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- Hacker News
- > Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team.
Depending on the manager and on the team, 1:1s with people can be very valuable for all involved.
by elric - There’s quite a bit of this but the big orgs have created a machine where they can capture (1+x) times the value of what they pay someone. If you’ve made such a machine, the best way to make more money is to put as much input into the machine as possible.
And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking.
Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”
by arjie - I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money.
YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.
by aloe_falsa - In my experience, actual producing impact/value and being able to demonstrate that you've produced impact/value are pretty loosely coupled to each, and it is often possible to do one without the other (in both directions). And time spent on one often directly competes with time spent on another.
I'd imagine it's the people who are better at "demonstrating value" than actually producing it that are the target of the original post.
by nicoburns - Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work.
This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.
by slibhb - > as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.
Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?
by creshal - Round your "~15%" up to 20%, and you've just discovered the Pareto Princlple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle, aka "The 80/20 rule".by loneboat
- I think this dynamic is not specific to SWE and as old as time. As organizations grow, so does the aspect of work that's more "seeing and being seen", and rightfully so.
There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy.
But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged.
That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business.
But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists.
But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.
by FinnLobsien - It doesn't help shareholders or customers in any way however so we should not celebrate it or even simply accept that this is "the way things are". It is an error to be corrected.by osigurdson
- It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked on projects with 50 programmers and it seemed many did nothing and a few did negative work.
We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved.
He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done.
I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative.
That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.”
I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.
by prepend - There's that, and then there's the other kind of negative work, whereby a rockstar engineer develops something that works but only he understands, completely failing to document it well. When this engineer leaves, the project is unmaintainable by virtue of being incomprehensible. In both cases, the management has been clueless.by OutOfHere
- I work almost exclusively in small (<100 employees) firms, usually no more than 20 developers, and it’s a complete mix here too.
One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care
It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.
by antonymoose - My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.
Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.
The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.
by 01284a7e - Being the rockstar doing all the technical work can also be performative. I'm currently working on a CTO team that is supposed to "disrupt" a big org. There's a lot of emphasis on demoing and sketching things out a mile wide and an inch deep. I think there's some merit to it but a lot of it is kayfabe.
Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.
by hdndjsbbs - Kayfabe is the best way to describe it.by AndyNemmity
- It is a property of any large bureaucracy that a large proportion of the bureaucracy exists to serve itself. And it's not BS, it's a natural consequence of growth. Imagine you start in the mode of "moving fast and breaking stuff". Eventually, you break enough stuff that someone says "enough". So you develop some launch standards and guidelines. Then hire a team to enforce them. Then someone to build a launch tool. Then you realize you also need to manage legal risks, have standardized UIs, make sure that production services have backups and redundancy, and all of sudden, you have ten review processes. And then, it gets so difficult to navigate the process that teams hire PMs just to coordinate. And on, and on.
And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off.
I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?
by zerobees - > Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?
1. that the existence of such very "chill" roles often leads to hiring of more mediocre people and diminishes the value of working at such a company (at least psychologically)
2. That little gets done / built with all these people and resources, which is seen as a waste of potential.
3. That bureaucracy itself may be more exhausting than doing real work.
by junior44660 - Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?
If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.
Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.
Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.
There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail...
Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.
by cadamsdotcom - > Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?
> If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.
I've been involved in a few projects where the value appeared clear at the beginning, but by the end there was little value.
In one case the project failed due to incompetence and mismanagement: Basically, the project dragged on and on until it missed its market window. (What stinks is it was basically a port of a Visual Basic sales tool to a more modern v2.)
In another case I was hired into a machine learning project in a company where everyone spent a lot of time justifying their jobs. The project ultimately didn't "improve" over the non-machine-learning approach, and devolved into a "solution in search of a problem".
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As far as why the company held onto the people involved? (I left after both projects.) That's harder to explain, but I like to think of an analogy to a king holding on to a standing army: It's there when you need it, and your soldiers aren't helping the rival kingdom.
A different way to say it: One of the downsides to working in a large company is that a lot of the people there are "warm butts on seats." The company could function without them. Many of the people you work with have competence issues. You're probably a "warm butt on a seat" too, and may have some competence issues. That's why I like working for smaller companies: they can't afford to be fat.
by gwbas1c - > Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive
This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent.
I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.
- Twitter had laid off like 75%+ of staff and everyone, including on this site, was convinced it would crash and burn, yet it's still working. Explain?by dilyevsky
- Indeed, and the third party may be someone who thinks the entire SWE department is useless. Most people have an equivalent understanding of what SWEs and high level managers actually do all day.
Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.
by analog31 - You've never had a task in a job where it is obvious the task is entirely useless and stupid and a waste of time and exists solely because of process that no one in the chain of being involved has the authority to rip out and replace with something sensible? You guys hiring?by asdff
- Working at FAANG, acutally the stuff I was doing was mostly bollocks. Nothing of real value, apart from a few projects was delivered.by KaiserPro
- > This is arrogant thinking typical of developers
typical for a lot of knowledge workers. "engineer's disease"
i am good at solving problems in X domain, and believe that carries over to all domains. it's just so simple, they're so dumb, etc.
these guys get to management and then crash out.
- It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.by wqaatwt
- I feel like you've maybe had the benefit of working in teams where this didn't happen.
I've seen it first hand, people cotton on to EM's latest buzz word, find some space to shove it into and then show it off. EM is blown away despite the result being over engineered or poor fit for the solution.
Last time I saw this was a system decomposed to events when tight orchestration was necessary. 10 months later a single function app was dropped in place to replace it. Dev who did the original work got a promotion for their gift of technical debt.
by ActionHank - The 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 meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?
by mercutio2 - Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.by eudamoniac
- Any good thing can be done wrong, and if it can be done wrong, the it will be done wrong.