[haxorito]

I made same mistake, I saw how old system underperformed and that I could make it better, faster, more stable and bring higher profit.

When I presented that my boss, next I know I’m in room with HR, my bosse’s boss and technical lead (who was practically executive director), to my surprise boss started conversation with “your actions concerning me...” they told me to give all the related code, documents and remove everything from my computer. After that incident I never got promoted, my annual bonus was always 50% of everyone’s. No one in the team wanted to talk to me, I was excluded from any design meetings. Eventually my whole team got promoted to principal engineers and all new comers were one level above me. That was the worst 4 years in my life ( I had to work for them because of the work visa)

[haxorito]

Answering all questions. One thing i left off is the reason why I was in hot water:

Everyone in our organization is really “rank-orientated”, I challenge their intellect and their baby they were proud of - it was foundation for our organization to even exist in company. Even though it was outdated, poorly designed system, that produced high percent of outages and heavy on maintenance. But it was not my place or position to do that.

From now on I moto “not my business”

[hueving]

It's also possible your solution wasn't as elegant, maintainable, or as performant in all cases as you thought.

If you're going to approach upper management with such a hostile attitude, you need to run it by some peers first to have them poke holes in the idea and get onboard.

Why I called your approach hostile: you phrased it as "challenging their intellect". That's not how good engineers pitch changes.

[Viliam1234]

> It's also possible your solution wasn't as elegant, maintainable, or as performant in all cases as you thought.

That usually doesn't result in being called to HR and asked to remove everything from one's computer.

[sonnyblarney]

Though I'm sympathetic to you, I feel there is more to this story.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

When you presented what to your boss, exactly?

Did you suggest "I can make it better, faster, more stable...?" or did you go ahead and make the change and say "see?" Were you in a position where you should even have been thinking about this system?

I wonder what steps in this story you're leaving out?

[haxorito]

Of course I did not just go and implement the change in production. I had put together PoC and documentation how and why it’s better, more error resilient and effective. The reason for just reaction was politics... I put my nose in other people business.

[jpatokal]

+1. The fact that HR's involved strongly suggests that OP was messing with something he had no business to touch.

[StavrosK]

I don't understand this, or the linked article. Can someone explain to me what possible reason there can be for responding with disciplinary action when someone proposes an improvement?

[jorgesborges]

I think this quote sums it up best: "I've realized that there were probably a dozen programmers on that ancient project who knew why the system was so slow and how to fix it. They knew, but they kept it to themselves because in that organization, there were some things that were more important than making the system better." The mistake was in assuming that code quality and performance always trumps other considerations. The title is misleading in this respect: it's not really programming advice. Even the phrase repeated in the article, stay the hell out of other people's code, is more about navigating the potential unknowns of a situation, and being in touch with what's happening around the office more generally.

[hueving]

An easy reason that often gets left out of these stories is that someone spent weeks on a rewrite without authorization rather than working on burning priorities.

[zbentley]

That's a real problem, and quite common. I think it's important, when confronting or correcting someone doing that (whether they're your employee, colleague, superior, team lead, etc.) to emphasize that they're not being punished or thought poorly of because of their ingenuity or initiative, but because they're wasting time and need to stick to the plan. Otherwise, initially headstrong but very capable people are often ground down before they have a chance to get used to the roadmapping/planning/etc. process at a company. This is especially true with new engineers.

I have no idea if the GP post you're replying to is someone rationalizing being in that position as being "disciplined for touching the wrong code", or whether something actually screwy was going on. I just wanted to mention that distinction because it was important to me when I started out (if people had come down on me for having ideas, instead of for wasting time, I'd be in a much less useful, happy, and capable place today).

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I have to admit that, as an engineering manager, this is exactly what I was thinking!

[ozim]

I look at documents and remove everything from my computer, and my guess is that op worked on it on his own time on his own machine. He was still working 4 years in that company, so he was not removed from project. Feels like action was uh, he got documents out of company.

Don't get any data out of company, I would never promote someone who got any documents out of company laptop to his own.

[baylisscg]

When they've gone on an unauthorised excursion through some code that has say, safety critical or legal, concerns some off the top of my head examples.

Hey guy's I've rewritten:

- The dosage control code for radiotherapy device so we can remove that expensive mechanical interlock! - The data access layer of our patient records system! - How we calculate x in out guidance software we can go to a cheaper CPU now!

especially if said code was rattling in the building around somewhere it might get into the code base.

[gnarlysasquatch]

In those cases, why not respond by explaining the risks or other considerations that might not be apparent from the code?

Frankly if there is real risk that the code is pushed to production by someone who shouldn't be touching it is a failure to properly safeguard critical assets.

Retaliating because someone tried to make something better is abusive and dysfunctional.

[zbentley]

> When they've gone on an unauthorised excursion through some code that has say, safety critical or legal, concerns

> especially if said code was rattling in the building around somewhere it might get into the code base.

Reading code should never require "authorization". There might be some edge cases related to logistical technicalities (e.g. there's a security clearance/IP/trade secret/plain-text password concern). But there is no reason that the criticality or risk from changes to code should prevent people from reading it.

Writing or rewriting code should never require authorization; getting it released should.

That's not some 'everyone should do whatever they want, damn the managers' statement: do your job and try meet your goals; if you go off the reservation and waste time, don't be surprised if you get slapped. If you take your code to your boss/team and they say "that's too critical to touch right now/at your experience level", "I don't have time in my day to review your side-of-desk rewrite, shelve it", or "that's incredibly misguided and too stupid to even try to improve", that's on you to work through.

But the act of [re]writing code alone should never be forbidden.

If one of your job's responsibilities is "don't rewrite this code, even as a scratchpad or personal what-if,", that is fucked.

If one of your job's responsibilities is "don't read code that is out of your lane, and don't try to understand the haunted forests"[1], that is fucked.

Your responsibilities might not be explicitly to do those things. But if your responsibilities include the negatives ("never touch this, even if you don't check it in"), something is very wrong.

If code "rattling around the building" might somehow "get into the codebase", that is fucked: you have a horrible problem with your code review process, your release process, your developer prod-access/permissioning system, or your colleagues' willingness to accept as gospel things they find lying around. Or all of the above.

To be blunt, that comment seemed harmfully closed-minded, paranoid without reason, and lacking in understanding of how engineers grow and learn: by reading and writing code, even if nothing release-able comes out of it immediately.

[1]: https://john-millikin.com/sre-school/no-haunted-forests

[ChristianGeek]

You make someone above you with an ego look bad.

[gbajson]

Similar thing has happened to me. I joined a security team in a Big Bank. During the first month of my work I discovered a terrible and obvious security hole, which was there for years. My manager took me aside and explained that they can't fix it, or even start doing anything about it, because the whole team will look incompetent. I was told not do anything and reassigned to the completely different tasks far from the team. After another month, I left.

[jonnycomputer]

Sounds like a toxic company. Sorry you couldn't ditch them.

[InafuSabi]

I do not understand why you were treated as if you wrote viral code which wiped all networked storage of the company.

Did anyone ever say why you were treated like an infectuous disease after doing something good, which would benefit everyone?

[jolmg]

The fact that he was a foreigner provides a hint. It seems there's a general fear in the US of foreign workers taking the jobs of citizens. I wonder, is it not possible to switch employers when you have a work visa?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

there's a general fear in the US of foreign workers taking the jobs of citizens

Comments from our idiot president and his ilk aside, there is not. I'm willing to entertain discussions to the contrary, but this is far from my experience either here in the Midwest, or on the East Coast where I previously worked.

[throwawaymjabba]

I worked for the US counter part of an Indian company in Illinois for a couple of years. We used to have town hall meetings every quarter. On 2 such meetings, I heard two separate American employees questioning the speaker about outsourcing more. He would be talking about how they are planning to spread out a project with 20% in US, 50% in India, remaining in Europe and some other place. In both the occasions, they asked questions that meant why only 20% in US or something similar. He always replied that's what the customer is willing to pay, that the customer has so and so budget, and this is how we are meeting it.

[ChristianGeek]

It’s not the case in Southern California, either.

[iratewizard]

Or maybe more realistic and less paranoid: the code he wrote was more performant but significantly less maintainable. Look at it from a director's perspective. Technical debt from an H1b. Is he trying to maintain job security by being the only one who understands how a critical module works?

[parrot_11]

"Technical debt from an H1b."

You seem to have jumped to a conclusion rather quickly. Even assuming for a second that the hysteria was because the new function that GP wrote is complex, wouldn't the reaction to that would've been "Can you write it more clearly?" instead of the hysteria and pariah ceremony?

[watwut]

That situation would warrant 10 min discussion with lead. Not this.

You version is quite paranoid on itself - junior denied learning and shunned for a single mistake.

[adrianhel]

In this scenario the lack of performance was significant, so I would say it was necessary. If performance was adequate, different story.

For example. We have a redux based content editor that is quite slow. It is however more than performant enough for the use case. I would love it if someone refactored it though...

[hueving]

You don't know how significant the performance difference was. You're just believing the commenter who thought it was without hearing from the company who obviously didn't think it was a priority.