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Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
151–160 of 307 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#152Being 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#153When 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#154It’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 we…
My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time. Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets ca…
The most shocking thing about entering Software as a career was the enormous number of "Brillant Paula Beans"[1] that are out there silently working, doing meetings, participating in all the software rituals, but producing useless and ultimately scrapped work product.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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?
things tend not to break in new ways when you don't change them.
maybe theres some scaling limit where twitter will have difficulty running, but its a fairly straightforward piece of software?
on the other hand, it likely has a bunch of security holes from not updating dependencies and so on
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#156Earlier 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 have standup every day so my manager knows what I am doing so my 1:1s are: - General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team. - Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my m…
So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#157Being 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…
Kayfabe is the best way to describe it.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#158“The Work Is Mysterious And Important.” - Mark S. To Helly (Severance, AppleTV) https://www.thegamer.com/severance-most-memorable-quotes/
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#159The 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…
Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.
This is only "Funny" in the sense that it's "funny" that a high-performing startup can run the entire thing on a single huge Postgres instance and that mysteriously stops working after you hit a certain level of scale. Relationship count scales quadratically as you scale headcount. A single poor relationship can sour an entire team or worse. When your team is 5 people, it's trivial for e.g. the CEO to have the state of all relationships in the company in his head. As a company grows larger it gets harder. Once you surpass Dunbar's number it's virtually impossible. The function of 1:1s is to scale this.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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.