11 ms·

Technical Excellence Is Not Enough

94 points by bo0tzz 7mo ago

sgarland 7mo ago
> "Discuss before shipping" sounds reasonable. In practice, when you're discussing with people who resist the category of change you're proposing, the outcome is predetermined. The discussion isn't evaluation, it's a veto dressed as process. I literally had this discussion with my boss yesterday. I spent time writing up what I already knew to be true (we have systemic issues which are unsolved, because we only ever fix symptoms, not root causes), replete with 10+ incidents all pointing to the same patterns, and was told I need to get the opinions of others on my team before proceeding with the fixes I recommended. “I can do that, but I also already know the outcome.” > Responsibility Without Authority This. So much this. Every time I hear someone excitedly explain that their dev teams “own their full stack,” I die a little inside. Do they fix their [self-inflicted] DB problems, or do they start an incident, ask for help, and then refuse to make the necessary structural changes afterwards? Thought so.
medi8r 7mo ago
Ouch I don't want to work there! It seems extreme. A decent place to work let's you do your thing. There will be guardrails. But my current job my boss has never told me not to do something. Getting the time to do it is another story and there are solutions. Sometimes picking the battle and lettung it go. Sometimes driving a decision and agreement. But if you do that people like it. And I work somewhere pretty well mocked on HN and Reddit etc. But they are good. Other places I worked it is usually another engineer throwing a spanner in the works. Smaller companies have a lot of pets in the code and architecture. But if you avoid the pets you can change things.
- dogleash 7mo ago
  > my current job my boss has never told me not to do something. Getting the time to do it is another story I’m confused. The polite way to say no at work is to make it about not having time.
  - medi8r 7mo ago
    Yeah the other story I refer to isn't using time as an excuse to block architectural improvements though. We get time for both new features and tech debt. But if your idea blows out the quarter it had bettet be game changing!
gaigalas 7mo ago
The world is a big place with all kinds of organizations and people that fit in different ways on those organizations. Some organizations do in fact optimize for correctedness, and some people are good at it. Some people are good in everything (totally possible, universe doesn't care about keeping dichotomies). Maybe that technical guy was only technical up until now because it was what added more value. People often don't consider that. Right now, we're seeing some small changes in value dynamics. It makes us foster those (mostly pointless) meta-conversations about what organizations are and how people fit in them. But the truth stays the same, both are incredibly diverse.
- glitchc 7mo ago
  Okay I'll bite: How does one find these organizations? They all have high quality listed in marketing blurbs on their websites. No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter.
  - gaigalas 7mo ago
    Look at what they do instead, not their marketing. NASA is the obvious and biggest example. They won't be vibe coding and skipping QA any time soon. Probably ever. Look at any high quality open source software, and the care people put into them. Those are organizations, made up of people, some of them highly technical. Startups often don't optimize for correctedness. They can't afford it. But that's a niche. Funny enough, it's the one that's being most affected by the shift in value dynamics right now, so I understand that some people here might see the world as just this, but it isn't.
  - sgarland 7mo ago
    IME, here are some signals that a company actually values correctness. This is not all-inclusive, nor is any one of them a guarantee. * Their codebase is written in something relatively obscure, like Elixir or Haskell. * They're an infrastructure [0] or monitoring provider. * They're running their code on VMs, and have a sane instantiation and deployment process. * They use Foreign Key Constraints in their RDBMS, and can explain and defend their chosen normalization level. * They're running their own servers in a colo or self-owned datacenter. And here are some anti-signals. Same disclaimers apply. * Their backend is written in JS / TS (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Python [1]). * They're running on K8s with a bunch of CRDs. * They've posted blog articles about how they solved problems that the industry solved 20 years ago. * They exclusively or nearly exclusively use NoSQL [2]. 0: This is hit or miss; reference the steady decline in uptime from AWS, GitHub, et al. 1: I love Python dearly, and while it can be made excellent, it's a lot easier to make it bad. 2: Modulo places that have a clear need for something like Scylla - use the the right tool for the job, but the right tool is almost never a DocumentDB.
eithed 7mo ago
I worked for 7 years in a place where my technical insight slowly turned into questioning my decisions and expertise (this was after being 3 years in tech lead and 2 years in staff engineer role). Sometimes the solution is just to walk away
- loevborg 7mo ago
  Yeah that's a painful process, as I know from experience. What do you think is the reason for the gradual shift?
  - vbezhenar 7mo ago
    While I can't say that I observe that kind of radical shift for myself, one of the reasons I still can see something similar is AI development. Basically manager asks me something and asks AI something. I'm not always using so-called "common wisdom". I might decide to use library of framework that AI won't suggest. I might use technology that AI considers too old. For example I suggested to write small Windows helper program with C, because it needs access to WinAPI; I know C very well; and we need to support old Windows versions back to Vista at least, preferably back to Windows XP. However AI suggest using Rust, because Rust is, well, today's hotness. It doesn't really care that I know very little of Rust, it doesn't really care that I would need to jump through certain hoops to build Rust on old Windows (if it's ever possible). So in the end I suggest to use something that I can build and I have confidence in. AI suggests something that most internet texts written by passionate developers talk about. But manager probably have doubts in me, because I'm not world-level trillion-dollar-worth celebrity, I'm just some grumpy old developer, so he might question my expertise using AI. Maybe he's even right, who knows.
    - tossandthrow 7mo ago
      It seems like a quote clear cut case? You mention the tradeoffs between rust. Including the high level of uncertainty and increased lead time as you need to learn the language. The manager, now having that information, can insist on using rust, and you get er great opportunity to learn rust. Now being totally off the hook, even if the project fails, as you mentioned the risks.
louwrentius 7mo ago
I've seen this pattern play out, and been frustrated by it many times over. > Authority matching responsibility. That's the only fix I've seen work. Either you get decision-making power that matches the decisions you're already making, or you find a place that treats your judgment as an asset instead of something to manage. I don't think the solution is to become some kind of dictator. And I don't think it's about not valuing your judgement. The key issue is a fundamental misalignment of core values. In the examples given, the culture is such that quality is not the highest priority. A system based on consensus only really works if core values are shared, or there will always be discontent. Consensus won't work under these circumstances. You'll never be able to 'trust' your colleagues to 'do the right thing'. If you care about quality, you have to look for another organisation and have a lot of questions about how they assure quality.
- sgarland 7mo ago
  > The key issue is a fundamental misalignment of core values. Agreed, but my main frustration is what glitchc wrote a few comments down: "No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter." I have never met anyone in management who will admit that they value velocity over correctness and uptime, but their actions do. If you want to optimize for velocity, growing your user base, expanding your features, that's fine - but you need to acknowledge that you're making a trade-off in doing so. If you're a solo dev, or working at an extremely small shop with high trust, it's possible that you can have high velocity and high quality, but the combination is vanishingly rare at most places.
avaku 7mo ago
Exactly
k33n 7mo ago
OP’s experience is all too common. If he keeps trying to do the right thing, he’s going to run afoul of “the no assholes rule”.
- JCDenton2052 7mo ago
  You have to be able to pick your battles. Sometimes people are in the wrong teams. Sometimes they are just assholes who think they are always right. Too often the "right thing" is subjective.
neya 7mo ago
Technical excellence is often overlooked by the MBA groups. They will simply walk into a project, pick something perfectly functional and ask you to tear it down for no fucking reason other than to demonstrate "they add value" to the company. They will be really good with the slides and graphs and that's what is visible to management anyway. Not the framework you developed. Not the fact that your work powers millions of users. To them, you're just a replaceable worker bee. You are only needed when something breaks. Architectural decisions are made by anecdotal experiences by them and it's just stone, paper, scissors all over again. And when shit blows up right in their faces, it will not be about their judgement or lack thereof - it will be about how you didn't communicate about the issue properly. It will always be you who will be under the bus. And then the bunch of these clowns go and vibe code some stupid-ass product and sell it to gullible investors "wHo NeEds EnGiNeErs?" And then you read about how 1000s of users' information went public all over the internet post their launch...the very next day. /endrant
hnthrow0287345 7mo ago
>If you're in this position (relied upon, validated, powerless), you're not imagining it. And it's not a communication problem. "Just communicate better" is the advice equivalent of "have you tried not being depressed?" How about "have you tried unionizing?" Because the common theme here is lack of respect which is ultimately limited by your own bargaining power. That means it's only your individual value against the collective will of the company, and the individual is going to lose that fight more often than not (with very rare exceptions for extremely talented and smart people who won the life lottery who are smarter than everyone at a company).
- raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
  I hate seeing the idea that unionization is the answer. I grew up in South GA. Every single time that a corporation didn’t want to deal with a union, they just picked up and left.
  - bdavisx 7mo ago
    And if everywhere they went would do the same thing, then they wouldn't be able to leave. Too bad people have been convinced that unions are bad.
    - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
      They left for Mexico… How hard do you think it is to get cheaper developers from LatAM?
      - Rapzid 7mo ago
        All the corporations that left Georgia over unions left for Mexico?
        raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        Not all of them M&M Mars left for Mexico, Firestone left for Alabama.
xorgun 7mo ago
[dead]
mikrl 7mo ago
>Ignoring it costs more later, but later is someone else's problem Given the standard advice to job hop every 1-3 years, and the intern/coop work pattern of semester long stints, is this not just a structural consequence? Do you gain competitive advantage as a company with longer tenures? Or shorter, even? Or is it an attitude problem, compare with old people planting shade trees: “Codebases flourish when senior devs write easily maintainable modules in whose extensions they will never work”
jonstewart 7mo ago
It’s a trust issue. There’s no one more of a PITA than a new team member who joins and starts questioning every little thing and demanding it be changed (the initial questioning is fine, so long as you accept “because” as a reason). OF COURSE any team that’s shipping software will have things that don’t make sense prima facie, because they’re accumulated tech debt or historical accident. Go beyond identifying all these problems towards solving them. Choose a small problem, where you won’t have to fight and argue, just a little dust bunny you can sweep out of the way. Do it again, and again, and again. This is how you build trust. As you build trust, it becomes easier to seek change. Additionally, you may also find that not all the little problems are worth solving, and what’s more interesting are the bigger problems around product-market fit, usability, and revenue.
- sgarland 7mo ago
  > Additionally, you may also find that not all the little problems are worth solving, and what’s more interesting are the bigger problems around product-market fit, usability, and revenue. TFA author (and me), and you have wildly different motivations. I don't know the author, but have said verbatim much of what they wrote, so I feel like I can speak on this. Beyond the fact that I recognize the company has to continue exist for me to be employed, none of those hold the slightest bit of interest for me. What motivates me are interesting technical challenges, full stop. As an example, recently at my job we had a forced AI-Only week, where everyone had to use Claude Code, zero manual coding. This was agony to me, because I could see it making mistakes that I could fix in seconds, but instead I had to try to patiently explain what I needed to be done, and then twiddle my thumbs while cheerful nonsense words danced around the screen. One of the things I produced from that was a series of linters to catch sub-optimal schema decisions in PRs. This was praised, but I got absolutely no joy from it, because I didn't write it. I have written linters that parse code using its AST before, and those did bring me joy, because it was an interesting technical challenge. Instead, all I did was (partially) solve a human challenge; to me, that's just frustration manifest, because in my mind if you don't know how to use a DB, you shouldn't be allowed to use the DB (in prod - you have to learn, obviously). I am fully aware that this is largely incompatible with most workplaces, and that my expectations are unrealistic, but that doesn't change the fact that it is how I feel.
james_marks 7mo ago
I find OP's communication style abrasive and off-putting, which tracks with them saying they've been coached on this, and found that advice lacking. Maybe it's still insufficient advice, but it hasn't worked for them at least in part because they haven't figured out how to apply it. From the post, I see low empathy and an air of superiority, (perhaps earned by genuinely being smarter than their peers-- doesn't make it more attractive). That's going to cause friction because a team is a _social_ construct.
- armchairhacker 7mo ago
  The first two sentences > Organizations don't optimize for correctness. They optimize for comfort ...do I need to say it?
  - Rapzid 7mo ago
    > One number, never measured before. It doesn't change rules or add warnings, just makes the existing count visible. Stopped here. That pattern. I recognize this pattern from this AI "companion" my mate showed me over Christmas. It told a bunch of crazy stories using this "seize the day" vibe. It had an animated, anthropomorphized animal avatar. And that animal was an f'ing RACCOON.
    - Terretta 7mo ago
      LLMs originally learned these patterns from LinkedIn and the “$1000 for my newsletter” SEO pillions. Both accomplish a goal. Now that's become a loop. There is a delayed but direct association between RLHF results we see in LLM responses and volume of LinkedIn-spiration generated by humans disrupting ${trend.hireable} from coffee shops and couches. // from my couch above a coffee shop, disrupting cowork on HN. no avatars. no stories. just skills.md
  - bossyTeacher 7mo ago
    You are absolutely right! - It is not X. It is Y. - X [negate action] Y. X [action] Z. The titles are giveaways too: Comfort Over Correctness, Consensus As Veto, The Nuance, Responsibility Without Authority, What Changes It. Has that bot taste. If you want I can compile a list of cases where this doesn't happen. Do you want me to do that?
instig007 7mo ago
> Ignoring it costs more later, but later is someone else's problem. and then the blame could be shifted to the future generations, it's their incompetence after all. > Correctness wins when the cost of ignoring it becomes impossible to miss: an outage, a customer complaint, data loss. Until then, comfort wins every time. Those who tolerate comfort-winning aren't engineers and shouldn't be admitted to stand close to engineering systems overall, especially outside the software industry.
MyHonestOpinon 7mo ago
That is why I think technical excellent people should be in charge. They are the ones able to see the trade offs. They can see who is actually doing great work. Think Linus, Guido, Larry Wall, or Carmack.
- elevatortrim 7mo ago
  Correct, but it becomes very hard to be in charge and stay technically excellent. The higher you are, the harder it is.
DrScientist 7mo ago
> Authority matching responsibility. That's the only fix I've seen work. So, if I understood correctly, complaining that his architectural advice for other teams/people was constantly ignored, and his solution is the same thing he was complaining about. ie The teams he was advising also thought authority should match responsibility - and they did want they wanted and ignored him?
tofukant 7mo ago
Those short sentences make it seem like it was written by ai, so jarring to read.
- quotemstr 7mo ago
  I hate AI writing as much as anyone, but cringe is orthogonal to correctness.
wiseowise 7mo ago
> The gap between responsibility and authority is where burnout lives. Insert fire writing gif here.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
cess11 7mo ago
I suspect the author has little to no experience running a commercial organisation. Business outcome comes first, and it is only rarely aligned with technical excellence. Closing a deal might involve making an unreasonable promise, and implementing it might not require more than an ugly hack, so you go with the ugly hack and make the money. Comfort could be important but many people don't perform well when comfortable, so the organisation has to add some degree of confusion and pressure to keep them at a productive equilibrium where they don't fall into either apathy or burst into flames. And yes, the boss decides, not because they are especially accountable or responsible, but because the power comes from ownership. In some organisations this is veiled and workers get a say most of the time, but in a pinch it'll be the higher-ups that actually have that power.
- UK-Al05 7mo ago
  Normally when you give an unreasonable promise, or have to implement ugly hack then it is known about and explicit that is what is happening. The problems come when you make a unreasonable promise, but no one knows that.
narag 7mo ago
That's exactly what happens in some organizations. I couldn't believe it the first time I saw it, but it is what it is. And the reason is some bosses are addict to consensus. Infuriating but there's really no other option than shrugging off the problems, waiting for staff changes or looking for another job.
pverheggen 7mo ago
OP's dismissiveness of soft skills is a big red flag. Unless you're a solo dev, software development is a social activity, and understanding the social dynamics is key to effecting change. Your efforts to improve quality could be vetoed by your coworkers for a variety of reasons: they don't care, they don't trust your judgement, they see other things as a higher priority... the list goes on and on. Some of these things can't be changed by you, but some can, and that's where the soft skills come into play.
- tripledry 7mo ago
  Side note, this is why I'm not that worried even if AI becomes even better at writing code. The only times I've spent "too long" on features, are times where I basically had an empty ticket. I need to find the right people to talk with, figure out requirements, iterate on changing requirements etc. That's only marginally sped up even if you could generate the code with a click of a button. This was somehow related to the "social activity" part :D
  - asa400 7mo ago
    100%. The thing I'm currently working on has been a pain probably 80% because the work was underspecified and didn't take a bunch of legacy concerns into account and probably 20% because of nature of the code itself. If it was better specified I'd be done already, but instead I've had to go back and forth with multiple people multiple times about what they actually wanted, and what legacy stuff is worth fixing and not, and how to coordinate some dependent changes. Most of this work has been the oft-derided "soft skills" that I keep hearing software engineers don't need.
- avazhi 7mo ago
  There is no OP. It’s ai slop.
- wiseowise 7mo ago
  Where did they dismiss soft skills? The point is that every improvement is met with "just get better soft skills bro" dismissal, which in reality has nothing to do with soft skills. I've met this firsthand.
deleted 7mo ago
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leothecool 7mo ago
Leadership is not the same thing as management. Maybe some day the OP will get training data to add that concept to its latent vector space.
tpoacher 7mo ago
> Nobody disagrees with the technical argument That's a very strong foundational claim right at the start. And in my experience, a completely false one. Which makes the whole argument that follows it completely unsound. Also, the author seems to treat the terms "consensus" and "buy-in" as synonymous. They're not, and this distinction can make a huge difference in terms of healthy teams can operate. Patrick Lencioni covers this well in his classic book, "Five Dysfunctions of a Team".
- sgarland 7mo ago
  > Also, the author seems to treat the terms "consensus" and "buy-in" as synonymous. Can you explain more? I'm not familiar with that distinction, nor that book. EDIT: I asked ChatGPT, and it came up with this [0]. Please let me know if it's accurate (I don't necessarily dislike LLMs, I just think they're wildly oversold, and also value human input). 0: https://chatgpt.com/share/69a05ce2-95e4-8006-ae56-bd514728949b https://chatgpt.com/share/69a05ce2-95e4-8006-ae56-bd51472894...
  - tpoacher 7mo ago
    Mr Chat more or less covers it correctly. If my memory serves correctly, in the book there's a bit more emphasis and nuance on the point that, for buy-in to exist in the first place, all team members who have a strong opinion prior to a decision, need to feel that they've been given an opportunity to give their opinion, their opinion has been heard, and its merits and demerits weighed earnestly against all other options on the table, before a decision has been made by the team (or in the case of a 'stalemate', by the ultimate decision-maker), and that there is a clear rationale for going with the final decision and rejecting all others. The rationale may well acknowledge the risk from not following other opinions, but cite other operational reasons for the decision. A healthy team then should proceed as if this was a team decision that they all commit to. But consensus isn't required, only buy-in. In a healthy team, all members should trust each other (in that, they are all working towards a common purpose), and not fear "creative conflict". This enables them to share their opinions in the first place, and the buy-in discussion helps everyone in the team to feel accountable for the joint decision, as well as hold each other accountable in a healthy way. If this doesn't happen, the usual outcome is that decisions are made, but people feel "I didn't agree with this decision and nobody asked me, so I won't really engage with it". I really do recommend the book. It's a very light read, presented as a story (with a final chapter examining the concepts a bit more theoretically), with excellent insights. You can probably find it online for free if you must, but it's a good book to have on any bookshelf.
deleted 7mo ago
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didgeoridoo 7mo ago
What in the House of Leaves is this website
yusyusyus 7mo ago
lol ive seen the pathological variant of this pattern and it is... something the hell else. some situations are just fundamentally broken.
Watson4321 7mo ago
[dead]

94 points by bo0tzz 7mo ago

> "Discuss before shipping" sounds reasonable. In practice, when you're discussing with people who resist the category of change you're proposing, the outcome is predetermined. The discussion isn't evaluation, it's a veto dressed as process. I literally had this discussion with my boss yesterday. I spent time writing up what I already knew to be true (we have systemic issues which are unsolved, because we only ever fix symptoms, not root causes), replete with 10+ incidents all pointing to the same patterns, and was told I need to get the opinions of others on my team before proceeding with the fixes I recommended. “I can do that, but I also already know the outcome.” > Responsibility Without Authority This. So much this. Every time I hear someone excitedly explain that their dev teams “own their full stack,” I die a little inside. Do they fix their [self-inflicted] DB problems, or do they start an incident, ask for help, and then refuse to make the necessary structural changes afterwards? Thought so.

medi8r 7mo ago

Ouch I don't want to work there! It seems extreme. A decent place to work let's you do your thing. There will be guardrails. But my current job my boss has never told me not to do something. Getting the time to do it is another story and there are solutions. Sometimes picking the battle and lettung it go. Sometimes driving a decision and agreement. But if you do that people like it. And I work somewhere pretty well mocked on HN and Reddit etc. But they are good. Other places I worked it is usually another engineer throwing a spanner in the works. Smaller companies have a lot of pets in the code and architecture. But if you avoid the pets you can change things.

dogleash 7mo ago
> my current job my boss has never told me not to do something. Getting the time to do it is another story I’m confused. The polite way to say no at work is to make it about not having time.
- medi8r 7mo ago
  Yeah the other story I refer to isn't using time as an excuse to block architectural improvements though. We get time for both new features and tech debt. But if your idea blows out the quarter it had bettet be game changing!

gaigalas 7mo ago

The world is a big place with all kinds of organizations and people that fit in different ways on those organizations. Some organizations do in fact optimize for correctedness, and some people are good at it. Some people are good in everything (totally possible, universe doesn't care about keeping dichotomies). Maybe that technical guy was only technical up until now because it was what added more value. People often don't consider that. Right now, we're seeing some small changes in value dynamics. It makes us foster those (mostly pointless) meta-conversations about what organizations are and how people fit in them. But the truth stays the same, both are incredibly diverse.

glitchc 7mo ago
Okay I'll bite: How does one find these organizations? They all have high quality listed in marketing blurbs on their websites. No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter.
- gaigalas 7mo ago
  Look at what they do instead, not their marketing. NASA is the obvious and biggest example. They won't be vibe coding and skipping QA any time soon. Probably ever. Look at any high quality open source software, and the care people put into them. Those are organizations, made up of people, some of them highly technical. Startups often don't optimize for correctedness. They can't afford it. But that's a niche. Funny enough, it's the one that's being most affected by the shift in value dynamics right now, so I understand that some people here might see the world as just this, but it isn't.
- sgarland 7mo ago
  IME, here are some signals that a company actually values correctness. This is not all-inclusive, nor is any one of them a guarantee. * Their codebase is written in something relatively obscure, like Elixir or Haskell. * They're an infrastructure [0] or monitoring provider. * They're running their code on VMs, and have a sane instantiation and deployment process. * They use Foreign Key Constraints in their RDBMS, and can explain and defend their chosen normalization level. * They're running their own servers in a colo or self-owned datacenter. And here are some anti-signals. Same disclaimers apply. * Their backend is written in JS / TS (and to a somewhat lesser extent, Python [1]). * They're running on K8s with a bunch of CRDs. * They've posted blog articles about how they solved problems that the industry solved 20 years ago. * They exclusively or nearly exclusively use NoSQL [2]. 0: This is hit or miss; reference the steady decline in uptime from AWS, GitHub, et al. 1: I love Python dearly, and while it can be made excellent, it's a lot easier to make it bad. 2: Modulo places that have a clear need for something like Scylla - use the the right tool for the job, but the right tool is almost never a DocumentDB.

eithed 7mo ago

I worked for 7 years in a place where my technical insight slowly turned into questioning my decisions and expertise (this was after being 3 years in tech lead and 2 years in staff engineer role). Sometimes the solution is just to walk away

loevborg 7mo ago
Yeah that's a painful process, as I know from experience. What do you think is the reason for the gradual shift?
- vbezhenar 7mo ago
  While I can't say that I observe that kind of radical shift for myself, one of the reasons I still can see something similar is AI development. Basically manager asks me something and asks AI something. I'm not always using so-called "common wisdom". I might decide to use library of framework that AI won't suggest. I might use technology that AI considers too old. For example I suggested to write small Windows helper program with C, because it needs access to WinAPI; I know C very well; and we need to support old Windows versions back to Vista at least, preferably back to Windows XP. However AI suggest using Rust, because Rust is, well, today's hotness. It doesn't really care that I know very little of Rust, it doesn't really care that I would need to jump through certain hoops to build Rust on old Windows (if it's ever possible). So in the end I suggest to use something that I can build and I have confidence in. AI suggests something that most internet texts written by passionate developers talk about. But manager probably have doubts in me, because I'm not world-level trillion-dollar-worth celebrity, I'm just some grumpy old developer, so he might question my expertise using AI. Maybe he's even right, who knows.
  - tossandthrow 7mo ago
    It seems like a quote clear cut case? You mention the tradeoffs between rust. Including the high level of uncertainty and increased lead time as you need to learn the language. The manager, now having that information, can insist on using rust, and you get er great opportunity to learn rust. Now being totally off the hook, even if the project fails, as you mentioned the risks.

louwrentius 7mo ago

I've seen this pattern play out, and been frustrated by it many times over. > Authority matching responsibility. That's the only fix I've seen work. Either you get decision-making power that matches the decisions you're already making, or you find a place that treats your judgment as an asset instead of something to manage. I don't think the solution is to become some kind of dictator. And I don't think it's about not valuing your judgement. The key issue is a fundamental misalignment of core values. In the examples given, the culture is such that quality is not the highest priority. A system based on consensus only really works if core values are shared, or there will always be discontent. Consensus won't work under these circumstances. You'll never be able to 'trust' your colleagues to 'do the right thing'. If you care about quality, you have to look for another organisation and have a lot of questions about how they assure quality.

sgarland 7mo ago
> The key issue is a fundamental misalignment of core values. Agreed, but my main frustration is what glitchc wrote a few comments down: "No one actually claims their product is crap and quality doesn't matter." I have never met anyone in management who will admit that they value velocity over correctness and uptime, but their actions do. If you want to optimize for velocity, growing your user base, expanding your features, that's fine - but you need to acknowledge that you're making a trade-off in doing so. If you're a solo dev, or working at an extremely small shop with high trust, it's possible that you can have high velocity and high quality, but the combination is vanishingly rare at most places.

avaku 7mo ago

Exactly

k33n 7mo ago

OP’s experience is all too common. If he keeps trying to do the right thing, he’s going to run afoul of “the no assholes rule”.

JCDenton2052 7mo ago
You have to be able to pick your battles. Sometimes people are in the wrong teams. Sometimes they are just assholes who think they are always right. Too often the "right thing" is subjective.

neya 7mo ago

Technical excellence is often overlooked by the MBA groups. They will simply walk into a project, pick something perfectly functional and ask you to tear it down for no fucking reason other than to demonstrate "they add value" to the company. They will be really good with the slides and graphs and that's what is visible to management anyway. Not the framework you developed. Not the fact that your work powers millions of users. To them, you're just a replaceable worker bee. You are only needed when something breaks. Architectural decisions are made by anecdotal experiences by them and it's just stone, paper, scissors all over again. And when shit blows up right in their faces, it will not be about their judgement or lack thereof - it will be about how you didn't communicate about the issue properly. It will always be you who will be under the bus. And then the bunch of these clowns go and vibe code some stupid-ass product and sell it to gullible investors "wHo NeEds EnGiNeErs?" And then you read about how 1000s of users' information went public all over the internet post their launch...the very next day. /endrant

hnthrow0287345 7mo ago

>If you're in this position (relied upon, validated, powerless), you're not imagining it. And it's not a communication problem. "Just communicate better" is the advice equivalent of "have you tried not being depressed?" How about "have you tried unionizing?" Because the common theme here is lack of respect which is ultimately limited by your own bargaining power. That means it's only your individual value against the collective will of the company, and the individual is going to lose that fight more often than not (with very rare exceptions for extremely talented and smart people who won the life lottery who are smarter than everyone at a company).

raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
I hate seeing the idea that unionization is the answer. I grew up in South GA. Every single time that a corporation didn’t want to deal with a union, they just picked up and left.
- bdavisx 7mo ago
  And if everywhere they went would do the same thing, then they wouldn't be able to leave. Too bad people have been convinced that unions are bad.
  - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
    They left for Mexico… How hard do you think it is to get cheaper developers from LatAM?
    - Rapzid 7mo ago
      All the corporations that left Georgia over unions left for Mexico?
      - raw_anon_1111 7mo ago
        Not all of them M&M Mars left for Mexico, Firestone left for Alabama.

xorgun 7mo ago

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mikrl 7mo ago

>Ignoring it costs more later, but later is someone else's problem Given the standard advice to job hop every 1-3 years, and the intern/coop work pattern of semester long stints, is this not just a structural consequence? Do you gain competitive advantage as a company with longer tenures? Or shorter, even? Or is it an attitude problem, compare with old people planting shade trees: “Codebases flourish when senior devs write easily maintainable modules in whose extensions they will never work”

jonstewart 7mo ago

It’s a trust issue. There’s no one more of a PITA than a new team member who joins and starts questioning every little thing and demanding it be changed (the initial questioning is fine, so long as you accept “because” as a reason). OF COURSE any team that’s shipping software will have things that don’t make sense prima facie, because they’re accumulated tech debt or historical accident. Go beyond identifying all these problems towards solving them. Choose a small problem, where you won’t have to fight and argue, just a little dust bunny you can sweep out of the way. Do it again, and again, and again. This is how you build trust. As you build trust, it becomes easier to seek change. Additionally, you may also find that not all the little problems are worth solving, and what’s more interesting are the bigger problems around product-market fit, usability, and revenue.

sgarland 7mo ago
> Additionally, you may also find that not all the little problems are worth solving, and what’s more interesting are the bigger problems around product-market fit, usability, and revenue. TFA author (and me), and you have wildly different motivations. I don't know the author, but have said verbatim much of what they wrote, so I feel like I can speak on this. Beyond the fact that I recognize the company has to continue exist for me to be employed, none of those hold the slightest bit of interest for me. What motivates me are interesting technical challenges, full stop. As an example, recently at my job we had a forced AI-Only week, where everyone had to use Claude Code, zero manual coding. This was agony to me, because I could see it making mistakes that I could fix in seconds, but instead I had to try to patiently explain what I needed to be done, and then twiddle my thumbs while cheerful nonsense words danced around the screen. One of the things I produced from that was a series of linters to catch sub-optimal schema decisions in PRs. This was praised, but I got absolutely no joy from it, because I didn't write it. I have written linters that parse code using its AST before, and those did bring me joy, because it was an interesting technical challenge. Instead, all I did was (partially) solve a human challenge; to me, that's just frustration manifest, because in my mind if you don't know how to use a DB, you shouldn't be allowed to use the DB (in prod - you have to learn, obviously). I am fully aware that this is largely incompatible with most workplaces, and that my expectations are unrealistic, but that doesn't change the fact that it is how I feel.

james_marks 7mo ago

I find OP's communication style abrasive and off-putting, which tracks with them saying they've been coached on this, and found that advice lacking. Maybe it's still insufficient advice, but it hasn't worked for them at least in part because they haven't figured out how to apply it. From the post, I see low empathy and an air of superiority, (perhaps earned by genuinely being smarter than their peers-- doesn't make it more attractive). That's going to cause friction because a team is a _social_ construct.

armchairhacker 7mo ago
The first two sentences > Organizations don't optimize for correctness. They optimize for comfort ...do I need to say it?
- Rapzid 7mo ago
  > One number, never measured before. It doesn't change rules or add warnings, just makes the existing count visible. Stopped here. That pattern. I recognize this pattern from this AI "companion" my mate showed me over Christmas. It told a bunch of crazy stories using this "seize the day" vibe. It had an animated, anthropomorphized animal avatar. And that animal was an f'ing RACCOON.
  - Terretta 7mo ago
    LLMs originally learned these patterns from LinkedIn and the “$1000 for my newsletter” SEO pillions. Both accomplish a goal. Now that's become a loop. There is a delayed but direct association between RLHF results we see in LLM responses and volume of LinkedIn-spiration generated by humans disrupting ${trend.hireable} from coffee shops and couches. // from my couch above a coffee shop, disrupting cowork on HN. no avatars. no stories. just skills.md
- bossyTeacher 7mo ago
  You are absolutely right! - It is not X. It is Y. - X [negate action] Y. X [action] Z. The titles are giveaways too: Comfort Over Correctness, Consensus As Veto, The Nuance, Responsibility Without Authority, What Changes It. Has that bot taste. If you want I can compile a list of cases where this doesn't happen. Do you want me to do that?

instig007 7mo ago

> Ignoring it costs more later, but later is someone else's problem. and then the blame could be shifted to the future generations, it's their incompetence after all. > Correctness wins when the cost of ignoring it becomes impossible to miss: an outage, a customer complaint, data loss. Until then, comfort wins every time. Those who tolerate comfort-winning aren't engineers and shouldn't be admitted to stand close to engineering systems overall, especially outside the software industry.

MyHonestOpinon 7mo ago

That is why I think technical excellent people should be in charge. They are the ones able to see the trade offs. They can see who is actually doing great work. Think Linus, Guido, Larry Wall, or Carmack.

elevatortrim 7mo ago
Correct, but it becomes very hard to be in charge and stay technically excellent. The higher you are, the harder it is.

DrScientist 7mo ago

> Authority matching responsibility. That's the only fix I've seen work. So, if I understood correctly, complaining that his architectural advice for other teams/people was constantly ignored, and his solution is the same thing he was complaining about. ie The teams he was advising also thought authority should match responsibility - and they did want they wanted and ignored him?

tofukant 7mo ago

Those short sentences make it seem like it was written by ai, so jarring to read.

quotemstr 7mo ago
I hate AI writing as much as anyone, but cringe is orthogonal to correctness.

wiseowise 7mo ago

> The gap between responsibility and authority is where burnout lives. Insert fire writing gif here.

deleted 7mo ago
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cess11 7mo ago

I suspect the author has little to no experience running a commercial organisation. Business outcome comes first, and it is only rarely aligned with technical excellence. Closing a deal might involve making an unreasonable promise, and implementing it might not require more than an ugly hack, so you go with the ugly hack and make the money. Comfort could be important but many people don't perform well when comfortable, so the organisation has to add some degree of confusion and pressure to keep them at a productive equilibrium where they don't fall into either apathy or burst into flames. And yes, the boss decides, not because they are especially accountable or responsible, but because the power comes from ownership. In some organisations this is veiled and workers get a say most of the time, but in a pinch it'll be the higher-ups that actually have that power.

UK-Al05 7mo ago
Normally when you give an unreasonable promise, or have to implement ugly hack then it is known about and explicit that is what is happening. The problems come when you make a unreasonable promise, but no one knows that.

narag 7mo ago

That's exactly what happens in some organizations. I couldn't believe it the first time I saw it, but it is what it is. And the reason is some bosses are addict to consensus. Infuriating but there's really no other option than shrugging off the problems, waiting for staff changes or looking for another job.

pverheggen 7mo ago

OP's dismissiveness of soft skills is a big red flag. Unless you're a solo dev, software development is a social activity, and understanding the social dynamics is key to effecting change. Your efforts to improve quality could be vetoed by your coworkers for a variety of reasons: they don't care, they don't trust your judgement, they see other things as a higher priority... the list goes on and on. Some of these things can't be changed by you, but some can, and that's where the soft skills come into play.

tripledry 7mo ago
Side note, this is why I'm not that worried even if AI becomes even better at writing code. The only times I've spent "too long" on features, are times where I basically had an empty ticket. I need to find the right people to talk with, figure out requirements, iterate on changing requirements etc. That's only marginally sped up even if you could generate the code with a click of a button. This was somehow related to the "social activity" part :D
- asa400 7mo ago
  100%. The thing I'm currently working on has been a pain probably 80% because the work was underspecified and didn't take a bunch of legacy concerns into account and probably 20% because of nature of the code itself. If it was better specified I'd be done already, but instead I've had to go back and forth with multiple people multiple times about what they actually wanted, and what legacy stuff is worth fixing and not, and how to coordinate some dependent changes. Most of this work has been the oft-derided "soft skills" that I keep hearing software engineers don't need.
avazhi 7mo ago
There is no OP. It’s ai slop.
wiseowise 7mo ago
Where did they dismiss soft skills? The point is that every improvement is met with "just get better soft skills bro" dismissal, which in reality has nothing to do with soft skills. I've met this firsthand.

deleted 7mo ago

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leothecool 7mo ago

Leadership is not the same thing as management. Maybe some day the OP will get training data to add that concept to its latent vector space.

tpoacher 7mo ago

> Nobody disagrees with the technical argument That's a very strong foundational claim right at the start. And in my experience, a completely false one. Which makes the whole argument that follows it completely unsound. Also, the author seems to treat the terms "consensus" and "buy-in" as synonymous. They're not, and this distinction can make a huge difference in terms of healthy teams can operate. Patrick Lencioni covers this well in his classic book, "Five Dysfunctions of a Team".

sgarland 7mo ago
> Also, the author seems to treat the terms "consensus" and "buy-in" as synonymous. Can you explain more? I'm not familiar with that distinction, nor that book. EDIT: I asked ChatGPT, and it came up with this [0]. Please let me know if it's accurate (I don't necessarily dislike LLMs, I just think they're wildly oversold, and also value human input). 0: https://chatgpt.com/share/69a05ce2-95e4-8006-ae56-bd514728949b https://chatgpt.com/share/69a05ce2-95e4-8006-ae56-bd51472894...
- tpoacher 7mo ago
  Mr Chat more or less covers it correctly. If my memory serves correctly, in the book there's a bit more emphasis and nuance on the point that, for buy-in to exist in the first place, all team members who have a strong opinion prior to a decision, need to feel that they've been given an opportunity to give their opinion, their opinion has been heard, and its merits and demerits weighed earnestly against all other options on the table, before a decision has been made by the team (or in the case of a 'stalemate', by the ultimate decision-maker), and that there is a clear rationale for going with the final decision and rejecting all others. The rationale may well acknowledge the risk from not following other opinions, but cite other operational reasons for the decision. A healthy team then should proceed as if this was a team decision that they all commit to. But consensus isn't required, only buy-in. In a healthy team, all members should trust each other (in that, they are all working towards a common purpose), and not fear "creative conflict". This enables them to share their opinions in the first place, and the buy-in discussion helps everyone in the team to feel accountable for the joint decision, as well as hold each other accountable in a healthy way. If this doesn't happen, the usual outcome is that decisions are made, but people feel "I didn't agree with this decision and nobody asked me, so I won't really engage with it". I really do recommend the book. It's a very light read, presented as a story (with a final chapter examining the concepts a bit more theoretically), with excellent insights. You can probably find it online for free if you must, but it's a good book to have on any bookshelf.

deleted 7mo ago

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didgeoridoo 7mo ago

What in the House of Leaves is this website

yusyusyus 7mo ago

lol ive seen the pathological variant of this pattern and it is... something the hell else. some situations are just fundamentally broken.

Watson4321 7mo ago

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