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Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

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Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#221

Post by phkahler »

afrodc_ wrote: post #140
monocasa wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Management commonly has a dumb understanding of economics and management. Particularly when they view engineering as a cost center.

To the untrained eye, it definitely is a huge cost center. Devs and smart people get premium dollar for their work, as they should, but for the bean counters, execs and bad managers, it's extremely difficult to simply quantify the work in such a way to see it as a value add. Especially in an executive excel sheet/powerpoint

>> it's extremely difficult to simply quantify the work in such a way to see it as a value add.

Which is often the case even in product development. They know the existing product is only going to be useful for the next few years. They know they need something new to build on the line. But somehow the development of that new thing is seen as pure cost rather than an investment in the future.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#222

Post by wutbrodo »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #196
RankingMember wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it broadly available could also potentially just set a new floor for productivity in an industry that doesn't always reward such gains commensurate with their value, i.e. you'd get an attaboy and "alright well now you can do three times as much work for the same pay!"

Yeah. Why would anyone do things that reduce their own leverage? Assuming rewards proportional to the value of one's work is magical thinking. "If I save a company $100,000, they will give me a significant portion of it." No such deal exists! They're just as likely to give us raises and bonuses as they are to pocket the profits for themselves and assign us even more work.

I have been thinking this for the last decade of reading this perspective on HN, but it's worth saying: if this is true, it's at best a dramatically bimodal situation.

The incredibly-slack labor market this describes wasn't reflective of my experience or that of anybody I knew as of ten years ago. After a decade of tightening in that market, this is even less true.

As I said, it's likely bimodal: certain geographies/verticals/perhaps specialties probably still afford tech workers a 1990s-like level of market power.

But it's worth pointing out that what you're describing is not remotely the norm for at least some dense subnetwork of labor (of which I'm a part). Further, it's potentially the case that entry into this labor market is accessible to those who are currently in the looser market, especially as IMO talent doesn't account for the entirety of the gap.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#223

Post by sabellito »

behnamoh wrote: post #171
sabellito wrote: post #86

This is the worst post I've ever seen on hacker news. You're just trumpeting your cause, assuming it's universal, and using an actual valid question to do so. I'm extremely surprised this is still up.

Ironically, you're proving my point by the tone of your comment.

How does it prove your point?

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#224

Post by sumtechguy »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #196
RankingMember wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making it broadly available could also potentially just set a new floor for productivity in an industry that doesn't always reward such gains commensurate with their value, i.e. you'd get an attaboy and "alright well now you can do three times as much work for the same pay!"

Yeah. Why would anyone do things that reduce their own leverage? Assuming rewards proportional to the value of one's work is magical thinking. "If I save a company $100,000, they will give me a significant portion of it." No such deal exists! They're just as likely to give us raises and bonuses as they are to pocket the profits for themselves and assign us even more work.

I have a nice coffee mug that I got for the end of a multi million dollar deal. I dont drink coffee. They would not have got that deal done without me. As I was one of two people on the planet who knew how that code worked and the other dude left years earlier. They then wondered why my productivity jumped off a cliff.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#225

Post by bsamuels »

It's really easy to sound smart when criticizing something, and HN promotes content that sounds smart.

I used to play a drinking game with friends where we would read HN submission titles and try to guess how the top comment was going to criticize it.

HN is simply not the place to go to share new ideas, projects, or anything that might undermine the consensus opinion.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#226

Post by aidenn0 »

bokchoi wrote: post #44
BatteryMountain wrote: post #9

Yeah I do this. Most of what I build, nobody knows about it nor is it release into the wild. Latest example: at my current workplace we have some crappy custom compilers for our platform.... I've rebuilt them in a way that I like (and using C# instead of Java), that enables me to use it in a small visual studio code plugin that enables me with real time error messages as I code against our platform, so basically cons…

Wait, why don't you want to help your colleagues? That seems pretty shitty.

As a contractor, I once made a tool that made things easier for me. The "breakeven" time (time saved exceeded time spent writing it) was a day or two. I made the mistake of sharing this tool and was berated by the client. Every single time after that they made sure to remind me not to work on things "outside the scope" of the contract as apparently writing tools to increase the output they get per billed hour is out-of-scope.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#227

Post by slaymaker1907 »

literallyWTF wrote: post #192
SuoDuanDao wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2/3 of all jobs are widely accepted to add no value to society[1] 2/3 of all consumption is accepted to add no incremental happiness[2] 2/3 of all CO2 emissions can be eliminated through careful lifestyle management and community design.[3] These quantities do not seem coincidental and they point to a better way of doing things. You're not wrong, there's no incentive currently to 'pay us back'. But collectively we ar…

Leave it to HN to argue that getting rid of jobs will reduce the carbon footprint of corporations. I mean you’re not wrong, once we purge a large chunk of the population, since ya know, they’ll have no way to provide for themselves, we will have a much greener planet.

That is a pretty bad faith interpretation of the original argument. You are assuming (incorrectly IMO) that the only purpose of people is to do work. While work is important, I think humans are inherently valuable, even if they don't produce anything else of value besides themselves. Instead of creating fake work for these people to do, I'd rather they just be provided for without doing fake work that accelerates us towards apocalypse.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#228

Post by behnamoh »

dotancohen wrote: post #209
notreallyserio wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see not wanting to support a tool. I've written tools that automate processes in useful ways but the interfaces aren't perfect and you need some base knowledge to understand how they work. I don't want to spend my time improving and supporting those tools. I wrote them to reduce the amount of work I have to do, not add yet another responsibility. I've also made the mistake of sharing my tools only to find cri…

> I could see not wanting to support a tool. I had one time written a small tool to reformat a CSV file for one of the office workers. One day she comes to me to make some change to the tool, but I was extraordinarily busy with my real work - and I only came in that day because there was a fire burning that I was best suited to putting out. So my refusal to drop the emergency that I was fixing (on my day off) in orde…

>> So my refusal to drop the emergency that I was fixing (on my day off) in order to modify this tool that had already saved her probably tens of hours of tedium, let to resentment and ultimately to me being fired from the place.

Man, we live in a society… glad you are in a better place now!

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#229

Post by wing-_-nuts »

deltree7 wrote: post #69
hallway_monitor wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people are assuming the worst intentions here but anyone who has worked in an enterprise knows sometimes it's useful to build tools for your use and not to share. The tool might not even be allowed, C# is probably not in the supported platforms and even if it was, getting it into the official repos can be arduous. If OP really cared about maximizing everyone's productivity of course they would share the tool…

Increasing productivity never lays people off, unless the people were originally being unproductive. That's a dumb understanding of economics and even management. Also, scaling tools to more than one user is incredibly hard. Software development is still custom / art. This tool works because it is suited to OPs workflow and his "way of thinking". In order to make it work for others, it needs lots of improvement and g…

>Increasing productivity never lays people off

Once, I worked for a medical claims company. We had a dozen people who just worked on processing claims. I wrote some software that cut the claim processing time in half. Instead of finding new work for the claims processors, they literally laid off half of them. I have never felt worse, as a software developer than I did that day. Management was so short sighted at that company.

Re: Do you ever avoid submitting something on HN so devs won't ruin it?

#230

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

shadowgovt wrote: post #178
edoceo wrote: post #116

When I was 20 (c1997) I took this job, it had a FileMaker database for tracking tickets. And then my team mates all had to review that system to manually fill out a Word document with hours. So I made a little code to pull from FM and put into Word. So we could fill these forms, required for payroll, in minutes rather than hours (not a joke). And my team mates loved it. And then our lead claimed it as his own work, p…

This is one of the less-obvious benefits of robust version control with authorship history.

Based on my experience, these problems are not so much technical as political. It rarely gets to the stage where you openly contest your boss saying, "I wrote it, not you, and I can prove it" - because it is often trivial to prove, especially nowadays. But in general you say nothing because you want to keep the job.
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