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.
Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
161–170 of 307 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#162Yes, 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
But 1 on 1 meetings are not crossing team boundaries, they are always within the team which is pretty much always smaller than 50. There's no reason the team cannot "talk to everyone all the time" just because other teams exist. But instead this communication is replaced by meetings even though the ability to talk hasn't changed.
Managers DO cross team boundaries though, their peers are other managers. I can't talk to the 100 people in my department every week, but my manager can talk to their 9 peers, who each talk to their 10 reports.
But the initial claim was that 1:1 meetings "add value to the team". I can believe that they add value to the manager's manager, but they are not adding value to the team of the person being met with.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#164Those 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#165The 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.
How many start ups fail vs how many are successful, again?
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not against 1 on 1's, but making that a regularly scheduled thing as if that adds value is kind of what I am arguing against. If people don't feel comfortable voicing something unless it is in private to their manager, that suggests to me two things - the manager/leadership is not fostering a collaborative environment, or the person needs to work on that (with the assistance/support of their manager), which I se…
You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment. You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting. You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quic…
> You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters
This is reframing the discussion a little bit. I said up thread, certain things need to be discussed in private, but why would it be on a regular, frequent cadence?
As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for? If someone requires negative feedback on like, a once a week cadence, I'd be very concerned that employee was a good fit or being managed wrong.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#167Scrum 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 interfa…
> the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_.
How about if the direct has absolutely no interest in talking about anything because they are just trying to do their job, which is going fine? Because that's 99%, maybe 100% of these meetings I've ever had.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#169Yeah, 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.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#170What 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…
Makes me think of this timeless and excellent quote by Oscar Wilde: “The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
Great sounding quotes of unclear origin are usually attributed to Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Winston Churchill, or a few others.