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> The modern version is: Every s/w evolves until it becomes facebook... This is primarily due to the SV promotion-driven development culture - where Engineerin

> The modern version is: Every s/w evolves until it becomes facebook... This is primarily due to the SV promotion-driven development culture - where Engineering managers don't do anything but performance reviews while offloading all tech work to tech leads. Then, they force every engineer to magically produce "impact" every 6 months or else... It sounds great because surely "impact" must be getting produced every 6 months right? Except, all that has happened is that engineers and product managers are spending months figuring out crap (such as github social, badges etc.) or sometimes boosting some BS metrics. The other side effect is that the work culture has become toxic because every developer is pitted against each other. The outcome? Enshittification of once beloved services. Because the stewards of said services are trapped in a cycle of perverse incentives.

icedchai 3y ago
This reminds me a SV company I worked for a couple years ago. The EM was always going on about impact. I was a staff engineer, needed to have organizational-level impact with my project... on and on. Meanwhile, I'd get so many interruptions for code reviews, meetings, etc. it was almost impossible to get any actual work done.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  > This reminds me a SV company I worked for a couple years ago. The EM was always going on about impact. I was a staff engineer, needed to have organizational-level impact with my project... on and on. Meanwhile, I'd get so many interruptions for code reviews, meetings, etc. it was almost impossible to get any actual work done. Been there. The obsession with levels and career ladder documents is too much sometimes. It is so hard to be an IC with constant org-wide impact as opposed to being a manager whose impact is automatically wider due to reporting structure.
  - icedchai 3y ago
    I eventually left. I hated the culture. They would literally shame people for not hitting 90% of their sprint goals, meanwhile the interruptions were constant and never ending. Also, despite all the time spent on code reviews, the code base was incredibly difficult to work with. Technical debt did not begin to describe it. 5000 line single file "modules", decade old dependencies nobody dared upgrade, not to mention Python 2.7 (in 2022), multiple ORMs, on and on.

icedchai 3y ago

This reminds me a SV company I worked for a couple years ago. The EM was always going on about impact. I was a staff engineer, needed to have organizational-level impact with my project... on and on. Meanwhile, I'd get so many interruptions for code reviews, meetings, etc. it was almost impossible to get any actual work done.

nine_zeros 3y ago
> This reminds me a SV company I worked for a couple years ago. The EM was always going on about impact. I was a staff engineer, needed to have organizational-level impact with my project... on and on. Meanwhile, I'd get so many interruptions for code reviews, meetings, etc. it was almost impossible to get any actual work done. Been there. The obsession with levels and career ladder documents is too much sometimes. It is so hard to be an IC with constant org-wide impact as opposed to being a manager whose impact is automatically wider due to reporting structure.
- icedchai 3y ago
  I eventually left. I hated the culture. They would literally shame people for not hitting 90% of their sprint goals, meanwhile the interruptions were constant and never ending. Also, despite all the time spent on code reviews, the code base was incredibly difficult to work with. Technical debt did not begin to describe it. 5000 line single file "modules", decade old dependencies nobody dared upgrade, not to mention Python 2.7 (in 2022), multiple ORMs, on and on.