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Is it? Maybe I'm out of touch, or used to a different work culture (non-US, consultant), but that's kinda obvious, you're paid because you make money.
Also, no one that knows a single teacher or nurse would ever fall into the trap of thinking that salary is proportional to job importance.
> It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you get paid for work because it’s important Is it? Maybe I'm out of touch, or used to a different work culture (non-US, consultant), but that's kinda obvious, you're paid because you make money. Also, no one that knows a single teacher or nurse would ever fall into the trap of thinking that salary is proportional to job importance.
If low-level workers are a 'cost centre', why don't companies just get rid of them? Wouldn't they be more profitable if they removed everyone outside the 'profit centre' of senior management? Obviously not.
Running companies like this is how you end up with the current state of Boeing. Only valuing engineers who are directly earning you profit and firing the ones who only have an indirect role in your profit centers. > If your work isn’t clearly connected to company profit, your position is unstable You know what really makes your position unstable as an engineer? Delaying a product over "safety" concerns, thereby doing…
> Or even worse, engineers who are preventing you from making profit over "safety" concerns. Ugh, this. After doing SRE for nearly a decade and being utterly pigeonholed, I've come to believe it's more accurately placed in the "controlled opposition" bucket than anything about either reliability or engineering.
I have often ended up working on the billing system - nobody cares if it functions and I don't know why. It pulls in the money every month and if it makes mistakes the company loses money.........!!!!..... In the same companies people do care about the UI ...even when it has about 2-3 unique users per day. I won't explain how this translates to being able to function as a company at all - just to say it does because…
But no individual manager loses anything compared to their colleagues. There is nothing for them to lose by not caring.
"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that. Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. I…
What if they're right, and at a certain point engineering is a commodity?
"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that. Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. I…
What if they're right, and at a certain point engineering is a commodity?
I feel like managers - even good managers - understand that better than most. That isn't to say there isn't variation in humans - choosing the humans right for your team and organization will help advance a lot, but it really helps us to think of organizations as ant colonies. One person can slow it down, but very few can speed it up, and they can only do so much.
It's the network of communication that matters more than the person.
> They throw themselves into various pieces of work that don’t make money ... better screenreader support Truth hurts lol. This I think is where Capitalism is at odds with a lot of people's intrinsic values. Accessibility unarguable improves people's lives and many people are in software to make the world better but yeah if you want to make as much money (or maybe just more money) doesn't mean working on even a usefu…