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Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#211

Post by lapcat »

smeej wrote: post #173
lordnacho wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism, not communism, not anything that's already been talked about for 200 years. It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happ…

So "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"? I hate to tell you this, but you've very much missed your target of "not something that's already been talked about for 200 years." Who does the selecting? Who says, "You, there! You shall devote your time to programming robots, so your neighbors can 'be good friends' and have meaningful relationships. Buck up, comrade. Look how good it will…

See also: "in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic." https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8116796-for-as-soon-as-the-...

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#212

Post by flagrant_taco »

tuatoru wrote: post #74
pdimitar wrote: post #7

That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it. The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow t…

> I've known a few company owners long time ago who ... swore on their lives they will not fire the managers for bringing them bad news It needs to go further. Fire everyone who says there are no problems. If there are no problems, why is an under-manager needed? Also fire everyone who makes up bullshit problems. If you're going to agree with me all the time, why do I need you?

Teams can actually function well and have no problems for periods of time. I those cases you would almost certainly break that by firing the manager.

I think everyone would agree that yes-people are useless for a team, but if you find yourself surrounded by them you have to ask why. Either you hired poorly, or more likely the way you treat you team and/or company creates a culture of fear and dishonesty.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#213

Post by Moru »

gcapu wrote: post #210
skrebbel wrote: post #192

Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them. It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo. At no point does this article, or most articles…

God points but: 1) For someone in BigCo it is fun to read. 2) BigCo is not a bad place for most people. Management should just shut up about efficiency and data driven. No one believes them, not even themselves.

It's also nice to read for us in SmallCo. We remember why we took that salary hit to stay sane.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#214

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

borroka wrote: post #106
repomies69 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My company can fire me tomorrow, they will forget my name in 5 days. To "fire" my company, I need to find another job, maybe in another city, working with colleagues I don't know who may eat food at lunch break I don't like the smell of. I don't think is very good comparison, generally. Some other company could offer you a job and you can leave any time. Depending on your tasks, the company might have very difficul…

It is a very good comparison (I work in California, at-will contracts). The effect of me leaving my company and the effect of my company leaving me, for the one who is getting dropped, are not even remotely comparable. The negative effects of my leaving or being laid off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left my group and other groups I worked in a…

> The negative effects of my leaving or being laid off/fired on the company of 100k people are, more often than not, not distinguishable from zero. Many folks left my group and other groups I worked in and, invariably, the escapees were barely remembered a few weeks after leaving. The cemetery is full of indispensable people, and I was never told that I was indispensable.

In fact, I'd go as far as to say that having "indispensable people" at all is a management failure. Large corporations that have been around for decades have survived because they don't have indispensable people.

This is why you don't get more money even if you outcode everyone on your team. The company doesn't want a rockstar developer, it much prefers having 4 average devs (where "average" obviously varies a lot based on the company and how much they pay etc.) It's simple risk management: the company knows it can recruit another average dev if it needs to.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#215

Post by spydum »

jiggawatts wrote: post #82

> “This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.” Ha-ha… haaa Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily. This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team, and all but one developer literally never even looking at…

i think tech folks like us often fail on this front of "change management". We can build/buy/integrate amazing tools that can actually solve (or prevent) problems, but we suck at changing organization behavior to adopt them and extract the value. Then we all look around like: why are we still operating in hard mode? because we havent made the case for change, and convinced folks to implement it. changing human behavior is tough

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#216

Post by maxslch »

They really don't, for a programmer there are million opportunities todo something at a smaller scale, on your own etc. If you're a product manager than the job itself only exists in inefficient corporations. corporations don't take risks, they're slow etc. look at google, how many exciting things did they push out over the last decade? and how many do we use today?

the thing these corporations are good at is control and marketing, they're everywhere and people always think first about them when searching for a job etc. they also pay the most, but you'll waste your potential there with endless titles etc. In a startup/your own project you can do everything yourself, learn anything, go into any direction you want to.

All it takes is a mindful shift in thinking, look deeper into what you want, what will fulfill you etc, but seems like most or a large number of people opt for not thinking stuff through and go with the easiest, most popular and obvious choice, it's like going to a factory to stand X hours near the machine...

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#217

Post by pdimitar »

erano wrote: post #40
adastra22 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I do this on a daily basis. Sometimes I want to have two different branches open simultaneously. Maybe there’s some fancy git hackery to have two open workspaces from the same .git local repository. But you know what? My time to figure that out is worth more than the measly megabytes of saved disk space.

The official way to do this is using git worktrees[0], but, as you say, it may not be worth the time to learn if what you have is working for you. [0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

It's not even only that, when you switch to another worktree you catch your language server with its pants down, and some tooling e.g. test watchers are bugging out as well.

I just always found it cleaner to have several directories on the rare occasion I need to work on several branches almost in parallel.

And let's face it, most of us don't work in a repo that is 100GB or above. Even if it was a 10GB I wouldn't care one bit and can easily have 20 copies of it temporarily.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#218

Post by Draiken »

skrebbel wrote: post #192

Blog posts like these are a staple on HN and I’m always mildly offended by them. It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, spend their evenings writing ranty blog posts about how terrible it all is, culminating in the inevitable “I quit” article, only subsequently to accept a job at a different terrible BigCo. At no point does this article, or most articles…

If we lived in a world where money wasn't so important I would fully agree with you.

But it is.

I can't earn the same as you all can because I don't live in the US, but if I did I would grind all the leetcode (as insulting as I find them) for one single reason: I don't want to work forever.

So I agree with some other comments here. No it's not really a choice.

Choosing to earn less and hope for a lottery ticket win like being an early employee in a unicorn startup is not a real plan. It's wishful thinking.

I hate this is the world we live in and my soul dies a bit every day I have to waste my talents writing useless software, but there's no real choice.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#219

Post by pdimitar »

cratermoon wrote: post #69
pdimitar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks. Happened to me about 2 years ago, and it was my shortest contract ever. Lasted 3 months. And it was not my imagination, I was complimented and groomed int…

Exactly what happened to me, but lasted 6 months. If the middle of the contract hadn't fallen over the US holiday season, when everyone kind of went into a holding pattern because some industries are just that way, it's entirely possible the contract would have been just 3 months. The organization, at some level, clearly never wanted me to solve the issues I was supposedly brought in to address, but give them cover t…

I thought of that and tried to reflect myself but in the end I couldn't decipher their motivation. It was either (1) I solved a big problem they wanted quicker than they thought and they had no idea what to do with me after, or (2) they lied to me that I did well, concluded I am no good and funneled me to a team where I was managed like an intern.

No clue either way but it was not okay to not communicate. It seems they still needed the manpower so they figured they will not say anything at all and hope that I will stay. Well, it didn't work for them. I was happy to leave, lol.

And sorry it happened to you as well. The motivations of companies when hiring are still foreign to me and I have to catch up there and learn a lot because I hate being blindsided like that.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#220

Post by flagrant_taco »

TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #202
lordnacho wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why I'm thinking we need a new system. Not capitalism, not communism, not anything that's already been talked about for 200 years. It seems to me that our real problem is that we are wired to demand everybody contributes. Both righties and lefties actually agree on this, they just have different views on how to get it done theoretically, and in practice have also come up with various schemes to make this happ…

Capitalism in theory doesn't support jobs that produce no value. Shareholders would have demanded that waste be optimized out of the company.

That sounds like a lovely version of capitalism, but the one I've experienced is anything but optimized. There can be incentives to keeping around unproductive jobs, the size and stability of an org can often be used as a basic sign of health.

See: AT&T

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