| > This surely happens sometimes. But I’ve personally witnessed a lot of engineers (especially junior engineers) who don’t give a shit about customers or shipping products or building alignment or communicating planning and impact. This attitude is what I've usually seen from management, and junior engineers are often the ones who fight against this attitude, before they get too jaded and leave. Management will dishonestly claim successful delivery with zero regard for the actual product, and then force the engineers into 24/7 oncall. > Good managers should support their team’s growth and careers, which should hopefully eliminate some of the “my manager is an idiot” stuff but it can’t eliminate all of it. That's great, but it's no substitute for actual understanding of the problems. Planning done by incompetent managers is nonsense since they don't understand the low level details of the problems.
From what I've seen, promotions into management are usually related to being best buddies with others in upper management. Incompetent managers will then use all types of excuses to justify their position, "I'm focused on hiring and growth of the team", "It's hard to be responsible for people", "leadership skills matter!" etc. all the while hiring and promoting their fellow incompetent friends and having zero care for the actual product. At least that's what I've seen at Amazon across multiple teams. Over here the incompetent management cliques will even hunt for the junior engineers brave enough to give the managers bad scores on the daily "connections" pop-up survey. |
Or do junior engineers build a broken system because they don't know better which results in them having to constantly fix shit and burn out?
And then a senior engineer is hired from outside with a lovely mess to clean up while getting paid more than the junior engineer was. And at that point in the company's life, the pressure is usually lower. So it's a nice gig. ;)