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by deepGem
1384 days ago
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I think these comments come mostly from engineers who have just started their software engineering journey or somewhere in their early stages. When you are at that stage, your odds of coming across an inspiring figure in other areas are very low, unless you have a natural proclivity to other areas in your life. As you grow, you do realize that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and you mellow down and start to learn the interfaces with other functions. Even then your superiority bias won't away but will mellow down for sure. This is simply because your success as a mid-senior engineer is no longer a function of just your engineering skills. Its a function of how well you can sell your ideas, how you can articulate your messaging so that every other function can work with you, how do you get buy-in from competing parties etc.
But again, engineers will brush these aside as 'politics' unrelated to software engineering :) |
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Year after year after year I learned again and again that there's something truly toxic about middle-management and up. It's like the higher you go, the worse the air gets, and your brain starts to get clouded and fuzzy. Technical people stay in their roles for decades and get better and better over time; management plays musical chairs where they change roles every 2 or 3 years. The new role has almost nothing to do with their old role. If you saw a whole group of people randomly switch every couple years between being an Aerospace Engineer, then a Software Engineer, then an Environmental Engineer, then a Structural Engineer, you'd rightly go: wow, all these engineering jobs must be super easy! They just throw anybody into those roles. They don't take any time to learn, etc. etc. So why, when people randomly switch every couple years between product manager, director of operations, financial director, project manager, sales manager, director of internal innovation, director of digital growth, director of New-Techy-Buzzword -- why do you not conclude the same thing? All those jobs are stupid and worthless, clearly, because they come and go with the wind, and anyone in the mid-to-upper-management sphere can take on any of those roles. Clearly they require no training. Clearly they are not hard. Having an MBA degree does not qualify you to do all of those roles, unless those roles have absolutely nothing to them. Note that I intentionally excluded anything having to do with "legal" in there, because that's an actual job that takes an actual expert.
My long-winded point is that I did the exact opposite of what you claim. I used to believe that software engineering is a piece in the overall puzzle and that all these other functions are an important part. But I learned, time and time and time again, that the primary driving force in corporate America is the Principal Agent Problem and that all these roles are just titles to be shuffled around among those in the Business Caste for their own personal benefit. Entire companies are nothing more than pawns in the game these guys (and it is mostly men) are playing with each other, jockying for the most impressive-sounding titles, extracting as much money as they can from the public sector into their own pockets. If they're actually doing their job well, they're losing at the game. You have to switch jobs every couple years to keep up.