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> they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form which is only possible because he's so important. imagine doing this as a stack-ranked IC in an org like AWS.

• quelltext 3y ago
  I'm by no means important in my org but when something appears like a shitty idea I will raise that (like other ICs around me) and more often than not it works out fine. I'll agree to give something a shot but if it doesn't work it doesn't work and my managers so far have all realized that a bit into the trial period. Reading comments like yours, I guess I should value my work environment more.
  • bickeringyokel 3y ago
    The question is really more do they actually act on the feedback on a regular basis?
  • xiphias2 3y ago
    If you want to see an extrema of people being afraid to speak up, just look at the Gemini image examples in a company that in theory encourages people to speak up. There are always topics that are exceptions.
    • pbhjpbhj 3y ago
      If you're OOTL on Google Gemini ML-based content creator then https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-image-generation-issue/ https://blog.google/products/gemini/gemini-image-generation-... is a pretty good summary. Ostensibly it appeared to be tuned to be racist. Maybe Google encourages people to speak up but also has a culture of racism?
  • eloisant 3y ago
    It's not about speaking up on a shitty idea, it's about not playing the game on a tool used to measure employee performance. That's a big difference. Especially because here we're talking about someone whose performance and contributions were very clear to everyone. Otherwise, he might have been seen like an underperformer by managers.
  • zelphirkalt 3y ago
    I think you are very fortunate then. The number of times I have raised concerns and my warnings have been ignored ... Even when I had direct past learning or experience with the thing they want to do, I can no longer change their mind.
  • rsynnott 3y ago
    Yeah, honestly over nearly 20 years of working in this industry, I’m not sure that I’ve ever worked anywhere where there’d be significant management pushback on something like this. Now, granted, I’ve mostly worked in small companies, and one rather selective largish companies; maybe things really are much worse in the truly huge companies.
• edent 3y ago
  And now you understand why programmers need to be part of a Trade Union. Protection from retaliation and group negotiation on working conditions are brilliant for people who aren't as "important" as Bill.
  • kjksf 3y ago
    And the probability of creating a Macintosh in a union shop is zero. Abusive boss, normalized unpaid overtime, compensation based heavily on stock options, pay and promotions being based on merit and not on seniority and time spent in a company.
  • kbolino 3y ago
    Unions have their own politics. The good ones will do this. The bad ones will make your life a living hell for causing trouble. Whether it's worth it to unionize will be situational.
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• Cheer2171 3y ago
  > The old days of a software as an artisanal craft is long over imho. In corporate or government software work, sure. But there are no guilds anywhere in those organizations... unless you count the upper executives. You might not get paid for it, but the artisanal craft of software is alive and well in free and open source software around the world. Tons of those projects get posted to HN. An app can be a home cooked meal and all that jazz. Lots of open source has been corportized too, but many are closer to an artisanal craft guild than modern corporate software work. And if it is your startup, you can write code however you want.
  • chii 3y ago
    > free and open source software around the world. aka, you are not economically valued, and in order to be artisanal, you have to sacrifice monetary gains to achieve it. > if it is your startup, you can write code however you want. yes that is true, but a startup is much more than just code. it's a business - with all of the extra work that entails.
    • Cheer2171 3y ago
      This is like complaining that the industrial steel mill doesn't hire artisan blacksmiths. You can still be an artisan blacksmith these days, but more likely at a Renaissance Faire than anywhere else. But I don't blame the industrial steel mill for their hiring policy.
• samatman 3y ago
  For better and for worse, it's been decades since filling out a form was a necessary or even useful part of tracking this sort of thing. The widespread use of revision control and ticketing systems means that management has that data at their fingertips whenever they want it. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it isn't. But I think we can count relieving the developers of the drudgery of form-filling as an unalloyed good.
  • chii 3y ago
    While the article mentions form filling, that isn't the point. The point is that there are management styles out there that tries to objectively measure a software engineer's performance (poorly). And unless you are someone with high clout in the organization, you are subjected to it regardless of whether you like it, it making sense, or it being used to control the employees (politics).
• knallfrosch 3y ago
  AWS has 136,000 employees. Of course they're mired in management and processes. Simply work for a smaller company..