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Things I want to say to my boss

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Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#151

Post by dghlsakjg »

xnorswap wrote: post #69
everdrive wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very good observation, and true of nearly any contemporary fiction set in the past. People just seem unable to avoid this flaw.

"contemporary fiction set in the past" Nitpick, but this is a contradiction. Contemporary fiction doesn't mean "current" (or least it didn't used to) it means "set in the time it was written". I guess the word contemporary has been misused to the point of just meaning current or modern and I shouldn't nitpick it!

"contemporary fiction" is an industry/academic term for a genre of literature, but not widely used in the TV world. I think they meant "contemporary fiction" in the sense of the production of the fiction is contemporary. As in the TV show is contemporary in its creation, but the setting is historical. I don't think that redefines contemporary outside of... contemporary usage and definition.

It makes the most sense in context, and the discussion is about a TV show and not literature.

Different nitpick: Mad Men first aired in 2007. Is an 18 year old show that stopped production more than a decade ago contemporary?

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#152

Post by aquariusDue »

hinkley wrote: post #114
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.

FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already. I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull u…

I've never thought about it this way but now that you mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.

Do I go soul searching now or start a blog?

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#153

Post by tehjoker »

psychoslave wrote: post #96

This year I started to have the background ideas popping up in my mind about a future where societies put care as the main goal. More precisely "la société du soin" comes to my mind. It's a bit different as in french the term as a very large semantic network. Sure care is the closest general translation. Anyway, we really are making much more progresses on technological side than on relevant careful social organisati…

This is a very good thing to want and if you are serious about that, I would implore you to look into socialism. That’s what people who take that idea seriously have written voluminously about how to make it happen.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#154

Post by quesera »

exasperaited wrote: post #46
slashdave wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.

I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates. I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when…

This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?

Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important.

Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees.

Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category.

Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?

I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction.

It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#155

Post by tehjoker »

ArcHound wrote: post #21

As with all issues of power abuse, the real question is: "what are you going to do about it?" If the answer from the workers is an overwhelming "nothing", then there's no reason to change. And I am not blaming workers. Bills need to be paid, mouths need to be fed. Staying low and taking it might be better than speaking up and risking homelessness. Please tell me how I am wrong, I struggle to see how the situation cou…

Unionization is an approach that would work.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#156

Post by cons0le »

orzig wrote: post #101

> You can’t fake care. People feel it. My company went through executive changes, layoffs, etc. I thought it was VERY clear that our senior manager handled the situation extremely poorly. At least a few people agreed with me, so imagine my shock when several others not only defended him but joined his next company. I am reminded of that when people assume "interpersonal dynamics are obvious to all involved", which is…

What's funny is you totally can fake that you care. They just don't want/need to

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#157

Post by ivanovm »

rhyperior wrote: post #121
ivanovm wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Say more, I'd love to know how this is a demonstration of illiteracy

Because "I haven't seen this literary tool" or "I wouldn't think to use it" or "It doesn't match my perception of human literary tools", it must be artificial.

It's far more telling that you'd imagine this is a literary tool so interesting or complex that other people haven't seen it or thought of it

https://www.google.com/search?q=it%27s+not+x+its+y

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#158

Post by cons0le »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #100
ArcHound wrote: post #21

As with all issues of power abuse, the real question is: "what are you going to do about it?" If the answer from the workers is an overwhelming "nothing", then there's no reason to change. And I am not blaming workers. Bills need to be paid, mouths need to be fed. Staying low and taking it might be better than speaking up and risking homelessness. Please tell me how I am wrong, I struggle to see how the situation cou…

What are we going to do about it? Many of us are withdrawing, just putting in the time without real effort, "quiet quitting". Companies still get us, but they don't get our best. Some instead turn into... well, in the sports world, they would be called "locker room cancers". People who bring a bad attitude, and communicate it to others. Either way, companies wind up harmed by this - harmed, eventually, in terms of th…

The only real answer is to unionize. But every time that gets mentioned here, ~90% of people are against it. I notice SWE try to cultivate that "rockstar" persona, the last thing people want to do is admit they need each other / take collective action.

We honestly should have unionized 20 years ago when the outsourcing started

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#159

Post by burningChrome »

ajkjk wrote: post #111
marcinzm wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.

imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since…

You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer - mostly on the front-end side.

I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.

All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.

Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.

Re: Things I want to say to my boss

#160

Post by Aurornis »

marcinzm wrote: post #48
reallymental wrote: post #3

I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of leadership mindset finally reap its rewards. Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "…

As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.

> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".

I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.

"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.

This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.

It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.

We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)

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