Debate over 'fake work' and 'lazy management' in tech industry

> In my own anecdotal experience, I’ve seen a lot more “fake work” come from listless leadership that lacks a true vision for the product.

Since an acquisition at a company I used to work for full-time and remained on call as a contractor with for some time after, I have seen this happen in a very impressive way.

Critical tech debt has gone unpaid as site performance degrades to the point of outages, but the new staff don't seem to know how to do anything except throw more hardware at the problem.

Meanwhile, a few weeks ago, I got an inquiry from them about "administrator passwords" for a list of a dozen or so programs in use on their developer machines, including 7-zip and Notepad++.

There were around a dozen items and all of them but some IDEs were completely open-source software. All of them were only deployed and run locally, with no administrative passwords or commercial licensing purchased. This inquiry came many months after I had left, including an extensive and agonizing knowledge transfer process.

There's no way the person asking me was such an idiot that he didn't realize that Notepad++ has no administrative passwords. But he asked me anyway. I can only assume this is because some wrathful idiot asked him to do this, and he knew that performing the ceremony of asking me as he was directed to do would be easier to deal with than just answering the inquiry directly with the parts he knew himself.

Once you have somebody generating fake work like that at the top, where can things possibly go other than down?

I think there's also an issue that execs can create the appearance of being busy (and may indeed spend a ridiculous number of hours in meetings) but it can be hard to see if they're contributing anything valuable. I was at a startup which over a period of years repeatedly had new execs come in, claim that something was wrong with our planning or goal-setting process, "restart" the whole thing in a way which was virtually identical except with new exemplar docs, tracking spreadsheets, meetings etc -- and then pat themselves on the back. So far as I can tell, this is only because creating the appearance of change allows them to take credit for any later success. I asked one once what they found problematic about our prior process, and the answer was roughly "I don't know about your prior process so I cannot comment."

As a senior engineer I don't really agree. I've had good and bad managers over time, and the presence of good managers has been key when I've had more success and satisfaction.

For me, the good ones help me do the work that I am usually bad at or don't want to do: the nitty gritty of task prioritization, keeping track of the a bunch of the higher level details, parsing leadership's emanation for product direction, etc. That, and acting like a shield to deflect any badness that might come down from above.

I like contributing opinions and so on to all that, but I don't want to be the person attending all those meetings and being the final arbiter -- at least not right now. So I'm very happy to have someone there doing that, so I can operate more at the technical level.

I guess I'm a bit ADHD, but a lot of what managers do doesn't motivate me, sorry. So, yes, please to having someone fill those shoes. If they're good.

But a bad manager, yes... a problem. Luckily it's a competitive job market, and my skills such as they are can be used elsewhere, with better management.

That doesn't always (or usually) work in some of these BigCorps. It's not that they don't give you freedom to go ... do stuff -- they often do -- but there are also are often very concrete boundaries about who is allowed to actually have the stuff they do go into any kind of production codebase. And very rigorous review processes, etc. and often the first question in a code review on something exotic and new at a place like Google is: Where is the PRD / design doc for this? (aka who approved this)..

They are often not environments promoting spontaneous contributions, especially not not at the L3/L4/L5 aka lower part of the promotion ladder.

That and corporate survival / promo at these places really depends on "demonstrating impact", which, well, at the lower levels... can come down to sticking with doing what someone more senior than you expected you to do, taking ownership of it, and etc etc.

The reality is that many of the people spinning their wheels like this should just leave and go find a new job. But that's awfully hard to do when you are making sometimes twice as much as what a more "meaningful" job in e.g. a startup or small company can offer. Or when you're on an H1B, or you need certain medical care, etc. etc. etc.