Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative? • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by drfloyd51 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:00 PM UTC

saulpw wrote: post #178

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 tea…

The doers can fire the system 5 people.

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

#182

Post by brailsafe » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:01 PM UTC

Imo it's a symptom and the cause of the entire incentive structure of a hierarchical company; success in that system is defined as doing exactly what one layer above you expects, no matter how rational or connected to output it is. Most people just accept the smaller ways this manifests as a fact of life because it's easy and it's how they get rewarded.

For example, generally you'll be fired if you're not on time, regardless of whether "on time" is meaningful or connected to any real constraint. If there isn't a hard deadline, someone will pick an arbitrary one and decide that's what they need to be mad about that week. It could be that you just weren't on Slack at the moment they said "hey".

If it's not immediate, they'll note it down and weaponize it later. There's seemingly always someone like this in charge and there are only limited, temporary, or lucky ways around it.

If it's not specifically time, it's some other aspect of visibility that's never sufficient. Controlling people and organizations are built on an insidious lack of trust and the pursuit of measurability. This is why, imho, it's rarely worth doing more than the bare minimum, because you need 100x positive extra credits to compensate for even one petty mistake. Not being available in the middle of the night to fix a bug in the system gets you a negative mark in a performance review, while staying late to fix the bug gets you 0.01 positive marks.

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

#183

Post by Esophagus4 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:05 PM UTC

wrxd wrote: post #111

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…

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.

That’s an anti pattern of management - the 1-1 shouldn’t be a status update. There are times you want to brief your boss on things that are important to them, but if you’re just going over your tickets, that’s a waste of time (unless you’re using that time to get technical guidance on your tickets).

There are lots of lousy managers out there, and you can’t control that - but you can set the agenda of your 1-1 yourself if they don’t have one. It’s your 45 minutes with the person who signs your checks, use it to your advantage.

Search the net for questions / topics to manage up in 1-1s.

I often ask my manager for feedback, ask about expectations for promotion, career opportunities, ask advice on problems I have, ask how I can get my thing prioritized, brief her on something I think she should be aware of and what I need from her, etc.

Don’t let your manager turn your 45 minutes into a waste of time.

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

#184

Post by dilyevsky » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:09 PM UTC

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…

Twitter had laid off like 75%+ of staff and everyone, including on this site, was convinced it would crash and burn, yet it's still working. Explain?

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

#185

Post by dilyevsky » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #104

wqaatwt wrote: post #30

Earlier 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.

Alternative ways of working

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

#186

Post by hnthrow10282910 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

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…

This response is naive.

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

#187

Post by Esophagus4 » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:13 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #171

jldugger wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 best companies I worked for had no 1:1's

The problem with this is we will ask, “if you want to talk about career progression, or go over a technical question, or talk about performance feedback, how do you get that from your manager?” And one might say, “just Slack them or ask them for a call.”

And the problem is that you now have created an environment where the voices the manager hears the most are the squeaky wheels, the people who can play politics. You don’t want that as a manager - you want an environment where you can get the best from all your team and everyone has the opportunity to get the benefit of a structured communication cadence with their manager, regardless of who plays politics.

There are some situations where you really don’t need 1-1s but these are rare edge cases (Jensen Huang is famous for not having them… but the people that report to him are senior enough to report to the CEO of the worlds largest company. So they don’t need much supervision.)

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

#188

Post by hilariously » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:13 PM UTC

01284a7e wrote: post #60

prepend wrote: post #10

It’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…

Yeah, the second one is really the most bitter pill - work for a year or more, see that the PMF or the actual product isn't going to meet the needs; raise red flags, nobody cares (or worse, people actively fight you and torpedo you) and then you get to see it literally do nothing in production.

I have seen this a lot in the mid sized business (4 units.

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

#189

Post by garciasn » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

Esophagus4 wrote: post #183

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.

That’s an anti pattern of management - the 1-1 shouldn’t be a status update. There are times you want to brief your boss on things that are important to them, but if you’re just going over your tickets, that’s a waste of time (unless you’re using that time to get technical guidance on your tickets). There are lots of lousy managers out there, and you can’t control that - but you can set the agenda of your 1-1 yoursel…

I lead teams of Data Engineers, Data Scientists, and Platform Engineers. My direct reports drive their 1:1s; from the need to have them in the first place to the agenda when we do.

We have standups for our team as well as the larger team and we are in constant contact with one another throughout each day via IM. Why would we need to repeat the same shit in a 1:1?

I consider their 1:1s THEIR meeting. If they want it, I'm there; if they don't and want to work, great.

As such, we almost never have 1:1s and my team continually leads the organization w/the highest overall as well as manager satisfaction. It's been this way at each and every company I've worked for and is likely why all but one inherited direct report has worked with me at multiple companies before.

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

#190

Post by ptmcc » Wed, Jun 10, 2026, 7:20 PM UTC

eudamoniac wrote: post #67

ewidar wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In startups with less than 50 people (and I am being generous on the number), everyone talks to everyone all the time, so there is no need for these moments to extract key info to fix/improve situations, identify topics to push, ... But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is int…

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.

1:1s don't have to be strictly manager:report

I'm a staff eng and have 1:1s with other managers I don't report to and my peer staff/principle engs in other reporting chains and they are some of the most valuable meetings I have to keep connected with what other teams and the rest of the organization is doing, what's going well, what they might need from me, pain points, initiatives, etc. And of course just to build and maintain rapport across the org, which absolutely pays dividends.

I do these less frequently than with my direct manager, but still on a regular cadence, typically once a month or every other month.