7 ms·

I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around

I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of leadership mindset finally reap its rewards. Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words. It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level? This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness): `In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years of cold war without the option.` So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow rules gentlemen.

pwillia7 10mo ago
I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class. If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people? I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.
  - no_wizard 10mo ago
    Deep professional understanding of a problem space that a business solves is way undervalued. Institutional knowledge, experience, and domain expertise have been devalued precisely because the managerial class (particularly executives and VPs) actively learn and live the idea that labor is always bad and to be minimized as much as possible. This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.
    - dragonwriter 10mo ago
      > This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it. Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about, the same way every productivity improving invention has been marketed to corporate buyers even if a major actual effect is increasing the value of each labor hour and driving wages up. (Which is largely isomorphic to reducing the number X role needed in the production of Y units of a good or service.) Its also sold as a labor productivity increase to independent creators. And the two things are, after all, different sides of the same coin.
      - nosianu 10mo ago
        > Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about Why "arguably", that is exactly what he wrote
        dragonwriter 10mo ago
        No, he wrote that it was marketed that way because that is what the “AI boom is really about”, in opposition to something else, which I also discuss in the post you excerpted this from. Not sure if you didn’t read the whole post and just kneejerk reacted to the first part of the first sentence out of context, or if you just didn’t understand how it sharply differs from the claims in the post it responds to.
- alephnerd 10mo ago
  It is a variation of the principal-agent problem, and recognizing had helped me climb up the ladder in my career.
  - pwillia7 10mo ago
    Tell me more
    - alephnerd 10mo ago
      When I was in the policymaking world and was considering grad school/academia, an underlying theme in my research was that the principal-agent problem is a reflection of misaligned incentives which leads a stag-hunt dynamic to become a Nash Equilibrium. Long story short, incentives matter, and understanding how to align your initiatives with the incentives of veto players helps build coalitions that you need to get initiatives out the door. That said, these initiatives also need to be executed successfully, becuase organizational dynamics are inherently multi-agent games. Essentially, I made sure to understand how to speak (ie. Understand the incentive structures) of multiple stakeholders (eg. How to convince Mgmt and IC Engineers, PMs, salespeople, customer success, and customers) and also how to execute successfully on initiatives (ie. How to successfully launch products, lead a round, land customers, or manage an M&A event). This meant both building domain knowledge about each of the stakeholders fields as well as building domain knowledge in a handful of fields I knew I could specialize in. Basically, understanding incentive structures and being able to show how your interests and goals align with those incentives is critical. For example, back when I was an IC level engineer, if I wanted to get tech debt prioritized, I made sure to: 1. Show that it was tied to active issues to customers that matter - eg. fixing a bug for a customer who spends $20k a year at a company generating $100M a year in revenue is a misallocation of resources for EMs and PMs 2. Show that it is tied to speeding up feature delivery: it converts a conversation around "maintenance" into a conversation around adding new capabilities that are assumed to generate revenue, thus aligning Sales, PM, and Leadership A lot of people on HN neurotically and reflexively don't care to understand how organizations work or how to make a case. A number of them assume that just because it's a technical problem it should actually matter to the top line of a business. In most cases, it does not if you cannot make a case for it. A number of them also don't care to leave a bad organization if they are in one (I have worked in 2 in my career, and made sure to leave). I have no MBA, I just have an undergrad CS degree (and a secondary in Government). Even though my current day job doesn't demand it, I can still code, but I also taught myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience research, and other functions. If you want to survive and thrive in the tech industry, nowadays you will need to build industry specific domain experience, technology specific domain experience, and basic product management, sales, and user experience chops.
exasperaited 10mo ago
Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity. The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc. Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back. Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.
- slashdave 10mo ago
  I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.
  - amarant 10mo ago
    Aren't contemporary boardrooms generally stuffed to the brim with MBA's though? Or is that just my preconceptions talking?
    - slashdave 10mo ago
      The Board represents shareholders, at least in principle. More celebrities really.
  - exasperaited 10mo ago
    I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates. I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that". There were four of us.
the_snooze 10mo ago
It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.
- eric_h 10mo ago
  Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)
  - deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
- hinkley 10mo ago
  The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office. I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”. But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work. Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware. The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.
- bongodongobob 10mo ago
forbiddenvoid 10mo ago
Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.
marcinzm 10mo ago
As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.
- arevno 10mo ago
  That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it. So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.
  - ian-g 10mo ago
    It isn't entirely that. Somewhat, sure. It's also managers who tell you you're being laid off, but good news, not for three months. And, oh, by the way, if you leave early no severance. And why are you being laid off? Your duties are being offshored. _You_ aren't being offshored because they need three people to replace you, but your duties are. Ostensibly this saves money.
  - BiteCode_dev 10mo ago
    Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.
    - hinkley 10mo ago
      FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already. I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one. (Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)
css_apologist 10mo ago
> last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35 ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s
- theideaofcoffee 10mo ago
  Easy now, I think it's pretty easy to see that he's talking about "three decades" generally, a decade in his own experience and two or more generalized out. You can know about things that you don't directly experience.
- jayd16 10mo ago
  I gave it a pass for those decades being in "recent memory" even if the experience wasn't first hand.
didibus 10mo ago
> Profit at any cost Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this... You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average. Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good. Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job. Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go. What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative. What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal. But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit. Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good. Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like. It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.
- dominotw 10mo ago
  luck is probabilistic after being selected for sucking up.
- stuffn 10mo ago
  > and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal. Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable. To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad. > Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good. You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this. > It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc. Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.
eleveriven 10mo ago
But I don't think the people in the article "took things too literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make it obvious they don't
Aurornis 10mo ago
> these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words. I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was hard to get any work done. These were people who had read 20 different management books and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work. They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets they would give us. They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored" you about things you knew. The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily in implementing all of the leadership material they could consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing they could. The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing important got done and the VC money bled out in between team lunches and off-site bonding experiences. So any extreme is bad.

pwillia7 10mo ago

I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class. If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people? I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

phantasmish 10mo ago
The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.
- no_wizard 10mo ago
  Deep professional understanding of a problem space that a business solves is way undervalued. Institutional knowledge, experience, and domain expertise have been devalued precisely because the managerial class (particularly executives and VPs) actively learn and live the idea that labor is always bad and to be minimized as much as possible. This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.
  - dragonwriter 10mo ago
    > This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it. Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about, the same way every productivity improving invention has been marketed to corporate buyers even if a major actual effect is increasing the value of each labor hour and driving wages up. (Which is largely isomorphic to reducing the number X role needed in the production of Y units of a good or service.) Its also sold as a labor productivity increase to independent creators. And the two things are, after all, different sides of the same coin.
    - nosianu 10mo ago
      > Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about Why "arguably", that is exactly what he wrote
      - dragonwriter 10mo ago
        No, he wrote that it was marketed that way because that is what the “AI boom is really about”, in opposition to something else, which I also discuss in the post you excerpted this from. Not sure if you didn’t read the whole post and just kneejerk reacted to the first part of the first sentence out of context, or if you just didn’t understand how it sharply differs from the claims in the post it responds to.
alephnerd 10mo ago
It is a variation of the principal-agent problem, and recognizing had helped me climb up the ladder in my career.
- pwillia7 10mo ago
  Tell me more
  - alephnerd 10mo ago
    When I was in the policymaking world and was considering grad school/academia, an underlying theme in my research was that the principal-agent problem is a reflection of misaligned incentives which leads a stag-hunt dynamic to become a Nash Equilibrium. Long story short, incentives matter, and understanding how to align your initiatives with the incentives of veto players helps build coalitions that you need to get initiatives out the door. That said, these initiatives also need to be executed successfully, becuase organizational dynamics are inherently multi-agent games. Essentially, I made sure to understand how to speak (ie. Understand the incentive structures) of multiple stakeholders (eg. How to convince Mgmt and IC Engineers, PMs, salespeople, customer success, and customers) and also how to execute successfully on initiatives (ie. How to successfully launch products, lead a round, land customers, or manage an M&A event). This meant both building domain knowledge about each of the stakeholders fields as well as building domain knowledge in a handful of fields I knew I could specialize in. Basically, understanding incentive structures and being able to show how your interests and goals align with those incentives is critical. For example, back when I was an IC level engineer, if I wanted to get tech debt prioritized, I made sure to: 1. Show that it was tied to active issues to customers that matter - eg. fixing a bug for a customer who spends $20k a year at a company generating $100M a year in revenue is a misallocation of resources for EMs and PMs 2. Show that it is tied to speeding up feature delivery: it converts a conversation around "maintenance" into a conversation around adding new capabilities that are assumed to generate revenue, thus aligning Sales, PM, and Leadership A lot of people on HN neurotically and reflexively don't care to understand how organizations work or how to make a case. A number of them assume that just because it's a technical problem it should actually matter to the top line of a business. In most cases, it does not if you cannot make a case for it. A number of them also don't care to leave a bad organization if they are in one (I have worked in 2 in my career, and made sure to leave). I have no MBA, I just have an undergrad CS degree (and a secondary in Government). Even though my current day job doesn't demand it, I can still code, but I also taught myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience research, and other functions. If you want to survive and thrive in the tech industry, nowadays you will need to build industry specific domain experience, technology specific domain experience, and basic product management, sales, and user experience chops.

exasperaited 10mo ago

Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity. The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc. Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back. Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.

slashdave 10mo ago
I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.
- amarant 10mo ago
  Aren't contemporary boardrooms generally stuffed to the brim with MBA's though? Or is that just my preconceptions talking?
  - slashdave 10mo ago
    The Board represents shareholders, at least in principle. More celebrities really.
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates. I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that". There were four of us.

the_snooze 10mo ago

It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.

eric_h 10mo ago
Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)
- deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
hinkley 10mo ago
The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office. I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”. But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work. Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware. The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.
bongodongobob 10mo ago

forbiddenvoid 10mo ago

Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.

marcinzm 10mo ago

As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.

arevno 10mo ago
That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it. So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.
- ian-g 10mo ago
  It isn't entirely that. Somewhat, sure. It's also managers who tell you you're being laid off, but good news, not for three months. And, oh, by the way, if you leave early no severance. And why are you being laid off? Your duties are being offshored. _You_ aren't being offshored because they need three people to replace you, but your duties are. Ostensibly this saves money.
- BiteCode_dev 10mo ago
  Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.
  - hinkley 10mo ago
    FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already. I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one. (Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)

css_apologist 10mo ago

> last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35 ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s

theideaofcoffee 10mo ago
Easy now, I think it's pretty easy to see that he's talking about "three decades" generally, a decade in his own experience and two or more generalized out. You can know about things that you don't directly experience.
jayd16 10mo ago
I gave it a pass for those decades being in "recent memory" even if the experience wasn't first hand.

didibus 10mo ago

> Profit at any cost Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this... You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average. Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good. Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job. Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go. What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative. What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal. But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit. Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good. Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like. It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

dominotw 10mo ago
luck is probabilistic after being selected for sucking up.
stuffn 10mo ago
> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal. Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable. To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad. > Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good. You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this. > It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc. Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.

eleveriven 10mo ago

But I don't think the people in the article "took things too literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make it obvious they don't

Aurornis 10mo ago

> these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words. I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was hard to get any work done. These were people who had read 20 different management books and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work. They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets they would give us. They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored" you about things you knew. The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily in implementing all of the leadership material they could consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing they could. The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing important got done and the VC money bled out in between team lunches and off-site bonding experiences. So any extreme is bad.