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Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

The large companies I’ve worked at (including FAANG) seemed to thrive on kudos via performative actions. Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive while the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal. Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team. Anyone else notice this? Not sure if there’s a word for it, but it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers

myth_drannon 4mo ago
Yeah, there is a famous book on that called "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber
rvrs 4mo ago
Work is performance art
ismailmaj 4mo ago
In my experience a lot of companies try really hard to be data oriented and try to find objective metrics for impact, sometimes it’s good, often it’s bad. Like LOC count, PR count, time in meetings or time spent at the office. Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.
- doctorpangloss 4mo ago
  on the flip side, try to get an open source maintainer to define what the criteria are for merging a pull request, or what a bug report needs in order to be fixed. they all say one thing and it is always another. it feels like pulling your hair out.
  - junior44660 4mo ago
    You forgot the gigachad gif.
    - doctorpangloss 4mo ago
      "Doesn't merge PRs." "Doesn't fix issues." "1m downloads."
elric 4mo ago
> Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team. Depending on the manager and on the team, 1:1s with people can be very valuable for all involved.
CalRobert 4mo ago
"including FAANG" What would make them less vulnerable to this?
- moralestapia 4mo ago
  I'd say they have people who have been doing software for as long as 30 years, and also all the human resources and billions of dollars to fix this problem if it was something that could be fixed with human resources and money. And still ... there's a lot of this.
dboreham 4mo ago
I think Elon noticed it.
- Jeremy1026 4mo ago
  I think Elon pretended to notice it. Instead of taking his time and doing it right, he was performative in his own actions causing unnecessary problems. In doing so got rid of the important pieces as well as the bloat.
  - Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
    It is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?
    - Jeremy1026 4mo ago
      You must have forgotten about how bad Twitter was after the takeover/purge. December 2022 - https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fine https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fi... February 2023 - https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cost-cutting-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cos... March 2023 - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286
      - boxed 4mo ago
        And yet, it's up NOW.
        Jeremy1026 4mo ago
        It's obviously hard to say how accurate these numbers[1] are, but it looks like Twitter has doubled their workforce from its lowest following their mass layoffs. It might be stable again now because they hired the workforce required to actually keep it running. [1] https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-employees/ https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-employees/
jameskilton 4mo ago
After a certain size, one of my favorite Civilization quotes kicks in: "The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.
- cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
  Agreed, but the small-company-doing-meaningful-work is also hard to find though. Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders.
- sethjgore 4mo ago
  ironically i posted the exact same quote before seeing your post. I've found that whatever work that can be counted as meaningful often also signifies a certain amount of agency that does not exist in a larger bureaucratic system.
moffers 4mo ago
I don’t know that this is something specific to workplaces. I think anywhere you have a hierarchy and incentives you’ll see people perform to those incentives. But, I am not a behavioral psychologist, so maybe there is something special to “corporations”. It could be that corporations have a lot more incentive to perform for.
prepend 4mo ago
It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked on projects with 50 programmers and it seemed many did nothing and a few did negative work. We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved. He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done. I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative. That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.” I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.
- OutOfHere 4mo ago
  There's that, and then there's the other kind of negative work, whereby a rockstar engineer develops something that works but only he understands, completely failing to document it well. When this engineer leaves, the project is unmaintainable by virtue of being incomprehensible. In both cases, the management has been clueless.
  - prepend 4mo ago
    Good point. There’s lots of kinds of negative work. I was thinking more of people burning stuff down. There’s also people burning the furniture for immediate warmth. And there’s people you mention who are doing things that look good but have time bombs inside them.
- antonymoose 4mo ago
  I work almost exclusively in small (<100 employees) firms, usually no more than 20 developers, and it’s a complete mix here too. One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.
phyzix5761 4mo ago
Price's Law says that the square root of the total number of items or participants contributes to at least half of the results[0]. I've found this to be true in almost everything in life, including work and business. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law
- 2b3a51 4mo ago
  Thanks for posting that, I'd never heard of it. I thought of n(n-1)/2 and coordination issues initially but nah.
- bicepjai 4mo ago
  That’s the first time I have heard this one. Feels something like Pareto principle
swiftcoder 4mo ago
That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done. Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.
- analog31 4mo ago
  This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity. I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.
  - swiftcoder 4mo ago
    > Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.
cjbgkagh 4mo ago
What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic. The Iron Law or Bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)
- ryandvm 4mo ago
  Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever. Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.
  - cjbgkagh 4mo ago
    In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.
  - order-matters 4mo ago
    Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason. I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs. If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.
quadrifoliate 4mo ago
> Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent. I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.
- wqaatwt 4mo ago
  It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.
  - bluGill 4mo ago
    Many are not doing anything obviously meaningful and useful. However that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful or useful, only that you don't know.
    - pixl97 4mo ago
      When an organization reaches a certain size it starts behaving more like an insect colony than individuals at most levels. There is a lot of exploration that occurs, much of it is unfruitful, yet still enough future resources are discovered for it to continue and expand.
    - dilyevsky 4mo ago
      Alternative ways of working
cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
This was my experience mostly in my 10 years at Google at a certain level. But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it. Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cautious development cycle where multiple levels of review covered everything. OWNERS, "readability", very uptight code review. And in order to survive in this environment you had to have a pile of code reviews all running concurrently because making progress on any single one could take days and days to get through review. But that was kind of the point because pushing the wrong thing and breaking the money printing machine is far worse than moving slow. But IMHO this didn't scale past 30k, 40k engineers. And inside Google, the culture shifted from one that was SWE/SRE driven to one that was PM driven. And the perf/promo culture for them had really perverse incentives. Also I have a theory about Google in particular -- its founders and all its initial strong hires all came from academia not industry. And so its internal culture became biased towards a "publish or perish" structure, and "perf" performance reviews honestly looked more like a thesis defense committee for someone's masters/PHD than anything I'd encountered in the software industry before.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  What did you see as the perverse incentives for the PMs there? Schedule optimization like cutting out testing? Cost cutting by under-hiring?
  - cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
    My perspective is that promotion especially for PMs (and SWEs to some extent) involves pushing novelty / "demonstrating impact". IMHO this in large part responsible for Google's ADHD around project cancellations/replacements. Not restricted to PMs but it is especially pernicious when product direction gets pushed this way. Cost cutting and underhiring were never a problem while I Was there. More the opposite. They overhired and then there was no good throughput on projects because every chef was in the kitchen at once. If I recall, the turndown on e.g. Google Reader was more about finding it difficult to get SWEs who wanted to work on it. I think it would have been increasingly difficult to survive the performance review cycle if you were stuck on a "backwater" project like that.
OutOfHere 4mo ago
There is something to be said for having your own startup and keeping it lean, implying that everyone on the payroll must be a cofounder. It's a prerequisite for but not a guarantee of staying mission focused.
itsalwaysgood 4mo ago
There is always some form of social loafing going on in any large group of people doing work. "The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases." There is evidence of this in simple tug of war games. But I think there is also truth in realizing work is mostly performative: the pareto principle seems to apply. 20% of the workforce sustains the other 80%. That's purely anecdotal, I doubt the numbers align that way. But it does always seem there are a few all-stars carrying others.
slibhb 4mo ago
Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work. This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.
- creshal 4mo ago
  > as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated. Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?
  - Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
    If that one person is the CEO or owner then yes, haha.
  - slibhb 4mo ago
    No, but would you want this? People who contribute more should be paid more, but mapping compensation to contribution exactly isn't easy and comes with downsides.
  - 4lx87 4mo ago
    No, those are the shareholders who don’t produce anything.
    - eudamoniac 4mo ago
      You think stock dividends pay out 4x the amount of money that the company pays for salaries?
- loneboat 4mo ago
  Round your "~15%" up to 20%, and you've just discovered the Pareto Princlple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle, aka "The 80/20 rule".
ipnon 4mo ago
A company is like a bridge. The job of a bridge is to support the weight of what crosses it. But if a particular deck or arch or beam or joint or bearing fails to do its own job, the bridge can fail and will catastrophically. Perhaps some beams hold more weights than others, but can any bridge be composed entirely of decks or entirely of arches or entirely of beams? Perhaps, but we do not see many of them. It is always possible to innovate in the design of bridges, but if most of the great bridges in the world all have a mix of decks and arches and beams and joints and bearings, instead of simply being composed of solely beams or solely joints, then we might begin to wonder if this composition is not accidental to the proper functioning of a great bridge, but essential to it, even if we are not particularly interested in or proficient in the Art of Being Another Part of the Whole.
jgbuddy 4mo ago
Yes
techdmn 4mo ago
Another way of thinking about this, is by thinking about who defines what is productive or what produces value. I tend to be a little old fashioned, I think that doing the right thing for customers produces value. (That's what my self-worth is based on anyway.) For other people, it's doing the thing that gets them the next raise or promotion. Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?
melozo 4mo ago
I worked at Amazon and I do think that more than anything we were overhired with little meaningful work. A lot of compliance goal chasing. Not that it’s performative to the top brass, but the work was very little and not usually very technical.
dormento 4mo ago
> Anyone else notice this? This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc. Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.
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bschmidt600 4mo ago
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Cheese48923846 4mo ago
Yes, everyone in the know knows it. That flaw is the edge start ups have. Fat, red tape, and bureaucracy is cut. Replaced with a new set of problems of course. Like no money. And if the startup is successful it will eventually morph into a big fat corporate culture. The circle of life.
mercutio2 4mo ago
The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild. If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide. But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?
- DanHulton 4mo ago
  Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week. The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing. All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.
  - JohnMakin 4mo ago
    Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you? A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.
    - solumos 4mo ago
      Yeah, if blockers are coming out in 1-on-1 meetings, that’s a really bad sign
FinnLobsien 4mo ago
I think this dynamic is not specific to SWE and as old as time. As organizations grow, so does the aspect of work that's more "seeing and being seen", and rightfully so. There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy. But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged. That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business. But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists. But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.
- osigurdson 4mo ago
  It doesn't help shareholders or customers in any way however so we should not celebrate it or even simply accept that this is "the way things are". It is an error to be corrected.
  - FinnLobsien 4mo ago
    Yes, agreed. But it's not a binary. It's not like you can either wrestle with hard engineering problems until an eventual breakthrough or exclusively pretend to be working. Sure, on one extreme is the purely value-extractive person whose only work product is calling recurring meetings to talk about how great things are going (while having contributed little). In that case, it's an error to be corrected. But there are different types of useful work. Let's use engineering as an example. You could build a set of new filter options on in-product analytics that customers have been asking for. Assuming this doesn't require net-new data sources or whatnot, this is usually not a complex engineering challenge, but will be loved by customers. Then you have types who refactor an obscure caching function to reduce its memory use 15% when performance wasn't an issue, but it was a fun engineering puzzle that made the code more elegant. Clearly both create value, but one will be more useful to customers, although it's not as fun to solve. My point isn't that we should treat corporate bureaucracy, performative work, and freeloading as "the way things are" (they're toxic to any work culture). I'm saying that "deeper engineering challenge" doesn't equal "more important work". Also, I don't necessarily like this! Deep problem-solving and focused work on tricky challenges are the most fulfilling things to me and to most people I know. But this is the dynamic we're in. (and yes you can argue that having the most efficient code possible prevents future performance issues and whatnot and is thus long-term more valuable than analytics options, but at least in the startup world, limited resources mean you tend to solve things when they become problems, not because they could one day become problems)
Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
All corporate jobs are performative, in the sense that there are many useless rituals one has to observe merely for appearances' sake and not because it benefits the company or accomplishes the work.
fasterik 4mo ago
This is one of the main reasons why I left the corporate software world. I love programming too much to spend my life climbing that ladder. I'm fortunate enough not to have to work right now, but if I ever go back to an organization I'm going to be very picky about finding one where the leaders are themselves technical contributors and they hold the team to a high standard.
sublinear 4mo ago
After some more experience at various types of workplaces, you'll discover that this hyperfocus on "productivity" is a mind virus trying to destroy all stability and long term value. Trying to be a rockstar every day is the fastest way to burning out and making bad decisions. It ensures that you will be left holding the bag. How is that not more performative, if it's in the name?
adithyaharish 4mo ago
> Anyone else notice this? This is not just the big MNCs but this is happening throughout all organisation irrespecitive of SWE or not. I know its really heartbreaking and there is still not a KPI to measure productivity/performance in a right way? Did anybody come across any intressting KPI they were measured against?
Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
The dynamic I saw at a FAANG-adjacent company when I worked there was wild between the contractors and FTEs. If an FTE could get one or two contractors reporting to them, they'd hand over all the work, put their feet up and take it easy, make fun of the contractors, and then if there were any good results jump in to take credit for those at meetings with upper management which the contractors were not invited to. So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.
zug_zug 4mo ago
I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies. At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co. </rant> IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.
- paradox460 4mo ago
  Lean, fast, agile (not in that way, in the real definition of the word) start ups hiring people who are fleeing a FAANG, only to have those FAANGers implement exactly what they left will always seem strange to me Saw it happen at a company I worked at. Company had flat org structure that took it very far, and worked well. Leadership rolled over, bunch of new manager blood came in, from FAANG, talked about how nice our systems were, and then proceeded to upset the applecart by implementing all the level systems and such, in such a way that the engineers who had been at the company before were never above an L4, and all the "staff" and "platform" were new blood. They then did one or two token promotions, and were astonished when half the legacy seniors quit within the year
strken 4mo ago
The one time I worked at a large corporate, my time was split between failing to find useful projects that I was allowed to work on, and failing to deliver much on the useless projects I was given because I didn't understand that it would e.g. take six weeks and two review meetings to provision an extra half a terabyte of storage on a db cluster. I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.
- al_borland 4mo ago
  Sometimes teams get a req to hire someone and it’s use it or lose it. They’d rather get someone in the seat that will hopefully be useful at some point, and simply retain or grow the team size, than to give it up and be short staffed down the road.
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polotics 4mo ago
Jeff Bezos covered these grounds well here already, with his mandate on how meetings must run, and about "day one". Check him out. So sad that with the right incentive structure his work would be of immense value to society, instead of his current Wall-E prologue side quest.
cadamsdotcom 4mo ago
Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them? If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see. Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it. Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive. There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dailydev https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail... Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.
- gwbas1c 4mo ago
  > Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them? > If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see. I've been involved in a few projects where the value appeared clear at the beginning, but by the end there was little value. In one case the project failed due to incompetence and mismanagement: Basically, the project dragged on and on until it missed its market window. (What stinks is it was basically a port of a Visual Basic sales tool to a more modern v2.) In another case I was hired into a machine learning project in a company where everyone spent a lot of time justifying their jobs. The project ultimately didn't "improve" over the non-machine-learning approach, and devolved into a "solution in search of a problem". --- As far as why the company held onto the people involved? (I left after both projects.) That's harder to explain, but I like to think of an analogy to a king holding on to a standing army: It's there when you need it, and your soldiers aren't helping the rival kingdom. A different way to say it: One of the downsides to working in a large company is that a lot of the people there are "warm butts on seats." The company could function without them. Many of the people you work with have competence issues. You're probably a "warm butt on a seat" too, and may have some competence issues. That's why I like working for smaller companies: they can't afford to be fat.
Henchman21 4mo ago
You are so naive you don’t get it yet? All of “adult” life is performative . Life is a game, a performance, a little play you put on for the benefit of all. Consider this: if management thinks something is impressive, well that makes it impressive. Managers, by definition, manage people, and having 1:1 meetings helps with that. Are you supposing managers also make the same exact effort and contribution as ICs? Would they still be managers? Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?
- Henchman21 4mo ago
  To add: This entire post rubs me so wrong. It just feels so naive, so foolish. I feel I’ve been baited into anger.
  - uncivilized 4mo ago
    You really think the work you do matters and is not performative? Meta, OpenAI, etc. could disappear overnight and I think most people would say good riddance (apart from those needing jobs).
    - Henchman21 4mo ago
      I do not think that. I mistakenly responded to myself -- so you're responding to my own echo. :) My personal thoughts on the matter are: we should burn this society to the ground and begin anew. Life will grow from the ashes of the Capitalists.
- hnthrow10282910 4mo ago
  This response is naive.
- salemh 4mo ago
  [dead]
- sqquima 4mo ago
  I don't think it's either black or white. That said, I wanted to highlight that some adults do have some neurodivergence, which, in a way, makes them a bit naive and unable to navigate the game you mention. There is no need to be condescending.
aloe_falsa 4mo ago
I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money. YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.
- nicoburns 4mo ago
  In my experience, actual producing impact/value and being able to demonstrate that you've produced impact/value are pretty loosely coupled to each, and it is often possible to do one without the other (in both directions). And time spent on one often directly competes with time spent on another. I'd imagine it's the people who are better at "demonstrating value" than actually producing it that are the target of the original post.
- deleted 4mo ago
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closeparen 4mo ago
Pretty much anything coming out of middle management or "org leadership" is performative. Line managers and their reports are generally actually building products and keeping the lights on.
arjie 4mo ago
There’s quite a bit of this but the big orgs have created a machine where they can capture (1+x) times the value of what they pay someone. If you’ve made such a machine, the best way to make more money is to put as much input into the machine as possible. And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking. Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”
zerobees 4mo ago
It is a property of any large bureaucracy that a large proportion of the bureaucracy exists to serve itself. And it's not BS, it's a natural consequence of growth. Imagine you start in the mode of "moving fast and breaking stuff". Eventually, you break enough stuff that someone says "enough". So you develop some launch standards and guidelines. Then hire a team to enforce them. Then someone to build a launch tool. Then you realize you also need to manage legal risks, have standardized UIs, make sure that production services have backups and redundancy, and all of sudden, you have ten review processes. And then, it gets so difficult to navigate the process that teams hire PMs just to coordinate. And on, and on. And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off. I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?
- junior44660 4mo ago
  > Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone? 1. that the existence of such very "chill" roles often leads to hiring of more mediocre people and diminishes the value of working at such a company (at least psychologically) 2. That little gets done / built with all these people and resources, which is seen as a waste of potential. 3. That bureaucracy itself may be more exhausting than doing real work.
NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo ago
The "true work" is sporadic. A business will need an engineer to work hard for long hours for a few weeks, then they won't need him at all for weeks more except to be on hand if something goes wrong. Then maybe some more work, and even longer lulls. But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse). Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).
junior44660 4mo ago
> the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal Consider yourself lucky. This part is missing in some places.
thelittlenag 4mo ago
The only place where the work I did was performative was government contracting. Not technically waste, but certainly useless.
wenbin 4mo ago
It’s basically bullshit jobs — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs The compensation can be high, but the psychological cost is real. Over time, that tradeoff isn’t always worth it: someone might earn more in the short term, yet pay for it with chronic stress, declining mental health, and even a shorter lifespan compared to a lower-paid role that’s more meaningful and less draining.
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tamimio 4mo ago
The reason why I distant myself from software even before AI is because of all the shenanigans the software people do, primarily silicon valley but it echoes quickly beyond that where other companies try to copy cat it. It feels like a cult, with all sort of weird rituals, if you are an individualist it’s hard to maintain it there.
nitwit005 4mo ago
You're both criticizing management for not knowing who's doing important work, and also for spending time talking to engineers to understand what's going on. Most solutions to understand what's going on, in detail, are naturally going to be quite time consuming.
meowspace 4mo ago
part of the universal scalability law: the cost of coherence scales quadratically as workers are added. everything else is downstream of that
yes_man 4mo ago
You can get incredible value out of 1-on-1s with capable managers. Insight about where the organization and product is going that you would otherwise miss, you’ll get to rubber duck about your high-level problems with someone who understands them, and its your time to influence decision making. But it does require a capable and motivated manager and an organization that gives the manager actual agency
devmor 4mo ago
The stuff you think is performative and useless is most likely the consequence of letting a couple "all stars" do what they want for years.
drudolph914 4mo ago
there is a lot to pull apart here there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more positive tone, make the information concise in a bottom-line up-front style, use a deeper voice (told to me by my wife and women colleagues), and pace the information in a way that lets people ask follow up questions iff needed. no one should _have_ to do all this, but it does change people's perception of how competent you are. I've seen both sides of this coin - amazing engineers that get no promo because they can't communicate, and mediocre engineers that get promoted quickly due to their ability to communicate. I'd almost even argue that this is how should be - as you climb the corporate ladder, communication becomes a lot more important than technical skills and ability to your point about 1:1s: if you're not getting anything out of your 1:1s, that's a skill issue and is on you IMHO. even when I had bad managers, I was able to effectively communicate my needs, goals, updates, thoughts, as well as give feedback back; in doing so, I've been able to turn horrible manager-team dynamics into a positive experiences. and I'd always argue it came down to the fact that the people perceive you directly correlates with how serious they'll take your word at the same time, I can empathize with the idea that some middle managers are just bodies that get in the way - everyone's had their fair share of that. but if you're actually good at your job and communicating , you should almost always be able to get around them when it's really necessary EDIT: and this is coming from a person who is and will always want to stay as an IC engineer
- hnthrow10282910 4mo ago
  Thanks. This was a valuable read for me
HoldOnAMinute 4mo ago
Promo-driven culture. Engineers and managers optimize for promotable work.
w10-1 4mo ago
TBH, large companies deliver tuned, complex products for long-term use by customers. The problem is not producing them, but getting it right all the time, because development costs are a tiny percentage of reliance costs by the customer. Most of what you call performative is likely real, but even if it were purely performative, it would surface people who were not on board and possibly unreliable. Similarly, a 1:1 with no apparent content could serve its purpose of looking you in the eye to see if you're of sound mind. I think your concern is better framed as whether people are pulling their weight. The solution for that is to make them deliver something hard on their own every so often, and cycling people through teams to avoid free riders.
goodmattg 4mo ago
You can choose to be as charitable as you want with your lense on this. Incentives within all organizations lead to a certain class of worker taking over. From the "getting things done" perspective I like the lense of insurgents vs. gatekeepers from this interview: https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transcript-mike-solana https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transc...
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deanCommie 4mo ago
like with most things, these things are both overrated and underrated. are there performative jobs|tasks|employees|cultures? yes. are most of the things that engineers think are performative and useless actually so? nope. some examples: * managers managing upward - feels useless - is actually the most impactful bang-for-buck for managers to give their teams space to operate without micromanaging * sales and marketing. The best software in the world won't get known, bought, or used, without good sales/marketing. There is no meritocracy on quality. Almost no business succeeds through technical credibility alone. * 1on1s. They may not add any value to you, but 1) you'd miss them when they're gone, 2) i don't know how else you expect managers to stay on top of employee concerns - just know "inately"? 3) they may matter A LOT for your teammates, and them being happy means your team will be happy There are other things like that.
channel_t 4mo ago
Yes, very much so, although I've come believe that the corporate jobs outside of SWE might be even more performative. It also seems like something that has become way worse since the late 2010s, in tech specifically at least.
- asdff 4mo ago
  Yeah it exists all over. Talk to your friends who were business majors in school what they are doing now. It is shocking what some of them actually do day in day out and they know full well it's bullshit jobs sort of stuff that just pays the bills.
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lowbloodsugar 4mo ago
Depends on where you are within those companies. These companies are not monocultures.
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hdndjsbbs 4mo ago
Being the rockstar doing all the technical work can also be performative. I'm currently working on a CTO team that is supposed to "disrupt" a big org. There's a lot of emphasis on demoing and sketching things out a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's some merit to it but a lot of it is kayfabe. Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.
- AndyNemmity 4mo ago
  Kayfabe is the best way to describe it.
  - qorrect 4mo ago
    New word for me, I love it.
fnoef 4mo ago
When I was working in a small company (3-4 devs), we used to build stuff that clients needed. We built billing systems, JS widgets (back when widgets were a thing), analytics, and full on CRM. As long as it helped our customers. We ran all this on VPSs. When I joined big tech, I understood that most of work is going around and “proposing” solutions or “solving inter team blockers”. People who did the actual job, got very little recognition. People who did peacocking were promoted. At that time I realized how fucked up corporate is.
theodpHN 4mo ago
“The Work Is Mysterious And Important.” - Mark S. To Helly (Severance, AppleTV) https://www.thegamer.com/severance-most-memorable-quotes/ https://www.thegamer.com/severance-most-memorable-quotes/
chinabison 4mo ago
As a (former) team-lead and engineering manager (now back to working as an IC), I can say, to paraphrase Edward Gibbon, that management is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions in which it is almost superfluous.
59nadir 4mo ago
Yes, and being completely sincere here: This is why most big companies have incredibly low velocity and do almost nothing of any actual value, and seem to make almost no progress at all. The only parts of these companies that actually do real work at any acceptable rate are skunkworks, and they are created precisely because the rest of the company's structure doesn't actually function for getting anything done.
atleastoptimal 4mo ago
Those companies still make money though. I think there are two levels to an organization 1. The level of "this is an arrangement of labor/capital in order to produce money" and 2. This is an enterprise where thousands of people spend 1/3 of their time and takes up a huge mental space, so they arrange it in a way that affirms their internal sense of purpose Organizations, especially large corporations which have passed a few "too big to fail barriers" gradually become a "purpose factory" where their product partially becomes imbuing their higher level employees a sense of importance and justification for spending years there.
replwoacause 4mo ago
Scrum and agile are performative and most 1:1s are a waste of time, they are just a way to stay in people's good graces and keep up appearances.
AJRF 4mo ago
Yeah, this is 100% the case - while not a FAANG I worked at a moderately large tech company in the UK and it was astonishing how slow everything moved, but people were always getting promoted. I eventually left because every project took about 10x the effort it should have. The stock price went down 20% during the time I was there, and I could see why - it took months to ship a tiny button. I work with a lot of ex-FAANG now and they haven't had much of a chance to do impactful things. I've heard a lot of "I was responsible for the reporting function on this dashboard that's 10 clicks deep on Google Play" I do think Layoffs, while obviously very sad for those involved, were needed.
BurningFrog 4mo ago
This is why I spent most of my career in startups. I did work at big companies twice for a few years, and it strongly reinforced that decision. Startup life has it's own problems. Primarily that the company may cease to exist at any time. it's not for everyone, but I adapted after my first big layoff.
wombat-man 4mo ago
I guess it depends on the company and the project. If you really think your work or your project isn't useful to the company, or it feels performative, maybe you should try to hop to another project or company.
YZF 4mo ago
Large companies are incredibly unproductive and inefficient. That said the unevenness of contribution isn't strictly a large company phenomena. Small companies have the same uneven distribution. I've worked at two startups with about 4 people total and people were not equally productive. That said, this is not necessarily the goal and productivity is also very hard to measure. It's doubly hard to measure across different types of work. One person can code up a greenfield back-end for something in 3 days while another can spend a week fixing some elusive infrastructure problem. Not everyone is as good at everything. So we do have engineers who truly are much better than average. And in large companies most are average. But that is just one factor here. 1:1's can add value or they can not add value. Large companies can't just be flat so someone needs to manage people. A good manager adds value, a bad manager might subtract value, but that's orthogonal. Is it demoralizing to work for a big and inefficient company? Sure. Is it more demoralizing for people who are motivated to get things done and are good at it? I think so. Go start your own company?
brailsafe 4mo ago
Imo it's a symptom and the cause of the entire incentive structure of a hierarchical company; success in that system is defined as doing exactly what one layer above you expects, no matter how rational or connected to output it is. Most people just accept the smaller ways this manifests as a fact of life because it's easy and it's how they get rewarded. For example, generally you'll be fired if you're not on time, regardless of whether "on time" is meaningful or connected to any real constraint. If there isn't a hard deadline, someone will pick an arbitrary one and decide that's what they need to be mad about that week. It could be that you just weren't on Slack at the moment they said "hey". If it's not immediate, they'll note it down and weaponize it later. There's seemingly always someone like this in charge and there are only limited, temporary, or lucky ways around it. If it's not specifically time, it's some other aspect of visibility that's never sufficient. Controlling people and organizations are built on an insidious lack of trust and the pursuit of measurability. This is why, imho, it's rarely worth doing more than the bare minimum, because you need 100x positive extra credits to compensate for even one petty mistake. Not being available in the middle of the night to fix a bug in the system gets you a negative mark in a performance review, while staying late to fix the bug gets you 0.01 positive marks.
quickthoughts 4mo ago
Are most corporations preformative? (yes)
BrenBarn 4mo ago
Most corporate jobs are performative, period.
strfry 4mo ago
You can analyze a company in different ways, like as a machine or organism. All images are valid, but some are more appropriate. If you fixate on one, like treating an organization as a machine of interlocking parts with defined purposes, then you may be overly surprised that people aren't adding value and start to expect either some deeper purpose or a "correction": imminent layoffs. If you try to understand large businesses as a kind of welfare system to keep the middle class satiated, then the behavior of your boss and coworkers makes sense. They're doing an acceptable amount of work to justify their salaries. Instead of being demoralized, shouldn't you be happy that you have a nice financial buffer, smart coworkers, and the choice to either effect change internally or compartmentalize work and create a more meaningful life outside of it? I'm not saying you should keep working there, but if you want to play hardball you can always step up or out.
danielsju6 4mo ago
Playing the game of nines, 99.9995% uptime, on-call rotations, and retaining all those certifications requires a lot of excess capacity. They're filling space until shit hits the fan. Might as well let them cosplay in the meantime.
wryoak 4mo ago
> it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers Why is the meaning of your own life derived from your perception of the lives of others? Or rather, why is it that when you judge others’ lives as inauthentic you find your own to be so too?
danudey 4mo ago
I watched (most of) this video on YouTube, an interview with a former VP at Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc The TL;DR about promotions seems to be that: 1. There are guidelines on what you need to do to reach each level 2. Your direct supervisor will work with you on how they can game the system to get you the promotion For example, they might propose a re-org that will take a product or feature (and therefore some direct reports) from another team and put them on your team so that you have enough direct reports to qualify for getting the promotion you want. They pitch that re-org to other people to get buy-in, either by being straight ("I want this so that my direct report can get promoted") or by justifying it business-wise ("bringing this feature over to our team will reduce overhead by allowing these two groups to communicate more directly"). In some cases, you just bring them over for six months until the promotion goes through and then you give them back; in others, you just cannibalize that team for good. In other words, it's a zero-sum game where you're taking away the ability for other teams to accomplish their goals so that someone can reach an arbitrary milestone for promotion that their team's current situation doesn't allow for. I was talking to a CEO of a small/mid-sized startup recently who was interviewing for an exec position and someone from Facebook was intervewing; CEO asked directly "why are you applying for this position? We can't pay anything remotely close to what you're getting at Facebook, surely you know that". His reply was that working at Facebook was so toxic, so stressful, that he just couldn't do it anymore. He was willing to cut his pay by 50-75% just to not have to deal with the constant toxic back-and-forth necessary to get anything done there (and/or to keep your job in the first place). People ask why I don't go apply for Google or Facebook or Amazon; part of it is that I don't know that my experience would get me in the door, to be honest, but part of it is also that working at those places sounds so stressful and toxic that the pay isn't worth it, at least not at my age.
- sqquima 4mo ago
  These companies do some marvelous engineering work, but it seems that the engineering skills get you in, while the political skills get you through performance reviews. There should be a FAANG-like acronym that encompasses great companies that aren't toxic.
kittikitti 4mo ago
I don't love this idea that software engineering is performative. It's become so prevalent that people instantly think my role is too. It's rather frustrating when you can point to dollar amounts related to the work you've been doing at corporate and then people ask if you do anything there. If you feel this way in your team, perhaps you can engage those who you think are being performative instead of criticize your own coworkers publicly. It's become so bad that people don't realize what's not performative. Also, just because I make things look easy or do things quickly, doesn't mean I didn't do anything at all. I much prefer the label "coder" than software engineer because of this. It signals that the label isn't doing the heavy lifting.
valbaca 4mo ago
Please read the book "Bullshit Jobs" Most SWEs are a mix of Duct tapers and Box tickers, and their managers are Taskmasters.
overfeed 4mo ago
ITT: "What is "coordination", and why is it bullshit?" The lack of humility among tech folk is astounding. Why dont you ask yourself why the 10x'ers/doers/high-impact people aren't setting up their 3-trillion dollar company if they are so darn effective by themselves? Perhaps becaus they'll need the "bureaucracy" to interface woth the rest of the world to get things like "money" and "contracts" and deal with the legal system...as well as ensuring their work is aligned and cohesive.
siren2026 4mo ago
It has always been super difficult in tech to know who does what exactly. You can look at PRs or # LoC but we all know they are not very representative. Plenty of people have realized that and played the visibility/politics game. Especially in the last decade where tech has tried to be more inclusive and less about hard metrics. Now the narrative is the key component of your performance review. It's vibes all the way essentially Then you introduce a layer of line managers that are blurring the signal even more, to the point where the narrative about someone is way more powerful than facts. Their whole job is to play politics and pushing a narrative to other managers/ICs during 1:1s.
dbehera 4mo ago
I think 50 to 60% off all the work that is done is actually wastage there's lot of things that are done for the sake of doing things but really doesn't add any value or doesn't add any output performance
JimsonYang 4mo ago
Good PMs really carry teams, clearing politics and bureaucracy on your behalf. It's just that these people aren't the majority of the populace
m0llusk 4mo ago
no
nahrin 4mo ago
Feels like taking an Uber to a battlefield, fully prepared for a bloody fight, and then realizing you're the only one there and nobody showed up. All those advertised slogans and inked cultural standards, and for what? I never worked for a FAANG company, but I had the pleasure of being interviewed by most of them. I met engineers dedicated to the vision, running in circles, hardly any of their hard work ever merged in production. I never understood it, and I think it's a real problem, how does an engineer build a track record if they spend years writing code that never reached a single real user.
newsicanuse 4mo ago
Atleast not at Amazon
billmaya 4mo ago
[dead]
mstaoru 4mo ago
I wish my manager's calendar was purely 1:1s. I switched to a large company from a series of startups (including my own), it is definitely a big change, and "efficiency" is not the thing anymore. Now I can spend days fighting with some gnarly IT security problem to load an internal Python package cross-org with a Managed Identity token issued to Build Pipeline that is scoped to a Service Principal with a wrong checkbox, or something equally cryptic and useless. Nothing of it would be even remotely possible in a startup. Is it "performative"?.. I think not. Is it efficient or necessary? Probably not, but who knows. Chesterton's Fence and all that.
vanshsoni0027 4mo ago
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myth_drannon 4mo ago

Yeah, there is a famous book on that called "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber

rvrs 4mo ago

Work is performance art

ismailmaj 4mo ago

In my experience a lot of companies try really hard to be data oriented and try to find objective metrics for impact, sometimes it’s good, often it’s bad. Like LOC count, PR count, time in meetings or time spent at the office. Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.

doctorpangloss 4mo ago
on the flip side, try to get an open source maintainer to define what the criteria are for merging a pull request, or what a bug report needs in order to be fixed. they all say one thing and it is always another. it feels like pulling your hair out.
- junior44660 4mo ago
  You forgot the gigachad gif.
  - doctorpangloss 4mo ago
    "Doesn't merge PRs." "Doesn't fix issues." "1m downloads."

elric 4mo ago

> Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team. Depending on the manager and on the team, 1:1s with people can be very valuable for all involved.

CalRobert 4mo ago

"including FAANG" What would make them less vulnerable to this?

moralestapia 4mo ago
I'd say they have people who have been doing software for as long as 30 years, and also all the human resources and billions of dollars to fix this problem if it was something that could be fixed with human resources and money. And still ... there's a lot of this.

dboreham 4mo ago

I think Elon noticed it.

Jeremy1026 4mo ago
I think Elon pretended to notice it. Instead of taking his time and doing it right, he was performative in his own actions causing unnecessary problems. In doing so got rid of the important pieces as well as the bloat.
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  It is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?
  - Jeremy1026 4mo ago
    You must have forgotten about how bad Twitter was after the takeover/purge. December 2022 - https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fine https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fi... February 2023 - https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cost-cutting-2023-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cos... March 2023 - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286 https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286
    - boxed 4mo ago
      And yet, it's up NOW.
      - Jeremy1026 4mo ago
        It's obviously hard to say how accurate these numbers[1] are, but it looks like Twitter has doubled their workforce from its lowest following their mass layoffs. It might be stable again now because they hired the workforce required to actually keep it running. [1] https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-employees/ https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-employees/

jameskilton 4mo ago

After a certain size, one of my favorite Civilization quotes kicks in: "The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.

cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
Agreed, but the small-company-doing-meaningful-work is also hard to find though. Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders.
sethjgore 4mo ago
ironically i posted the exact same quote before seeing your post. I've found that whatever work that can be counted as meaningful often also signifies a certain amount of agency that does not exist in a larger bureaucratic system.

moffers 4mo ago

I don’t know that this is something specific to workplaces. I think anywhere you have a hierarchy and incentives you’ll see people perform to those incentives. But, I am not a behavioral psychologist, so maybe there is something special to “corporations”. It could be that corporations have a lot more incentive to perform for.

prepend 4mo ago

It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked on projects with 50 programmers and it seemed many did nothing and a few did negative work. We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved. He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done. I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative. That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.” I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.

OutOfHere 4mo ago
There's that, and then there's the other kind of negative work, whereby a rockstar engineer develops something that works but only he understands, completely failing to document it well. When this engineer leaves, the project is unmaintainable by virtue of being incomprehensible. In both cases, the management has been clueless.
- prepend 4mo ago
  Good point. There’s lots of kinds of negative work. I was thinking more of people burning stuff down. There’s also people burning the furniture for immediate warmth. And there’s people you mention who are doing things that look good but have time bombs inside them.
antonymoose 4mo ago
I work almost exclusively in small (<100 employees) firms, usually no more than 20 developers, and it’s a complete mix here too. One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.

phyzix5761 4mo ago

Price's Law says that the square root of the total number of items or participants contributes to at least half of the results[0]. I've found this to be true in almost everything in life, including work and business. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law

2b3a51 4mo ago
Thanks for posting that, I'd never heard of it. I thought of n(n-1)/2 and coordination issues initially but nah.
bicepjai 4mo ago
That’s the first time I have heard this one. Feels something like Pareto principle

swiftcoder 4mo ago

That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done. Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.

analog31 4mo ago
This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity. I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.
- swiftcoder 4mo ago
  > Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.

cjbgkagh 4mo ago

What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic. The Iron Law or Bureaucracy: Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)

ryandvm 4mo ago
Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever. Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.
- cjbgkagh 4mo ago
  In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.
- order-matters 4mo ago
  Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason. I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs. If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.

quadrifoliate 4mo ago

> Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent. I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.

wqaatwt 4mo ago
It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.
- bluGill 4mo ago
  Many are not doing anything obviously meaningful and useful. However that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful or useful, only that you don't know.
  - pixl97 4mo ago
    When an organization reaches a certain size it starts behaving more like an insect colony than individuals at most levels. There is a lot of exploration that occurs, much of it is unfruitful, yet still enough future resources are discovered for it to continue and expand.
  - dilyevsky 4mo ago
    Alternative ways of working

cmrdporcupine 4mo ago

This was my experience mostly in my 10 years at Google at a certain level. But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it. Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cautious development cycle where multiple levels of review covered everything. OWNERS, "readability", very uptight code review. And in order to survive in this environment you had to have a pile of code reviews all running concurrently because making progress on any single one could take days and days to get through review. But that was kind of the point because pushing the wrong thing and breaking the money printing machine is far worse than moving slow. But IMHO this didn't scale past 30k, 40k engineers. And inside Google, the culture shifted from one that was SWE/SRE driven to one that was PM driven. And the perf/promo culture for them had really perverse incentives. Also I have a theory about Google in particular -- its founders and all its initial strong hires all came from academia not industry. And so its internal culture became biased towards a "publish or perish" structure, and "perf" performance reviews honestly looked more like a thesis defense committee for someone's masters/PHD than anything I'd encountered in the software industry before.

Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
What did you see as the perverse incentives for the PMs there? Schedule optimization like cutting out testing? Cost cutting by under-hiring?
- cmrdporcupine 4mo ago
  My perspective is that promotion especially for PMs (and SWEs to some extent) involves pushing novelty / "demonstrating impact". IMHO this in large part responsible for Google's ADHD around project cancellations/replacements. Not restricted to PMs but it is especially pernicious when product direction gets pushed this way. Cost cutting and underhiring were never a problem while I Was there. More the opposite. They overhired and then there was no good throughput on projects because every chef was in the kitchen at once. If I recall, the turndown on e.g. Google Reader was more about finding it difficult to get SWEs who wanted to work on it. I think it would have been increasingly difficult to survive the performance review cycle if you were stuck on a "backwater" project like that.

OutOfHere 4mo ago

There is something to be said for having your own startup and keeping it lean, implying that everyone on the payroll must be a cofounder. It's a prerequisite for but not a guarantee of staying mission focused.

itsalwaysgood 4mo ago

There is always some form of social loafing going on in any large group of people doing work. "The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases." There is evidence of this in simple tug of war games. But I think there is also truth in realizing work is mostly performative: the pareto principle seems to apply. 20% of the workforce sustains the other 80%. That's purely anecdotal, I doubt the numbers align that way. But it does always seem there are a few all-stars carrying others.

slibhb 4mo ago

Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work. This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

creshal 4mo ago
> as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated. Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?
- Schlagbohrer 4mo ago
  If that one person is the CEO or owner then yes, haha.
- slibhb 4mo ago
  No, but would you want this? People who contribute more should be paid more, but mapping compensation to contribution exactly isn't easy and comes with downsides.
- 4lx87 4mo ago
  No, those are the shareholders who don’t produce anything.
  - eudamoniac 4mo ago
    You think stock dividends pay out 4x the amount of money that the company pays for salaries?
loneboat 4mo ago
Round your "~15%" up to 20%, and you've just discovered the Pareto Princlple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle, aka "The 80/20 rule".

ipnon 4mo ago

A company is like a bridge. The job of a bridge is to support the weight of what crosses it. But if a particular deck or arch or beam or joint or bearing fails to do its own job, the bridge can fail and will catastrophically. Perhaps some beams hold more weights than others, but can any bridge be composed entirely of decks or entirely of arches or entirely of beams? Perhaps, but we do not see many of them. It is always possible to innovate in the design of bridges, but if most of the great bridges in the world all have a mix of decks and arches and beams and joints and bearings, instead of simply being composed of solely beams or solely joints, then we might begin to wonder if this composition is not accidental to the proper functioning of a great bridge, but essential to it, even if we are not particularly interested in or proficient in the Art of Being Another Part of the Whole.

jgbuddy 4mo ago

Yes

techdmn 4mo ago

Another way of thinking about this, is by thinking about who defines what is productive or what produces value. I tend to be a little old fashioned, I think that doing the right thing for customers produces value. (That's what my self-worth is based on anyway.) For other people, it's doing the thing that gets them the next raise or promotion. Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?

melozo 4mo ago

I worked at Amazon and I do think that more than anything we were overhired with little meaningful work. A lot of compliance goal chasing. Not that it’s performative to the top brass, but the work was very little and not usually very technical.

dormento 4mo ago

> Anyone else notice this? This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc. Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.

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bschmidt600 4mo ago

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Cheese48923846 4mo ago

Yes, everyone in the know knows it. That flaw is the edge start ups have. Fat, red tape, and bureaucracy is cut. Replaced with a new set of problems of course. Like no money. And if the startup is successful it will eventually morph into a big fat corporate culture. The circle of life.

mercutio2 4mo ago

The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild. If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide. But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?

DanHulton 4mo ago
Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week. The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing. All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.
- JohnMakin 4mo ago
  Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you? A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.
  - solumos 4mo ago
    Yeah, if blockers are coming out in 1-on-1 meetings, that’s a really bad sign

FinnLobsien 4mo ago

I think this dynamic is not specific to SWE and as old as time. As organizations grow, so does the aspect of work that's more "seeing and being seen", and rightfully so. There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy. But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged. That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business. But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists. But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.

osigurdson 4mo ago
It doesn't help shareholders or customers in any way however so we should not celebrate it or even simply accept that this is "the way things are". It is an error to be corrected.
- FinnLobsien 4mo ago
  Yes, agreed. But it's not a binary. It's not like you can either wrestle with hard engineering problems until an eventual breakthrough or exclusively pretend to be working. Sure, on one extreme is the purely value-extractive person whose only work product is calling recurring meetings to talk about how great things are going (while having contributed little). In that case, it's an error to be corrected. But there are different types of useful work. Let's use engineering as an example. You could build a set of new filter options on in-product analytics that customers have been asking for. Assuming this doesn't require net-new data sources or whatnot, this is usually not a complex engineering challenge, but will be loved by customers. Then you have types who refactor an obscure caching function to reduce its memory use 15% when performance wasn't an issue, but it was a fun engineering puzzle that made the code more elegant. Clearly both create value, but one will be more useful to customers, although it's not as fun to solve. My point isn't that we should treat corporate bureaucracy, performative work, and freeloading as "the way things are" (they're toxic to any work culture). I'm saying that "deeper engineering challenge" doesn't equal "more important work". Also, I don't necessarily like this! Deep problem-solving and focused work on tricky challenges are the most fulfilling things to me and to most people I know. But this is the dynamic we're in. (and yes you can argue that having the most efficient code possible prevents future performance issues and whatnot and is thus long-term more valuable than analytics options, but at least in the startup world, limited resources mean you tend to solve things when they become problems, not because they could one day become problems)

Schlagbohrer 4mo ago

All corporate jobs are performative, in the sense that there are many useless rituals one has to observe merely for appearances' sake and not because it benefits the company or accomplishes the work.

fasterik 4mo ago

This is one of the main reasons why I left the corporate software world. I love programming too much to spend my life climbing that ladder. I'm fortunate enough not to have to work right now, but if I ever go back to an organization I'm going to be very picky about finding one where the leaders are themselves technical contributors and they hold the team to a high standard.

sublinear 4mo ago

After some more experience at various types of workplaces, you'll discover that this hyperfocus on "productivity" is a mind virus trying to destroy all stability and long term value. Trying to be a rockstar every day is the fastest way to burning out and making bad decisions. It ensures that you will be left holding the bag. How is that not more performative, if it's in the name?

adithyaharish 4mo ago

> Anyone else notice this? This is not just the big MNCs but this is happening throughout all organisation irrespecitive of SWE or not. I know its really heartbreaking and there is still not a KPI to measure productivity/performance in a right way? Did anybody come across any intressting KPI they were measured against?

Schlagbohrer 4mo ago

The dynamic I saw at a FAANG-adjacent company when I worked there was wild between the contractors and FTEs. If an FTE could get one or two contractors reporting to them, they'd hand over all the work, put their feet up and take it easy, make fun of the contractors, and then if there were any good results jump in to take credit for those at meetings with upper management which the contractors were not invited to. So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.

zug_zug 4mo ago

I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies. At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co. </rant> IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.

paradox460 4mo ago
Lean, fast, agile (not in that way, in the real definition of the word) start ups hiring people who are fleeing a FAANG, only to have those FAANGers implement exactly what they left will always seem strange to me Saw it happen at a company I worked at. Company had flat org structure that took it very far, and worked well. Leadership rolled over, bunch of new manager blood came in, from FAANG, talked about how nice our systems were, and then proceeded to upset the applecart by implementing all the level systems and such, in such a way that the engineers who had been at the company before were never above an L4, and all the "staff" and "platform" were new blood. They then did one or two token promotions, and were astonished when half the legacy seniors quit within the year

strken 4mo ago

The one time I worked at a large corporate, my time was split between failing to find useful projects that I was allowed to work on, and failing to deliver much on the useless projects I was given because I didn't understand that it would e.g. take six weeks and two review meetings to provision an extra half a terabyte of storage on a db cluster. I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.

al_borland 4mo ago
Sometimes teams get a req to hire someone and it’s use it or lose it. They’d rather get someone in the seat that will hopefully be useful at some point, and simply retain or grow the team size, than to give it up and be short staffed down the road.

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polotics 4mo ago

Jeff Bezos covered these grounds well here already, with his mandate on how meetings must run, and about "day one". Check him out. So sad that with the right incentive structure his work would be of immense value to society, instead of his current Wall-E prologue side quest.

cadamsdotcom 4mo ago

Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them? If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see. Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it. Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive. There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dailydev https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail... Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.

gwbas1c 4mo ago
> Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them? > If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see. I've been involved in a few projects where the value appeared clear at the beginning, but by the end there was little value. In one case the project failed due to incompetence and mismanagement: Basically, the project dragged on and on until it missed its market window. (What stinks is it was basically a port of a Visual Basic sales tool to a more modern v2.) In another case I was hired into a machine learning project in a company where everyone spent a lot of time justifying their jobs. The project ultimately didn't "improve" over the non-machine-learning approach, and devolved into a "solution in search of a problem". --- As far as why the company held onto the people involved? (I left after both projects.) That's harder to explain, but I like to think of an analogy to a king holding on to a standing army: It's there when you need it, and your soldiers aren't helping the rival kingdom. A different way to say it: One of the downsides to working in a large company is that a lot of the people there are "warm butts on seats." The company could function without them. Many of the people you work with have competence issues. You're probably a "warm butt on a seat" too, and may have some competence issues. That's why I like working for smaller companies: they can't afford to be fat.

Henchman21 4mo ago

You are so naive you don’t get it yet? All of “adult” life is performative . Life is a game, a performance, a little play you put on for the benefit of all. Consider this: if management thinks something is impressive, well that makes it impressive. Managers, by definition, manage people, and having 1:1 meetings helps with that. Are you supposing managers also make the same exact effort and contribution as ICs? Would they still be managers? Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?

Henchman21 4mo ago
To add: This entire post rubs me so wrong. It just feels so naive, so foolish. I feel I’ve been baited into anger.
- uncivilized 4mo ago
  You really think the work you do matters and is not performative? Meta, OpenAI, etc. could disappear overnight and I think most people would say good riddance (apart from those needing jobs).
  - Henchman21 4mo ago
    I do not think that. I mistakenly responded to myself -- so you're responding to my own echo. :) My personal thoughts on the matter are: we should burn this society to the ground and begin anew. Life will grow from the ashes of the Capitalists.
hnthrow10282910 4mo ago
This response is naive.
salemh 4mo ago
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sqquima 4mo ago
I don't think it's either black or white. That said, I wanted to highlight that some adults do have some neurodivergence, which, in a way, makes them a bit naive and unable to navigate the game you mention. There is no need to be condescending.

aloe_falsa 4mo ago

I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money. YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.

nicoburns 4mo ago
In my experience, actual producing impact/value and being able to demonstrate that you've produced impact/value are pretty loosely coupled to each, and it is often possible to do one without the other (in both directions). And time spent on one often directly competes with time spent on another. I'd imagine it's the people who are better at "demonstrating value" than actually producing it that are the target of the original post.
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closeparen 4mo ago

Pretty much anything coming out of middle management or "org leadership" is performative. Line managers and their reports are generally actually building products and keeping the lights on.

arjie 4mo ago

There’s quite a bit of this but the big orgs have created a machine where they can capture (1+x) times the value of what they pay someone. If you’ve made such a machine, the best way to make more money is to put as much input into the machine as possible. And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking. Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”

zerobees 4mo ago

It is a property of any large bureaucracy that a large proportion of the bureaucracy exists to serve itself. And it's not BS, it's a natural consequence of growth. Imagine you start in the mode of "moving fast and breaking stuff". Eventually, you break enough stuff that someone says "enough". So you develop some launch standards and guidelines. Then hire a team to enforce them. Then someone to build a launch tool. Then you realize you also need to manage legal risks, have standardized UIs, make sure that production services have backups and redundancy, and all of sudden, you have ten review processes. And then, it gets so difficult to navigate the process that teams hire PMs just to coordinate. And on, and on. And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off. I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?

junior44660 4mo ago
> Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone? 1. that the existence of such very "chill" roles often leads to hiring of more mediocre people and diminishes the value of working at such a company (at least psychologically) 2. That little gets done / built with all these people and resources, which is seen as a waste of potential. 3. That bureaucracy itself may be more exhausting than doing real work.

NoMoreNicksLeft 4mo ago

The "true work" is sporadic. A business will need an engineer to work hard for long hours for a few weeks, then they won't need him at all for weeks more except to be on hand if something goes wrong. Then maybe some more work, and even longer lulls. But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse). Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).

junior44660 4mo ago

> the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal Consider yourself lucky. This part is missing in some places.

thelittlenag 4mo ago

The only place where the work I did was performative was government contracting. Not technically waste, but certainly useless.

wenbin 4mo ago

It’s basically bullshit jobs — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs The compensation can be high, but the psychological cost is real. Over time, that tradeoff isn’t always worth it: someone might earn more in the short term, yet pay for it with chronic stress, declining mental health, and even a shorter lifespan compared to a lower-paid role that’s more meaningful and less draining.

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tamimio 4mo ago

The reason why I distant myself from software even before AI is because of all the shenanigans the software people do, primarily silicon valley but it echoes quickly beyond that where other companies try to copy cat it. It feels like a cult, with all sort of weird rituals, if you are an individualist it’s hard to maintain it there.

nitwit005 4mo ago

You're both criticizing management for not knowing who's doing important work, and also for spending time talking to engineers to understand what's going on. Most solutions to understand what's going on, in detail, are naturally going to be quite time consuming.

meowspace 4mo ago

part of the universal scalability law: the cost of coherence scales quadratically as workers are added. everything else is downstream of that

yes_man 4mo ago

You can get incredible value out of 1-on-1s with capable managers. Insight about where the organization and product is going that you would otherwise miss, you’ll get to rubber duck about your high-level problems with someone who understands them, and its your time to influence decision making. But it does require a capable and motivated manager and an organization that gives the manager actual agency

devmor 4mo ago

The stuff you think is performative and useless is most likely the consequence of letting a couple "all stars" do what they want for years.

drudolph914 4mo ago

there is a lot to pull apart here there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more positive tone, make the information concise in a bottom-line up-front style, use a deeper voice (told to me by my wife and women colleagues), and pace the information in a way that lets people ask follow up questions iff needed. no one should _have_ to do all this, but it does change people's perception of how competent you are. I've seen both sides of this coin - amazing engineers that get no promo because they can't communicate, and mediocre engineers that get promoted quickly due to their ability to communicate. I'd almost even argue that this is how should be - as you climb the corporate ladder, communication becomes a lot more important than technical skills and ability to your point about 1:1s: if you're not getting anything out of your 1:1s, that's a skill issue and is on you IMHO. even when I had bad managers, I was able to effectively communicate my needs, goals, updates, thoughts, as well as give feedback back; in doing so, I've been able to turn horrible manager-team dynamics into a positive experiences. and I'd always argue it came down to the fact that the people perceive you directly correlates with how serious they'll take your word at the same time, I can empathize with the idea that some middle managers are just bodies that get in the way - everyone's had their fair share of that. but if you're actually good at your job and communicating , you should almost always be able to get around them when it's really necessary EDIT: and this is coming from a person who is and will always want to stay as an IC engineer

hnthrow10282910 4mo ago
Thanks. This was a valuable read for me

HoldOnAMinute 4mo ago

Promo-driven culture. Engineers and managers optimize for promotable work.

w10-1 4mo ago

TBH, large companies deliver tuned, complex products for long-term use by customers. The problem is not producing them, but getting it right all the time, because development costs are a tiny percentage of reliance costs by the customer. Most of what you call performative is likely real, but even if it were purely performative, it would surface people who were not on board and possibly unreliable. Similarly, a 1:1 with no apparent content could serve its purpose of looking you in the eye to see if you're of sound mind. I think your concern is better framed as whether people are pulling their weight. The solution for that is to make them deliver something hard on their own every so often, and cycling people through teams to avoid free riders.

goodmattg 4mo ago

You can choose to be as charitable as you want with your lense on this. Incentives within all organizations lead to a certain class of worker taking over. From the "getting things done" perspective I like the lense of insurgents vs. gatekeepers from this interview: https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transcript-mike-solana https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transc...

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deanCommie 4mo ago

like with most things, these things are both overrated and underrated. are there performative jobs|tasks|employees|cultures? yes. are most of the things that engineers think are performative and useless actually so? nope. some examples: * managers managing upward - feels useless - is actually the most impactful bang-for-buck for managers to give their teams space to operate without micromanaging * sales and marketing. The best software in the world won't get known, bought, or used, without good sales/marketing. There is no meritocracy on quality. Almost no business succeeds through technical credibility alone. * 1on1s. They may not add any value to you, but 1) you'd miss them when they're gone, 2) i don't know how else you expect managers to stay on top of employee concerns - just know "inately"? 3) they may matter A LOT for your teammates, and them being happy means your team will be happy There are other things like that.

channel_t 4mo ago

Yes, very much so, although I've come believe that the corporate jobs outside of SWE might be even more performative. It also seems like something that has become way worse since the late 2010s, in tech specifically at least.

asdff 4mo ago
Yeah it exists all over. Talk to your friends who were business majors in school what they are doing now. It is shocking what some of them actually do day in day out and they know full well it's bullshit jobs sort of stuff that just pays the bills.

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lowbloodsugar 4mo ago

Depends on where you are within those companies. These companies are not monocultures.

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hdndjsbbs 4mo ago

Being the rockstar doing all the technical work can also be performative. I'm currently working on a CTO team that is supposed to "disrupt" a big org. There's a lot of emphasis on demoing and sketching things out a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's some merit to it but a lot of it is kayfabe. Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.

AndyNemmity 4mo ago
Kayfabe is the best way to describe it.
- qorrect 4mo ago
  New word for me, I love it.

fnoef 4mo ago

When I was working in a small company (3-4 devs), we used to build stuff that clients needed. We built billing systems, JS widgets (back when widgets were a thing), analytics, and full on CRM. As long as it helped our customers. We ran all this on VPSs. When I joined big tech, I understood that most of work is going around and “proposing” solutions or “solving inter team blockers”. People who did the actual job, got very little recognition. People who did peacocking were promoted. At that time I realized how fucked up corporate is.

theodpHN 4mo ago

“The Work Is Mysterious And Important.” - Mark S. To Helly (Severance, AppleTV) https://www.thegamer.com/severance-most-memorable-quotes/ https://www.thegamer.com/severance-most-memorable-quotes/

chinabison 4mo ago

As a (former) team-lead and engineering manager (now back to working as an IC), I can say, to paraphrase Edward Gibbon, that management is seldom of much efficacy except in those happy dispositions in which it is almost superfluous.

59nadir 4mo ago

Yes, and being completely sincere here: This is why most big companies have incredibly low velocity and do almost nothing of any actual value, and seem to make almost no progress at all. The only parts of these companies that actually do real work at any acceptable rate are skunkworks, and they are created precisely because the rest of the company's structure doesn't actually function for getting anything done.

atleastoptimal 4mo ago

Those companies still make money though. I think there are two levels to an organization 1. The level of "this is an arrangement of labor/capital in order to produce money" and 2. This is an enterprise where thousands of people spend 1/3 of their time and takes up a huge mental space, so they arrange it in a way that affirms their internal sense of purpose Organizations, especially large corporations which have passed a few "too big to fail barriers" gradually become a "purpose factory" where their product partially becomes imbuing their higher level employees a sense of importance and justification for spending years there.

replwoacause 4mo ago

Scrum and agile are performative and most 1:1s are a waste of time, they are just a way to stay in people's good graces and keep up appearances.

AJRF 4mo ago

Yeah, this is 100% the case - while not a FAANG I worked at a moderately large tech company in the UK and it was astonishing how slow everything moved, but people were always getting promoted. I eventually left because every project took about 10x the effort it should have. The stock price went down 20% during the time I was there, and I could see why - it took months to ship a tiny button. I work with a lot of ex-FAANG now and they haven't had much of a chance to do impactful things. I've heard a lot of "I was responsible for the reporting function on this dashboard that's 10 clicks deep on Google Play" I do think Layoffs, while obviously very sad for those involved, were needed.

BurningFrog 4mo ago

This is why I spent most of my career in startups. I did work at big companies twice for a few years, and it strongly reinforced that decision. Startup life has it's own problems. Primarily that the company may cease to exist at any time. it's not for everyone, but I adapted after my first big layoff.

wombat-man 4mo ago

I guess it depends on the company and the project. If you really think your work or your project isn't useful to the company, or it feels performative, maybe you should try to hop to another project or company.

YZF 4mo ago

Large companies are incredibly unproductive and inefficient. That said the unevenness of contribution isn't strictly a large company phenomena. Small companies have the same uneven distribution. I've worked at two startups with about 4 people total and people were not equally productive. That said, this is not necessarily the goal and productivity is also very hard to measure. It's doubly hard to measure across different types of work. One person can code up a greenfield back-end for something in 3 days while another can spend a week fixing some elusive infrastructure problem. Not everyone is as good at everything. So we do have engineers who truly are much better than average. And in large companies most are average. But that is just one factor here. 1:1's can add value or they can not add value. Large companies can't just be flat so someone needs to manage people. A good manager adds value, a bad manager might subtract value, but that's orthogonal. Is it demoralizing to work for a big and inefficient company? Sure. Is it more demoralizing for people who are motivated to get things done and are good at it? I think so. Go start your own company?

brailsafe 4mo ago

Imo it's a symptom and the cause of the entire incentive structure of a hierarchical company; success in that system is defined as doing exactly what one layer above you expects, no matter how rational or connected to output it is. Most people just accept the smaller ways this manifests as a fact of life because it's easy and it's how they get rewarded. For example, generally you'll be fired if you're not on time, regardless of whether "on time" is meaningful or connected to any real constraint. If there isn't a hard deadline, someone will pick an arbitrary one and decide that's what they need to be mad about that week. It could be that you just weren't on Slack at the moment they said "hey". If it's not immediate, they'll note it down and weaponize it later. There's seemingly always someone like this in charge and there are only limited, temporary, or lucky ways around it. If it's not specifically time, it's some other aspect of visibility that's never sufficient. Controlling people and organizations are built on an insidious lack of trust and the pursuit of measurability. This is why, imho, it's rarely worth doing more than the bare minimum, because you need 100x positive extra credits to compensate for even one petty mistake. Not being available in the middle of the night to fix a bug in the system gets you a negative mark in a performance review, while staying late to fix the bug gets you 0.01 positive marks.

quickthoughts 4mo ago

Are most corporations preformative? (yes)

BrenBarn 4mo ago

Most corporate jobs are performative, period.

strfry 4mo ago

You can analyze a company in different ways, like as a machine or organism. All images are valid, but some are more appropriate. If you fixate on one, like treating an organization as a machine of interlocking parts with defined purposes, then you may be overly surprised that people aren't adding value and start to expect either some deeper purpose or a "correction": imminent layoffs. If you try to understand large businesses as a kind of welfare system to keep the middle class satiated, then the behavior of your boss and coworkers makes sense. They're doing an acceptable amount of work to justify their salaries. Instead of being demoralized, shouldn't you be happy that you have a nice financial buffer, smart coworkers, and the choice to either effect change internally or compartmentalize work and create a more meaningful life outside of it? I'm not saying you should keep working there, but if you want to play hardball you can always step up or out.

danielsju6 4mo ago

Playing the game of nines, 99.9995% uptime, on-call rotations, and retaining all those certifications requires a lot of excess capacity. They're filling space until shit hits the fan. Might as well let them cosplay in the meantime.

wryoak 4mo ago

> it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers Why is the meaning of your own life derived from your perception of the lives of others? Or rather, why is it that when you judge others’ lives as inauthentic you find your own to be so too?

danudey 4mo ago

I watched (most of) this video on YouTube, an interview with a former VP at Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc The TL;DR about promotions seems to be that: 1. There are guidelines on what you need to do to reach each level 2. Your direct supervisor will work with you on how they can game the system to get you the promotion For example, they might propose a re-org that will take a product or feature (and therefore some direct reports) from another team and put them on your team so that you have enough direct reports to qualify for getting the promotion you want. They pitch that re-org to other people to get buy-in, either by being straight ("I want this so that my direct report can get promoted") or by justifying it business-wise ("bringing this feature over to our team will reduce overhead by allowing these two groups to communicate more directly"). In some cases, you just bring them over for six months until the promotion goes through and then you give them back; in others, you just cannibalize that team for good. In other words, it's a zero-sum game where you're taking away the ability for other teams to accomplish their goals so that someone can reach an arbitrary milestone for promotion that their team's current situation doesn't allow for. I was talking to a CEO of a small/mid-sized startup recently who was interviewing for an exec position and someone from Facebook was intervewing; CEO asked directly "why are you applying for this position? We can't pay anything remotely close to what you're getting at Facebook, surely you know that". His reply was that working at Facebook was so toxic, so stressful, that he just couldn't do it anymore. He was willing to cut his pay by 50-75% just to not have to deal with the constant toxic back-and-forth necessary to get anything done there (and/or to keep your job in the first place). People ask why I don't go apply for Google or Facebook or Amazon; part of it is that I don't know that my experience would get me in the door, to be honest, but part of it is also that working at those places sounds so stressful and toxic that the pay isn't worth it, at least not at my age.

sqquima 4mo ago
These companies do some marvelous engineering work, but it seems that the engineering skills get you in, while the political skills get you through performance reviews. There should be a FAANG-like acronym that encompasses great companies that aren't toxic.

kittikitti 4mo ago

I don't love this idea that software engineering is performative. It's become so prevalent that people instantly think my role is too. It's rather frustrating when you can point to dollar amounts related to the work you've been doing at corporate and then people ask if you do anything there. If you feel this way in your team, perhaps you can engage those who you think are being performative instead of criticize your own coworkers publicly. It's become so bad that people don't realize what's not performative. Also, just because I make things look easy or do things quickly, doesn't mean I didn't do anything at all. I much prefer the label "coder" than software engineer because of this. It signals that the label isn't doing the heavy lifting.

valbaca 4mo ago

Please read the book "Bullshit Jobs" Most SWEs are a mix of Duct tapers and Box tickers, and their managers are Taskmasters.

overfeed 4mo ago

ITT: "What is "coordination", and why is it bullshit?" The lack of humility among tech folk is astounding. Why dont you ask yourself why the 10x'ers/doers/high-impact people aren't setting up their 3-trillion dollar company if they are so darn effective by themselves? Perhaps becaus they'll need the "bureaucracy" to interface woth the rest of the world to get things like "money" and "contracts" and deal with the legal system...as well as ensuring their work is aligned and cohesive.

siren2026 4mo ago

It has always been super difficult in tech to know who does what exactly. You can look at PRs or # LoC but we all know they are not very representative. Plenty of people have realized that and played the visibility/politics game. Especially in the last decade where tech has tried to be more inclusive and less about hard metrics. Now the narrative is the key component of your performance review. It's vibes all the way essentially Then you introduce a layer of line managers that are blurring the signal even more, to the point where the narrative about someone is way more powerful than facts. Their whole job is to play politics and pushing a narrative to other managers/ICs during 1:1s.

dbehera 4mo ago

I think 50 to 60% off all the work that is done is actually wastage there's lot of things that are done for the sake of doing things but really doesn't add any value or doesn't add any output performance

JimsonYang 4mo ago

Good PMs really carry teams, clearing politics and bureaucracy on your behalf. It's just that these people aren't the majority of the populace

m0llusk 4mo ago

nahrin 4mo ago

Feels like taking an Uber to a battlefield, fully prepared for a bloody fight, and then realizing you're the only one there and nobody showed up. All those advertised slogans and inked cultural standards, and for what? I never worked for a FAANG company, but I had the pleasure of being interviewed by most of them. I met engineers dedicated to the vision, running in circles, hardly any of their hard work ever merged in production. I never understood it, and I think it's a real problem, how does an engineer build a track record if they spend years writing code that never reached a single real user.

newsicanuse 4mo ago

Atleast not at Amazon

billmaya 4mo ago

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mstaoru 4mo ago

I wish my manager's calendar was purely 1:1s. I switched to a large company from a series of startups (including my own), it is definitely a big change, and "efficiency" is not the thing anymore. Now I can spend days fighting with some gnarly IT security problem to load an internal Python package cross-org with a Managed Identity token issued to Build Pipeline that is scoped to a Service Principal with a wrong checkbox, or something equally cryptic and useless. Nothing of it would be even remotely possible in a startup. Is it "performative"?.. I think not. Is it efficient or necessary? Probably not, but who knows. Chesterton's Fence and all that.

vanshsoni0027 4mo ago

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