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Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• l0b0 3y ago
  Working at a medium-size government org, 6 years into a reorg, with projects being cancelled after two years because nobody actually needs it, dropping rebuilds because they might overrun, not hiring anybody who actually has a background relevant to the original system so that it can be maintained, not allotting any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey to automate things, then assigning a senior to be that code monkey, security having all the clout and no thought for just how miserable they make everybody's lives, [omitted for brevity]. Yep, dysfunctional is about right.
  • cratermoon 3y ago
    > not hiring anybody who actually has a background relevant to the original system so that it can be maintained, not allotting any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey to automate things, then assigning a senior to be that code monkey An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks. Of course the organization doesn't want to make any changes the Expert recommends, but by hiring that person they can claim they are addressing issues. Of course, it also gives management someone to blame and fire if (when) things go south.
    • pdimitar 3y ago
      > An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks. Happened to me about 2 years ago, and it was my shortest contract ever. Lasted 3 months. And it was not my imagination, I was complimented and groomed into thinking they are hiring an expert to help them with difficult problems. Immediately after I made one huge PR (120-ish files diff) that helped them resolve a very thorny problem, and after it was approved by the CTO and several other seniors, and after I was complimented of the quality of my work... I got reassigned to a new project where I was ordered to pull tickets and not even formulate tasks, and to just "do what I am told". I didn't even last two months when put in that position. Me and the CTO very quickly hated each other and he started acting like he never said the things he did during the interviews, and me leaving was a relief for everyone, myself the most.
      • cratermoon 3y ago
        Exactly what happened to me, but lasted 6 months. If the middle of the contract hadn't fallen over the US holiday season, when everyone kind of went into a holding pattern because some industries are just that way, it's entirely possible the contract would have been just 3 months. The organization, at some level, clearly never wanted me to solve the issues I was supposedly brought in to address, but give them cover to say they hired help. After some reflection, I'm starting to think the project was never really expected to succeed in any significant way. The company claimed they were trying to build an in-house replacement for a third party system the vendor no longer supported, but it's possible they just wanted a stop-gap while they found another turn-key vendor. The interim system didn't have to be all that good, it just had to have enough structural integrity to carry the organization over the gap.
        • pdimitar 3y ago
          I thought of that and tried to reflect myself but in the end I couldn't decipher their motivation. It was either (1) I solved a big problem they wanted quicker than they thought and they had no idea what to do with me after, or (2) they lied to me that I did well, concluded I am no good and funneled me to a team where I was managed like an intern. No clue either way but it was not okay to not communicate. It seems they still needed the manpower so they figured they will not say anything at all and hope that I will stay. Well, it didn't work for them. I was happy to leave, lol. And sorry it happened to you as well. The motivations of companies when hiring are still foreign to me and I have to catch up there and learn a lot because I hate being blindsided like that.
  • isthispermanent 3y ago
    I can’t imagine the infosec, security department puts a moment of thought into the lived experience of dealing with all the security. And I get it, it is important, but I often think to myself that it seems like they don’t want me to get any work done and that must be why they put all these security hoops in front of me. I must spend an hour+ a day logging in and out of things, and then another hour waiting for security checks on a deploys.
    • Arbortheus 3y ago
      This comment has made me appreciate my company’s security team and their pragmatism and effective prioritisation. Thank you :)
    • BeFlatXIII 3y ago
      Security like that is how companies end up with shadow IT and private State Department e-mail servers.
• galaxyLogic 3y ago
  I think this is a manifestation of Prisoner's Dilemma. If everybody in the organization would co-operate and do their best everybody would win. But if some people or some managers decide to look for their own interests and job-security first, the people who do the right thing will lose. We are all just prisoners here, of our own device
• smokefoot 3y ago
  This is a painfully cynical take and beyond that I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. If it’s all crap, make it better. Do something, don’t just complain!
  • pdimitar 3y ago
    How? Programmers don't have executive powers. You are very often told that this is not your job and you should be doing yours and leave the "experts" to theirs. Well, they are not experts. They are not even at the level of informed amateurs. But they have the power. What would you do? Sure, there are good companies and you can switch until you find one but let's recognize that statistically speaking this absolutely does not scale -- likely maximum 20% of the programmer workforce can do that. Maybe even only 10%. So again, what would you do?
    • ludicity 3y ago
      Hello! I am the author, and you've saved me writing this out. The whole point is that you actually can't do something (and that's okay! I don't complain anymore either!). Burnout comes from believing what people are saying in corporate contexts without looking at what they're actually doing. I have come across so many government teams that say they want to start using version control... as if someone has been stopping them all these years! If they were serious, they'd just do it, so you're better off just looking at what they're doing than talking.
      • Loggias 3y ago
        [dead]
    • smokefoot 3y ago
      In no particular order: 1. Use your powers of persuasion to drive better decisions 2. Recruit some good people 3. Suggest and execute some positive changes—“there’s this thing called source control and it’s great…” or, “seems like the reports we built aren’t that useful—how can we make this better” There’s a trap here which is thinking it’s all crap so I may as well not try. It’s seductive but quite poinsonous to the organization and to the individual.
• brilee 3y ago
  In this long rant, there is only one concrete thing named that is supposedly bad: > I saw someone that was working on a few Git branches, twenty years my senior, and they decided to clone the entire repository ten times, then checkout a different branch in each repository clone "because it's easier". > Can you imagine the kind of havoc such a person could wreak upon infrastructure and code if left unchecked? But I'm very confused, because this is the workflow paradigm of several VCSs that are not named Git. If this is their only concrete complaint, then I have to assume that this person has no idea what they're talking about.
  • ludicity 3y ago
    Hello, hello, I am the original poster. I had surmised why this person was doing this, but didn't want to spend ages venting about a particular person, especially in a way that might actually cause that person to realize they're reading about themselves one day. Suffice it to say that there are other serious issues. Here's a more concrete thing - I work on a product that took years and a spectacular sum of money to get going on the data space (all it does is land CSVs into S3 and then load them into a database every day, < 10GB per day). The original designers decided that the entire thing should be powered by spreadsheets, so we now have about 10 full-time staff editing spreadsheets that trigger build pipelines, one of which I believe has 400 separate worksheets in it. However, you are right that, broadly speaking, I have no idea what I'm talking about. I have made peace with this.
    • pdimitar 3y ago
      Truth be told, I liked your article a lot but that particular example definitely should have been replaced with something more concrete and a bit more convincing. Having several copies of a GIT repo for different branches is a viable strategy as long as one does not do force-pushes.
      • ludicity 3y ago
        Thank you for the feedback - I hammered this out over an hour this morning, and wasn't really expecting much readership but should have been more careful. As noted elsewhere on my blog, I'm young enough that I've only used Git, so it's good to know that the original example was not good. I read much too far into it given the other dysfunction I've seen from the same people. In any case, I've made a speedy replacement.
• pdimitar 3y ago
  That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it. The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow themselves be dragged into endless meetings and they know the script (that the OP author is referring to several times) and they recite it by heart. Because if they don't, their manager is going to think they are useless and will inevitably fire them. People find a cushy place to work in with a good salary, then just work their way up the economical ladder (or the organizational) and will do anything that's needed to achieve that goal. It's as simple as that, and I am convinced that a good chunk of these people (probably 20%-30%) are very well aware they are bullshitters but they think they have no choice. At the same time, I've known a few company owners long time ago who were just BEGGING their managers to tell them the problems exactly as they are, swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news (and made contracts that made sure of it in no uncertain terms)... and yet all of the managers below those people were sycophant yes-men. Quite tragic really. All of this is a collective delusion. I keep remembering this old article -- "Bullshit Jobs" -- and yep, it still rings true to this day, and will likely do so for decades more, likely centuries even because our societal changes are slower than glaciers...
  • 88913527 3y ago
    You can make improvements, but it ends up being small things that you can showcase to leaders to demonstrate that progress is happening, but it's nothing of actual material value. It's a lot like public political discourse where a policy solution is touted, all the ooh's and ahh's, but then nothing really changes.
    • pdimitar 3y ago
      Yep, I have found the same over my career. It's better than nothing, I agree on that, but it still ends up being infuriating because it's so damned slow. Truth is, everyone just wants to clock out and go home. CEOs included.
• lapestenoire 3y ago
  Unreadable. Organize your thoughts, write concisely. You believe you have something to say; we would love to hear it. But we aren’t willing to wade through a sewage of words.
  • meesterdude 3y ago
    we would love to see you cite some examples
  • jsocuwl 3y ago
    Don't hide behind "we", stand for yourself. I found this article very readable and I heard what the author had to say.
  • shepherdjerred 3y ago
    On the contrary, I liked this post quite a lot, and enjoyed the way that it was written.
  • ludicity 3y ago
    Agreed. Author is a pretentious moron, and it's people like him that ruin companies for everyone else. Absolutely toxic. I just wish he'd keep these opinions to himself instead of spreading them around the internet, lowering our collective IQs.
• artyom 3y ago
  I was expecting an thoughtful analysis, got a furious rant instead. Not disappointed at all.
  • ludicity 3y ago
    Of all the responses, this is the one that demonstrates the strongest understanding of me.
• justin_oaks 3y ago
  Of course the organization doesn't want to improve things. The bosses would have to be humble enough to receive feedback. Most people can't take feedback, let alone the bosses who feel that those under their management are beneath them. At my last job, the bosses ignored everything even the smartest employees suggested. Changes only came when customers, news outlets, vendors, or auditors made suggestions. Anyone external had more influence on company direction than the most experienced employees. A person leaving an anonymous review on an app store had more influence. It was clear that we were ignored because the bosses didn't want to take direction from those they manage. Their arrogance and fragile egos wouldn't allow them to.
  • steve_gh 3y ago
    > Anyone external had more influence on company direction than the most experienced employees. That's one reason why people employ consultants. A consultant is someone an organisation employs to tell it what it already knows. Sometimes it doesn't know that it knows it, but more often it already knows what needs to be done, but an external entity gives a veneer of respectability to grasping a difficult nettle.
• addicted 3y ago
  > My current organization has 8000 staff members, and I used to glance over the usage metrics of the dashboards my old team produced. I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day. I'd estimate the cost of maintaining our team was approximately $1,000,000, for an organization that supposedly can't afford to waste that money. I’m not sure how to explain this, but often when I find posts on HN linking to an engineer discussing how management is doing it wrong (especially if it’s someone who’s not running a successful company themselves), there’s usually a hyperfocus on really insignificant numbers as evidence of their point. This company has 8000 employees. And the cost of maintaining those dashboards is about $1mm according to the post. It only takes someone in management to identify a change which improved employee efficiency by $125 annually to completely pay for the $1mm spent to maintain the dashboard. Identify a new $125 efficiency improvement every year, and by year 5 your $1mm annual expense is saving you $5mm every year.
  • ludicity 3y ago
    It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we wouldn't be wasting that money. What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a core business that generates amounts of money large enough to fund departments that do nothing other than reaffirm that we care about whatever that department is supposed to do. That's totally fine (though I doubt it's a deliberate strategy) unless you waste time thinking they want to make people read the dashboards. It turns out that it's totally irrelevant to anything - they just want to have the team there to say they care about data, and you'll go insane if you try to do your job better. (Excellent critique though.)
    • aeturnum 3y ago
      But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc).... Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which the org does not care about the data. But also there's probably a point where they would care! Being data driven is not about spending all of your energy optimizing for exactly the scenario you have data to optimize for (see: the post-covid logistic crisis). To me - it seems like you need to "waste" a certain amount of money tracking down problems that don't happen to exist - but you can't know for sure they didn't exist before you tracked them down. I guess like...do you have the impression the data should drive people in a direction they are not going? Like...if the systems you work on are saying things are ok aren't they ok?
• lr4444lr 3y ago
  The upside to all of this is that large monopolistic corporations in an industry can be utterly vanquished by much smaller competitors who focus on hiring productive, capable people who work really well with one another. And it doesn't take a lot of them, because the org. described in this post is often getting in its own way, and is unable to deliver a sustained defense on quality or efficiency. So they often try to sue - but that's often blood in the water, and equally a sign to keep striking that weak spot as it is a serious deterrence.
  • darrenbkl 3y ago
    I remember in one episode of Silicon Valley, Gavin was lecturing Richard on a similar topic along the line of “so you don’t want your startup to be an big corporation, and what’s next for you? Taking vc money? going Ipo? And then becoming a big corp?”
• reactordev 3y ago
  While I don’t disagree, I think labeling and calling people “bad” is wrong. Derek is doing the best he can. He hired you to help make the company better, more profitable, etc etc. He’s trying anything to get you to understand that you need to deliver value, a product, a service, research output, something so the Bob’s have something to sell/offer/justify grant money. I’ve met a lot of engineers that think they were hired to perfect the art of software engineering. Not the case, not unless that is your mantra and you work at FAANG or Big Blue. The rest of the 90% have to deliver value. For managers, that’s getting the product/service/research out the door. For directors, it’s that X N where N is the number of managers, for VP’s the same - Product/Service/Output X Directors X Managers. Often the more inception you have (higher up you go) the more confusing the management and meetings as everything becomes strategic. I usually work a bit with the team to prove myself, talk the talk and walk the walk, before I ever ask to lead them. Let me solve a hard problem with you so we both know how we problem solve and I’ll handle “The Business”. I’ve taken my fair share of punches. What doesn’t help is the black and white thinking that this article is written in. If 98 of 100 dashboards aren’t used or even viewed. Build a grafana dashboard of stuff that is useful and present it as a means for cost cutting Power BI. Build a bunch of widgets they can use if they need it. I’m saying - take a step back and look not at the individuals behavior but at the situation that drives it. How can you, the engineer, provide better tooling so Derek looks like a genius. They clearly know what you’re working on, how production is going. Bob has stuff to sell and people to drink with. You get more time to work on perfecting the art of software engineering. Stop looking at ineptitude as someone’s failure and start looking at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help those who can’t Rust, rust. Or those who are stuck on C++. Or Brian who keeps committing small revisions to PRs and makes 30-80 commit PRs in a sprint. These are not signs of individual failure, they are symptoms.
  • specialist 3y ago
    > Derek is doing the best he can. Yup. Few people go to work every day to do a bad job. Like the OC's epiphany about Sturgeon's Law, I chilled (a little bit) once I realized that most people are already playing at their highest level. > ...start looking at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help... Back when I was doing proper product development, eg burning CDs and printing manuals, this was a pretty good strategy. Something changed. And I'm not smart enough to see it. My best guess is that most dev work is now "IT". Agile. Everything is make believe. Nothing ever really ships or is considered done. Then 18 - 36 elapse and its time for a do over. Any knowledge, culture, or lessons learned sent to /dev/null. I've been binging the Oxide Computer podcast. They're actually making something. Concrete, real, shippable, useful. That'd be nice.
• stinkytaco 3y ago
  I'd like to see a post like this on HN where someone revisits their organization 10 years later and decides if they were right or not. It's not that all organizations don't have disfunction, but as a younger person I was very fixated on everything I saw that was wrong and ignored either the problems I myself was introducing which were (and probably still are) numerous or the systems and programs that made the organization successful. Now that I'm older and in a position with a different perspective, I'm far less likely to find systemic fault. Perhaps I'm just lucky in my career atc? I don't have a blog to go back to, but this author seems insightful and I'd like to see what they think in 5 or 10 years.
  • antupis 3y ago
    I have gone oppositional direction younger me was kinda yes-man and now I am more jaded and see systemic failures all around me.
  • itronitron 3y ago
    What happens to be wrong is all relative to everything else wrong in the larger organization. It's been my experience that a lot of an organization's internal messaging is crafted to be a distraction from either really bad stuff that is going on or simply because management can't or doesn't want to do productive work. From that perspective, any dysfunction in a small team is inconsequential to the organization. As a younger person that was the sort of stuff I fixated on, until I learned that the various very trusted professional corporate suit folks acting like HQ were doing illegal shit, destroying their families with workplace affairs, bullying everyone around them, and ruining other people's work.
  • zmgsabst 3y ago
    What happens when you were right? Eg, as an SDE in 2017 you worked on Amazon Device’s econometrics team and were screaming the entire org was in trouble — but the PhD economists and directors ignored you. We’re at 5 years, a gutted department, billions in losses, etc. Now what? Or you warned WarnerMedia executives about their internal corporate misandry just before they fired Johnny Depp for being a male victim — and destroyed two tent pole properties in the process. Or were at Amazon again and warned there’d be financial troubles circa start of 2022 based on unprofessional conduct in FinTech? …what happens when you’re repeatedly right about multi-billion dollar mistakes before they happen, but your employer just doesn’t care? I don’t want to participate in what I see at WarnerMedia, Amazon,… Target, Disney, Bud Light, etc. I want to be able to say I did the right thing for shareholders — not shut my mouth and took the hush money to defraud them.
• zoomablemind 3y ago
  It's obviously a rant-inspired introspection about a specific kind of organisations. These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles, yet for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state that no one dares to disturb. It could be a niche product sold out to big orgs or other steady clients. It could be a subsidiary or some other steady org. Either way, there is no market pressure to really push such orgs to adapt. Thus all this theater and moldy props. These orgs are not expected to improve, they will live, but required to demonstrate an effort. This reminds me of some shitty restaurants or deserted "boutique" storefronts which stay in business for decades with no suply-demand explanation for such longevity. I guess, these may somehow have low operating costs and some strong funding source.
  • lazide 3y ago
    They’re still functioning per market principles, just like the Dodo bird was still functioning in an evolutionary environment! It was just a particularly protected and ‘calm’ place. Which, unfortunately, made the Dodo bird very susceptible to an outside context problem/sudden upset. But it worked for a very long time!
  • ajkjk 3y ago
    > These orgs are not truly functioning per market principles, yet for various reasons are stuck in a captive energy state that no one dares to disturb. All signs point to market principles leading directly to this kind of situation. It seems like markets produce ruthless competition but that's a rudimentary and naive extrapolation from the prediction. Reality gives good evidence to a more sophisticated prediction: that, in times of non-scarcity, markets produce docile mediocrity, because everyone's goal is to keep their job and make enough money and status to survive, rather than to maximize their money or status, and mediocrity attains that.
    • marcosdumay 3y ago
      Absolutely this. People keep thinking about markets as some all-knowing relentless optimization machines. But they are just a bunch of distributed computing acting on extremely limited data trying to act over a completely chaotic environment. Markets are neither all-knowing nor relentless. They are always extremely conservative and risk-adverse. That holds for times of crisis too, they just become a little bit less risk-adverse.
• fallingfrog 3y ago
  Oh I love it when people say “we’re an agile shop”. Meaningless. No you’re not, I know this because you signed a contract that says that in two years you’re going to deliver a specific pre-agreed set of features. But I guess if you say you’re “agile” you’ll get brownie points with the next level up? Who knows. Doesn’t matter, I suppose.
• seer 3y ago
  The author seems to be doing the classic mistake of thinking how to use technical means to solve what amounts to political problems. All the Dereks I’ve met over the years (I know terribly anecdotal) are aware of the position they’re in. They are desperately scared of those nosy engineers that can prove with data how bad they are and try hard to put them in positions where that is not possible. The portrayal of Michael Scott in “The Office” was sometimes too painfully real. But knowing that, I’ve found its actually possible to use it to your own if not advantage, then at least peace of mind. The way one does it is to get to know your Derek as a person, become his confidant - a surprisingly large amount of the “stupid jira tickets” those people generate are usually because of of very stupid requirements and policies that they have to follow. After one understands the deep reasons for the busy work and inefficiencies - be it other bosses and hire ups or inadequate policies, one can work with their Dereks to sideline / fix them. The former being way easier than the latter of course. Then you can approach the hire ups and understand why they put those policies in the first place, slowly getting a deeper understanding of the bigger picture. Cause there usually are reasons for all the madness, it just takes civility, patience and empathy to get to it. “Why bother” one would ask? Well in the end you get known by all those people as “the guy to go to, to get shit done” and start being pushed into very interesting and consequential projects. People trust you, at least on a personal level - and even if you don’t manage to solve the political issues that frustrate you, you still have the peace of mind of being productive and friendly with your environment.
• otteromkram 3y ago
  I love how the author is just too busy solving problems brought about by idiots (not him, of course), but never mentions solving problems via: 1. Improving dashboard engagement through awareness. Maybe through something like periodic email blasts that showcase metrics from the dashboards. 2. Mentoring some of the subpar engineers to help them improve so that future issues ebb and overall quality increases. But, no, the author is too smart for that nonsense...
  • wildrhythms 3y ago
    There's only so much one person can do for 'awareness'. At my workplace new projects usually trickle down from leadership, thru management, and eventually to the engineers. Leadership, in an effort to meet some OKR to be 'more data driven', had the engineers make an intake process for new work. After months of email blasts 'Please submit new project requests thru the form' across the org the grand total of project requests received was one (1). Even the leadership that demanded this process be implemented didn't use it.
• jmcgough 3y ago
  > It was sparked by reference to a concept called the honne-tatemae divide, which are Japanese concepts related to the true feelings of an individual and the front they present in public Another related concept is in sociology, back stage vs front stage self: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramaturgy_(sociology)
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• alphazard 3y ago
  I often think about the huge amount of economic displacement that would occur if organizations had a detector which could determine who was in the 80 vs the 20. I don't think the world knows what to do with all the imposters in tech alone, let alone white collar jobs broadly. We might wake up tomorrow to a startup marketing just such a detector. It certainly doesn't require AGI to determine who is adding value. Everything is online now, patterns of git commits, slack communications, call transcripts. It's totally feasible that AI can figure out who is good at solving problems before it can solve those problems directly.
  • uoaei 3y ago
    Not all benefit is quantifiable. There's that anecdote about the guy who wasn't a superstar by metrics but sat with all the high performers at lunch and gave them useful info and asked the right questions to help them achieve great things. I think it was Nyquist at Bell Labs?
• jb_gericke 3y ago
  So TL/DR, the author works for a large org with a less than perfect culture? I’d simply move. Even in keeping to companies of similar scale, there are definitely highly successful enterprises out there that wouldn’t entertain entire departments doing meaningless work, and have a generally good culture of accountability and feedback. This before even considering smaller businesses and startups where there’s simply no room to have these sorts of inefficiencies.
  • hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
    I feel this is one of the most interesting tradeoffs of the modern day. No, seriously. Imagine the kind of flexibility an ordinary person has to build into everything else they have going on to make "I'd just move" a viable long term strategy. Buying property immediately becomes way more hassle than it's worth, because you might have to move in 6 months to the next place anyway. Providing a stable schooling situation for your kids just became a lot harder. Want to avoid those issues? Are you willing to pay for rent or a mortgage in a city large enough where you can keep running this strategy, over and over again? What about the situation where the culture is actually fine, but you yourself just want more money or more responsibility than they're willing to pass down to you? It's an interesting example of how when you hold one thing fixed in place, everything else has to orbit around it. Very few people get to have it all without putting in a lot of work to get there first. Like a lot of societal ills, I think this is one place where remote working is going to make things a lot better for people even while a vocal minority will bemoan how it's all worse than ever. Many, many, many talented people would be thrilled to live in a world where they can live in the same gorgeous small town in the middle of nowhere they call home while also feeling like they aren't running a serious risk of unemployment if they give up the one job they managed to claw out of the aether.
    • ImPostingOnHN 3y ago
      I think that by "move", they meant "to another employer", versus "to another home"
• MetalGuru 3y ago
  I still don’t understand why things need to be this way? Like, people could not be worthless. It’s theoretically possible.
  • lmm 3y ago
    I think it's getting better, but slowly, like all social change. You read books about corporate culture from 50 years ago and it's all jock stuff and personal loyalty. Now there's at least some sense of the job being actually doing the job right, even if at the moment that mostly cashes out as saying the right buzzwords.
  • ludicity 3y ago
    I suspect the organization gets too big, and the communication overhead + politics takes over everything else. That is, I think it is theoretically not possible at a large organization, except in very rare circumstances where you've lucked into the right people and incentive structure. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• lulznews 3y ago
  >I have never met a single manager at any large company that has not said they want to be data driven. This is a powerful insight. Very important article.
• shepherdjerred 3y ago
  Which companies do things "right"? How do I select for them when interviewing? Also, how do I know that _I'm_ not the one who's wrong?
  • esafak 3y ago
    I'd look for companies led by conscientious founders.
    • shepherdjerred 3y ago
      So does that mean that I have to look at startups? I love the idea of working for a startup, but I want to be paid well and avoid too much risk. From what I know, those goals aren't really compatible with startups.
  • lmm 3y ago
    > Which companies do things "right"? Small ones, or ones that are very focused on making money. > How do I select for them when interviewing? Ask the people who interview you what they work on and why, then avoid the ones where the "why" doesn't connect back to something useful. > Also, how do I know that _I'm_ not the one who's wrong? You don't, not immediately. In the end you can only look at the results over the medium/long term.
  • ludicity 3y ago
    Some super easy heuristics. If it's a government agency, or some other organization where it's possible that they're genuinely stunningly incompetent, I usually ask to see a Git repository. It's shocking how many places either literally don't version control code (including me, on my first team out of university) or can't even handle their branching strategy. I usually ask a few questions about their management philosophy. A lot of people just immediately say crazy stuff around work hours and Agile. I'll ask to look at their Jira backlog, or whatever they use. If they've got hundreds of cards in there, something has gone wrong (though this is not a dealbreaker by any means). But for real, if they can keep a clean repository, that's so highly correlated with general competence that I can basically stop asking questions there. It's also nice because it isn't an aggressive question and you don't have to reveal what you're actually looking for. And finally, I only interview at places through my network these days. Isn't worth the risk of running into a psychopath manager and having them ruins months of my life.
• opportune 3y ago
  The most jarring thing about entering the workforce to me, and it seems to the author as well, is the nigh-pathological lack of pride (or “passion”, which I think is a loathsome term) most people put into their jobs. I don’t accept that all of those people intrinsically are lazy morons - maybe some or even most are, but a lot of people get that attitude metaphorically beaten into them by lazy and disengaged coworkers. I know this for a fact because I’ve witnessed it happen to many people as they mature as workers and also noticed it in myself. I can’t prove it’s not related to age, or position in life (eg a young single person eager to prove themselves at work, vs someone who prioritizes family) but I know firsthand that there are at least some experienced workers with families, responsibilities, and hobbies that manage to stay focused and engaged for a long time. I expect some pushback against this, but I really do think this phenomenon - whatever you want to call it - is the basis for ageism. It frankly is a real, observable thing that life has a way of beating the passion out of people into a point they see their job as clock-in, clock-out. It doesn’t happen to everyone of course. One of the reasons I love working with interns and recent college grads is that, despite their lack of skills or knowledge in many areas, they mostly haven’t gone through that transformation yet.
  • ajkjk 3y ago
    I think it's basically circular. If you try to have pride in your job, your pride gets destroyed by the frustration of it all and you either quit or give up on the pride. So what deserves is pride-less work, which causes the frustration. The best teams I've worked on were ones where we managed to locally have pride by feeling like a little team who cared about each other's work and occasional sacrifice (being on-call, etc) and it felt like a little family. As soon as further-away managers start reaching in and "fiddling" with it, from their prideless vantage post where everything is just a system to accomplish quarterly goals, the family-feeling fades away and it goes back to soul-crushing pointlessness.
    • imkehno 3y ago
      Yeah, this is what I’ve also experienced. You can have a great team, and a lot of influence in that team context. Scaling up that common feeling from 5-10 people gets harder. Realizing this, I’m not really interested in working in larger organizations anymore. All the overhead that bogs down speed just sucks the life out of me.
• Guvante 3y ago
  I agree with the core point of the article but the bit about unused bar charts reminded me of a weird reality. You don't know the bar charts you need when you make them. Not in a "you didn't do enough research" way (waterfall isn't the solution to everything) but instead in a "until it breaks no one notices" fashion. Sometimes a chart points to an exact problem. You may only look at that chart once every other year but if 1/10 it avoids an outage that is a win for the chart. The problem is knowing which charts work like that vs which ones are superfluous.
• jiggawatts 3y ago
  > “This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.” Ha-ha… haaa Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily. This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team, and all but one developer literally never even looking at any of: APM, deployment pipeline, log analytics system, issue tracker, or dashboard.
  • semi-extrinsic 3y ago
    IDK, but a possible counterargument to some of your observation is that you could have a team where every day/week they have a meeting to look at the dashboards, and it's always Sam who opens the dashboard and shares on the big monitor/group call.
    • jiggawatts 3y ago
      Replace Sam with me, the person that built the thing. My experience aligns with the the author of the original blog article. It's impossible for someone near the bottom of a hierarchy to convince anyone of anything, unless the building is literally on fire and you're the external fire safety consultant. I'm the proverbial fire safety consultant. I come in, upgrade the suppression systems, hold multiple hour-long training sessions on how to check the figurative "water levels"... and nobody does. If I turn up a year later, it's guaranteed that the system is empty and rusting, and the monitoring panels have cobwebs on them. I've actually noticed that you can have an emergency situation (a "raging fire"), and then sure, people will listen to you about that particular problem, but if you ask them to pour a glass of water onto something that is "just smouldering" they'll laugh in your face for wasting their time. "Come back later if it's really on fire."
  • chris_wot 3y ago
    I work at a school, and hop boy do the students damage their laptops a lot. When we hit the point where we refused to loan out laptops for stupid shit like the kid punched the laptop screen, we found that the year coordinators actually needed a very simple daily report with the name of the student and how long the laptop has been in for repair. That’s it. And you know what? It was useful. You can make as many fancy dashboards as you like. But if the data is truly useful operationally, it will likely be a boring list with no graphics.
• sharas- 3y ago
  this examines corporate characters: https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html
• jalapenos 3y ago
  This is feelgood venting, but without addressing the root of the problem. All these managers are paid to do this BS. By the company. And that company is owned by people, who ultimately have the final say how it will be run, and who are paying the price. There needs to be a lot more discussion around corporate governance with regards to this topic. I.e. how is it allowed to happen. Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous? Why do we frequently hear stories like Icahn goes and fires a floor of staff with no effect on operations? Because it sounds like a huge opportunity in the M&A space. Perhaps new tech can be developed to detect companies like these, to target them for acquisition and then purge them of BS.
  • beachy 3y ago
    > Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous? That's how the world used to work, back in the 90s and before. It doesn't work today, since job mobility is so high. What's the point in training up someone, just for them to jump ship to a competitor for a healthy pay raise?
    • jpc0 3y ago
      Yep, also pension plans going away and the fact those same employees can even get that substantial pay raise isn't the problem at all. Pay employees well, give them a dream to catch and make sure they won't die miserable and would you believe they may just decide to stick around.
    • jalapenos 3y ago
      A skilled acquirer would've interviewed engineering before moving forward, ostensibly on the grounds of "knowing what they're buying". They'd then know who to give bonuses and promotions to, vs those to kick out, from day one.
  • prometheon1 3y ago
• rgblambda 3y ago
  >Actually remove the staff that no one works to work with or who terrorize their subordinates and I'll know you're serious about performance. Unfortunately, that sort of person is great at convincing managers that they're the top performing employee in the team, and it's better for the others to just put up with them.
• paulsutter 3y ago
  There are companies reshaping their industries. They are fast growing and staffed by smart people who care about making an impact This is the right website to find them
• politelemon 3y ago
  I am intrigued by the spreadsheet to control infrastructure bit. > the engineers responsible for it elected to use spreadsheets to control the infrastructure Can you explain what this means, how would you control infra through spreadsheets? Is it something like terraform... You change a '1' to a '2' in a particular cell and some script queries that XLSX and notice the change and create a new EC2?
  • gawa 3y ago
    Not OP, but shokingly, what you describe _does_ exist. Or at least something similar for managing kubernetes. [0] In my own experience, I at least once found one slack app that was configured throught spreadsheet. [1] It actually worked quite well. Although in this context, I assume that by "infrastructure", OP was probably refering to the whole configuration of some Microsoft tools (PowerBI). I don't think it was about provisionning infrastructure. But I'm not familiar with PowerBI so it's only my guess. I would also love to hear more about InfrastructureAsSpreadsheet, if anyone have fun or horror stories to share :) [0] https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl [1] https://emmti.com/tiny-elf-a-slack-bot-with-google-sheets-and-typescript https://emmti.com/tiny-elf-a-slack-bot-with-google-sheets-an...
  • ludicity 3y ago
    I can't go into a lot of detail for reasons of anonymity, but suffice it to say, this involves handing out spreadsheets to stakeholders, uploading them to Git repositories, then performing some truly unholy rites to create stuff in AWS and a database. The gist of what you suggested is basically right though.
• 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
  > "Reward people for staying, and I'll know you're serious about valuing people." this resonates. what i noticed is that managers often hire people that won't outshine them. so, soon you end up with a team of idiots being managed by an even bigger idiot. it's just all so tiresome. in the end quiet-quitting or work-to-rule is the only logical result, especially in a bad job market where your options are limited.
• aiunboxed 3y ago
  I believe the issue isn't necessarily with the organization itself, but rather with the inherent nature of most individuals who may not actively seek improvement or introspection. Many people tend to gravitate towards comfort and familiarity, resisting change even when it's beneficial After all, an organization is ultimately a reflection of its people. Sometimes people need direction and for that direction having a visionary leadership team and having strong middle managers become extremely necessary.
  • isthispermanent 3y ago
    This is my thinking, people hate change. It explains so much of human behavior. Natural selection would say that those that can handle change well are the ones whose genes will likely carry on. But that does not mean that they want to handle change.
• lloydatkinson 3y ago
  This was honestly cathartic and a completely refreshing read. Lots of articles rightly criticise the vast and widespread incompetence management and organisations. But this article comes at it from a different angle and I really enjoyed the read. The “Dereks” of the article are some of the worst members of this corporate incompetence. Derek was the main reason I left my last job. Systematically failed to manage the entire development department (about 30 teams) and actively hostile to any and all suggestions that weren’t his, even going as far as falsely reporting people to HR if they rightly criticised another dumb decision. Frequently stole the ideas and suggestions people made and claiming them as his own, despite having reported said person to their manager or HR for the very same idea months prior. Absolutely classic “yes man” with a smug and nasty personality. All of the good devs left, with nothing to show for it. Three years and customers hated the crappy software, that was only pushed for because some CEO type had heard about “digital transformation” and “cloud” - and of course lots of agile bullshit thrown in on top.
• ksec 3y ago
  >Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crud, and that explains almost everything. I used to think it was an 80/20 split, and later in my life it goes up to 90%. Now I think it is more like 95%. Where it fits the normal distribution curve. It is sad, but I am also surprised and inspired how 5% of people are pushing the progress so 95% of people gets to benefits, most likely without them knowing it. The author said 10 years ago. HN used to discuss a lot of these things pre 2015, and it was mostly gone from 2015 - 2022 because it doesn't fit the general Silicon Valley narrative. But I am glad it is back.
• laurels-marts 3y ago
  > 90% of everything is crud, and that explains almost everything. > Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't crud at their jobs - you're surrounded by people that are crud. I wish people stopped overusing crud. It kind of dilutes the argument and makes it less clear.
• Niksko 3y ago
  Thanks for writing this, it's incredibly cathartic to know that I'm not alone in feeling this way. Question for the audience: are there places where it isn't like this? Can anyone attest to having worked in places like the one that the author describes, and then escaping to somewhere that isn't like that? If so, are you hiring? Or should I just be content with spending 2 or so years somewhere and then moving on? (2 years seems to be about the natural amount of time it takes for me to fully realize the dysfunction of wherever I'm currently employed)
  • ornornor 3y ago
    I feel the same way, been in that occupation for over a decade now, have worked with over a dozen companies in that timeframe (consulting or full time)… I have never experienced a sane environment where a psychopath isn’t in charge. I sincerely don’t think it exists. I haven’t found the solution you’re looking for. I’ve refused to go back to the grindstone for about two years now. Exploring other avenues such as bizdev because I don’t think I’m physically capable of remaining healthy and being an employee software engineer anymore. I think the prime quality for the vast majority of software developers isn’t technical skill but rather whether you can settle/give up on your ideals and just drive the bus into the wall whenever asked. If you can’t do that (I can’t), pick another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing because it’ll drive you insane and shave years off your life.
    • Niksko 3y ago
      > I don’t think I’m physically capable of remaining healthy and being an employee software engineer anymore I'm sorry to hear that, and that makes me worry about my future in this industry. However > If you can’t do that (I can’t), pick another occupation and keep the programming as a side gig thing because it’ll drive you insane and shave years off your life. Won't this just apply to any career? Or do you think there's something unique about software that leads to this? > Exploring other avenues such as bizdev I don't think I fully understand what this entails, can you elaborate?
      • ornornor 3y ago
• bryananderson 3y ago
  There’s some worthwhile stuff here about how perverse incentives lead to pathological outcomes in large organizations, but… > Here's the pressure if you're in the 10% of people that aren't crud at their jobs - you're surrounded by people that are crud. > In professional settings, approximately all of my time goes into solving problems introduced by people that are just indescribably bad. Jesus. If this is really the case, consider that your organization might be abnormally bad and that you should leave. I’ve worked with a few incompetent engineers, but never have I ever worked somewhere where 90% of ICs are so bad that they’re actively making the product worse and burning all of the other 10%’s time on trying to undo the 90%’s work. Of course it’s also not true when an organization claims that everyone there is a “10x ninja rockstar”. Most people I’ve worked with are smart but human. If I worked somewhere where 90% of my peer engineers were as bad as OP’s are, I’d leave ASAP by any means necessary. The alternate hypothesis, of course, is that I’m part of the 90% but don’t know it!
  • Drakim 3y ago
    The thing is, there isn't one singular measure of value in terms of how the product can be "bad" or "good". I've very often seen less experienced engineers make stuff that helps a specific customer (good), but makes the app just a little less organized and understandable in the long run (bad). I often have to step in and fix the damage done that might not be visible at first glance for a lot of my coworkers. I wouldn't say it's 90%, but maybe 60%. The thing is, it's not like said engineer didn't actually deliver a useful thing to a customer, so it's not like he did objectively universally bad. But they might not realize that if everybody worked like this, a few years down the line, our entire product would be beyond saving.
    • denton-scratch 3y ago
      > but makes the app just a little less organized and understandable in the long run (bad) This sounds like normal code-rot; code is changed to achieve some particular goal, but budget isn't allocated for the requisite refactoring. I personally prefer that refactoring opportunities are seized whenever they appear; managers with budgets don't usually agree, for understandable reasons. Eventually you end up with a hairball that can't be refactored, and has to be rewritten. Whether a change should be made at all, whether to go ahead and refactor there and then, or how long to postpone the refactoring, are all business decisions that have to be taken by the person that manages the budget.
• birdstheword5 3y ago
  > Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything is crud, and that explains almost everything > In professional settings, approximately all of my time goes into solving problems introduced by people that are just indescribably bad Translation: everyone except me is stupid. Why do we let people say things like this without calling them out on it?
• lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  I have a new heuristic on this sort of stuff. Assume the rule of 80/20 is accurate. 80% of profits come from 20% of customers, 80 % of usefulwork comes from 20% of employees etc. but then of the remaining 20%, 80% of that (16%) will come from 20% of the 80% of other workers. So just two rounds of this and basically 1/3 of your company produces 96% of the results. this 1/3-2/3 split weirdly seems to correlate with other sources (see Google as it grew compared to established firms of same revenue)
• skrebbel 3y ago
  Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them. It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo. At no point does this article, or most articles like it, do any effort to realize that things are not always like this. Even if there is some unavoidable law that huge companies inevitably fill their ranks with idiots, like this article suggests, you do not need to work at a huge company. Most people do not work at huge companies. There’s lots of amazing tech companies with fulfilling jobs and they want you, now. But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”. There’s some weird kind of suffer porn going on here that’s just unnecessary. If you choose to trade your sanity for a high salary then go right ahead but don’t act like you had no choice.
  • TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”. Behind all such writing is an unspoken piece of context: those terrible huge companies pay software devs better than small ones. It's not that they can't work at a smaller company - it's just that it means taking a hit to your take-home pay, so it's Not An Option.
    • skrebbel 3y ago
      Agree! In fact, while you wrote this I made an edit (last sentence) to address that. It was supposed to be my core point but I had somehow left it implicit.
    • antupis 3y ago
      Also work life balance is usually better in big corp you actually can clock that 9:5 and go home.
• zubairq 3y ago
  Brilliant post. Yes, I agree with 99% of it. I do however think you should start your own business and be your own boss, to see if you can be any better. I used to complain about management all the time, and then I became management, and i was even WORSE than they had been! (But I was able to recognise that I was worse)
  • ludicity 3y ago
    So true, haha. One of the engineers I look up to the most told me the same thing - he became a manager and was awful at it... which is why I didn't get into management. I suspect I'd recognize I was worse, but I'm much happier just doing an okay job (not trying to "fix" the organization) and clocking out on a part-time schedule.
• rvba 3y ago
  > I have never met a single manager at any large company that has not said they want to be data driven. Grinding Gear Games - developers of Path of Exile famously said that they dont use data (probably because they dont know how to interpret it) - explains why their game is very poorly balanced. On a side note, everyone knows that the game is infested by bots... everyone apart from GGG. There was a post by them, where they noted how it was strange that 15% of players did not make a certain quest... Guess what: bots (at that time) werent advanced enough to make that quest.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• maxslch 3y ago
  They really don't, for a programmer there are million opportunities todo something at a smaller scale, on your own etc. If you're a product manager than the job itself only exists in inefficient corporations. corporations don't take risks, they're slow etc. look at google, how many exciting things did they push out over the last decade? and how many do we use today? the thing these corporations are good at is control and marketing, they're everywhere and people always think first about them when searching for a job etc. they also pay the most, but you'll waste your potential there with endless titles etc. In a startup/your own project you can do everything yourself, learn anything, go into any direction you want to. All it takes is a mindful shift in thinking, look deeper into what you want, what will fulfill you etc, but seems like most or a large number of people opt for not thinking stuff through and go with the easiest, most popular and obvious choice, it's like going to a factory to stand X hours near the machine...
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  >>"Most managers have never had an independent thought on how to manage people effectively (hence the Agile parroting), >>> most programmers don't know what an abstraction is, etc, etc. " So many programmers think they are the next Dijkstra and are upset with LLM's producing crap code, but really over inflate themselves in their own reflection and forget that it is better than 90% of programmers. Remember in collage, when 1 guy did the group project and the 3 other people on the team coasted and got the A. Well 75% of who you are working with now, are the ones that didn't finish the project, and likely you are one of them. That's why LLM's are going to cause sweeping changes.
• anvil-on-my-toe 3y ago
  Why do modern organizations suck? 1) Power corrupts - individuals who acquire power don't concern themselves with the well-being of others. They are blinded by greed. 2)The bureaucratic trap - the idea you can just think really hard and anticipate what all the problems will be and then write rules. It always fails. People need agency. A smart, careful, considering person or community thinks about the actual situation and how to deal with it in some way. Top down thinking and the belief that you can predict everything and subject it to a process, is flawed.
• Michelangelo11 3y ago
  > This means they will inevitably become promoted over time, because unlike the rest of us who have to put in effort and pay what a friend of mine terms soul cost to act like a sycophant, they believe it sincerely. "Soul cost" is only a problem if you have a soul.
• simpaticoder 3y ago
  People are naturally strangely shaped. When they join a large organization, they must fit into a Voronoi diagram[1]. Shape is a metaphor for both degrees-of-freedom and for knowledge. This is also, funnily enough, a good way to describe cell packing in plants, incl. trees. One striking example of a role requiring deep behavioral and epistemic changes is that of a judge. A judge must learn to edit their memory and learn to not know things. I find this striking because you'd think that, objectively, knowing more is better. But the rules of court have decided this is not true. If you want that job, you will do this. (It's not all bad: any lawyer will tell you of the risk-minimizing bliss of not knowing things.) The behavioral adjustments - mostly behavioral losses - are usually not so strange. Usually they are a peon to tribal socialization. In a tribe there are rules that aren't 'fair' because they do not reference the details of the specific conflict, who's right or wrong. The rules are simpler than that, making reference only to relationships and "who started it". You don't dis the leader, you don't pick fights, and absolutely never pick a fight with leader-favored members, etc. The OP hints at the proper viewpoint, but then diverges. They are strange structures with lots of rustling leaves. But he does not perceive the value and origin of these structures on their own terms. One must take the view of a zoologist observing the behavior of a parasite, or a slime-mold. It is a mistake to anthropomorphize them, just as it is a mistake to anthropomorphize human social structures. 1 - https://github.com/d3/d3-voronoi https://github.com/d3/d3-voronoi
• jerska 3y ago
  Smart people don’t consider themselves better than people around them. This article is so annoying. It has some truth to it, e.g. the mismatch between incentives and success, or even the corporate bullshit to avoid saying hard truths are on point. But the second part lacks the proper reasoning needed to establish the self-proclaimed intelligence of it author. Comparing software development’s product building with fencing competitions is so far-fetched, yet most of the arguments of the second part build on this premise. You don’t need amazing individuals to build a great thing, what you need is a great team. That’s why most people try to address the system. It’s hard to do when you factor in individual incentives, but it’s not because everybody is dumb, it’s because everybody (smartly) addresses their own self-interests above the company’s.
  • jdeaton 3y ago
    > Smart people don’t consider themselves better than people around them. Do you have any direct evidence of this or are you merely making an observation.
    • Clubber 3y ago
      >Smart people don’t consider themselves better than people around them. He probably doesn't work in software. There's hubris in spades in that realm. The worst is when people's ego is significantly bigger than their actual ability.
• angarg12 3y ago
  On one side we have things like the efficient market hypothesis, that says that people are rational, they make logical decisions, and there is no room for inefficiencies. On the other we might think that people who runs companies are blithering idiots who just got lucky, and their head is so far up their asses that they can't see they are headed to self-destruction. Reality is somewhere in between.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  > Most managers have never had an independent thought on how to manage people effectively (hence the Agile parroting) exactly. And if you want to decide whether you want to work at a company, you can look at the top managers and imagine if they ever have independent thoughts.
• pmontra 3y ago
  I'm sure that the author understands the difference between a clearcut fencing competition and the messy competition between companies and between the very people inside those companies. Yet there is little or nothing about that in the article. Those Dereks can survive inside companies because the contribution of every single person is so tiny that it's very difficult to measure. Furthermore, most of the times it doesn't influence the success or failure of ambitious managers. Those Dereks know it, maybe got their fingers burned attempting to be smart in the past, they do only what's needed to get their money on their bank account at the end of the month. Move some of them in a position where their work makes the difference between losing and winning (software for a racing car team?) and they might undull themselves.
  • ludicity 3y ago
    Very fair critique. I just thought it was very obvious, but perhaps I should have elaborated. The article is not confused about why Derek exists (I feel bad for anyone named Derek now!), it is about why Derek is not incentivized to change, and likely never will. You can of course try to help, but if you find yourself putting energy into the world and not getting results, just stop and do something actually fulfilling.
• lifeisstillgood 3y ago
  The problem with software engineering in large companies is that the large companies are encoding themselves in software - it's the natural endpoint of software eating the world. The problem is that software engineers are then asked to square all the circles - the hacks, the business models that don't work, the illogical policies that have kept the peace between powerful entrenched parties. Volkswagen found it impossible to build a diesel engine that met California emissions criteria. So they encoded a cheat. They did not write the cheat in an email, the CTO literally committed a line of code. (wish I could see the repo). The point is that software demands clarity - it has no vagueness. So if you are going to digitise your business your business processes and model must also be clean and clear.
• ayx 3y ago
  Sturgeon’s law really does apply. It applies to doctors, plumbers, therapists, programmers, managers, x. There really is too much stupidity in the world. “Obviously”. Learning to ignore it is an easy but reasonable response. Accepting it however, and learning that most stupidity can be dispelled with a bit of guidance is much harder. You can get there if you aren’t stupid. :)
• morphicpro 3y ago
  My career in house started at around 2011. I did only contracting before that starting at around 2004. I used to hate contract work because at the time I was very new and was heavily invested in academics. I really just wanted to work in a team environment. I had a strong desire to work directly with my peers so that I could learn the trade. After I got my first real in house job I loved it for about the first 5 years. Then I kept growing in my career and moving to larger companies where "scrum master" was a title. I hated everything about programming from there on because the job became about constantly trying to measure something useless while also doing it differently every new try... As of last 3 months I have completely stop working in tech. I will only ever come back to tech as a contractor. I'm rebuilding my personal site to go as a consultant and contractor only from here on. I'm literally pulling down my resume today so that I stop getting harassed by these stupid recruiter Indian call centers. I will never willing work in a corporate hell scrape again and if I choose to it will be on my terms. I honestly think if this blog post resonated with you, you should just go work for yourself. It's far more rewarding even if its harder work to be your own boss. Good riddance to complacency and incompetence!
• wcerfgba 3y ago
  I would like to know what initiatives at systemic change the author has participated in, and what the outcomes where. There are plenty of case studies of action research and appreciative inquiry leading to more effective and fulfilling organisations.
  • ludicity 3y ago
    I would love to have a look at your favourite reading material on this topic. I must admit that, while I've seen many attempts at improving things across numerous organizations (and the contacts through my blog give me a lot of vicarious experience), I've never seen a large organization take a serious attempt at a change, guided by sound theory, common sense, and appetite for risk.
• somsak2 3y ago
  While I share some of the same frustrations as the author, I have a really hard time getting on board with the tone of most of these kinds of posts. It seems like they've gotten so far into frustration with work that it's crazy to me they wouldn't make a change. Personally if I were feeling even 50% or 25% as frustrated, I'd seek to quit, or at least a leave of absence or another role in the company.
• osigurdson 3y ago
  Brains are, in fact, data driven - photons and sound pressure changes.
• kazinator 3y ago
  Let me introduce you to mizuganureteiru; a phrase for the Japanese concept of water being wet.