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That's the dream at a big company for sure. The last mega tech company I worked for had the familiar trap of not knowing how to rate higher level engineers. Thi

by zdragnar 11mo ago

That's the dream at a big company for sure. The last mega tech company I worked for had the familiar trap of not knowing how to rate higher level engineers. Things basically turned into a popularity contest, with grading criteria like your "impact on or leadership in the tech community" and other such nonsense. Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better is where it is at.

zwnow 11mo ago
As long as quietly making stuff pays off, sure. If I get a bigger paycheck just from being known by the higher ups I'll go for the popularity contest. People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. So yeah, popularity contest and doing as little work as possible it is.
- lotsofpulp 11mo ago
  > People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. A little hyperbolic. Members of my family have found great utility in accessibility improvements, language translation, video calling, navigation assistance, etc.
  - zwnow 11mo ago
    Yea all that is neat if all that data wouldn't be collected and sold by all these big tech companies.
ownagefool 11mo ago
The thing about your bigco, the OPs and the post he's talking about, is it's all so abstract from money. You have two poles here. 1. The VC route, strikes gold, and never really needs to live with the reality of asking what an ROI is, it's all talk about spotlight, impact and value, without any articulation about cash money. 2. The MBA route where you effectively can't brush your teeth without a cost/benefit analysis that itself often cost multiple times your initiative, resulting in nothing getting done until you're in some tech debt armageddon. The reality is if you're still making bank on the abstract without being able to articulate revenue or costs, you're probably still in the good times.
- cm2012 11mo ago
  This description of the poles is so true from my experience
- beauzero 11mo ago
  That was painful to read and acknowledge. Succinct.
verelo 11mo ago
Couldn’t agree more (but frustratingly due to HN’ shitty mobile experience i downvoted this, sorry!) In a past life i used to complain that people only praised my work after i fucked up and subsequently fixed it. I’d go month on month of great execution and all I’d hear would be complaints, but as soon as i “fixed” a major issue, i was a hero. I’ve learn that setting appropriate incentives is the hardest part of building an effective organization.
- LadyCailin 11mo ago
  Click the “undown” button to undo a down vote.
- ericd 11mo ago
  You can hit the undown link that shows up?
- neilv 11mo ago
  I had to mention this in an early startup, when I did some firefighting, and the biz people were praising that. I said I wanted to set a culture in which engineering was rewarded for making things just happen and work, not for firefighting. A nice thing about early startups is that it's the easiest time to try to set engineering culture like this on a good track. Once you start hiring people, they will either cement elements of whatever culture you're setting, or they'll bring a poor culture with them. (My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)
  - hylaride 11mo ago
    > (My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.) You just described my last job. It went from one of the most productive (and I mean we fucking SHIPPED - quality work, usually the first time around), engaging, and fun places I've ever worked to a place where a new VP would sit in every single group's sprint planing, retros, and standups and interject if we deviated one iota from a very orthodox scrum framework. The engineering turnover was pretty much 95% within a year, with only the most junior people remaining because they didn't really know better to move on. Work slowed, tech debt ballooned, but OMFG were the product managers happy because they were also allowed in every step of the way. Work slowed to a crawl, too. Eventually a private equity firm swooped in and made things even worse...
chanux 11mo ago
Deep work that's important but does not appear shiny carries an elevated risk of being completely messed up by someone. "Oh this thing here looks steady and boring. This sure does not need a team of six." Next thing you know, the thing falls apart, destabilizing everything that stood on it's stability.
- avhception 11mo ago
  Basically the Sysadmin's dilemma. Everything working fine: "What are we paying you for?" Something broken: "What are we paying you for?"
  - throwaway894345 11mo ago
    Yeah, a couple years ago I built a system that undergirded what was at the time a new product but which now generates significant revenue for the company. That system is shockingly reliable to the extent that few at the company know it exists and those who do take its reliability for granted. It's not involved in any cost or reliability fires, so people never really have to think about how impressive this little piece of software really is--the things they don't need to worry about because this software is chugging along, doing its job, silently recovering from connectivity issues, database maintenance, etc without any real issue or maintenance. It's a little bit of a tragic irony that the better a job you do, the less likely it is to be noticed. (:
    - bakul 11mo ago
      May be you need to have "scheduled downtime" when your undergirding system is down for "maintenance" and they will notice! [Half joking... Probably not possible but better to have scheduled maintenance than have to do firefighting under extreme time pressure]
      - the_sleaze_ 11mo ago
        I had a coworker legitimately put wait statements in his code so that later he could remove them and report the optimizations. I approved a few of them
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
MyHonestOpinon 11mo ago
Unfortunately, in this profession we are being lead by managers that do not longer have deep knowledge of how to build good software systems. They can't evaluate contributions in code, so they resort to evaluate participation, and popularity. As an engineer you are left with a dilema. Either you focus on writing solid code and making your projects move forward or you focus on selling your self to the leadership class.
- LPisGood 11mo ago
  It’s so much easier to sell yourself when you write solid code
  - snoman 11mo ago
    If you don’t write solid code, it’s so much more important to be better at selling yourself than those who do.

zwnow 11mo ago

As long as quietly making stuff pays off, sure. If I get a bigger paycheck just from being known by the higher ups I'll go for the popularity contest. People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. So yeah, popularity contest and doing as little work as possible it is.

lotsofpulp 11mo ago
> People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. A little hyperbolic. Members of my family have found great utility in accessibility improvements, language translation, video calling, navigation assistance, etc.
- zwnow 11mo ago
  Yea all that is neat if all that data wouldn't be collected and sold by all these big tech companies.

ownagefool 11mo ago

The thing about your bigco, the OPs and the post he's talking about, is it's all so abstract from money. You have two poles here. 1. The VC route, strikes gold, and never really needs to live with the reality of asking what an ROI is, it's all talk about spotlight, impact and value, without any articulation about cash money. 2. The MBA route where you effectively can't brush your teeth without a cost/benefit analysis that itself often cost multiple times your initiative, resulting in nothing getting done until you're in some tech debt armageddon. The reality is if you're still making bank on the abstract without being able to articulate revenue or costs, you're probably still in the good times.

cm2012 11mo ago
This description of the poles is so true from my experience
beauzero 11mo ago
That was painful to read and acknowledge. Succinct.

verelo 11mo ago

Couldn’t agree more (but frustratingly due to HN’ shitty mobile experience i downvoted this, sorry!) In a past life i used to complain that people only praised my work after i fucked up and subsequently fixed it. I’d go month on month of great execution and all I’d hear would be complaints, but as soon as i “fixed” a major issue, i was a hero. I’ve learn that setting appropriate incentives is the hardest part of building an effective organization.

LadyCailin 11mo ago
Click the “undown” button to undo a down vote.
ericd 11mo ago
You can hit the undown link that shows up?
neilv 11mo ago
I had to mention this in an early startup, when I did some firefighting, and the biz people were praising that. I said I wanted to set a culture in which engineering was rewarded for making things just happen and work, not for firefighting. A nice thing about early startups is that it's the easiest time to try to set engineering culture like this on a good track. Once you start hiring people, they will either cement elements of whatever culture you're setting, or they'll bring a poor culture with them. (My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)
- hylaride 11mo ago
  > (My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.) You just described my last job. It went from one of the most productive (and I mean we fucking SHIPPED - quality work, usually the first time around), engaging, and fun places I've ever worked to a place where a new VP would sit in every single group's sprint planing, retros, and standups and interject if we deviated one iota from a very orthodox scrum framework. The engineering turnover was pretty much 95% within a year, with only the most junior people remaining because they didn't really know better to move on. Work slowed, tech debt ballooned, but OMFG were the product managers happy because they were also allowed in every step of the way. Work slowed to a crawl, too. Eventually a private equity firm swooped in and made things even worse...

chanux 11mo ago

Deep work that's important but does not appear shiny carries an elevated risk of being completely messed up by someone. "Oh this thing here looks steady and boring. This sure does not need a team of six." Next thing you know, the thing falls apart, destabilizing everything that stood on it's stability.

avhception 11mo ago
Basically the Sysadmin's dilemma. Everything working fine: "What are we paying you for?" Something broken: "What are we paying you for?"
- throwaway894345 11mo ago
  Yeah, a couple years ago I built a system that undergirded what was at the time a new product but which now generates significant revenue for the company. That system is shockingly reliable to the extent that few at the company know it exists and those who do take its reliability for granted. It's not involved in any cost or reliability fires, so people never really have to think about how impressive this little piece of software really is--the things they don't need to worry about because this software is chugging along, doing its job, silently recovering from connectivity issues, database maintenance, etc without any real issue or maintenance. It's a little bit of a tragic irony that the better a job you do, the less likely it is to be noticed. (:
  - bakul 11mo ago
    May be you need to have "scheduled downtime" when your undergirding system is down for "maintenance" and they will notice! [Half joking... Probably not possible but better to have scheduled maintenance than have to do firefighting under extreme time pressure]
    - the_sleaze_ 11mo ago
      I had a coworker legitimately put wait statements in his code so that later he could remove them and report the optimizations. I approved a few of them

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

MyHonestOpinon 11mo ago

Unfortunately, in this profession we are being lead by managers that do not longer have deep knowledge of how to build good software systems. They can't evaluate contributions in code, so they resort to evaluate participation, and popularity. As an engineer you are left with a dilema. Either you focus on writing solid code and making your projects move forward or you focus on selling your self to the leadership class.

LPisGood 11mo ago
It’s so much easier to sell yourself when you write solid code
- snoman 11mo ago
  If you don’t write solid code, it’s so much more important to be better at selling yourself than those who do.