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Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

terriblesoftware.org

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Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#61

Post by jjmarr »

My company rewards impact because we work in a competitive industry and we feel like we cannot afford to waste time on unnecessary complexity. Our goal is to make money and if it doesn't meet business goals we don't waste time on it.

> Now, promotion time comes around. Engineer B’s work practically writes itself into a promotion packet: “Designed and implemented a scalable event-driven architecture, introduced a reusable abstraction layer adopted by multiple teams, and built a configuration framework enabling future extensibility.” That practically screams Staff+.

What are these companies where you have unlimited money to pay engineers to solve problems in less efficient ways??

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#62

Post by sandeepkd »

There is another facet to it as well, if it really makes sense to solve it via code or could it be more effective to handle with a manual process.

The hard part is that its a cyclic problem, you learn the importance of simplicity only by observing how complexity may not always be adding value. As a principal or staff if you suggest the engineers to simplify things, they may even see it as a missed opportunity for promotion.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#64

Post by p0w3n3d » 

  If you have 10 teams working on the same product, you probably need service boundaries.
Recently I started thinking that monolith or at least monorepo is better for AI development, because the context and the contract are in one place...

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#65

Post by shermantanktop »

This type of post is almost always a “why didn’t I get promoted” complaint in disguise.

If you want to do great work, do great work. If you want to be promoted, do what it takes in your organization. If someone told you those are the exact same thing, stop listening to that person.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#66

Post by samrus »

tomxor wrote: post #53
Swizec wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an org wants to fix the incentive, I think the question to ask in reviews isn’t “how big was the thing you built,” it’s “did you make the system easier to change next quarter.” This has been my personal mission and motivation to go into management. I see my job as making sure engineers are rewarded for building the simplest thing that works. So far the best way to align incentives that I've found is a simple pol…

Yup, in a word, ownership. But that's an unpopular approach these days where many companies are obsessed with minimising the bus factor to the point that their IP is as replaceable as their employees.

Companies hate ownership because it means they need to hire competent people who are more expensive

These days its turned less into bus factor and more into got-fed-up-of-wage-compression-and-left factor

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#67

Post by pjmlp »

tomxor wrote: post #53
Swizec wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If an org wants to fix the incentive, I think the question to ask in reviews isn’t “how big was the thing you built,” it’s “did you make the system easier to change next quarter.” This has been my personal mission and motivation to go into management. I see my job as making sure engineers are rewarded for building the simplest thing that works. So far the best way to align incentives that I've found is a simple pol…

Yup, in a word, ownership. But that's an unpopular approach these days where many companies are obsessed with minimising the bus factor to the point that their IP is as replaceable as their employees.

Even when one is lucky to find such companies, it only lasts until the next round of layoffs or management re-structuring, been there a few times.

Re: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

#68

Post by pjmlp »

samrus wrote: post #66
tomxor wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, in a word, ownership. But that's an unpopular approach these days where many companies are obsessed with minimising the bus factor to the point that their IP is as replaceable as their employees.

Companies hate ownership because it means they need to hire competent people who are more expensive These days its turned less into bus factor and more into got-fed-up-of-wage-compression-and-left factor

That only works in world regions where being a developer isn't seen culturally as yet another office job, and there is actually a job market that allows jumping easily across companies.
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