7 ms·

Why that one coworker got fired for no reason

64 points by andyg_blog 2y ago

coding123 2y ago
You don't get pulled into a meeting like that unless other devs were already pointing it out.
- andyg_blog 2y ago
  My experience has been a little different. Usually you have regular one-on-ones with your manager where you discuss career things, including what you've been working on lately. From being in the manager shoes myself, I do this so that you and I are more ready to advocate for you when it comes to actual performance review time.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > You don't get pulled into a meeting like that unless other devs were already pointing it out. Aka backstabbing?
sksxihve 2y ago
Keeping a paper trail of what you've done in the ticket, issues you came across, and questions you've had while working on something, even if you were able to answer them yourself is great advice that really separates junior from senior devs.
- piva00 2y ago
  I do a lot of documenting but not for the paranoid reasons in the article but to leave breadcrumbs for any person, including myself, who might need to look for information in the future. I've worked long enough to get absolutely tired of yet-another-archaelogy-trip to figure out business logic, a reason for that weird counter-intuitive implementation, how exactly a bug was detected and fixed, why the architecture looks this way, so on and so forth. It's one of the most draining and stupidest part of this job. When I bump into someone's else work who diligently left breadcrumbs scattered around; in commit messages, PR descriptions, comments, history of tickets, etc. I almost literally jump with joy. It's a gift to the future that I really enjoy paying forward, hoping I can instill this feeling unto someone else, again: including myself.
  - foobarian 2y ago
    Nothing makes me more sad than seeing a PR with the default description like 'Closes FOO-123'. Conversely nothing makes me happier than an informative description especially when it states how the PR was tested. Sometimes I don't even need to look at the code.
ThrowawayB7 2y ago
Yep, "visibility" and "impact" (oh, how I loathe those words) are everything in a competitive environment or when management is looking to make job cuts. If your manager can't make the case as to why you are more important to the organization than your co-workers, your employment hangs by a thread.
- andyg_blog 2y ago
  100%. Consider a scenario where someone with too much money accidentally is forced into buying out your company and then they decide to cut 75% of the workforce. At that point it's all metrics, good or not, that decides who stays and who goes. >Are these tools measuring the “right” thing? It doesn’t matter!
- rolisz 2y ago
  Eh, not always. Sometimes it's truly random. For example, at one of the recent Google layoffs, they fired a guy who was oncall. He just woke up and didn't have access to his email anymore, even though he was supposed to be responsible and react to any issues in some service.
  - zarathustreal 2y ago
    Yep, same thing happened to us at AWS. Sometimes it’s actually random.
  - paxys 2y ago
    Layoffs and PIPs are very different. The former is random, or at least the decision is made at the top of the organization by someone who probably doesn't know who you are. The latter is about your specific performance.
kunley 2y ago
Idiots who mismanage should be fired instead of people who provide the value. Aaand, there are companies where it happens
cvoss 2y ago
> What’s a more realistic scenario here? Your manager stands up to their entire chain of command... She should try, at the very least. Otherwise you have a bad manager. Your manager's job is to look out for what's best for the team, not to answer to a chain of command. This isn't the military. If any employee, at any level, can't have a constructive conversation with the level above about what the level above has gotten wrong, you have a busted company culture. Remember, you, the IC, are supposed to be the expert at your programming job. Your manager doesn't have that expertise, but she is supposed to be the expert at understanding what you're up to. Her manager doesn't have that expertise, so the second line manager should depend on your manager for that information, rather than dictate down manifestly inadequate productivity measures.
- zaphar 2y ago
  Additionally, if your organization doesn't have the kind of culture where managers do this, then you should get out as soon as you can. It is the kind of place that doesn't value quality because quality is too hard to measure. Start looking for a different place and don't stop looking until you do.
  - andrewla 2y ago
    A police officer sees a drunkard under a streetlamp and asks him what is the matter. He says that he dropped his keys, and the officer asks him where he dropped them. He points off to the side and says that he dropped them over there, but "the light is better here". > because quality is too hard to measure This is the heart of it. A common business school trope that leaks everywhere is to be data-driven. This is fine up to a point. Once you realize that you can't measure actual quality, and decide to measure something else and call it quality, you are now part of a management structure whose goal is the preservation of the management structure.
- jjk7 2y ago
  Then she will eventually get pushed out. You can't fight the culture of your leadership forever.
paxys 2y ago
In reality that coworker got fired because he was sending inappropriate DMs to all the young women in the organization.
- stonethrowaway 2y ago
  If only! I’ve been employed here way too long.
robin_reala 2y ago
DORA’s such a cult. In other news, I’ve had pretty good luck when trying to build culture by getting people to measure both the act of practising the behaviours and the overall expected outcomes, but not setting specific targets on the teams. Measuring the outcomes for individual teams leads to “checklisting” rather than behavioural change.
Neywiny 2y ago
I've had great success with gitlab and it's issue + mr (they use "merge requests" which tbh feels more appropriate) tracker. I make an issue ticket, dump all symptoms, logs, relevant configs, whatever into it. Then I make the MR, and put all my fix stuff in there. I like the separation of what the issue was vs what the fix was, while still keeping them linked. Really helps when somebody else does the other half. ETA: none of this is as helpful as having my team and higher ups understand and appreciate what I do, though. That's step 1. Or step 0 if you can feel that out in the interview.
- croes 2y ago
  Put if your MR is just one line of code and it took you two weeks, you still have the same problem.
  - Neywiny 2y ago
    Agreed. That's why the documentation is important. If the issue ticket says "I saw this but once. It took 2 days of reproducing and it could only be done if the moon was in a waning phase while 3 dogs bathed simultaneously" and "this is the log dump. You can see on line 3453 that we segfault" etc, it shows what you've been doing. The way I felt the article should be interpreted is that yes, if after 2 weeks you have a 1 line change, that's going to get you fired. And debatably it should, given that it'll likely take somebody else another 2 weeks to fix a similar problem. Why would a manager want to pay 2 weeks salary for (what we call, unsure if commonly used) "tribal knowledge"? At least do a post-mortem/lessons-learnt
- imp0cat 2y ago
  Gitlab and its ability to link together issues, MRs, branches and commits is a lifesaver.
  - Neywiny 2y ago
    Oh yeah the branches too. It's made it super easy for me to ticket the issue, maybe the MR + branch in one click, and add it as a worktree. Honestly worktrees have saved my multitasking. I know Jira/Bitbucket do similar, but that's not what I primarily use.
trentnix 2y ago
> Your manager...“I don’t [know how it goes]. I went to business school.” There's the problem. Organizations whose leaders aren't able to discern your actual value are going to be miserable places to work. You play their games or baffle them with BS. But you don't get to attain any sort of authentic actualization. ... Take my pessimistic commentary with a grain of salt. I'm job searching at the moment for a software manager role and the opportunity landscape is a wasteland of b2b insurance widget companies, usury companies, and AI dead-ends. If you want to build things that help real people, you may have to DIY.
- SkipperCat 2y ago
  If someone told me "I don't know. I went to business school", I'd then ask "So why are you managing programmers, shouldn't you be managing business people?" But all joking aside, I think there are few MBAs so dense as the one portrayed in this article. Sadly, I'll probably be proven wrong...
  - stephenbez 2y ago
    Somehow software engineers can be as dense as the MBA in the example. I had a manager who used to be a dev. He remarked that a certain teammate is really productive and gets so much done. I asked how he knew and he said that when the teammate is on call he is able to close a large number of tickets. I showed him that the teammate just closed all the tickets as “self resolved” or “can’t reproduce”.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      i am missing the real punchline. did the manager accept the explanation and change his view?
tombert 2y ago
I don't really disagree with anything in this post, but it's a bit sad. I understand the "why" of the scenario, but it will never not be frustrating to me when I have to "prove" that I'm creating value because I didn't tailor my work to optimize for whatever system the company is using. Like, I just want to solve problems with code, I hate that I also have to constantly advertise how smart and useful I am because managers are so myopic that they can't figure out if I'm valuable. It brings out the worst in people; you get people holding meetings about stuff that could be summarized in an email in order to give the illusion of working hard. Pages and pages of documents that will never be read are created because if you don't create them then it's hard to say you were doing stuff. Hundreds of tickets pile up in Jira that will never get done because you need to give the appearance that you're actively important in the improvement of the product(s). I get it, it's the world we live in, but I don't have to like it.
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  It also makes me sad that someone is earnestly and honestly trying to hack through these weeds, when someone with the gift of the gab will sit in that performance review, jazz hands their way through it, and go for a barbecue at the manager’s house that weekend, while having done precisely 22 minutes of arguable work in the last quarter. I mean, I know. I’ve been that asshole. Useful to still have a paycheck while you’re getting a startup off the ground. I got so much practice at “the dog ate my homework but here’s a fresh coffee” as a kid it was ridiculous.
  - tombert 2y ago
    Absolutely. I had a job once where my manager and the CEO were both fairly frequent smokers, and so the people at the company that smoked would go outside and join them on their smoke breaks. I noticed that these people were frequently the ones who got bonuses and the benefit of the doubt compared to the people who didn't smoke, I think simply because they had more exposure with the leaders. I didn't (and don't) smoke, so it was always a bit awkward for me. I suppose I could have just hung out with them as they smoked and I didn't, but I never did that.
andrewla 2y ago
Your company has been captured. It's over -- if you are quietly competent you will either have your coworkers and technical managers create a shield around you or you will find yourself outcompeted by developers who spend all of their time creating proof of work instead of doing work, and creating heavily documented CRUD apps with predictable milestones rather than challenging work where the solution is not known. Join them if you can; dumb down your work and focus on predictable things rather than interesting work. Try to move closer to a profit center instead of a cost center because you'll get proof in the pudding there. And start quietly sending out resumes. If you have a good manager who understands your contribution and can deal with the politics and constant demands for progress reports from do-nothing middle managers who need to send progress reports to their managers then you can probably do well until they get pushed out.
- ActionHank 2y ago
  This resonates so hard with me. Reading the article I was agasp at the lunacy. "Prove your worth", "Publish your notes", these are the ravings of someone who has convinced themselves that it is ok for someone who has no idea what you do or how anything works to determine the value of your contribution. I have for the longest time believed that you shouldn't be "working in tech" if you never "worked in tech". Before I'm accused of being exclusionary or elitist, I mean that you should build something or at the very least have studied in the field. Knowing how to run a factory does not mean you know how to run a tech company. Treating devs like they are on a production line building cars is backward toilet sitting behaviour.
  - krapp 2y ago
    It is OK. That's the system. That's how capitalist hierarchies work, at just about every company, everywhere. You're an asset. Even if you make six figures, get catered lunches and unlimited PTO, you're a cog in someone else's money machine. Everybody complains that their managers don't understand how their jobs actually work. There's no reason why tech should be unique in this regard.
    - 2y ago
deanCommie 2y ago
This is dumb. We've gone from "You don't get promoted if you don't show clear visibility for the things that you do" to "You can get fired for not showing clear visibility for the things that you do". The first is true. The latter isn't. There are dystopian black swan events like the richest person in the world going on a ketamine binge and buying your company and dragging everyone into a meeting room with printouts of examples of your code. Unless you're involved in one of those, noone gets fired for doing a lot of things but not tracking them enough in JIRA to cover your notes. Most teams know who on their team gets shit done and who doesn't. They also know the ones who get things done without a clear track record of it. They are asked to help with every problem, and are constantly too busy to get their own stuff done because they're helping everyone else with theirs. Yes, they struggle to get promoted, but they certainly don't get fired. The people who get fired are the ones who THINK they're in that group, but they're talkers, not do'ers. They get fired and everyone shrugs and goes "oh well, anyway." Then they go and write blog posts like this to help precisely the wrong type of person that needs this advice - cargo culting impact. Becoming allegiant to process for the sake of visibility. It'll certainly lead to more clutter and confusion in the world and in the tracking systems. Might as well write blog posts about how to pad your line counts in your pull requests so that people looking at your Github graph at performance review time think you did more than you did.
- skellington 2y ago
  You're the perfect example of "holds an irrationally strong opinion about something they know nothing about."
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
darioush 2y ago
Kind of sad that paperwork is more important than work. In my experience I don't want to be in companies that have this culture, and I take my contributions where I don't have to constantly prove myself. In other words, if you are not excited to work with me, I am not working for you. Too much feudalism mindset in especially the US workforce is hampering wide-scale productivity. If your work environment is not win-win and you're managing optics to avoid getting fired, just go where your coding talents are valued & be a happy person instead.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  > Kind of sad that paperwork is more important than work. In my experience I don't want to be in companies that have this culture, and I take my contributions where I don't have to constantly prove myself. Welcome to Bullshit Jobs. People are being forced to be stressed about absolute lunacy.
elzbardico 2y ago
Do those things if your current job require them, but at the same time have a plan to leave this hellhole as soon as possible. Those kind of places value more effort, or worse, the appearance of effort than the results. So, act accordingly, but leave as soon as you can.
dzonga 2y ago
the most unproductive places I have worked - ran according to what OP says and some of the comments etc. things that should take a week took 6 months due to bureacracy and everyone covering their ass and documenting details that don't matter. because after all - they have to account for your time. the most productive n best place I worked at - whether the work was delivered after 5pm or at 11pm - as long as it was quality and delivered that's all that mattered. thing is most software engineers don't think like "business-men" and just as Jay-z said "i'm a `business` man" not a "business-man". Be a business, then "business-man" then lastly a jira ticket pusher. Jira ticket pushers lives are miserable -- you get hazed over leetcode, you have to be pretend-nice to your fellow jira ticket pushers because of 360-review etc. learn to look at other industries and see if they play those stupid games.
MichaelRo 2y ago
>>“Well I fixed that showstopper bug! And everyone agreed it had a big impact.” >>“It looks like the fix was just one line of code.” >>“Yeah but it took me two days to find that one line haha, you know how it goes.” >>“I don’t. I went to business school.” Was this article written by a LLM? Coze that's the most made-up, cliché, unrealistic, middle school parody-level perception of how businesses operate. Any reasonably large and old company with a software base will have a god-awful overengineered incomprehensible duct-tape wrapped ball of mud that needs constant pampering and costly maintenance. With most task being very much "find the needle in the haystack" type, with the needle being that "one line" indeed but the problem in finding it being, obviously, the haystack. And this "needle finding" being that one thing that totally and definitely all this AI hype can't do shit about. Literally nothing, all those 700 billions burned into LLM training are absolutely orthogonal and useless with respect to the real problem maintenance and development of legacy software (that is most software) poses.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  Hum... Yeah, it's a parody. But then you already expended a huge paragraph explaining how it's realistic. So I don't understand your complaint.
svilen_dobrev 2y ago
reminds me of this: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... so we are the losers.. ah. Fine.
SkipperCat 2y ago
This stuff may happen, I can't say it is untrue, but I've never seen a manager terminate a decent to good programmer because they didn't understand their workload. The companies I've worked for spend a lot of time recruiting talent. If a manager wanted to can someone because they didn't know that fixing bugs takes time, it would be the manager in front of a more senior manager demanding they explain their logic. Also, if you've managed programmers or SW projects for any amount of time, you'd understand why things take time. Most folks I've seen get terminated is because the company is shrinking, or they are not performing or they are a jerk and/or violating company policies. My thoughts are do the best work you can, be nice to others and you'll be fine as long as the company is making money. Don't worry about 'metrics', people generally know who's worth keeping based on more than that alone.
- WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
  > This stuff may happen, I can't say it is untrue, but I've never seen a manager terminate a decent to good programmer because they didn't understand their workload. This happens all the time. It just doesn't look so obvious. In practice management will push the developer to communicate and document and justify the work. If the dev complies, they find themselves spending most of their time on the overhead. Welcome to big software enterprises where very little gets done. If they don't comply, then management will keep adding pressure and eventually get rid of the developer because of "behavioural issues".
nine_zeros 2y ago
> “Yeah but it took me two days to find that one line haha, you know how it goes.” > “I don’t. I went to business school.” The conversation should end right here. They don't know what they are managing, why fixing things is unpredictable, and worst of all - they are communicating AFTER the fact, one month later - which is too late. The manager needs to be fired for incompetence and incapability. But this is not how tech companies work - leading to all the management hate.
steeeeeve 2y ago
Create a paper trail. Crank out tickets. Document everything. Hit the numbers. No. Add value. It's not your job to quantify it. It's not your job to create an understanding of what you do. If your organization or your manager specifically does not recognize your contributions, be happy to move on. If you get feedback that says "we recognize your value, but we really need x" that's reprioritization. Respond appropriately. If documenting your value in that way prevents you from actually being valuable, be vocal about it. If it's just a pain and you can still do your job, then suck up the pain like everybody else. I've been in large engineering organizations. They want to quantify everyones value so that there's "fairness". BS. There is no large scale way to determine of a software engineer is good at his job or productive. Yes, some people have more opportunities to affect the bottom line than others. Yes, some people have easily quantifiable work. That's how the world works. Have they figured out a way to recognize and effectively incentivize good teachers? Not in my 51 years. Have they figured out a way to recognize and effectively incentivize good CEOs? Nope. What makes you think that we should be that easy to stack together and figure out? I'm senior. I'm experienced. I'm valuable. I'm not always right, and I am not always valuable. In the end, I've had a good and healthy career focusing on the things I'm good at and the things I care about while letting other people figure out if I'm worth what I cost to keep around. Some of those people made good decisions and some bad ones. I still moved forward and my kids have always had food on the table. I say that's enough.
Joker_vD 2y ago
> If management is measuring pull request (PR) throughput, is it really so bad that developers start pushing through smaller PRs? So, just the previous week I've made 5 small PRs, all of them working on the same certain "area" of the code base but different pieces of it. Two of those PRs touched almost every single corner of that "area" (differently structured error reporting and differently formatted logging) another one had a rather sizeable refactoring and code movements between three major files of that code area, and as for the two remaining ones, one absolutely depended on the other but could not be done in the same PR because of how the JIRA issues were structured (i.e. "PROJ-9004: Make it do foo", "PROJ-9005: While foo from PROJ-9004 is happening, make it also do bar"). I've also made a decision to not order those PRs sequentially (i.e., base the next PR on a previous PR), and instead branched each PR from the dev trunk and went to work on them. As a result, I've increased the work I had to do approximately by 50% because of the merge conflicts I had to resolve. The reviews combined took about twice as much time as a single big review of all five changes in one PR would've probably taken. The QA took about five times as long since QA did full regression of that code area 5 times instead of 1 time; they've also almost missed an error in the 4th pull request because of all the repetitiveness. All in all, 10/10, recommend it if you need your coworkers to get lost in the maze of similarly-themed little branches, all alike.
irrational 2y ago
> If your manager can’t see it, it doesn’t exist when performance review time rolls around. I've become very jaded around performance reviews. A number of years ago, I worked my butt off putting in insane hours and being extremely productive. I knew that I deserved the highest performance rating possible. And in the review my manager agreed that that was what I deserved, but instead I got a successful rating - completely middle of the road average. I was shocked. My manager informed me that HR specified what percentage of each rating they were allowed to give out and that he had had to give the higher ratings to other employees for various reasons. Ever since then, I've done the bare minimum of work to get by. Why work my butt off to get a successful rating when I can do the bare minimum and get the same rating?
- em-bee 2y ago
  HR specified what percentage of each rating they were allowed to give out that's like grading on a curve in school. that has always been unfair.
RHSeeger 2y ago
> If management is measuring pull request (PR) throughput, is it really so bad that developers start pushing through smaller PRs? God forbid we end up delivering value faster with fewer defects, better testing, and more thorough peer review. This one bothered me. Because increased pull request (PR) throughput does not, in ANY way, imply "fewer defects, better testing, and more thorough peer review". In fact, it probably implies the reverse; just writing the smallest amount of code you can to get it out the door, then coming back and adding to it later. Edge cases? Next PR. Automated tests? Next PR. Comments? Next PR. Maintainability? Next PR. Taking the time to make sure the feature you're working on makes sense? That's not a PR, skip it. Measuring PR throughput is the same as measuring lines of code, effectively. Nothing about increasing either one of them implies adding real value.
wjholden 2y ago
Blogging and writing lots of white papers has become one of my favorite techniques for this in IT. Pretty much anytime something really interesting happens, I'll spend some time carefully writing up a detailed explanation. I often find myself surprised by my own findings when I re-read them months later.
disambiguation 2y ago
>They have tools that will suck up data from literally every possible source available. And these tools are getting better every year. Tools like Jellyfish, CodeClimate, Quantive, and if your organization is old and rich enough, plenty of homegrown stuff. If you’re unfortunate enough to live in the United States, they can legally install a keylogger on your laptop. This is why my next project is a programmable HID bluetooth device that simulates key strokes and mouse movement. Imagine hackertyper.com but from a device instead. Because your corporate surveillance metrics are bad and you should feel bad ;)
reviewmoreprs 2y ago
I recently quit a job, for a large number of reasons, but the one most relevant to this post was the topic of my github numbers. My manager gave me a "needs improvement" review, citing my "bad numbers" and comparing them to several of my teammates. Their numbers, to me, were laughably high. I thought I was doing pretty good on PR reviews. I do one or two a day. I read the description, sometimes more than once. I read through the practical testing steps. I follow them, sometimes with a lot of setup required. I really make sure it does what it's supposed to do. I read the code, line by line. Sometimes before I do the practical testing, sometimes after. But I read through the code, several times. I don't know how you wouldn't. Functions are calling other functions I haven't gotten to yet. So I read through the code multiple times. I don't just try to understand what it does, but why it does what it does. Is there a better way? Is this going to change or impact something else it should or shouldn't? A good code review can easily take an hour or more, in my humble opinion. Two reviews a day on top of all my bs meetings and I still have my own shit to do. How does my teammate have triple my PR reviews for the quarter? Seems crazy. One day I'm pair programming with one such teammate. We finish the task, I create a PR, write a description etc. I press the ready for review button and start to say, "see you later bla bla" and suddenly there's an approval on the PR. It's been 5 seconds, tops. It's the other teammate with 10x code ninja numbers on the team. I remark that approval was pretty quick. My teammate forces a nervous sounding laugh. They work together ever day and seem pretty close, huh. Anyway, after that, every morning after I made coffee and opened my laptop I'd spend 10-15 minutes just going down the list of open PRs on the project and approving them. I didn't look at the code or even bother reading the description. I just approved them all. I also started opening PRs for stupid shit like minor typos in comments that I'm quite sure no one even reads. My next review my manager said I had made some impressive improvements and gave me a "meets expectations". I'm looking for a job in a different industry now. I'm not out of software development, I just don't think I can work on another e-commerce webapp company run by MBAs again. I think I'd rather be broke.
- xyzzy123 2y ago
  I think this comes down to a lack of shared understanding on what a PR approval means, it sounds like you didn't believe it meant the same thing as your team did. There's not one standard meaning of the "rubber stamp". It's a culture thing and teams should discuss and eventually agree on what they think it means. Mature teams will have guides, checklists and documented expectations. It's moderately likely that behind the scenes someone was complaining to your manager that you were blocking their work and that the "metrics" discussion was just a cover for that. Usually when I review a PR I am just sanity checking the overall approach, figuring out or asking how they tested it, and making sure there's nothing crazy that will cause pain for everyone else later. Detail correctness I don't consider my problem because there's no economic way I can verify it. I can usually approve in minutes and I don't consider it a waste of time, I did the things the process needed of me. Unless something irreversible is happening (and it should be reviewer's job to be aware of that), the fix for a bad PR is more PRs. There are projects where almost the only thing that matters is approving quickly because this will let your co-workers get on with their job, this culture tends to evolve in orgs with lots of related repos where you need 5 MRs and pipelines (that flow on to each other) to deploy the tiniest unit change. It's completely dysfunctional but it happens a lot. I imagine there are places where reviewers are expected to spend an hour "raising the bar" on every PR but I've never worked at one. I'm also not sure if I'd want to. Note that there's not one thing or process that makes sense, it's very context dependent with lots of exceptions. For example, if someone from a "far away" team is contributing to a particular repo for the first time I will probably reach out to them to see what they're trying to do and review more carefully because they likely have limited context vs a core contributor.
binary132 2y ago
if only there were some type of way to operate a tech business that didn’t generate pathological incentives oh well, back to my scaled agile workflow grooming planning meeting grooming meeting planning meeting
laserDinosaur 2y ago
I once heard someone say a phrase which feels relevant to this article: "If you know nothing of what they are doing, you suspect them of doing nothing". I've used this sentence to catch myself over the years where I've been quick to judge someone as doing nothing at their job or day-to-day, and then used it as motivation to (if possible) learn about what their days actually look like. I'm almost always finding out I just didn't know enough about what they did. As the article points out, this goes the other way too. It doesn't matter how good you are at your job if nobody at a decision making level understands what you are doing.
csours 2y ago
There's a lot to be sad and mad about in this, but keeping an engineering journal or logbook is a great idea.
KotlinDude 2y ago
I can't tell if he's joking or not. I mean, it is a perfect plan for working at a dysfunctional company, but why would you want to? That said, it's actually very good advice if you want a promotion. Your manager needs hard data to take upstairs.

64 points by andyg_blog 2y ago

coding123 2y ago

You don't get pulled into a meeting like that unless other devs were already pointing it out.

andyg_blog 2y ago
My experience has been a little different. Usually you have regular one-on-ones with your manager where you discuss career things, including what you've been working on lately. From being in the manager shoes myself, I do this so that you and I are more ready to advocate for you when it comes to actual performance review time.
nine_zeros 2y ago
> You don't get pulled into a meeting like that unless other devs were already pointing it out. Aka backstabbing?

sksxihve 2y ago

Keeping a paper trail of what you've done in the ticket, issues you came across, and questions you've had while working on something, even if you were able to answer them yourself is great advice that really separates junior from senior devs.

piva00 2y ago
I do a lot of documenting but not for the paranoid reasons in the article but to leave breadcrumbs for any person, including myself, who might need to look for information in the future. I've worked long enough to get absolutely tired of yet-another-archaelogy-trip to figure out business logic, a reason for that weird counter-intuitive implementation, how exactly a bug was detected and fixed, why the architecture looks this way, so on and so forth. It's one of the most draining and stupidest part of this job. When I bump into someone's else work who diligently left breadcrumbs scattered around; in commit messages, PR descriptions, comments, history of tickets, etc. I almost literally jump with joy. It's a gift to the future that I really enjoy paying forward, hoping I can instill this feeling unto someone else, again: including myself.
- foobarian 2y ago
  Nothing makes me more sad than seeing a PR with the default description like 'Closes FOO-123'. Conversely nothing makes me happier than an informative description especially when it states how the PR was tested. Sometimes I don't even need to look at the code.

ThrowawayB7 2y ago

Yep, "visibility" and "impact" (oh, how I loathe those words) are everything in a competitive environment or when management is looking to make job cuts. If your manager can't make the case as to why you are more important to the organization than your co-workers, your employment hangs by a thread.

andyg_blog 2y ago
100%. Consider a scenario where someone with too much money accidentally is forced into buying out your company and then they decide to cut 75% of the workforce. At that point it's all metrics, good or not, that decides who stays and who goes. >Are these tools measuring the “right” thing? It doesn’t matter!
rolisz 2y ago
Eh, not always. Sometimes it's truly random. For example, at one of the recent Google layoffs, they fired a guy who was oncall. He just woke up and didn't have access to his email anymore, even though he was supposed to be responsible and react to any issues in some service.
- zarathustreal 2y ago
  Yep, same thing happened to us at AWS. Sometimes it’s actually random.
- paxys 2y ago
  Layoffs and PIPs are very different. The former is random, or at least the decision is made at the top of the organization by someone who probably doesn't know who you are. The latter is about your specific performance.

kunley 2y ago

Idiots who mismanage should be fired instead of people who provide the value. Aaand, there are companies where it happens

cvoss 2y ago

> What’s a more realistic scenario here? Your manager stands up to their entire chain of command... She should try, at the very least. Otherwise you have a bad manager. Your manager's job is to look out for what's best for the team, not to answer to a chain of command. This isn't the military. If any employee, at any level, can't have a constructive conversation with the level above about what the level above has gotten wrong, you have a busted company culture. Remember, you, the IC, are supposed to be the expert at your programming job. Your manager doesn't have that expertise, but she is supposed to be the expert at understanding what you're up to. Her manager doesn't have that expertise, so the second line manager should depend on your manager for that information, rather than dictate down manifestly inadequate productivity measures.

zaphar 2y ago
Additionally, if your organization doesn't have the kind of culture where managers do this, then you should get out as soon as you can. It is the kind of place that doesn't value quality because quality is too hard to measure. Start looking for a different place and don't stop looking until you do.
- andrewla 2y ago
  A police officer sees a drunkard under a streetlamp and asks him what is the matter. He says that he dropped his keys, and the officer asks him where he dropped them. He points off to the side and says that he dropped them over there, but "the light is better here". > because quality is too hard to measure This is the heart of it. A common business school trope that leaks everywhere is to be data-driven. This is fine up to a point. Once you realize that you can't measure actual quality, and decide to measure something else and call it quality, you are now part of a management structure whose goal is the preservation of the management structure.
jjk7 2y ago
Then she will eventually get pushed out. You can't fight the culture of your leadership forever.

paxys 2y ago

In reality that coworker got fired because he was sending inappropriate DMs to all the young women in the organization.

stonethrowaway 2y ago
If only! I’ve been employed here way too long.

robin_reala 2y ago

DORA’s such a cult. In other news, I’ve had pretty good luck when trying to build culture by getting people to measure both the act of practising the behaviours and the overall expected outcomes, but not setting specific targets on the teams. Measuring the outcomes for individual teams leads to “checklisting” rather than behavioural change.

Neywiny 2y ago

I've had great success with gitlab and it's issue + mr (they use "merge requests" which tbh feels more appropriate) tracker. I make an issue ticket, dump all symptoms, logs, relevant configs, whatever into it. Then I make the MR, and put all my fix stuff in there. I like the separation of what the issue was vs what the fix was, while still keeping them linked. Really helps when somebody else does the other half. ETA: none of this is as helpful as having my team and higher ups understand and appreciate what I do, though. That's step 1. Or step 0 if you can feel that out in the interview.

croes 2y ago
Put if your MR is just one line of code and it took you two weeks, you still have the same problem.
- Neywiny 2y ago
  Agreed. That's why the documentation is important. If the issue ticket says "I saw this but once. It took 2 days of reproducing and it could only be done if the moon was in a waning phase while 3 dogs bathed simultaneously" and "this is the log dump. You can see on line 3453 that we segfault" etc, it shows what you've been doing. The way I felt the article should be interpreted is that yes, if after 2 weeks you have a 1 line change, that's going to get you fired. And debatably it should, given that it'll likely take somebody else another 2 weeks to fix a similar problem. Why would a manager want to pay 2 weeks salary for (what we call, unsure if commonly used) "tribal knowledge"? At least do a post-mortem/lessons-learnt
imp0cat 2y ago
Gitlab and its ability to link together issues, MRs, branches and commits is a lifesaver.
- Neywiny 2y ago
  Oh yeah the branches too. It's made it super easy for me to ticket the issue, maybe the MR + branch in one click, and add it as a worktree. Honestly worktrees have saved my multitasking. I know Jira/Bitbucket do similar, but that's not what I primarily use.

trentnix 2y ago

> Your manager...“I don’t [know how it goes]. I went to business school.” There's the problem. Organizations whose leaders aren't able to discern your actual value are going to be miserable places to work. You play their games or baffle them with BS. But you don't get to attain any sort of authentic actualization. ... Take my pessimistic commentary with a grain of salt. I'm job searching at the moment for a software manager role and the opportunity landscape is a wasteland of b2b insurance widget companies, usury companies, and AI dead-ends. If you want to build things that help real people, you may have to DIY.

SkipperCat 2y ago
If someone told me "I don't know. I went to business school", I'd then ask "So why are you managing programmers, shouldn't you be managing business people?" But all joking aside, I think there are few MBAs so dense as the one portrayed in this article. Sadly, I'll probably be proven wrong...
- stephenbez 2y ago
  Somehow software engineers can be as dense as the MBA in the example. I had a manager who used to be a dev. He remarked that a certain teammate is really productive and gets so much done. I asked how he knew and he said that when the teammate is on call he is able to close a large number of tickets. I showed him that the teammate just closed all the tickets as “self resolved” or “can’t reproduce”.
  - em-bee 2y ago
    i am missing the real punchline. did the manager accept the explanation and change his view?

tombert 2y ago

I don't really disagree with anything in this post, but it's a bit sad. I understand the "why" of the scenario, but it will never not be frustrating to me when I have to "prove" that I'm creating value because I didn't tailor my work to optimize for whatever system the company is using. Like, I just want to solve problems with code, I hate that I also have to constantly advertise how smart and useful I am because managers are so myopic that they can't figure out if I'm valuable. It brings out the worst in people; you get people holding meetings about stuff that could be summarized in an email in order to give the illusion of working hard. Pages and pages of documents that will never be read are created because if you don't create them then it's hard to say you were doing stuff. Hundreds of tickets pile up in Jira that will never get done because you need to give the appearance that you're actively important in the improvement of the product(s). I get it, it's the world we live in, but I don't have to like it.

madaxe_again 2y ago
It also makes me sad that someone is earnestly and honestly trying to hack through these weeds, when someone with the gift of the gab will sit in that performance review, jazz hands their way through it, and go for a barbecue at the manager’s house that weekend, while having done precisely 22 minutes of arguable work in the last quarter. I mean, I know. I’ve been that asshole. Useful to still have a paycheck while you’re getting a startup off the ground. I got so much practice at “the dog ate my homework but here’s a fresh coffee” as a kid it was ridiculous.
- tombert 2y ago
  Absolutely. I had a job once where my manager and the CEO were both fairly frequent smokers, and so the people at the company that smoked would go outside and join them on their smoke breaks. I noticed that these people were frequently the ones who got bonuses and the benefit of the doubt compared to the people who didn't smoke, I think simply because they had more exposure with the leaders. I didn't (and don't) smoke, so it was always a bit awkward for me. I suppose I could have just hung out with them as they smoked and I didn't, but I never did that.

andrewla 2y ago

Your company has been captured. It's over -- if you are quietly competent you will either have your coworkers and technical managers create a shield around you or you will find yourself outcompeted by developers who spend all of their time creating proof of work instead of doing work, and creating heavily documented CRUD apps with predictable milestones rather than challenging work where the solution is not known. Join them if you can; dumb down your work and focus on predictable things rather than interesting work. Try to move closer to a profit center instead of a cost center because you'll get proof in the pudding there. And start quietly sending out resumes. If you have a good manager who understands your contribution and can deal with the politics and constant demands for progress reports from do-nothing middle managers who need to send progress reports to their managers then you can probably do well until they get pushed out.

ActionHank 2y ago
This resonates so hard with me. Reading the article I was agasp at the lunacy. "Prove your worth", "Publish your notes", these are the ravings of someone who has convinced themselves that it is ok for someone who has no idea what you do or how anything works to determine the value of your contribution. I have for the longest time believed that you shouldn't be "working in tech" if you never "worked in tech". Before I'm accused of being exclusionary or elitist, I mean that you should build something or at the very least have studied in the field. Knowing how to run a factory does not mean you know how to run a tech company. Treating devs like they are on a production line building cars is backward toilet sitting behaviour.
- krapp 2y ago
  It is OK. That's the system. That's how capitalist hierarchies work, at just about every company, everywhere. You're an asset. Even if you make six figures, get catered lunches and unlimited PTO, you're a cog in someone else's money machine. Everybody complains that their managers don't understand how their jobs actually work. There's no reason why tech should be unique in this regard.
  - 2y ago

deanCommie 2y ago

This is dumb. We've gone from "You don't get promoted if you don't show clear visibility for the things that you do" to "You can get fired for not showing clear visibility for the things that you do". The first is true. The latter isn't. There are dystopian black swan events like the richest person in the world going on a ketamine binge and buying your company and dragging everyone into a meeting room with printouts of examples of your code. Unless you're involved in one of those, noone gets fired for doing a lot of things but not tracking them enough in JIRA to cover your notes. Most teams know who on their team gets shit done and who doesn't. They also know the ones who get things done without a clear track record of it. They are asked to help with every problem, and are constantly too busy to get their own stuff done because they're helping everyone else with theirs. Yes, they struggle to get promoted, but they certainly don't get fired. The people who get fired are the ones who THINK they're in that group, but they're talkers, not do'ers. They get fired and everyone shrugs and goes "oh well, anyway." Then they go and write blog posts like this to help precisely the wrong type of person that needs this advice - cargo culting impact. Becoming allegiant to process for the sake of visibility. It'll certainly lead to more clutter and confusion in the world and in the tracking systems. Might as well write blog posts about how to pad your line counts in your pull requests so that people looking at your Github graph at performance review time think you did more than you did.

skellington 2y ago
You're the perfect example of "holds an irrationally strong opinion about something they know nothing about."

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

darioush 2y ago

Kind of sad that paperwork is more important than work. In my experience I don't want to be in companies that have this culture, and I take my contributions where I don't have to constantly prove myself. In other words, if you are not excited to work with me, I am not working for you. Too much feudalism mindset in especially the US workforce is hampering wide-scale productivity. If your work environment is not win-win and you're managing optics to avoid getting fired, just go where your coding talents are valued & be a happy person instead.

nine_zeros 2y ago
> Kind of sad that paperwork is more important than work. In my experience I don't want to be in companies that have this culture, and I take my contributions where I don't have to constantly prove myself. Welcome to Bullshit Jobs. People are being forced to be stressed about absolute lunacy.

elzbardico 2y ago

Do those things if your current job require them, but at the same time have a plan to leave this hellhole as soon as possible. Those kind of places value more effort, or worse, the appearance of effort than the results. So, act accordingly, but leave as soon as you can.

dzonga 2y ago

the most unproductive places I have worked - ran according to what OP says and some of the comments etc. things that should take a week took 6 months due to bureacracy and everyone covering their ass and documenting details that don't matter. because after all - they have to account for your time. the most productive n best place I worked at - whether the work was delivered after 5pm or at 11pm - as long as it was quality and delivered that's all that mattered. thing is most software engineers don't think like "business-men" and just as Jay-z said "i'm a `business` man" not a "business-man". Be a business, then "business-man" then lastly a jira ticket pusher. Jira ticket pushers lives are miserable -- you get hazed over leetcode, you have to be pretend-nice to your fellow jira ticket pushers because of 360-review etc. learn to look at other industries and see if they play those stupid games.

MichaelRo 2y ago

>>“Well I fixed that showstopper bug! And everyone agreed it had a big impact.” >>“It looks like the fix was just one line of code.” >>“Yeah but it took me two days to find that one line haha, you know how it goes.” >>“I don’t. I went to business school.” Was this article written by a LLM? Coze that's the most made-up, cliché, unrealistic, middle school parody-level perception of how businesses operate. Any reasonably large and old company with a software base will have a god-awful overengineered incomprehensible duct-tape wrapped ball of mud that needs constant pampering and costly maintenance. With most task being very much "find the needle in the haystack" type, with the needle being that "one line" indeed but the problem in finding it being, obviously, the haystack. And this "needle finding" being that one thing that totally and definitely all this AI hype can't do shit about. Literally nothing, all those 700 billions burned into LLM training are absolutely orthogonal and useless with respect to the real problem maintenance and development of legacy software (that is most software) poses.

marcosdumay 2y ago
Hum... Yeah, it's a parody. But then you already expended a huge paragraph explaining how it's realistic. So I don't understand your complaint.

svilen_dobrev 2y ago

reminds me of this: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-office/ https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-... so we are the losers.. ah. Fine.

SkipperCat 2y ago

This stuff may happen, I can't say it is untrue, but I've never seen a manager terminate a decent to good programmer because they didn't understand their workload. The companies I've worked for spend a lot of time recruiting talent. If a manager wanted to can someone because they didn't know that fixing bugs takes time, it would be the manager in front of a more senior manager demanding they explain their logic. Also, if you've managed programmers or SW projects for any amount of time, you'd understand why things take time. Most folks I've seen get terminated is because the company is shrinking, or they are not performing or they are a jerk and/or violating company policies. My thoughts are do the best work you can, be nice to others and you'll be fine as long as the company is making money. Don't worry about 'metrics', people generally know who's worth keeping based on more than that alone.

WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
> This stuff may happen, I can't say it is untrue, but I've never seen a manager terminate a decent to good programmer because they didn't understand their workload. This happens all the time. It just doesn't look so obvious. In practice management will push the developer to communicate and document and justify the work. If the dev complies, they find themselves spending most of their time on the overhead. Welcome to big software enterprises where very little gets done. If they don't comply, then management will keep adding pressure and eventually get rid of the developer because of "behavioural issues".

nine_zeros 2y ago

> “Yeah but it took me two days to find that one line haha, you know how it goes.” > “I don’t. I went to business school.” The conversation should end right here. They don't know what they are managing, why fixing things is unpredictable, and worst of all - they are communicating AFTER the fact, one month later - which is too late. The manager needs to be fired for incompetence and incapability. But this is not how tech companies work - leading to all the management hate.

steeeeeve 2y ago

Create a paper trail. Crank out tickets. Document everything. Hit the numbers. No. Add value. It's not your job to quantify it. It's not your job to create an understanding of what you do. If your organization or your manager specifically does not recognize your contributions, be happy to move on. If you get feedback that says "we recognize your value, but we really need x" that's reprioritization. Respond appropriately. If documenting your value in that way prevents you from actually being valuable, be vocal about it. If it's just a pain and you can still do your job, then suck up the pain like everybody else. I've been in large engineering organizations. They want to quantify everyones value so that there's "fairness". BS. There is no large scale way to determine of a software engineer is good at his job or productive. Yes, some people have more opportunities to affect the bottom line than others. Yes, some people have easily quantifiable work. That's how the world works. Have they figured out a way to recognize and effectively incentivize good teachers? Not in my 51 years. Have they figured out a way to recognize and effectively incentivize good CEOs? Nope. What makes you think that we should be that easy to stack together and figure out? I'm senior. I'm experienced. I'm valuable. I'm not always right, and I am not always valuable. In the end, I've had a good and healthy career focusing on the things I'm good at and the things I care about while letting other people figure out if I'm worth what I cost to keep around. Some of those people made good decisions and some bad ones. I still moved forward and my kids have always had food on the table. I say that's enough.

Joker_vD 2y ago

> If management is measuring pull request (PR) throughput, is it really so bad that developers start pushing through smaller PRs? So, just the previous week I've made 5 small PRs, all of them working on the same certain "area" of the code base but different pieces of it. Two of those PRs touched almost every single corner of that "area" (differently structured error reporting and differently formatted logging) another one had a rather sizeable refactoring and code movements between three major files of that code area, and as for the two remaining ones, one absolutely depended on the other but could not be done in the same PR because of how the JIRA issues were structured (i.e. "PROJ-9004: Make it do foo", "PROJ-9005: While foo from PROJ-9004 is happening, make it also do bar"). I've also made a decision to not order those PRs sequentially (i.e., base the next PR on a previous PR), and instead branched each PR from the dev trunk and went to work on them. As a result, I've increased the work I had to do approximately by 50% because of the merge conflicts I had to resolve. The reviews combined took about twice as much time as a single big review of all five changes in one PR would've probably taken. The QA took about five times as long since QA did full regression of that code area 5 times instead of 1 time; they've also almost missed an error in the 4th pull request because of all the repetitiveness. All in all, 10/10, recommend it if you need your coworkers to get lost in the maze of similarly-themed little branches, all alike.

irrational 2y ago

> If your manager can’t see it, it doesn’t exist when performance review time rolls around. I've become very jaded around performance reviews. A number of years ago, I worked my butt off putting in insane hours and being extremely productive. I knew that I deserved the highest performance rating possible. And in the review my manager agreed that that was what I deserved, but instead I got a successful rating - completely middle of the road average. I was shocked. My manager informed me that HR specified what percentage of each rating they were allowed to give out and that he had had to give the higher ratings to other employees for various reasons. Ever since then, I've done the bare minimum of work to get by. Why work my butt off to get a successful rating when I can do the bare minimum and get the same rating?

em-bee 2y ago
HR specified what percentage of each rating they were allowed to give out that's like grading on a curve in school. that has always been unfair.

RHSeeger 2y ago

> If management is measuring pull request (PR) throughput, is it really so bad that developers start pushing through smaller PRs? God forbid we end up delivering value faster with fewer defects, better testing, and more thorough peer review. This one bothered me. Because increased pull request (PR) throughput does not, in ANY way, imply "fewer defects, better testing, and more thorough peer review". In fact, it probably implies the reverse; just writing the smallest amount of code you can to get it out the door, then coming back and adding to it later. Edge cases? Next PR. Automated tests? Next PR. Comments? Next PR. Maintainability? Next PR. Taking the time to make sure the feature you're working on makes sense? That's not a PR, skip it. Measuring PR throughput is the same as measuring lines of code, effectively. Nothing about increasing either one of them implies adding real value.

wjholden 2y ago

Blogging and writing lots of white papers has become one of my favorite techniques for this in IT. Pretty much anytime something really interesting happens, I'll spend some time carefully writing up a detailed explanation. I often find myself surprised by my own findings when I re-read them months later.

disambiguation 2y ago

>They have tools that will suck up data from literally every possible source available. And these tools are getting better every year. Tools like Jellyfish, CodeClimate, Quantive, and if your organization is old and rich enough, plenty of homegrown stuff. If you’re unfortunate enough to live in the United States, they can legally install a keylogger on your laptop. This is why my next project is a programmable HID bluetooth device that simulates key strokes and mouse movement. Imagine hackertyper.com but from a device instead. Because your corporate surveillance metrics are bad and you should feel bad ;)

reviewmoreprs 2y ago

I recently quit a job, for a large number of reasons, but the one most relevant to this post was the topic of my github numbers. My manager gave me a "needs improvement" review, citing my "bad numbers" and comparing them to several of my teammates. Their numbers, to me, were laughably high. I thought I was doing pretty good on PR reviews. I do one or two a day. I read the description, sometimes more than once. I read through the practical testing steps. I follow them, sometimes with a lot of setup required. I really make sure it does what it's supposed to do. I read the code, line by line. Sometimes before I do the practical testing, sometimes after. But I read through the code, several times. I don't know how you wouldn't. Functions are calling other functions I haven't gotten to yet. So I read through the code multiple times. I don't just try to understand what it does, but why it does what it does. Is there a better way? Is this going to change or impact something else it should or shouldn't? A good code review can easily take an hour or more, in my humble opinion. Two reviews a day on top of all my bs meetings and I still have my own shit to do. How does my teammate have triple my PR reviews for the quarter? Seems crazy. One day I'm pair programming with one such teammate. We finish the task, I create a PR, write a description etc. I press the ready for review button and start to say, "see you later bla bla" and suddenly there's an approval on the PR. It's been 5 seconds, tops. It's the other teammate with 10x code ninja numbers on the team. I remark that approval was pretty quick. My teammate forces a nervous sounding laugh. They work together ever day and seem pretty close, huh. Anyway, after that, every morning after I made coffee and opened my laptop I'd spend 10-15 minutes just going down the list of open PRs on the project and approving them. I didn't look at the code or even bother reading the description. I just approved them all. I also started opening PRs for stupid shit like minor typos in comments that I'm quite sure no one even reads. My next review my manager said I had made some impressive improvements and gave me a "meets expectations". I'm looking for a job in a different industry now. I'm not out of software development, I just don't think I can work on another e-commerce webapp company run by MBAs again. I think I'd rather be broke.

xyzzy123 2y ago
I think this comes down to a lack of shared understanding on what a PR approval means, it sounds like you didn't believe it meant the same thing as your team did. There's not one standard meaning of the "rubber stamp". It's a culture thing and teams should discuss and eventually agree on what they think it means. Mature teams will have guides, checklists and documented expectations. It's moderately likely that behind the scenes someone was complaining to your manager that you were blocking their work and that the "metrics" discussion was just a cover for that. Usually when I review a PR I am just sanity checking the overall approach, figuring out or asking how they tested it, and making sure there's nothing crazy that will cause pain for everyone else later. Detail correctness I don't consider my problem because there's no economic way I can verify it. I can usually approve in minutes and I don't consider it a waste of time, I did the things the process needed of me. Unless something irreversible is happening (and it should be reviewer's job to be aware of that), the fix for a bad PR is more PRs. There are projects where almost the only thing that matters is approving quickly because this will let your co-workers get on with their job, this culture tends to evolve in orgs with lots of related repos where you need 5 MRs and pipelines (that flow on to each other) to deploy the tiniest unit change. It's completely dysfunctional but it happens a lot. I imagine there are places where reviewers are expected to spend an hour "raising the bar" on every PR but I've never worked at one. I'm also not sure if I'd want to. Note that there's not one thing or process that makes sense, it's very context dependent with lots of exceptions. For example, if someone from a "far away" team is contributing to a particular repo for the first time I will probably reach out to them to see what they're trying to do and review more carefully because they likely have limited context vs a core contributor.

binary132 2y ago

if only there were some type of way to operate a tech business that didn’t generate pathological incentives oh well, back to my scaled agile workflow grooming planning meeting grooming meeting planning meeting

laserDinosaur 2y ago

I once heard someone say a phrase which feels relevant to this article: "If you know nothing of what they are doing, you suspect them of doing nothing". I've used this sentence to catch myself over the years where I've been quick to judge someone as doing nothing at their job or day-to-day, and then used it as motivation to (if possible) learn about what their days actually look like. I'm almost always finding out I just didn't know enough about what they did. As the article points out, this goes the other way too. It doesn't matter how good you are at your job if nobody at a decision making level understands what you are doing.

csours 2y ago

There's a lot to be sad and mad about in this, but keeping an engineering journal or logbook is a great idea.

KotlinDude 2y ago

I can't tell if he's joking or not. I mean, it is a perfect plan for working at a dysfunctional company, but why would you want to? That said, it's actually very good advice if you want a promotion. Your manager needs hard data to take upstairs.