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You have to know how to drive the car

seangoedecke.com

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Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#11

Post by alexwennerberg »

davidw wrote: post #7

The more I read these kinds of things, the more I agree with > The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether. I've done plenty of really fun, engaging and interesting work in smaller companies. If you're able to be involved in open source work, what you do can still be something that many people appreciate, beyond the customers of your company,

> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether.

This is perhaps what I find somewhat odd about Sean's writing. It sometimes reads to me like a scathing critique of the dysfunctional bureaucratic dynamics of big tech companies, but that isn't really his conclusion!

Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#12

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

casualscience wrote: post #5
alexjplant wrote: post #4

> You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success. Notice that the author didn't write "getting good at delivering value." They wrote "getting good at shipping projects " because > Shipping is a socia…

> Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving somebody else to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and violent on-call isn't something to be rewarded IMO. Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG

> FAANG

And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.

There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.

It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.

Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#13

Post by wmf »

rednafi wrote: post #9

Do you ever get tired of playing this “visibility,” “impact,” “promo politics” game and think, “I came into this industry because I like computers, not… whatever this is”?

He somewhat addresses that at the end. Maybe soon enough we can replace management with AI and just download Pliny's latest promotion jailbreak.

Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#14

Post by rednafi »

wmf wrote: post #13
rednafi wrote: post #9

Do you ever get tired of playing this “visibility,” “impact,” “promo politics” game and think, “I came into this industry because I like computers, not… whatever this is”?

He somewhat addresses that at the end. Maybe soon enough we can replace management with AI and just download Pliny's latest promotion jailbreak.

I dearly hope so. Not that I am saying software development shouldn't be a social activity, but does it have to be this performative & toxic?

Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#16

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

alexwennerberg wrote: post #11
davidw wrote: post #7

The more I read these kinds of things, the more I agree with > The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether. I've done plenty of really fun, engaging and interesting work in smaller companies. If you're able to be involved in open source work, what you do can still be something that many people appreciate, beyond the customers of your company,

> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether. This is perhaps what I find somewhat odd about Sean's writing. It sometimes reads to me like a scathing critique of the dysfunctional bureaucratic dynamics of big tech companies, but that isn't really his conclusion!

The key point is at the end of the OP. The dysfunction and bureaucracy are annoying, even to the people who make a career out of it, there's no level of enlightenment where it stops being so. It's just an inevitable consequence of doing some kinds of things and making some kinds of decisions. If you're faced with an important decision affecting 10,000 employees or a million users, there's no perfectly good way to make it, only a least bad way.

Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#17

Post by augusteo »

I left a large tech company for a startup partly because of this. The politics of shipping were exhausting. At a certain scale, what gets rewarded isn't always what's valuable.

But I'd push back on the idea that all tech companies work this way. Smaller companies and startups can be different. The feedback loops are shorter, you're closer to customers, and it's harder to hide behind the appearance of shipping.

The trick is finding places where the incentives actually align with the work.

Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#18

Post by teeray »

alexjplant wrote: post #4

> You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success. Notice that the author didn't write "getting good at delivering value." They wrote "getting good at shipping projects " because > Shipping is a socia…

> Crapping something out as quickly as possible…

I suppose that makes AI Taco Bell for companies.

Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#19

Post by casualscience »

ytoawwhra92 wrote: post #12
casualscience wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving somebody else to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and violent on-call isn't something to be rewarded IMO. Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG

> FAANG And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world. There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look. It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and pr…

People succeed in spite of these systems. They have resources, tremendous network advantages, and the people at the very top crust of engineers are indeed quite good at their job.

Re: You have to know how to drive the car

#20

Post by saidinesh5 »

After a decade or so at startup/smaller companies, I moved to a big company in 2024 for the first time.

It amazes me how much low hanging fruit there is to grab to work on. At least things I felt would have had a truly positive impact on the customer and my own organisation.

The only way you get to work on it is if you don't ask for permission, but directly show some progress.

Now I'm switching to a different team within the same organisation that "wants to move like a start up". Let's see how things will move...

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