> Anyone else notice this?
This is not just the big MNCs but this is happening throughout all organisation irrespecitive of SWE or not. I know its really heartbreaking and there is still not a KPI to measure productivity/performance in a right way?
Did anybody come across any intressting KPI they were measured against?
Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
41–50 of 307 posts
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#42The dynamic I saw at a FAANG-adjacent company when I worked there was wild between the contractors and FTEs. If an FTE could get one or two contractors reporting to them, they'd hand over all the work, put their feet up and take it easy, make fun of the contractors, and then if there were any good results jump in to take credit for those at meetings with upper management which the contractors were not invited to.
So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#43This was my experience mostly in my 10 years at Google at a certain level. But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it. Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cauti…
What did you see as the perverse incentives for the PMs there? Schedule optimization like cutting out testing? Cost cutting by under-hiring?
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#44"including FAANG" What would make them less vulnerable to this?
I'd say they have people who have been doing software for as long as 30 years, and also all the human resources and billions of dollars to fix this problem if it was something that could be fixed with human resources and money.
And still ... there's a lot of this.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#45This was my experience mostly in my 10 years at Google at a certain level. But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it. Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cauti…
What did you see as the perverse incentives for the PMs there? Schedule optimization like cutting out testing? Cost cutting by under-hiring?
My perspective is that promotion especially for PMs (and SWEs to some extent) involves pushing novelty / "demonstrating impact".
IMHO this in large part responsible for Google's ADHD around project cancellations/replacements.
Not restricted to PMs but it is especially pernicious when product direction gets pushed this way.
Cost cutting and underhiring were never a problem while I Was there. More the opposite. They overhired and then there was no good throughput on projects because every chef was in the kitchen at once.
If I recall, the turndown on e.g. Google Reader was more about finding it difficult to get SWEs who wanted to work on it. I think it would have been increasingly difficult to survive the performance review cycle if you were stuck on a "backwater" project like that.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#46I think Elon noticed it.
I think Elon pretended to notice it. Instead of taking his time and doing it right, he was performative in his own actions causing unnecessary problems. In doing so got rid of the important pieces as well as the bloat.
It is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#47The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild. If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide. But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meeti…
Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week.
The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.
All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#48I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies.
At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.
IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#49That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done. Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had…
This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity.
I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.
Re: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
#50The one time I worked at a large corporate, my time was split between failing to find useful projects that I was allowed to work on, and failing to deliver much on the useless projects I was given because I didn't understand that it would e.g. take six weeks and two review meetings to provision an extra half a terabyte of storage on a db cluster.
I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.