421–430 of 471 posts
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I am writing an MA thesis on cultural conflict between engineers and management. I would suggest reading works from the field of CMS - critical management studies. You can find lots of articles available, with no paywalls, through google scholar. I would start with Alvesson's work on CMS. We've actually used CMS to improve recruitment and retention of engineers in an organization. I subscribe to hard realism. We can'…
> We've actually used CMS to improve recruitment and retention of engineers in an organization. Would you mind revealing which organization? And how long have they managed to sustain these values? It would be super interesting to learn more about their industry, the size of the engineering org, how much product features get built in a given year etc.
I would summarize the idea as "If you can't promise and pay developers "fuck-you" money, at least don't fuck them instead".
I will be writing more on the topic, but I aim for about 2 years for the experiment, as that would be the minimum to establish success in retaining talent.
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> helped raise millions out of poverty You do know that 850M of those live in China, right?
Where do you think that comes from? The modern CCP leverages market economies to build that wealth. That success is because Xi recognizes the power for capitalism and growth to create wealth. They then try to control that though and the recent disappearance of Jack Ma and the government block of that IPO is more what I'm talking about. The cultural revolution, hundred flowers campaign, and current Uyghur genocide are…
I really don't enjoy the tone here. The derision with which it speaks about managers, like they are either evil or incompetent, is unfair in my experience. (my) Managers are just people. They have a task, they do their best to get that task done. Sometimes they decisions that seem bad to me. Often that is because I misunderstand their goals. Sometimes, it is because I know something they don't, and something they cou…
Your experience is atypical: most people will encounter bad managers in their careers, and more so in this industry, which deifies youth (twentysomethings managing people is a poor idea, period, as are teams comprising only twentysomethings). Things are further exacerbated by the reality that SV has above-average people in the technical sphere, but way below average people in the people-management sphere. Management…
Many people think that they live in a free democracy. In reality, something like 50% of all working people are employed in a strict hierarchical organisation that is essentially feudal in its nature. Most employees are the equivalent of serfs, overseen by lords, with a king in charge. The common employees don't get a vote. Their managers are not elected. They don't get a say in policy. The managers in turn form a str…
A recent observations my co-founders and I also made are that companies are basically authoritarian regimes. This is probably necessary during the startup phase, but perhaps less so as the company matures. Is there a precedent for moving from dictatorship/authoritarianism to democracy for company governance as it grows? One movement that shows up on the radar are zebras (vs. unicorns). An analogy for this comes from…
Unsurprisingly, dictatorial and democratic companies don't want to cooperate with each other.
And in many societies, the latter are a small minority so they struggle to survive.
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Are we talking about work or life? Sure, private companies aren't democracies, but why should they be? Democracies are extremely inefficient. Imagine if Linux or Python projects were run as democracies and not lead by BDFLs? I can't imagine them being nearly as effective because democratic processes to get new features would always be gridlocked. Benevolent dictators are 10x, maybe even 100x more efficient than democ…
Linux and Python are both projects where people can vote with their feet, though. The projects themselves are not a democracy, but they're certainly not the same sort of ballgame as employment. If I decide my management chain is doing the wrong thing, there's a huge personal cost to finding another job, and little guarantee it will be better. If I decide Linux is doing the wrong thing, I can just stop using it or con…
It's obviously true that being banned from contributing to an important project can be saddening and in rare occasions harm your career, but it happens very rarely.
OTOH losing your job can be way more serious consequences and happens way more often, even without any blame on the employee (e.g. a company shutdown)
And on top of that, a project BDFL cannot order inactive contributors to do some work under threat of banning them.
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> 2. Not everyone who codes is in the US, or a small number of other countries, where salaries for coders are high. I don't have much stats, but this is true in countries that I know of: US, Switzerland, Germany, Poland, Ukraine, India So I wouldn't expect other countries to be much different, it might depend on company you work for, if you stay in small < 10 people places, you won't get much salary as a coder.
Is it possible that the entire reason that you know about the coding salaries for these countries is precisely because the salaries for coding are high there? Like, I live in the US, and I knew someone who transferred to Switzerland and got a pay raise for cost of living increase. So when you mentioned Switzerland I was thinking, "Well, yeah. Zurich is an expensive place to live, and there are some big engineering of…
Poland, Ukraine and India aren't exactly hugh cost living places compared to Zurich or SF.
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We need to convince the serfs, not the lords. The lords can keep lording alone, it doesn't matter.
The real trick, assuming you succeed, is not becoming a lord yourself.
- Mao Zedong
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Haha... indeed. I meant specifically from the perspective that you were in a situation where leaving your job meant you were now uninsurable (in many states, at least). I have an entirely separate rant on how the ACA stuck people with higher deductible health plans outside of employers (like me and my family) with virtually all of the risk of the formerly uninsurable. It was more politically expedient for the Democra…
It was fairly maddening hearing endless glory heaped upon the ACA, while most sq mi of the US remained saturated with uncovered Americans. At least until 2017. After that it seemed a little okay to discuss the realities of the ACA.
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Holy shit this is the most privileged mindset. Do you know people who aren't coders? You know we live and work in some sort of dream land and 99% of people in other jobs don't have anywhere near this level of freedom and bargaining power. You will sell yourself short by forgetting this. Coding isn't guaranteed to stay like this - as tooling gets better and better and more people get into it we will be seen less and l…
You can get the same level of freedom with manual labor. I don't know where you live, but here, contractors make a shitload of money. Especially plumbers are in high demand.
Any "manual labour"? Certainly not true. Unskilled manual labour is a race to the bottom in most places and usually done by immigrants who can afford to work for peanuts.