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I do wish I knew of a better solution/mitigation. I feel like there might not be anything an individual really can do. It depends on coworkers picking up the sl

I do wish I knew of a better solution/mitigation. I feel like there might not be anything an individual really can do. It depends on coworkers picking up the slack or leadership/customers just demanding less (hah). I quit my last job over this, which kinda inspired this post. I tried to formally shed some of my responsibilities, but the only people who volunteered were other over-capacity people! So really nothing changed haha

nobodyandproud 4y ago
That’s easy: If there are competing priorities then there are also competing interests and stakeholders. If these are internal, then nicely and professionally relay that some of these will need to take a backseat and then let the stakeholders argue and decide what needs to happen. Also drop hints that a larger technical team would help. If you’re doing things that matter, then sooner or later you’ll find yourself with a team because it’s the stakeholders pushing for it. The worst outcome is that you burn yourself out trying to do it all, which is expected in startups but very counterproductive when the organization matures a bit.
- Test0129 4y ago
  > Also drop hints that a larger technical team would help. If you’re doing things that matter, then sooner or later you’ll find yourself with a team because it’s the stakeholders pushing for it. Never works. If there's one thing the PHBs and their MBA goons hate it's paying people. That sounds like sarcasm but it's not. I've yet to hear some high-flying MBA tell me that the solution is to give me more money and hire more people. My favorite is that sales, a field probably just as important as developers, is not minimized and sales doesnt have to deal with "two pizza" non-sense, ping pong tables as a benefit, and long hours working literally for free because of the magic of salary. Sales gets to go home on the weekend and suckers like me are stuck doing pagerduty. Of course, when review time comes around there's never enough money in the pot to pay me more... To these idiots, developers are a cost center to be minimized. Hence why as a developer you regularly wear the hats of 3 different subfields. For example, as a backend/systems engineer there are days I spend more time maintaining terraform/k8/whatever than actually writing code. Or even worse these days - maintaining code written by foreign contractors because labor arbitrage is the new hotness. The industry needs an entire upheaval and software engineers need to stand up for themselves. Until that happens, the suffering will continue even if you're tied to the wall with golden handcuffs.
  - mgkimsal 4y ago
    > maintaining code written by foreign contractors because labor arbitrage is the new hotness. It was pretty new in 1999 as well...
Test0129 4y ago
In my case I have regularly found myself deep inside the bus factor zone because I had a lot of knowledge acquired through working on so many things. Raising the issue "I'm a roadblock" or "I'm overburdened" doesnt seem to work as you pointed out. It seems this is just a sign to a manager to do more managing to you. The real fix, in my opinion, is to actually hire people. Tech has gotten into this fetish of "dev ops as a culture" or "admin as a culture" or whatever nonsense. These are just excuses to not hire teams to take this work on. Overburdening developers is exactly what they want by design. I suspect this is because developers are paid so much they want to "feel like they're getting their moneys worth" out of them. Tech culture is toxic and full of abuse parroted gleefully by a lot of these startups HN tends to adore. Leaving companies doesn't even help because its a problem in the culture of tech. Until developers just outright refuse to do nonsense like maintain kubernetes clusters, perform SRE tasks, etc the pain will continue. I look forward to the day I can retire from this awful industry. I unfortunately have many years left of 60 hours weeks to go.

nobodyandproud 4y ago

That’s easy: If there are competing priorities then there are also competing interests and stakeholders. If these are internal, then nicely and professionally relay that some of these will need to take a backseat and then let the stakeholders argue and decide what needs to happen. Also drop hints that a larger technical team would help. If you’re doing things that matter, then sooner or later you’ll find yourself with a team because it’s the stakeholders pushing for it. The worst outcome is that you burn yourself out trying to do it all, which is expected in startups but very counterproductive when the organization matures a bit.

Test0129 4y ago
> Also drop hints that a larger technical team would help. If you’re doing things that matter, then sooner or later you’ll find yourself with a team because it’s the stakeholders pushing for it. Never works. If there's one thing the PHBs and their MBA goons hate it's paying people. That sounds like sarcasm but it's not. I've yet to hear some high-flying MBA tell me that the solution is to give me more money and hire more people. My favorite is that sales, a field probably just as important as developers, is not minimized and sales doesnt have to deal with "two pizza" non-sense, ping pong tables as a benefit, and long hours working literally for free because of the magic of salary. Sales gets to go home on the weekend and suckers like me are stuck doing pagerduty. Of course, when review time comes around there's never enough money in the pot to pay me more... To these idiots, developers are a cost center to be minimized. Hence why as a developer you regularly wear the hats of 3 different subfields. For example, as a backend/systems engineer there are days I spend more time maintaining terraform/k8/whatever than actually writing code. Or even worse these days - maintaining code written by foreign contractors because labor arbitrage is the new hotness. The industry needs an entire upheaval and software engineers need to stand up for themselves. Until that happens, the suffering will continue even if you're tied to the wall with golden handcuffs.
- mgkimsal 4y ago
  > maintaining code written by foreign contractors because labor arbitrage is the new hotness. It was pretty new in 1999 as well...

Test0129 4y ago

In my case I have regularly found myself deep inside the bus factor zone because I had a lot of knowledge acquired through working on so many things. Raising the issue "I'm a roadblock" or "I'm overburdened" doesnt seem to work as you pointed out. It seems this is just a sign to a manager to do more managing to you. The real fix, in my opinion, is to actually hire people. Tech has gotten into this fetish of "dev ops as a culture" or "admin as a culture" or whatever nonsense. These are just excuses to not hire teams to take this work on. Overburdening developers is exactly what they want by design. I suspect this is because developers are paid so much they want to "feel like they're getting their moneys worth" out of them. Tech culture is toxic and full of abuse parroted gleefully by a lot of these startups HN tends to adore. Leaving companies doesn't even help because its a problem in the culture of tech. Until developers just outright refuse to do nonsense like maintain kubernetes clusters, perform SRE tasks, etc the pain will continue. I look forward to the day I can retire from this awful industry. I unfortunately have many years left of 60 hours weeks to go.