Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 307 posts

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

#141

Post by Henchman21 »

uncivilized wrote: post #134
Henchman21 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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.

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

#142

Post by 2b3a51 »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #12

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

Thanks for posting that, I'd never heard of it. I thought of n(n-1)/2 and coordination issues initially but nah.

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

#144

Post by lowbloodsugar »

mercutio2 wrote: post #35

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 meeti…

Any good thing can be done wrong, and if it can be done wrong, the it will be done wrong.

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

#146

Post by asdff »

hermitShell wrote: post #129
wrxd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With most of my managers 1:1 have always been a way for them to catch up with what I’ve been working on, despite doing a standup every single day so that the team knows what each other is doing.

I used to be a believer in daily standup plus bi-weekly sprint planning, but lost faith with the (possibly cargo cult) methodology I was trying to follow. Adding 1:1 in with that would be far too frequent, and probably far too little real content in each meeting. Did productivity actually change dispensing with those meetings? Probably not by much, it's hard to say empirically because task estimation was always a wil…

The general academic lab model is still the best I've seen and experienced. People sign up to present at the weekly lab meeting if they have something to present, 1 person per meeting. There's maybe 10 mins of quick bringing things up at the beginning of lab meeting before the presenter starts, if you have something short to share or general announcements. Specific project groups will have their own direct meetings on their own schedule that makes sense to them with the pace of incoming results to discuss.

When you do daily standups or mandatory everyone says something type stuff, it does something damaging psychologically. You end up scrambling to get things together for the standup to not look like you are a fumbling idiot, when it would have been better to take a few more days with a clearer head, less cortisol in your blood, and output and share better work.

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

#147

Post by jldugger »

Aurornis wrote: post #73
mercutio2 wrote: post #35

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 meeti…

1:1s add value to a point, but I’ve worked at one company where the fixation on 1:1s started replacing useful communication. Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have t…

> Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.

> I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people. ... All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

Yes, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them. But what you describe does not sound like a 1:1. At most it's a cross-functional meeting, and should have multiple people from both sides.

> The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

It sounds like someone got halfway through the ManagerTools guidance on 1:1s and decided they could improvise a better solution and failed. The purpose of 1:1s is to build and keep relationships, and they encourage this chitchat as relationship building, but the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. If you want to talk about work that's great! The best way to build a relationship is working towards a common goal, and work is pretty much the only expected common goal anyways. And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda -- if a manager wants time on a direct's calendar they can always ask for more, but the reverse is much harder.

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

#148

Post by asdff »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #15

> 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…

You've never had a task in a job where it is obvious the task is entirely useless and stupid and a waste of time and exists solely because of process that no one in the chain of being involved has the authority to rip out and replace with something sensible? You guys hiring?

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

#149

Post by ActionHank »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #15

> 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…

I feel like you've maybe had the benefit of working in teams where this didn't happen.

I've seen it first hand, people cotton on to EM's latest buzz word, find some space to shove it into and then show it off. EM is blown away despite the result being over engineered or poor fit for the solution.

Last time I saw this was a system decomposed to events when tight orchestration was necessary. 10 months later a single function app was dropped in place to replace it. Dev who did the original work got a promotion for their gift of technical debt.

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

#150

Post by asdff »

channel_t wrote: post #140

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.

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.
Post reply on HN