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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?

#211

Post by Esophagus4 »

watwut wrote: post #206
Esophagus4 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 squeak…

If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings. Second, scheduled 1:1 is not a mechanism to avoid politics. People who can play politics better are as much advantaged as they are without it. They will simply know better what to say and do in those 1:1.

> If you need 1:1 to talk about technical questions, something is horribly wrong. And I would expect pwrformance feedback to have its own set of meetings.

With this approach, I hope you are not a manager.

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

#212

Post by habinero »

mystifyingpoi wrote: post #177
JohnMakin wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not a conspiracy theory, that's intended behavior.

You want your reports to feel safe to tell you things, you (or they) can always shift to written later.

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

#213

Post by bschmidt700 »

Sharlin wrote: post #119
Aurornis wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to. At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved qu…

The thing is, "everybody just communicates" really does break down when the size of the organization grows past some limit. Everything is easy in a ten-person company, but that absolutely does not scale to a 1000-person company.

[dead]

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

#214

Post by habinero »

dilyevsky wrote: post #184
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?

None of the exTwitter people thought that if you talked to them.

Sometimes, people talk about what they hope will come true. I dunno what to tell you.

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

#215

Post by win311fwg »

cebert wrote: post #156
harrall wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Depends on the size of the company and/or where you fit in the organization. If your manager is also the owner then there is something to be said about keeping a friendly relationship. If it is some middle manager several layers deep who doesn't mean anything in the grand scheme of things, then yeah, it's a waste. That time would be far better spent speaking to the CEO or board of directors.

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

#216

Post by icedchai »

Esophagus4 wrote: post #187
icedchai wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 squeak…

I will agree 1:1's can potentially be useful, however, having them on a weekly basis often is way too frequent. I can count on one hand the number of useful 1:1's I've had over the past 10 years.

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

#217

Post by danudey »

I watched (most of) this video on YouTube, an interview with a former VP at Amazon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WaeGfLnRvc

The TL;DR about promotions seems to be that:

1. There are guidelines on what you need to do to reach each level

2. Your direct supervisor will work with you on how they can game the system to get you the promotion

For example, they might propose a re-org that will take a product or feature (and therefore some direct reports) from another team and put them on your team so that you have enough direct reports to qualify for getting the promotion you want. They pitch that re-org to other people to get buy-in, either by being straight ("I want this so that my direct report can get promoted") or by justifying it business-wise ("bringing this feature over to our team will reduce overhead by allowing these two groups to communicate more directly"). In some cases, you just bring them over for six months until the promotion goes through and then you give them back; in others, you just cannibalize that team for good.

In other words, it's a zero-sum game where you're taking away the ability for other teams to accomplish their goals so that someone can reach an arbitrary milestone for promotion that their team's current situation doesn't allow for.

I was talking to a CEO of a small/mid-sized startup recently who was interviewing for an exec position and someone from Facebook was intervewing; CEO asked directly "why are you applying for this position? We can't pay anything remotely close to what you're getting at Facebook, surely you know that". His reply was that working at Facebook was so toxic, so stressful, that he just couldn't do it anymore. He was willing to cut his pay by 50-75% just to not have to deal with the constant toxic back-and-forth necessary to get anything done there (and/or to keep your job in the first place).

People ask why I don't go apply for Google or Facebook or Amazon; part of it is that I don't know that my experience would get me in the door, to be honest, but part of it is also that working at those places sounds so stressful and toxic that the pay isn't worth it, at least not at my age.

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

#218

Post by danudey »

order-matters wrote: post #81
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…

Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason. I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs. If you think the on…

The quote that I heard was "the purpose of a system is what it does", which was to a degree kind of revelatory.

The example I heard was McDonald's ice cream machines. What is the purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine? To make ice cream? No, they break down all the time, they're actually pretty bad at making ice cream.

The purpose of a McDonald's ice cream machine is to create billable service calls and ensure support contracts. The company making these machines isn't making bad machines because they're incapable of making good ones, they're making bad machines because bad machines are more profitable in the long term.

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

#219

Post by hnthrow10282910 »

drudolph914 wrote: post #127

there is a lot to pull apart here there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more posit…

Thanks. This was a valuable read for me

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

#220

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> 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 agree wholeheartedly, but this company culture had different ideas than you and I.

Their idea of a 1:1 was that it was the formal and correct way to synchronize people. It wasn’t limited to managers and their reports.

This shows up a lot in companies with matrix-style org charts. You end up with product managers and designers assigned to 3 different teams and setting up 1:1s with their managers and certain ICs to sync. Then their managers set up 1:1s with the managers of the other teams. Instead of being a tree it turns into a giant graph with edges everywhere.

> And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda

Now imagine this multiplied by 10 1:1s. That’s almost two hours of a manager keeping people captive on Zoom repeating stories from their weekend. Now imagine this practice was semi-standardized as the ideal way to run 1:1s at this company, so each employee had to spend the first 10m of every 1:1 with their manager, their product manager, their design lead, their team lead, and other people following the template listening to their weekend plans. Now imagine that you get pressured to reciprocate because after they spend all that time talking about themselves they need to ask about your weekend and pull a response out so they don’t feel awkward.

Sounds insane? It was! I almost wouldn’t have believed it until I experienced it. I couldn’t believe how many people at the company acted like it was normal and good.

> es, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them.

I was in a manager role at the company I’m describing. I got reprimanded on my performance review for not having enough 1:1s and for declining 1:1s with people who were not my reports (they tried to claim I was shutting them out and preventing them from doing their job)

Trust me, the problem was not a lack of managers. It was the giant interconnected graph of too many managers trying to set up recurring meetings with each other because that was the expectation.

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