4 ms·

Yeah I've worked at enough places that could generate vastly more software feature ideas than they could ever implement, to find the "justify your own existence

Yeah I've worked at enough places that could generate vastly more software feature ideas than they could ever implement, to find the "justify your own existence"-type places utterly insufferable. And I absolutely refuse to suffer them and everyone else should too.

arwhatever 9mo ago
"How about YOU justify my existence BEFORE making the decision to hire me in the first place?" - I've never quite said but have come close. (Sorry, you struck a nerve with your BigCo depiction. :-)
- tombert 9mo ago
  Genuinely not the guy's real name, but let's say that this manager's name was "Steven". When I said that the job boiled down to a lot of people trying to justify their existence, Steven said "do you really think that people are doing things to justify their existence in the company, Tom? Really?" I responded back with "Yes. I think some managers, STEVEN, really like to schedule meetings to make it look like they're doing important work, STEVEN, despite the fact that most of these meetings are useless and could have been handled over slack STEVEN. I don't want to name names STEVEN, but I have observed it on the management side. I suppose you'll need to figure out who I am talking about STEVEN". This was several years ago so I'm paraphrasing, but barely. I really disliked that job and when he wouldn't just let me answer with "it wasn't a good fit" I got (maybe irrationally) angry and it ended up being an excuse to air all my grievances. I could tell that he was getting upset when I started basically resorting to thinly-veiled insults. Not my proudest moment, to be 100% honest, but I also can't really say that I'm sorry either because I meant everything I said.
  - twosdai 9mo ago
    As an outsider of Big co's. I always felt that if youre not on one of the 10-20 awesome product teams. Eg, Google maps, aws lambda, windows core os. Something along those lines. It seems like a territory for justification Olympics. Just my view as a dev who's largest co was like 500 people. ~100 engineers.
    - nunez 9mo ago
      Couldn't be more on the nose. Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (a) in sales with a clear path to hitting/exceeding quota, (b) a strategic revenue generator, or (c) a super hot and extremely well funded corporate initiative (basically all AI projects right now). The money tap is always on, you get all the cool toys, travel perks are great, and you get to work on amazing stuff without as much red tape.
      - tombert 9mo ago
        Yeah, I was working on more of an infra thing (involving caching and indexing). Certainly important given the size of the company, but not something that gets lots of hype or sexiness. There were occasional bits of ambition to occasionally work on interesting stuff, but it was mostly a “keep the lights on and then figure out how to make yourself seem important”. One of my biggest pet peeves is when engineers say that we can’t do something because we would have to learn something new. I got into several arguments because I wanted to rewrite some buggy mutex-heavy code (that kept getting me paged in the middle of the night) with ZeroMQ, and people acted like learning it was some insurmountable challenge. My response would usually be something to the effect of “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that we were engineers, and that we had the ability to learn new things”. As I said, complaints about my attitude weren’t completely unfounded, but it’s just immensely frustrating for people using their unwillingness to learn new things as an excuse to keep some code in a broken state.
        jmalicki 9mo ago
        You're complaining about resume driven development in the same thread you're upset they wouldn't let you rewrite everything in ZeroMQ? That is a very inconsistent position, and reflects extreme confirmation bias, and by itself justifies that you may need to look in the mirror.
        tombert 9mo ago
        I didn’t want to rewrite everything in ZeroMQ. I wanted to rewrite one 2000 line service with ZeroMQ because the service was already broken and I was the only person who was dealing with the consequences because I was the only person who got paged for that particular service. Usually I advocated for doing things a more boring way, and I certainly don’t agree with making every damn thing an “initiative”, which was my biggest issue at BigCo. I don’t think it’s inconsistent. I wanted to use the right tool for the right job. Usually I can get by with Java’s built in tooling, and that was my initial attempt at a rewrite, but I ended up trying to re-invent a bunch of concurrency patterns with BlockingQueue and I found that literally everything I was spending a lot of (my own free) time was handled in like four lines of ZeroMQ. I have a single line on my resume for ZeroMQ as a keyword, despite having used it in many, many projects, so it certainly wasn’t using explicitly to pad my resume.
tombert 9mo ago
I've never really figured out a test to tell if the company is going to fall into that category without actually working at the company. It's not as simple as "BigCo" vs startup; I've worked at startups where layoffs were frequent enough that it devolved into existence justification, and I've worked at BigCos that actually did give a fair bit of leeway in how you do things (within some degree of reason). The closest thing to a "rule" that I've come to is if they use a less-mainstream language; if they're routinely using Haskell or something, they're probably a bit more onboard with experimentation, but that's still not a hard and fast rule.

arwhatever 9mo ago

"How about YOU justify my existence BEFORE making the decision to hire me in the first place?" - I've never quite said but have come close. (Sorry, you struck a nerve with your BigCo depiction. :-)

tombert 9mo ago
Genuinely not the guy's real name, but let's say that this manager's name was "Steven". When I said that the job boiled down to a lot of people trying to justify their existence, Steven said "do you really think that people are doing things to justify their existence in the company, Tom? Really?" I responded back with "Yes. I think some managers, STEVEN, really like to schedule meetings to make it look like they're doing important work, STEVEN, despite the fact that most of these meetings are useless and could have been handled over slack STEVEN. I don't want to name names STEVEN, but I have observed it on the management side. I suppose you'll need to figure out who I am talking about STEVEN". This was several years ago so I'm paraphrasing, but barely. I really disliked that job and when he wouldn't just let me answer with "it wasn't a good fit" I got (maybe irrationally) angry and it ended up being an excuse to air all my grievances. I could tell that he was getting upset when I started basically resorting to thinly-veiled insults. Not my proudest moment, to be 100% honest, but I also can't really say that I'm sorry either because I meant everything I said.
- twosdai 9mo ago
  As an outsider of Big co's. I always felt that if youre not on one of the 10-20 awesome product teams. Eg, Google maps, aws lambda, windows core os. Something along those lines. It seems like a territory for justification Olympics. Just my view as a dev who's largest co was like 500 people. ~100 engineers.
  - nunez 9mo ago
    Couldn't be more on the nose. Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (a) in sales with a clear path to hitting/exceeding quota, (b) a strategic revenue generator, or (c) a super hot and extremely well funded corporate initiative (basically all AI projects right now). The money tap is always on, you get all the cool toys, travel perks are great, and you get to work on amazing stuff without as much red tape.
    - tombert 9mo ago
      Yeah, I was working on more of an infra thing (involving caching and indexing). Certainly important given the size of the company, but not something that gets lots of hype or sexiness. There were occasional bits of ambition to occasionally work on interesting stuff, but it was mostly a “keep the lights on and then figure out how to make yourself seem important”. One of my biggest pet peeves is when engineers say that we can’t do something because we would have to learn something new. I got into several arguments because I wanted to rewrite some buggy mutex-heavy code (that kept getting me paged in the middle of the night) with ZeroMQ, and people acted like learning it was some insurmountable challenge. My response would usually be something to the effect of “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that we were engineers, and that we had the ability to learn new things”. As I said, complaints about my attitude weren’t completely unfounded, but it’s just immensely frustrating for people using their unwillingness to learn new things as an excuse to keep some code in a broken state.
      - jmalicki 9mo ago
        You're complaining about resume driven development in the same thread you're upset they wouldn't let you rewrite everything in ZeroMQ? That is a very inconsistent position, and reflects extreme confirmation bias, and by itself justifies that you may need to look in the mirror.
        tombert 9mo ago
        I didn’t want to rewrite everything in ZeroMQ. I wanted to rewrite one 2000 line service with ZeroMQ because the service was already broken and I was the only person who was dealing with the consequences because I was the only person who got paged for that particular service. Usually I advocated for doing things a more boring way, and I certainly don’t agree with making every damn thing an “initiative”, which was my biggest issue at BigCo. I don’t think it’s inconsistent. I wanted to use the right tool for the right job. Usually I can get by with Java’s built in tooling, and that was my initial attempt at a rewrite, but I ended up trying to re-invent a bunch of concurrency patterns with BlockingQueue and I found that literally everything I was spending a lot of (my own free) time was handled in like four lines of ZeroMQ. I have a single line on my resume for ZeroMQ as a keyword, despite having used it in many, many projects, so it certainly wasn’t using explicitly to pad my resume.

tombert 9mo ago

I've never really figured out a test to tell if the company is going to fall into that category without actually working at the company. It's not as simple as "BigCo" vs startup; I've worked at startups where layoffs were frequent enough that it devolved into existence justification, and I've worked at BigCos that actually did give a fair bit of leeway in how you do things (within some degree of reason). The closest thing to a "rule" that I've come to is if they use a less-mainstream language; if they're routinely using Haskell or something, they're probably a bit more onboard with experimentation, but that's still not a hard and fast rule.