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At my previous $JOB I started calling this Promotion-Driven Development because it's everywhere. Take the easy problems that look good and you can finish quickl

At my previous $JOB I started calling this Promotion-Driven Development because it's everywhere. Take the easy problems that look good and you can finish quickly, get promoted, hand off the facade to team that has to actually solve the real problem, and repeat.

dmitrygr 3y ago
This is very much how Google is on the inside. And that’s not surprising. People respond to the incentives presented. If you spend years fixing hard problems that actually affect users, and don’t get promoted, you’ll almost certainly become jaded, and start doing things that are pointless but do get you promoted. Because that’s how you make more money. And that’s the actual reason to be working.
- andrewstuart2 3y ago
  And yeah, it shows via ye olde Google graveyard. Honestly I do think it's just a hard problem not to have, because the world tends to work on visibility combined with innovation. You can't solve hard problems and make money if nobody uses your solution because they don't know it exists. But I struggle with the balance because yeah, I'm a bit jaded.
syntaxing 3y ago
I think the crappy part is that it works most of the time.
shalmanese 3y ago
The purpose of a system is what it does. All development is promotion driven development, different people can either choose to be clear eyed about this or not and, subsequently, good at it or not. Your job is the venn diagram intersection of an organized system of rewards and punishments from both inside and outside of the firm intersected with your own goals and aspirations over time. Anything not in this intersection is not a job, it's something else we like to delude ourselves into thinking is a job to preserve our egos. More specifically, your worry about how distorted incentives lead to poor quality software is not your job unless it is your job to worry about said incentives. People keep hoping to go work for one of the magically sane company where all the incentives are correct and everyone is doing the quote-unquote "right" thing at all times. Such a company does not exist because the very concept is incoherent, every system of possible incentives will come with a different set of tradeoffs and the art of operating a firm is to pick from amongst a bunch of shitty options for the least shitty one. People who do not accept this will be perpetually unhappy and bitter about how others obtain undeserved success because they simply did the unsporting thing of playing the game they were asked to play. You can either be one of those people or you can receive the radical acceptance of what a job is.
- Spivak 3y ago
  I like to think I'm pretty good at this game, swung two promotions and raises by working every request from outside the team out of band to the detriment of my main flow of work -- "everyone loves you and your work is constantly noticed by $upper_management." Wow that's crazy, it's just nice to be appreciated I guess wink wink.
- em-bee 3y ago
  People who do not accept this will be perpetually unhappy or they go start their own business to get away from this nonsense. when i deal with clients i actually have to deliver something because i am not getting any promotions.
  - shalmanese 3y ago
    Client work is its own unique hell of misaligned incentives. You've just replaced one boss with a dozen bosses, all of which have the power to "promote" or fire you. I'm not saying that any one individual can't find a job that is the unique perfect blend of incentives for them, indeed, the entire point of this framework is that alignment between your goals and the incentives of your job is the most powerful lever an employee can pull. But that incentive structure will necessarily make others working there deeply unhappy as its unique choice of tradeoffs is just shitty in a way invisible to you.
    - em-bee 3y ago
      all of which have the power to "promote" or fire you that's fair, because i also have the power to fire them. loosing one client when i have a dozen others is not a big deal. with so many bosses i can focus on the good ones and reject working with the bad ones. i can also unilaterally raise my fees, especially for bad clients.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Not all jobs are promotion driven, at all. My current dev job is for a small family biotech business, and the only path upwards from where I currently am would involve church bells and a flower girl.
mprovost 3y ago
I've seen this over and over with cloud projects. People absolutely get promoted/raises based on optimising/cutting cloud budget. So there's no incentive in doing things efficiently from the start. You're much better off to build a vastly (but maybe not obviously) inefficient first version and then go back later and show how you "saved" the company tons of money by turning off a bunch of unused services etc. It's harder to hide racks of powered off servers which is why this is so prevalent in the cloud.
- ludicity 3y ago
  Fascinating! I'm young enough to have almost entirely worked on cloud services, but that certainly explains the prevalence of this kind of behavior.
- davidgerard 3y ago
  * Save 50p: cost-cutting genius * Spend £5,000: prudent investment in the future
- jmetzmeier 3y ago
  For many businesses the faster time to market is worth the additional starting costs. Doing it quickly and optimizing cost later has been an explicit desire for a lot of organizations I have been a part of.
over_bridge 3y ago
Some of the best ladder climbers I've seen are amazing at pitching projects. They get the business case done, fully funded, themselves promoted to run it - and then immediately leverage the new title into a job somewhere else. I've been on the receiving end of one of those projects and once you dive in without the person who pitched it, you see how hollow and nonsensical it really is. But by then its too late. The consultants who wrote it are all paid and the executives who attached their names to it as sponsors keep it limping along for years, draining everyone's will to live. The other guy meanwhile is doing the same thing again at a bigger company having a great time.

dmitrygr 3y ago

This is very much how Google is on the inside. And that’s not surprising. People respond to the incentives presented. If you spend years fixing hard problems that actually affect users, and don’t get promoted, you’ll almost certainly become jaded, and start doing things that are pointless but do get you promoted. Because that’s how you make more money. And that’s the actual reason to be working.

andrewstuart2 3y ago
And yeah, it shows via ye olde Google graveyard. Honestly I do think it's just a hard problem not to have, because the world tends to work on visibility combined with innovation. You can't solve hard problems and make money if nobody uses your solution because they don't know it exists. But I struggle with the balance because yeah, I'm a bit jaded.

syntaxing 3y ago

I think the crappy part is that it works most of the time.

shalmanese 3y ago

The purpose of a system is what it does. All development is promotion driven development, different people can either choose to be clear eyed about this or not and, subsequently, good at it or not. Your job is the venn diagram intersection of an organized system of rewards and punishments from both inside and outside of the firm intersected with your own goals and aspirations over time. Anything not in this intersection is not a job, it's something else we like to delude ourselves into thinking is a job to preserve our egos. More specifically, your worry about how distorted incentives lead to poor quality software is not your job unless it is your job to worry about said incentives. People keep hoping to go work for one of the magically sane company where all the incentives are correct and everyone is doing the quote-unquote "right" thing at all times. Such a company does not exist because the very concept is incoherent, every system of possible incentives will come with a different set of tradeoffs and the art of operating a firm is to pick from amongst a bunch of shitty options for the least shitty one. People who do not accept this will be perpetually unhappy and bitter about how others obtain undeserved success because they simply did the unsporting thing of playing the game they were asked to play. You can either be one of those people or you can receive the radical acceptance of what a job is.

Spivak 3y ago
I like to think I'm pretty good at this game, swung two promotions and raises by working every request from outside the team out of band to the detriment of my main flow of work -- "everyone loves you and your work is constantly noticed by $upper_management." Wow that's crazy, it's just nice to be appreciated I guess wink wink.
em-bee 3y ago
People who do not accept this will be perpetually unhappy or they go start their own business to get away from this nonsense. when i deal with clients i actually have to deliver something because i am not getting any promotions.
- shalmanese 3y ago
  Client work is its own unique hell of misaligned incentives. You've just replaced one boss with a dozen bosses, all of which have the power to "promote" or fire you. I'm not saying that any one individual can't find a job that is the unique perfect blend of incentives for them, indeed, the entire point of this framework is that alignment between your goals and the incentives of your job is the most powerful lever an employee can pull. But that incentive structure will necessarily make others working there deeply unhappy as its unique choice of tradeoffs is just shitty in a way invisible to you.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    all of which have the power to "promote" or fire you that's fair, because i also have the power to fire them. loosing one client when i have a dozen others is not a big deal. with so many bosses i can focus on the good ones and reject working with the bad ones. i can also unilaterally raise my fees, especially for bad clients.
OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Not all jobs are promotion driven, at all. My current dev job is for a small family biotech business, and the only path upwards from where I currently am would involve church bells and a flower girl.

mprovost 3y ago

I've seen this over and over with cloud projects. People absolutely get promoted/raises based on optimising/cutting cloud budget. So there's no incentive in doing things efficiently from the start. You're much better off to build a vastly (but maybe not obviously) inefficient first version and then go back later and show how you "saved" the company tons of money by turning off a bunch of unused services etc. It's harder to hide racks of powered off servers which is why this is so prevalent in the cloud.

ludicity 3y ago
Fascinating! I'm young enough to have almost entirely worked on cloud services, but that certainly explains the prevalence of this kind of behavior.
davidgerard 3y ago
* Save 50p: cost-cutting genius * Spend £5,000: prudent investment in the future
jmetzmeier 3y ago
For many businesses the faster time to market is worth the additional starting costs. Doing it quickly and optimizing cost later has been an explicit desire for a lot of organizations I have been a part of.

over_bridge 3y ago

Some of the best ladder climbers I've seen are amazing at pitching projects. They get the business case done, fully funded, themselves promoted to run it - and then immediately leverage the new title into a job somewhere else. I've been on the receiving end of one of those projects and once you dive in without the person who pitched it, you see how hollow and nonsensical it really is. But by then its too late. The consultants who wrote it are all paid and the executives who attached their names to it as sponsors keep it limping along for years, draining everyone's will to live. The other guy meanwhile is doing the same thing again at a bigger company having a great time.