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“ To these folks, it feels like giving a damn is a huge career liability in your organization. Because it is.” And it’s easy to see why. Software Quality, Cos
by guhcampos 3y ago
“ To these folks, it feels like giving a damn is a huge career liability in your organization. Because it is.”
And it’s easy to see why.
Software Quality, Cose Maintainability, Good Design. These things only matter if you are planning to work on that company for a long time. If you’re planning to stay a couple years then hop to the next company, the most optimal path is to rise fast by doing high visibility work, then find use your meteoric rise as a resume material to get a higher paying job. Rinse and repeat. If that project is going to break or become unmaintainable in a couple years, who cares? You’re not going to be there.
Recognize the pattern? Startups work the same. It’s the “growth mindset” imprinted everywhere. If this product becomes unmaintainable in 5 years, who cares? I will have exited and cashed in.
I don’t judge people who do that exactly because it’s the practice the companies themselves use. I don’t like it, I actually hate it, but I understand people are just playing by the rules.
The fun part is watching managers and executives complaining about employee turnover, lack of company engagement, quiet quitting, like this isn’t them tasting their own poison.
- BoxFour 3y ago> Startups work the same. If this product becomes unmaintainable in 5 years, who cares? This is a reasonable stance for a startup to take. The majority of startups likely won't last five years as they tend to fail. Being alive in five years with technical debt is a good problem for most startups to have, because that means they managed to make it five years.
- guhcampos 3y agoExactly. That’s why I say I don’t like it, but understand it. I enjoy the fast paced and highly creative environments of startups more than the politics and bureaucracy of corporations, but the short term vision bothers me a lot. The result is I choose to work for midsized companies, or established startups. I kind of specialized in working on the growing pains of companies in their first hundred of engineers. There’s a lot to say about startup culture and the growth mindset, but I don’t consider it necessarily evil. It exists, lots of the products we use and love would be impossible to build without it. It can be extremely harmful, though. It burns out people, it leads to excessive risk taking, it favors aggressive, invasive marketing, it rewards reckless management - yet it works. It isn’t good or evil, like mostly everything in the World. It’s just… there.
- hinkley 3y agoWe've been through snake oil and pyramid schemes and now we have settled on depeche mode.