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by sepositus 461 days ago
I'm not sure if things have changed over the past five years, but this is exactly the stuff you'd throw in a promotion packet or maybe in a performance (perf) review to hit that mythical "superb" rating.

The breaking point for me (and why I left after almost a decade) was when people started getting high ratings for fixing things they had an original hand in causing. Honestly, the comfiest job in the world if you're a professional bullshitter.

4 comments

By "had a hand in causing" do you mean "they should have prevented it", or do you just mean "they were involved in the causation"? Because sometimes you're forced to do things you know are wrong, because that's what other people are making you do, and in that case you still "have a hand" in causing.
Something in between. Like "pushed to implement a feature without the safety measures". When outages started to happen implemented Outage Prevention Program, i.e. implemented the safety measures that should have been implemented from the start.

Subsequent data collection demonstrated X% outage frequency drop clearly demonstrating readiness for promotion, data driven.

Exactly this.
It's not easy or popular to link Dilbert these days, but there's a classic cartoon of the PHB announcing their bug bounty program for dev employees, and one of the fellows exclaims that he's going to “code his way to a minivan”!
What I’ve been seeing from Google’s products lately suggests that these are the only ones still there. It’s a house of cards built with professional bullshitters. Google’s culture has entered or is already deep within the bullshit era.
It will happen in all companies that has a monopoly status. If they start to struggle they will just increase the rent.
You can’t swoop in and be a hero and make impact without a meteor.