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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?

#51

Post by antonymoose »

prepend wrote: post #10

It’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…

I work almost exclusively in small (One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care

It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.

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

#52

Post by analog31 »

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…

Indeed, and the third party may be someone who thinks the entire SWE department is useless. Most people have an equivalent understanding of what SWEs and high level managers actually do all day.

Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.

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

#53

Post by slibhb »

creshal wrote: post #34
slibhb wrote: post #19

Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work. This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

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

No, but would you want this? People who contribute more should be paid more, but mapping compensation to contribution exactly isn't easy and comes with downsides.

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

#54

Post by Jeremy1026 »

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?

You must have forgotten about how bad Twitter was after the takeover/purge.

December 2022 - https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fi...

February 2023 - https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cos...

March 2023 - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286

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

#55

Post by loneboat »

slibhb wrote: post #19

Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work. This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

Round your "~15%" up to 20%, and you've just discovered the Pareto Princlple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle, aka "The 80/20 rule".

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

#57

Post by ryandvm »

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 making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.

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

#58

Post by 4lx87 »

creshal wrote: post #34
slibhb wrote: post #19

Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work. This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

> 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.

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

#59

Post by eudamoniac »

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.

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

#60

Post by 01284a7e »

prepend wrote: post #10

It’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…

My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.

Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.

The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.

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