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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?

#201

Post by watwut »

tclancy wrote: post #196
cebert wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically useless unless you need to schedule a meeting with them

That's assuming an awful lot, mainly about how we no longer need human connection or context with other people to be able to succeed as a team. When I took over as an engineering manager, it took a couple of 1:1s per person but actually being interested in them as fellow humans made a huge difference. One of my reports, a former teammate who I really liked and got along well with, was carrying serious depression arou…

Nothing says human connection as much as scheduled meeting and necessity to have scheduled meeting to get or provide context.

If the general mussings about a company, causual fun project and a little small talk about life require scheduled meething, you dont have those human connections with the team.

Did you considered that people understand difference between human connection, relationship and being one of mandatory duties/meeting with someone who is actually apart and disconnected?

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

#202

Post by strfry »

You can analyze a company in different ways, like as a machine or organism. All images are valid, but some are more appropriate. If you fixate on one, like treating an organization as a machine of interlocking parts with defined purposes, then you may be overly surprised that people aren't adding value and start to expect either some deeper purpose or a "correction": imminent layoffs. If you try to understand large businesses as a kind of welfare system to keep the middle class satiated, then the behavior of your boss and coworkers makes sense. They're doing an acceptable amount of work to justify their salaries.

Instead of being demoralized, shouldn't you be happy that you have a nice financial buffer, smart coworkers, and the choice to either effect change internally or compartmentalize work and create a more meaningful life outside of it? I'm not saying you should keep working there, but if you want to play hardball you can always step up or out.

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

#203

Post by dilyevsky »

DoctorDabadedoo wrote: post #199
dilyevsky wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Twitter had been around for a long time and could very well be considered feature complete and run with a skeleton crew. They don't own any mission critical software and in the days it went down after Elon started pulling the plugs, the only thing that changed was the people going to reddit to complain about stability.

sure but there are tons of products from faang and other large companies that can be considered feature complete

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

#205

Post by lovich »

JohnMakin wrote: post #166
lovich wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment. You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting. You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quic…

> You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters This is reframing the discussion a little bit. I said up thread, certain things need to be discussed in private, but why would it be on a regular, frequent cadence? As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for? If someone requires neg…

The longer the period in between reviews the larger the gap can become between the manager and employees perception of the employees performance.

Personally I don’t think once a week is absolutely necessary but I tailored it to the employees. I let them choose a cadence with a maximum of once a week and a minimum of once a month and had a mixture of choices amongst my team.

Some people also want to feel heard, but I had to balance that out with my other responsibilities and couldn’t guarantee I could drop everything to talk, so I carve out the time on my calendar and also made it clear that we could drop the meeting that week if both parties felt it was unnecessary

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

#206

Post by watwut »

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…

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.

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

#207

Post by [deleted] »

KaiserPro wrote: post #116
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.

I would hope that people, having dealt with LLMs for a few years would understand that its all about context. In a 25 person company, context is easy, assuming even half arsed communications. Its possible to hold the state of the entire company in your head. That scales to about 50. after that it becomes hard. then you start having team meetings and the like. Even at my old startup we had 1:1s when we were ~25 people…

[deleted]

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

#208

Post by wryoak »

> it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers

Why is the meaning of your own life derived from your perception of the lives of others? Or rather, why is it that when you judge others’ lives as inauthentic you find your own to be so too?

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

harrall wrote: post #121
wrxd wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With most of my managers 1:1 have always been a way for them to catch up with what I’ve been working on, despite doing a standup every single day so that the team knows what each other is doing.

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…

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by habinero »

JohnMakin wrote: post #166
lovich wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment. You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting. You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quic…

> You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters This is reframing the discussion a little bit. I said up thread, certain things need to be discussed in private, but why would it be on a regular, frequent cadence? As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for? If someone requires neg…

> As far as negative feedback - yes, but isn't that what quarterly/bi-yearly/yearly reviews are for?

Absolutely not, no. The opposite of that. You never want to hear negative feedback for the first time at an annual review.

You don't want to be giving negative feedback every week, sure, but you do want to give feedback as close to the behavior as possible. Otherwise, you're just letting someone fuck up for months when they could be learning

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