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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?

#61

Post by cjbgkagh »

ryandvm wrote: post #57
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…

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…

In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.

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

#62

Post by eudamoniac »

4lx87 wrote: post #58
creshal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated. Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?

No, those are the shareholders who don’t produce anything.

You think stock dividends pay out 4x the amount of money that the company pays for salaries?

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

#63

Post by polotics »

Jeff Bezos covered these grounds well here already, with his mandate on how meetings must run, and about "day one". Check him out.

So sad that with the right incentive structure his work would be of immense value to society, instead of his current Wall-E prologue side quest.

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

#64

Post by ewidar »

eudamoniac wrote: post #59
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…

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.

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 intermediaries and 1-1s.

[also, being sarcastic is unhelpful.]

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

#65

Post by swiftcoder »

analog31 wrote: post #49
swiftcoder wrote: post #13

That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done. Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had…

This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity. I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was a…

> Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff

This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.

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

#66

Post by eudamoniac »

Schlagbohrer wrote: post #46
Jeremy1026 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?

Because it does not take 7500 employees to keep a website online. It never did and it still doesn't and Twitter is not special in this regard.

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

#67

Post by eudamoniac »

ewidar wrote: post #64
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.

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.

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

#68

Post by cadamsdotcom »

Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?

If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.

Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.

Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.

There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail...

Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.

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

#69

Post by Henchman21 »

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? Would they still be managers?

Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?

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

#70

Post by Henchman21 »

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…

To add:

This entire post rubs me so wrong. It just feels so naive, so foolish. I feel I’ve been baited into anger.

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