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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

#381

Post by eliasdaler »

skrebbel wrote: post #375
BoiledCabbage wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea who Zippia is, but according to them 1/3rd of software engineers in the US work at companies >10,000 people. And 2/3rds of software engineers work at companies still > 1,000 people. So I'd argue, working at a small shop, while not rare, also isn't as predominant as you're portraying. https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/

While I meant globally, and I’m not sure that these stats generalize beyond the US (but they very much might), I’m surprised! I had expected 2/3rd to work at companies under 1000 employees simply because there’s so extremely many of those and many of them need devs. EDIT woa that page says there’s 320k software engineers in the US. That’s one entire percent of the population! That’s a lot, could that really be true?

That’s 0.1%, actually.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#382

Post by 015a »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #128
opportune wrote: post #73

The most jarring thing about entering the workforce to me, and it seems to the author as well, is the nigh-pathological lack of pride (or “passion”, which I think is a loathsome term) most people put into their jobs. I don’t accept that all of those people intrinsically are lazy morons - maybe some or even most are, but a lot of people get that attitude metaphorically beaten into them by lazy and disengaged coworkers…

I think this is mostly just growing up and realising that your own life is worth more than being a cog in a machine at some corporation. Not only that, but in most cases, giving 100% every single day actually doesn't matter that much for career progression, at least not within most companies. You can coast by quite smoothly. There are certain very high-paying companies where the above doesn't apply. But they have to…

I think its interesting how takes like this are always stated so matter-of-factly. Growing up, inevitable maturation, leads to the discovery of individualism and the desire for something more than being a cog in a machine.

I believe, strongly, that this reverses the cause and effect. No one wants to be a cog in a dysfunctional machine; and the sheer density of dysfunctional machines in our society has induced a renaissance of individualism. Its a reasonable response; you can't trust the machine to reliably arrive at the correct outcomes, but you can trust yourself.

The biggest reason why I believe so strongly that this cause and effect is reversed correlates toward human nature, which has always angled toward social organization. Some philosophers would argue that there's nothing more fulfilling than being a part of an organization larger than the individual; taking any form from marriage and starting a family, to organized religion, government service, or capitalistic corporations.

Individualism isn't a symptom of maturity; its a symptom of systemic dysfunction.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#383

Post by anvil-on-my-toe »

neogodless wrote: post #334
anvil-on-my-toe wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot taxes. $38k - $27k in taxes = $11k savings. So 9 years to save up, by which time housing inflation will have taken the price to ~$700k. You are then $40k short for the down payment.

Do you know a lot of software engineers that barely make $100k? That's why I'm not getting caught up in the particulars of this example.

Don't you think it's interesting that taxes dramatically skew the example?

Think about people earning $50k - $100k. 37 million households in the US. Another 34 million households earn less. 128 million households in America total.[1]

12, give or take 2, years into professional life, you sign a 30-year note and cash out all of your savings. Wages and cost of living won't be constant, but that's basically the optimistic case. Working 42 years to retire by owning one basic shelter.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#384

Post by Aurornis »

Draiken wrote: post #218
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 l…

> 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.

I find it funny that the internet exaggerations have convinced non-US people that:

1. Doing a couple LeetCode problems is the only thing interviewers look for

2. Everyone here automatically gets a high paying FAANG-like job if they can memorize enough LeetCode problems

3. All of these jobs just write useless software all day and never really do anything productive

and

4. LeetCode problems are impossibly difficult and it’s a tragedy that anyone would be asked to code during a coding interview.

I struggle to read these threads any more because everything seems so stretched out of proportion from the real world. If your view of what US development or interviewing culture is like comes from HN threads, you’d probably be pleasantly surprised by what it’s actually like here most of the time. The weird catastrophizing that happens on HN and Reddit is hyperbole.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#385

Post by anticensor »

throw9away6 wrote: post #269
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The concept of a voting shareholder is a myth. Most shares are owned/managed by funds so they are the true voters. They just vote to make sure the that the boat isn’t rocked too much.

Even in those cases, there are eventual beneficial owners which are indeed real natural persons.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#386

Post by aeturnum »

jt2190 wrote: post #363
aeturnum wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc).... Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which…

That’s true from a top-down corporate perspective, but this blog post is addressing the perspective of an individual on the team, who is repeatedly told that the company really cares about data, and then can’t seem to understand why serious problems with the data are just ignored.

I don't think that's actually what it says though! The blog post talks about how no one looks at the data (implying that the data is not used) and it separately talks about the inconsistent and disconnected ways that companies allocate funds. It does not, that I could tell, actually say the metrics work has revealed data the company is ignoring. Obviously if they are that's different from what I said!

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#387

Post by Aurornis »

antupis wrote: post #201
TeMPOraL wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But there’s this super prevalent idea that keeps getting pumped around the blogosphere that it’s absolutely impossible to not work at a terrible huge company and therefore you cannot possibly escape, and I quote, “going home and despairing”. Behind all such writing is an unspoken piece of context: those terrible huge companies pay software devs better than small ones. It's not that they can't work at a smaller comp…

Also work life balance is usually better in big corp you actually can clock that 9:5 and go home.

Depends on the company. My stints with BigCorp life were full of 6-7PM meeting times and expectations to keep up with Slack and email even during vacations and holidays.

I have friends at Amazon who have started to miss our Saturday events because they’re feverishly working to avoid being caught in the next round of layoffs.

I also have friends at some FAANG companies who seem like they’re barely working (their own admission) so it varies wildly. Can’t really generalize.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#388

Post by 015a »

aeturnum wrote: post #35
ludicity wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we wouldn't be wasting that money. What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a co…

But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc).... Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which…

I think this highlights the big difference between being Data Driven versus Data Reactive. If a dashboard surfaces a strategy problem; you're reacting to data. If you're forming strategy based on a dashboard; you're being driven by data.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#389

Post by mixmastamyk »

Aurornis wrote: post #384
Draiken wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> 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. I find it funny that the internet exaggerations have convinced non-US people that: 1. Doing a couple LeetCode problems is the only thing interviewers look for 2. Everyone here automatically gets a high paying FAANG-like job if they can memorize enough LeetCode proble…

I haven't had a job interview without leetcode bullshit in about 15 years. And years before that.

Basically since Joel's posts in the early 2000s. He promoted a reasonable idea-that programmers should know how to program. Then B and C players rushed to make that happen! Similar to how agile became the complete opposite of what it meant originally.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#390

Post by Aurornis »

indymike wrote: post #373
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…

>It seems to me that there’s a class of programmer that will take an overpaid job at a terrible BigCo, People are bad at understanding risk. When a company pays significantly more for the same job than another, there is always an economic reason: * The job is undesirable because of how people are treated, and as a result the only way to attract and retain people is to overpay. The extra pay mitigates flight risk when…

This is true, but it got very temporarily skewed in recent years at some companies that had a lot of cash flow. There really were companies hiring a lot of highly qualified people mostly to have large teams of highly qualified people.

The rubber band is snapping back, though. Layoffs are hitting all of these companies and expectations are rising quickly. Inevitably, companies paying a lot of money for people will expect to get their money’s worth out of them.

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