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Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

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Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

#131

Post by w10-1 »

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.

Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

#132

Post by Aurornis »

Sharlin wrote: post #119
Aurornis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to. At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved qu…

The thing is, "everybody just communicates" really does break down when the size of the organization grows past some limit. Everything is easy in a ten-person company, but that absolutely does not scale to a 1000-person company.

1:1s are designed for 1000-person communication. They're used by small groups of people like a manager and their team.

Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

#133

Post by glitchc »

antonvs wrote: post #95
sethjgore wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me think of this timeless and excellent quote by Oscar Wilde: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

*Commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde. There doesn't appear to be any definitive source for it. The quote actually reads like a summary of Parkinson's Law, that bureaucracies inherently tend to grow because officials create work for each other another and seek to increase their numbers. But the exact quote doesn't appear in Parkinson's original essay. Quote from that essay: "Factor 1: An official wants to multiply subo…

I suggest reading the book if you can get your hands on a copy. It's a short and highly entertaining read:

https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/parkinsons-law_c-northcote-par...

Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

#134

Post by uncivilized »

Henchman21 wrote: post #70
Henchman21 wrote: post #69

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? Woul…

To add: This entire post rubs me so wrong. It just feels so naive, so foolish. I feel I’ve been baited into anger.

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).

Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

#135

Post by goodmattg »

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-transc...

Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

#137

Post by pavel_lishin »

bell-cot wrote: post #83
cjbgkagh wrote: post #14

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 sc…

Unfortunately, real-world bureaucratic orgs of any meaningful size or age always include a third type of person - dedicated neither to the org's goals, nor to the org itself. In general, one should speak more circumspectly about that third type.

> There was a point of equilibrium in any organization’s middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it. Tyren knew from experience that a shrewd official could find this pivot-point within the org chart and, once entrenched, enjoy near-complete autonomy with almost no responsibility.

From "Son of a Liche", by J. Zachary Pike.

Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

#139

Post by deanCommie »

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.

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