A company is like a bridge. The job of a bridge is to support the weight of what crosses it. But if a particular deck or arch or beam or joint or bearing fails to do its own job, the bridge can fail and will catastrophically. Perhaps some beams hold more weights than others, but can any bridge be composed entirely of decks or entirely of arches or entirely of beams? Perhaps, but we do not see many of them. It is always possible to innovate in the design of bridges, but if most of the great bridges in the world all have a mix of decks and arches and beams and joints and bearings, instead of simply being composed of solely beams or solely joints, then we might begin to wonder if this composition is not accidental to the proper functioning of a great bridge, but essential to it, even if we are not particularly interested in or proficient in the Art of Being Another Part of the Whole.
Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
21–30 of 307 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#22Yes
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#23I think Elon noticed it.
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.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#24Another way of thinking about this, is by thinking about who defines what is productive or what produces value. I tend to be a little old fashioned, I think that doing the right thing for customers produces value. (That's what my self-worth is based on anyway.) For other people, it's doing the thing that gets them the next raise or promotion.
Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#25It’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…
There's that, and then there's the other kind of negative work, whereby a rockstar engineer develops something that works but only he understands, completely failing to document it well. When this engineer leaves, the project is unmaintainable by virtue of being incomprehensible. In both cases, the management has been clueless.
Good point. There’s lots of kinds of negative work.
I was thinking more of people burning stuff down.
There’s also people burning the furniture for immediate warmth.
And there’s people you mention who are doing things that look good but have time bombs inside them.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#26> Anyone else notice this?
This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc.
Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#27[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#28[dead]
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#29In my experience a lot of companies try really hard to be data oriented and try to find objective metrics for impact, sometimes it’s good, often it’s bad. Like LOC count, PR count, time in meetings or time spent at the office. Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.
on the flip side, try to get an open source maintainer to define what the criteria are for merging a pull request, or what a bug report needs in order to be fixed. they all say one thing and it is always another. it feels like pulling your hair out.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#30> 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…
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.