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- Hacker News
- > there are plenty of companies with people who will make a good faith effort to do what makes sense ... I always like working for these companies
Everyone likes working for these companies, but this requires a mature work culture. The people with seniority have to be competent and experienced enough to distinguish good ideas and not abuse their position for personal gain.
In my experience these good places tend to be midsized companies. In contrast, just about any team you land in at a big tech company is going to be siloed off with one or more psychopaths at the helm who never "spent enough time in the trenches" to understand what healthy management looks like. The same is true at a startup. Those are workplaces mired in politics precisely because nobody in charge knows what good sense is and they do everything in their power to make sure anyone with a good idea is silenced or bullied out.
by sublinear - > if you can find the logic and the will to do it.
This is important. Both logic and will are required. If only one of the 2 exists the impact can be limited if any at all. Broadly speaking, mostly, people have the logic but not the "will" in a sense that latter gets diluted by factors like ego, seniority, org lag etc.
by LaFolle - Work in a large organization. Though it's a special industry in terms of being heavily regulated. One person can push over time to change management opinions on their scope of work and what the policy is. Junior engineers become seniors and leads over a decade or longer. If you're jumping every 2 years to a different company, yes you won't be changing much.by fortranfiend
- There is not enough nuance here to really understand the friction that this would have created but I've found the more conducive environments that engage and value healthy debate are made up of individuals that have the "strong opinions loosely held" mindset. This, on the other hand, sounds like stubbornness and wearing everyone down but again a lot gets lost in the details so I'll opt to not jump to conclusions.
- A neat story, but it can be a bad trait too. Someone who can’t take no for an answer can be incredibly toxic and forcing a change by incessant badgering until everyone gives in is not the right way to go about this. I’m not saying that was the case in this particular instance, but it happens all too often.by zenethian
- I guess this is only possible at engineering focused organizations that value technical excellence and also requires that one person be right enough in most cases to expend their social capital to advocate for the engineering changes that they want to see.
As a counterexample, I worked at a company with an extremely bureaucratic release process involving multiple levels of reviews from stakeholders, people manually monitoring a system after a release, and a policy of performing deployments only at nights, all indicators of the lack of confidence in the engineering processes of the organization.
While company management talked a lot about faster releases, “falling behind in the age of AI”, and the like, they also loved their processes and would rather keep it as to them it was a sign of meticulousness and quality. I hated it, but I don’t see how anyone, even the people who carried far more importance than me could have changed it, even though they’d acknowledge that it was slow and could do with more automation in private discussions.
- Even if this is possible, it is seldom worth it. If you look around and find deep disagreements with your coworkers, the right answer is typically to find another cohort of people to work with, not to fight an uphill battle every day. You will burn out. Just move on.
- This is the "Voice" option of the Exit/Voice/Loyalty model:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
These days it seems to be deeply unpopular though: the normal pattern is superficial Loyalty, followed by a quick dash to Exit as soon as something slightly better pops up. Anybody even attempting to Voice and actually change the organization is laughed off as hopelessly naive, especially if they're junior.