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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?

#171

Post by icedchai »

jldugger wrote: post #147
Aurornis wrote: post #73

Earlier 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…

I worked at a place where the manager had, at the height of the organization's growth, five reports. He couldn't handle that many 1:1's so, at one point, he made them into a "group" 1:1. Of course, that made no sense. Eventually his manager reversed the decision. I'm honestly sure what he did all day, but he eventually got laid off.

The best companies I worked for had no 1:1's. Eventually the company was acquired and the practice was "installed" by the acquirer.

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

#172

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

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

#174

Post by ghaff »

KaiserPro wrote: post #116
eudamoniac wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I would hope that people, having dealt with LLMs for a few years would understand that its all about context. In a 25 person company, context is easy, assuming even half arsed communications. Its possible to hold the state of the entire company in your head. That scales to about 50. after that it becomes hard. then you start having team meetings and the like. Even at my old startup we had 1:1s when we were ~25 people…

And changes happen at pretty much all levels of scale. Even once you get well past startup size the times of structure and processes required for a 10,000 or 20,000 person company is much different from a 1,000 or 2,000 person company.

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

#175

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

quotemstr wrote: post #108
ryandvm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

And that's why command economies fail. They fail in the same way that firms do, except that because the whole economy is one giant firm, you can't get the you need to remove entrenched bureaucrats until the situation gets so bad that you have a revolution or lose a war.

The whole economy is always one giant firm.

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

#176

Post by JsonDemWitOster »

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…

I have a fraught relationship with 1:1s. Some days I curse the MBA who came up with this. Some days I'm rather ambivalent. Doesn't help that I'm naturally introverted and 1:1s is just a leech on my limited social battery. It's rather telling that IME 1:1s are the first meetings to be cancelled when the schedule tightens up.

I'm not outright saying they are useless but 1:1s won't make a bad manager good and they're a nice bonus when your manager is competent. In the latter I actually get career and professional guidance.

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

#177

Post by mystifyingpoi »

JohnMakin wrote: post #71
DanHulton wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> Why does this have to take place in a meeting?

Conspiracy theory (which I believe in): because calls or in office meetings are not persistent and they are not recorded, but chat messages are persistent. Anyone can say they didn't say something, it gets harder in writing.

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

#178

Post by saulpw »

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…

In cybernetics, the first kind of people are devoted to System 1, and the others are devoted to Systems 2-5. Any functioning organization has all 5 systems.

Imagine a school with only teachers and no administration. Who hires the teachers, who collects tuition, who schedules classes? Even if the teachers could do those things, now the teachers have to do the administration, which takes away from teaching--and the teachers quickly find (like any new business owner) that most of their time is spent on 'overhead' and very little on teaching itself.

The Iron Law is generally viewed as undesirable, because the 'doers' don't want the 'managers' to control the organization--this is how everything becomes enshittified. At best you have benevolent managers who are extremely sympathetic to the doers and act accordingly, but this is generally short-lived and depends on the organization hiring those benevolent managers. So the big question is, how can we ensure that the values of the organization (System 5) remain aligned with the values of the doers?

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

#179

Post by YZF »

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?

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

#180

Post by dilyevsky »

Blackthorn wrote: post #165
eudamoniac wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

nearly all big companies have failed too just on longer horizon
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