy your life with whatever pittance is left afterward. I doubt anyone reading this website is in such a time or place.
  - krageon 4y ago
    Basically every corporation you can work for will have you doing something meaningless (and is dedicated to a meaningless pursuit besides). As the world population shrinks in the deep future, perhaps that will change - but right now it definitely will not. As such, I have trouble seeing why you'd think any work you do means anything. Most likely it doesn't and that's okay. It is not within your control to have meaningful work available. It is within your control to have a healthier attitude towards your workplace and your work.
    - shanusmagnus 4y ago
      If you find your work to be meaningless, who am I to argue. But I've had a number of jobs at different companies at various places along the 'meaning' gradient. It's not all the same. Though I also agree that meaning is, to large degree, yours to make, at least as much as it is a property of the situation.
- netheril96 4y ago
  Well, I care about raises. I can coast along in my current role, but I want more money, so I need to do impactful work. If I can earn more on some side work or investment and those earnings are stable enough, then I too will not care about work.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wonderwonder 4y ago
I spent about a year and a half being dead weight. I was so completely burned after working months of 70 to 90 hour weeks I just couldn't do anything. Things that used to take me an hour to code now took me days. Complete mental block. Luckily I had built up such a good reputation prior I was able to coast and it was a weird project. In a new job / role now and it's better. Only work 40 hours max. Still not back to normal but 75% of the way there.
rgblambda 4y ago
>And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. I once spent two months trying to get my technical lead to do a code review for a PR I raised. Eventually the business informed us they didn't actually need the feature that the PR implemented. At that point, my technical lead immediately approved the PR so it wouldn't be (seen as) a waste.
throwaway292939 4y ago
That's one take, but if you hang around on Blind (which is an anonymous forum heavily populated by FAANG), you will find many who gloat about how little they work.
sibeliuss 4y ago
> "and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees" Come on! This is straight up impossible. Anyone who has worked for any length of time in the tech industry has come across people that simply don't do anything, and are totally fine with that. It is *very common* and its borderline dishonest to say otherwise.
- confidantlake 4y ago
  Is it really? I haven't worked at that many companies but I've seen it maybe once or twice out of hundreds of workers. I have see devs that were incompetent but tried. I see a lot of pms, managers, business analysts etc who seemed to always be collaborating with each other but contribute very little to the actual product. But the truly lazy dgaf dev is very rare in my experience.
queuebert 4y ago
I feel this in my bones, as I'm having to fill out a 27-page document to ask permission to use a new piece of software on the intranet.
robomartin 4y ago
Remote working has been around forever. The pandemic opened the doors to a larger set of candidates. None if it changed human nature. There are people who do well on their own. I think most don’t. I know someone who has had remote jobs for probably 35 years. How does he spend his time? Re-roofing his home, upgrading his bathrooms, fixing his cars, etc. Not working. And these are six figure jobs. Watching this first hand —for decades— has not made me a huge believer in remote work for everyone. Not sure how to define who does well and who does not.
gofreddygo 4y ago
Measure the product before measuring productivity. across the board execs complaining about productivity turn out to be poor at defining product ("its just a website, how long could it take to build, Jeez"). Any productivity comparisons between software and other manufacturing processes should begin with a few minutes spent to compare software specs and the said product's spec, see how hard it is to change its spec ("add a button to accept payments" v/s. "add a knob on the car's dashboard") provide a technical spec first, then we can talk about productivity.
YZF 4y ago
Another factor here is that companies will hire more people as a growth strategy without having any clear idea of how to deploy them. Even if they have a high level idea they may not know how to translate that high level idea to something actionable. They have a high P/E. There's cheap money. They need to somehow grow. The only way they know to grow is just to hire more people. As you say, no wonder they don't have anything to work on. Maybe the idea is that if they're working for you they're not working for the competition. I donno.
jrsj 4y ago
I wish this were true but most of the people I have worked with in the past 3 years are just lazy and will pretend to be doing a days worth of work for 2 weeks whenever they can get away with it
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
likortera 4y ago
Well said. This matches my experience 100%. A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have. And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do". Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others. I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.
michaelcampbell 4y ago
> And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Not entirely true. I don't mind that one bit. I can voice my opinion on what "we need", but ultimately that's not my decision and there are people hired to do that. I get paid to write it, I'm happy in that spot, and if I end up not having to deploy it, go through whatever baroque testing cycles are in place, or do the job of 3 with the salary of 1 by having to do sysadmin, DevOps, or whatever other fad du jour is sweeping the industry with fancy terms just trying to keep the CEO's in their millions, fine with me.
addicted 4y ago
I find this attitude among developers frustrating to say the least. Apparently developers are just helpless sheep being ruled by an amorphous entity called “management”. Supposedly developers are important enough to command 3-400k in salaries, but not important enough that “management” would be open to all of them pointing out that maybe that 1 daily meeting is costing too much in employee time and not giving enough value and could be reduced to 2-3 times a week.

by fefe23 4y ago

hef19898 4y ago

Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out once the problem was understood, people tend to build upon those not fit for purpose things...

toss1 4y ago
YES!! Even coming from an attitude of being big on abstractions and generalized/scaled solutions, I cannot overstate the importance of writing a throw-away version at the outset. Hit the highlights, write it fast & dirty, use it, extend it a bit as you start to understand the system — then throw it away. Use that knowledge to design and build your real system, from scratch, but informed by your earned knowledge. >>agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. And to this in the GP post, I think he identified a fundamental problem with Agile. Its entire bias is to write code fast, when the bias should be to avoid writing code — code is slow and habitat for bugs. Obviously everything requires code, but it should be minimized, not maximized. Of course, writing code quickly and seeing it run is satisfying, but developers' dopamine hits shouldn't be the primary driver of design & mgt - end performance should be, and that takes careful thought of what can be eliminated, and basing that thought on knowledge of a throw-away-version-1 is very useful, and pays benefits to both the dev team and to users for years.
- beachy 4y ago
  > The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers. Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
- cassianoleal 4y ago
  Code is Liability, the Less the Better https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/less-code-is-better/ https://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/less-code-is-better/
- jimjimjim 4y ago
  replacing the prototype is important, but you need enough power in your org to be able to throw it away. 'nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution'
- ok123456 4y ago
  Until your boss doesn't understand this concept and thinks your prototype is a finished system, even after explaining the fact it's just a demo that you made to help gather requirements time-and-time-again.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Also goes the other way, developers believing something is good while totally ignoring user feedback stating otherwise. Admittesly so, you example so much more frequent.
colechristensen 4y ago
Some of the most valuable work I've ever done was spending a month creating something, throwing every byte away, and then spending two weeks creating the same thing, much improved. The key to rework like this is you have to actually be able to finish it and get rid of the old, instead of spending months or years maintaining two half-baked versions of something instead of just one.
- stouset 4y ago
  Almost every single thing I build I throw away at least one of them, sometimes two. The finished projects tend to stick around forever and, if they need maintenance, it’s adding a feature or two or updating dependencies. I do backend work so this kind of workflow probably doesn’t work for customer-facing projects that need to iterate on finding traction. But for something where the problem is generally well defined and not likely to change drastically in the short or medium term, it’s amazing. I have multiple projects I’ve written that run on virtually every machine (server and workstation) at my company (former unicorn, current Fortune 500) that are effectively “done” and only need to be redeployed a couple times a year for dependency updates and preventing bitrot in general. Having worked like this, I can confidently say I will never again remain on a team where this isn’t the normal state of affairs.

harpiaharpyja 4y ago

I thought the point of iterating early is that sometimes writing code is the best way to gain understanding of the problem (depending on the kind of problem). You're supposed to throw that stuff away... it's iteration...

codegeek 4y ago

"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight." I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years. Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE to do something meaningful but are stuck with red tape. I was one of those and quit my high paying Investment Bank Tech Job to start my own thing. I was getting paid big as a consultant and once my main project finished, they just wanted me around because traders loved me. I literally had to find things to do every day otherwise it was soooo boring unless something broke.

lujim 4y ago
I disagree with this. An entire business day is a long time to do nothing. I've always loved jobs where there was enough strategic direction to know what to focus on but enough latitude where you could actually do it. I can't think of anyone (not suffering from pure burnout) that didn't devour meaningful work that had well written requirements.
colechristensen 4y ago
If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important". I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.
- granshaw 4y ago
  Yeah it’s the “pretending to work” part that’s soul crushing. If you could be explicit that “this is what I need to do this week, it’ll only take 4 hours. The rest of the time I’ll be available but I won’t do make-work”, that’d be awesome. Also a lot of people don’t realize that being available for questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely limits what you can do with that time even if working remotely. So were you near your computer 9-5 today and could respond on short notice? Well then you worked 8 hours basically. And that availability itself is hugely valuable to employers.

devwastaken 4y ago

Large corps are propped up by intellectual property law and economies of scale. They do not hold their market positions on their own merit. If we remove IP laws, we will have another golden age of tech innovation tomorrow.

diordiderot 4y ago
Yeah but then no one would invent anything because that's the only reason anyone does anything! _glances nervously at FOSS, science, art, & philosophy_

PKop 4y ago

>Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. Of course this isn't true.

abledon 4y ago

> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight. Have you worked in Government? edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an example

matsemann 4y ago
I hate this take of "gobernment bad, capitalism good". As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.
- jononomo 4y ago
  I completely agree -- but it is remarkable how many Americans have bought into this idea that "government is bad".
  - just_steve_h 4y ago
    We'll, it is true that our "ownership class" and its media and political mouthpieces have spent the better part of the last two generations drilling this notion into people's skulls will all the considerable power at their disposal.
    - BuckRogers 4y ago
      I’ve held a job ever since I was 12 years old. And I worked before that under the table to pay for my things as a child. I’ve worked at many multinationals now that I’m middle aged. Yes, I’m American. And my view on this is completely contrary to conventional wisdom. Private enterprise is not only less efficient than government, it’s destructive. Private enterprise doesn’t care about doing a good job or delivering quality product. It only cares about making money. It’s a perverse incentive that drives everything down to the bottom almost every time. The only way to circumvent that perverse incentive system is to have someone in charge that cares about something other than profits. And there just are not enough Steve Jobs or similar characters out there that cared about quality and legacy enough to make blind participation as a buyer in your favor. Of course someone will say, that’s how you make money is by delivering quality. But that’s not true. You deliver money by monopolizing, putting in barriers to entry, or simply by cutting costs. By definition, if something you buy was cheaper to produce than the price you paid, you’re getting a bad deal. People just don’t see this because they have no other choice. Now all that said, I also believe that it is the worst system, except for all the others. I think with sensible regulation to counterbalance abuse, the system is as good of one as I’ve seen.

hcarvalhoalves 4y ago

> The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem. I've seen this increase proportional to the number of employees. People start trying to worry more about perception of progress by tracking proxy metrics, because the large the company, the harder it is to prove how each one contributes directly to the bottom line.

wsc981 4y ago
Managers also seem to love these proxy metrics, so delivering these metrics to management (as a dev) can be a good way to get noticed.

dleslie 4y ago

> It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done! IMHO, if you're a developer and have more than 8h of meetings a week then you are no longer a developer. In the worst case, you are a body to fill a seat in a meeting to fluff the self-importance of your management. In the best case, you're on track to being management yourself.

g051051 4y ago

commandlinefan 4y ago
As Dilbert says: "our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late".

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

commandlinefan 4y ago

> company calendar is 80% filled with meetings The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.

daviddever23box 4y ago
Except that's not a reasonable ask when you have a global presence and meetings into the evening. Saying no to an over-scheduled calendar is the mechanism by which you gain control of your life. My measure of a meeting's worth is: if you were shackled to a chair for the scheduled duration of this meeting, would you get anything useful done, from a discussion perspective? If not, simply decline the invite; your brain is not important enough to have been productive in that context.
ryneandal 4y ago
Typical where? I've _never_ had to deal with such a schedule.
- zhengyi13 4y ago
  When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical work) is done outside 9-5. Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.
  - treis 4y ago
    A former coworker called these people professional meeters. Had an EM like that. Either he was in a meeting or he was walking around and talking the ear off of whichever unfortunate soul he bumped into. Tangible output was basically 0.
  - icedchai 4y ago
    Incredible. I haven't seen a PM that does technical work in years, maybe well over a decade.

rajeshp1986 4y ago

What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects or project features which never get released. One of my co-workers was working on a feature which was shelved after working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as clueless and lazy as engineers.

lazyasciiart 4y ago
ah, yes...six years at MSFT, only one year working on code that eventually shipped
- goodpoint 4y ago
  MSFT is hardly a FAANG
  - Der_Einzige 4y ago
    Why? Their stock performs just as well, and they pay better than Amazon, better benefits, all with a reputation for legendary good WLB. Amazon is hardly a FAANG
    - ruraljuror 4y ago
      Better pay? Not for new hires. Most recent reports I have seen (blind, levels.fyi) and my own experiences have shown Amazon skyrocket to the top paying FAANG, with the first two years heavily skewed toward cash and backloading RSUs. I am surprised out of all the FAANGs you picked the generally lowest paying one as the counter example.
    - goodpoint 4y ago
      I always understood FAANGS to be defined by their engineering culture and the innovative approach to problems, not just salary. Hence the selection of companies.
  - 4y ago

asdjjsvnn 4y ago

Part of the problem is also the incentives and performance axes that are defined to evaluate work/productivity. At a higher experience level, you are expected not just to churn out code but also to demonstrate performance on axes such as influence, scope, leadership etc. In fact, if you just churn out code and not perform on other axes, you are under performing under other axes. So, I could solve a particular problem for my team quickly with no dependencies with other teams/people, but I am now forced to go to other teams and look if they have similar problems to solve and then work on getting alignment on a common solution which would work as a common framework for both team's use cases. While this in theory is good to have one generic solution for a set of similar problems, once a huge company has incentivized this, lot of people are trying to build the next standard/framework and as you'd expect adoption becomes a problem because everyone is trying to evangelize their own framework. The end result, you suddenly have to work with x number of people and let everyone align with what you are doing, that takes time, then you implement something and now have to convince others to use your framework, which again takes time. Add these dependencies and you have what you currently have, a mechanism that moves slowly with most people involved feel helpless and think if it was just up to them they would have it all done in a few days.

barrenko 4y ago

The exact point of a big company is that nothing gets done.

bogota 4y ago

I just know of at least 20 people left my previous company because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your manager or in some cases your managers manager. But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no right to be managing or running a business. Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for depression and burnout. No one wants that.

data-ottawa 4y ago
The biggest lie I ever got told at work was "all teams have equal opportunity for impact". They don't, and team+org is about 80% of your potential performance. At the time my org had a "mission & building" group and a "maintenance & operations" group. I was placed in the maintenance group. Every single project in the maintenance group went the same: good idea, planning & initial prototype, gets noticed by management, you get permanently blocked or management pilfers your star players and you start again or scope down. All our projects were tiny or failures. Meanwhile the people in the mission group got showered with raises and promotions. It was soul crushing, I had never been so unhappy. I had no (opportunity for) impact on the business, so my reviews were always that I was technically strong but didn't demonstrate impact. You can get stuck in a real feedback loop there, you get burned out at constant failure. I'm sure we all looked lazy from above, I certainly felt lazy, but the org structure simply quashed any attempts at progress and we were all powerless against it. I ended up leaving that role, it gave me a strong focus on impact only roles which was the best career move I ever made.
- YZF 4y ago
  That sounds like a dysfunctional organization and a good example why trying to measure "impact" in the sense you're describing is not a good idea. Let's say you're on an internal tools team that's building tools that others in the organization rely on to build whatever products your company is making money of. You might say your direct "impact" [edit: is small/zero] but your indirect impact is definitely not. In a well run company those people would be highly valued for their indirect contribution. You're absolutely right that how a company is organized, and its culture, is directly linked to those outcomes. The ability of individuals to make impact is also very related to their being in the right position to utilize their strengths aka role fit. In a well run company managers try to optimize for all these things. Ofcourse the best intentioned managers can't always place everyone in the perfect spot and lots of projects have work that isn't super shiny but is still important. Sounds like you made the right decision in leaving.

dboreham 4y ago

> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.

weard_beard 4y ago
I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.
- bcrosby95 4y ago
  This isn't anything like how a place like Google or Facebook works. I would guess that the vast majority of developers (I daresay 100% of them) posting on HN would not like to work at a place like that.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    I think it's a mix of both - I'd kill for anyone at my current job to spend more than a bare minimum of time on their acceptance criterion so I don't just feel like I'm writing code and hoping it does vaguely what the person wants. What the GP is describing feels a bit too far in the other direction, but I'd almost rather it trend towards having an over-prescriptive ticket I can push back on then playing telephone with another department because they gave me 3 sentences of writeup for a month/quarter long project.
    - closeparen 4y ago
      At a product company, the lead engineer(s) and the product manager, who is a direct everyday member of the engineering team, collectively own what the product is supposed to be. There’s not someone else two departments away who is a more legitimate authority on what to build.

osigurdson 4y ago

The sad part about excessive meetings is often they are not enough on their own. In between all of the the pointless meetings, smaller, less formal, often unscheduled, real meetings where actual decisions are made still need to happen.

999900000999 4y ago

>But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done! As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing. I've been reprimanded before , when I took the initiative to try and start building out a framework. I literally had nothing else to do, but I was later told I should have waited until a committee could be formed. Even if you barely do anything, at least you're not causing trouble. In my career. I've worked with several abrasive angry people, I've seen folks confront C level employees. Developers who cry about having to use a PC to write some.net code and throw a temper tantrum. Threaten to just walk out because some legacy code needed updating and they're so used to having a precious Mac to code on. That said, I actually really like him how limited social interactions are with remote work. I don't need to know your political beliefs, I don't need to be your friend, I don't want to get drinks with you, I want to do what is necessary for my job. Corporate fluff plays a role. I imagine Google develops products that will never be profitable just so they can look at their shareholders and say, looky we do stuff aside from search.

SnowHill9902 4y ago
I was with you until that part. Having to write .NET and on Windows is just too much.
smeagull 4y ago
> As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing. Longer if you're CEO.

coffeeisyummy 4y ago

This iteration through pseudo productivity comes from management's real world problem of demonstrating progress on their projects. The promises of visibility on your development team's productivity always turns Agile into a steaming pile of burn-downs and story points. "No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real world, no one uses Agile in an ideal environment free of pressures like deadlines or budgets.

jimjimjim 4y ago
exactly. the sales department has targets for the quarter and they won't give 2 damns about how many story points your team got through this sprint. They want on this date or else.
spc476 4y ago
I think my department was Agile, doing the stuff on the left (good) side of the Agile Manifesto [1], even as we didn't think we were doing Agile. We made deadlines, had smooth deployments, and any bugs in production were not that bad. Then new management came in (company was bought) and started pushing "Agile" on us, which is doing the stuff on the right [bad] side of the Agile Manifesto. Now we've missed deadlines, rarely have a smooth deployment, and are now constantly finding bugs in production. When pressed, upper management has stated that "Agile" is to make it possible to work faster than we were. Yeah. [1] https://agilemanifesto.org/ https://agilemanifesto.org/

rubiquity 4y ago

I'm surprised to see this is the top voted comment because it is completely off the mark in this case and anyone that has spent any amount of time reading Blind (a website dedicated to... I'm not sure what exactly) knows it. While Facebook/Meta, Google, and others have always paid comparatively well, in the past 2-3 years the pay shot up even higher and the only price of admission is supreme obedience to "grinding LeetCode." This hysteria created an entire culture of pay chasers that congregate on that Blind website with little regard for anyhing other than compensation. These people, who I consider to be among the most toxic people in tech, have a singular focus on pay and it is not at all surprising that when put in minimal supervision environments they choose to merely exist and collect said paycheck. CEOs lamenting this are merely reaping what they sow.

jerglingu 4y ago
Blind is interesting. I'm grateful for the insights into total compensation it granted me, and Blind combined with a managerial stint gave me a very solid feel for both industry and company-specific bands. I also got notice of an impending reorg that was coming my way, and started early in looking for another home. On the other hand, it only exacerbated the cynicism and burnout covid and WFH brought. Trolls are rewarded with attention through "engagement" with their incendiary posts, misinformation and speculation passed as dogma are rampant, and as you mentioned the collective priority in "the community" is this egocentric worship of money. It reminds me of the subreddit /r/relationships, where the number one piece of advice is to obviously break up or divorce because you're getting screwed over. Blind's number one piece of advice is to obviously grind leetcode and start interviewing because you're getting screwed over.
rr888 4y ago
TC or GTFO. Honestly I've been in markets where this worked out. You pay a lot of money to get someone good who's motivated and does great work. Tech recently though has been a game where you get a high paying job and you just spend a year trying to get the next one rather than working.
closeparen 4y ago
Blind is full of people from the Bay Area, where if you are the very best in the world at wringing the corporate ladder for everything it’s worth, you might just maybe be able to buy a home for your family one day. One thing remote work might bring us is a little more chill about compensation, as people live in regions where people not optimizing for TC can be comfortable and secure.

goodpoint 4y ago

> agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity In most companies agile/scrum meetings are make-believe work.

geekbird 4y ago
And, IMO, a total waste of time for a bunch of cargo cult nonsense. Scrum is waterfall micromanagement dressed in the verbiage of worker empowerment, and merely shortens the time between death marches.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

cm2187 4y ago

It's not just meetings. I spend 80% of my energy fighting internal resistance, in the form of moronic decision, moronic policies, short signtedness and incompetence. It's not even bad will or people deliberately sabotaging the business. Just frictions grinding the organisation to a quasi standstill, people taking principled approaches to cover their own ass irrespective of the consequences, or being so far remote from the ground that they have no idea of the consequences of their decisions. And in the middle of that you have some courgageous busy bees trying to make things happen despite this internal resistance. Many have given up. I am somewhere in the middle.

gonzo41 4y ago

I've seen companies where the leaders will only trust the opinions of the consultants. Even if they are the same conclusions of existing employees. Hired talent isn't magical but for some businesses the consultant workers have an glow about them. The result is the business effectively making their own workforce redundant because they fear relying on them. And then morale tanks, and people leave.

icedchai 4y ago

I worked at a company where I'd have at least 2 or 3 days a week where we had 4 hours of meetings. It was pure hell. Half the time I wouldn't even pay attention. I'd be browsing reddit or HN. You hit the nail on the head with agile. I remember writing some code only to have the whole thing ripped out "next sprint" because nobody bothered to think a couple weeks ahead. Or starting an integration project with a third party, only to find out they're not ready, so we have no API that actually works. So we waste time mocking it out, only to find out the docs they gave us don't match reality.

2muchcoffeeman 4y ago

I'm not sure why you needed to come around. Leadership signs off on hiring. Leadership signs off on installing far reaching processes that inhibit devs from making contributions. I'm sure some people try to find ways to cheat the system. But I find it hard to believe that it's a wide spread problem. Even people doing the minimum work possible probably have a ton of other interests or ideas and would rather be engaged with their work somewhat and learning things than idling.

rr888 4y ago

> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight I read loads of blogs and posts where people are loving WFH, doing very little and openly recommending tech career to others because its so great. They might not think they're a dead weight, they just think thats what modern working is like.

sokoloff 4y ago
There were coffee-mug-carriers and hall-wanderers back in the office as well. I don’t think it’s new in WFH, but at least now they bother fewer people with their “checking in”. I swear one guy must have gotten 15K steps/day in just wandering around the building.
- geekbird 4y ago
  Seriously. One job I was at had four of us working in one room. A guy from a completely different department would wander in with his cup of whatever and talk at us for at least an hour. He was both dodging actual work and interrupting us. Since he didn't report to our manager there was nothing we could do. His boss was a piece of work as well. It's these useless people that make open plans so toxic. It's bad enough that the general noise and visual distraction decreases your ability to concentrate and get anything done, but the wandering trolls of gossip and sports talk just add an extra booger icing on the shit cake.

adolph 4y ago

Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work—from what Daniel Yankelovich called an “instrumental” view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, where people seek the “intrinsic” benefits of work. “Our grandfathers worked six days a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon,” says Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. “The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man’s higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging.” Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle Edition.

giantg2 4y ago

Some company cultures will punish people for taking the initiative too.

pojzon 4y ago

I really have trouble understanding why ppl should dream about labor / fulfilment at work. There are so many ways to find a real meaning. Be a great person, help others, read a book, do yoga, help kids with homework, plant a tree, build something with own hands, grow food, clean-up trash. So many things to keep you busy. Work is just a necessity to do something that actually matters in the longer run (for majority at least). Ppl that deeply care about the company and product are such a tiny minority.

shanusmagnus 4y ago
I assume because you literally spend most of your life there, and if it doesn't mean something, that is ... awful? I mean, there have been times / places in history where you work so that you have enough money to not die; and you enjoy your life with whatever pittance is left afterward. I doubt anyone reading this website is in such a time or place.
- krageon 4y ago
  Basically every corporation you can work for will have you doing something meaningless (and is dedicated to a meaningless pursuit besides). As the world population shrinks in the deep future, perhaps that will change - but right now it definitely will not. As such, I have trouble seeing why you'd think any work you do means anything. Most likely it doesn't and that's okay. It is not within your control to have meaningful work available. It is within your control to have a healthier attitude towards your workplace and your work.
  - shanusmagnus 4y ago
    If you find your work to be meaningless, who am I to argue. But I've had a number of jobs at different companies at various places along the 'meaning' gradient. It's not all the same. Though I also agree that meaning is, to large degree, yours to make, at least as much as it is a property of the situation.
netheril96 4y ago
Well, I care about raises. I can coast along in my current role, but I want more money, so I need to do impactful work. If I can earn more on some side work or investment and those earnings are stable enough, then I too will not care about work.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

wonderwonder 4y ago

I spent about a year and a half being dead weight. I was so completely burned after working months of 70 to 90 hour weeks I just couldn't do anything. Things that used to take me an hour to code now took me days. Complete mental block. Luckily I had built up such a good reputation prior I was able to coast and it was a weird project. In a new job / role now and it's better. Only work 40 hours max. Still not back to normal but 75% of the way there.

rgblambda 4y ago

>And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. I once spent two months trying to get my technical lead to do a code review for a PR I raised. Eventually the business informed us they didn't actually need the feature that the PR implemented. At that point, my technical lead immediately approved the PR so it wouldn't be (seen as) a waste.

throwaway292939 4y ago

That's one take, but if you hang around on Blind (which is an anonymous forum heavily populated by FAANG), you will find many who gloat about how little they work.

sibeliuss 4y ago

> "and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees" Come on! This is straight up impossible. Anyone who has worked for any length of time in the tech industry has come across people that simply don't do anything, and are totally fine with that. It is *very common* and its borderline dishonest to say otherwise.

confidantlake 4y ago
Is it really? I haven't worked at that many companies but I've seen it maybe once or twice out of hundreds of workers. I have see devs that were incompetent but tried. I see a lot of pms, managers, business analysts etc who seemed to always be collaborating with each other but contribute very little to the actual product. But the truly lazy dgaf dev is very rare in my experience.

queuebert 4y ago

I feel this in my bones, as I'm having to fill out a 27-page document to ask permission to use a new piece of software on the intranet.

robomartin 4y ago

Remote working has been around forever. The pandemic opened the doors to a larger set of candidates. None if it changed human nature. There are people who do well on their own. I think most don’t. I know someone who has had remote jobs for probably 35 years. How does he spend his time? Re-roofing his home, upgrading his bathrooms, fixing his cars, etc. Not working. And these are six figure jobs. Watching this first hand —for decades— has not made me a huge believer in remote work for everyone. Not sure how to define who does well and who does not.

gofreddygo 4y ago

Measure the product before measuring productivity. across the board execs complaining about productivity turn out to be poor at defining product ("its just a website, how long could it take to build, Jeez"). Any productivity comparisons between software and other manufacturing processes should begin with a few minutes spent to compare software specs and the said product's spec, see how hard it is to change its spec ("add a button to accept payments" v/s. "add a knob on the car's dashboard") provide a technical spec first, then we can talk about productivity.

YZF 4y ago

Another factor here is that companies will hire more people as a growth strategy without having any clear idea of how to deploy them. Even if they have a high level idea they may not know how to translate that high level idea to something actionable. They have a high P/E. There's cheap money. They need to somehow grow. The only way they know to grow is just to hire more people. As you say, no wonder they don't have anything to work on. Maybe the idea is that if they're working for you they're not working for the competition. I donno.

jrsj 4y ago

I wish this were true but most of the people I have worked with in the past 3 years are just lazy and will pretend to be doing a days worth of work for 2 weeks whenever they can get away with it

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

likortera 4y ago

Well said. This matches my experience 100%. A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have. And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do". Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others. I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.

michaelcampbell 4y ago

> And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Not entirely true. I don't mind that one bit. I can voice my opinion on what "we need", but ultimately that's not my decision and there are people hired to do that. I get paid to write it, I'm happy in that spot, and if I end up not having to deploy it, go through whatever baroque testing cycles are in place, or do the job of 3 with the salary of 1 by having to do sysadmin, DevOps, or whatever other fad du jour is sweeping the industry with fancy terms just trying to keep the CEO's in their millions, fine with me.

addicted 4y ago

I find this attitude among developers frustrating to say the least. Apparently developers are just helpless sheep being ruled by an amorphous entity called “management”. Supposedly developers are important enough to command 3-400k in salaries, but not important enough that “management” would be open to all of them pointing out that maybe that 1 daily meeting is costing too much in employee time and not giving enough value and could be reduced to 2-3 times a week.