[reallymental]

I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of leadership mindset finally reap its rewards.

Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.

It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level?

This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness):

`In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years of cold war without the option.`

So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow rules gentlemen.

[marcinzm]

As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.

[arevno]

That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.

So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.

[dakiol]

I feel divided. I do love my career (computer science/engineering) and I dedicate a lot of my free time to it (reading tech books, doing side projects, HN, etc.). But at the same time, I don't give a damn about my company. I hate the leaders, C-level execs, ... I cannot stand them, and it's not just my company, it's almost every tech company out there; so I work for the money, and take pride of my skills when working on open source and the like.

[wahnfrieden]

Fortunately there is a gold rush at the moment with consumer apps and social media marketing (methods which are called "organic" and "UGC") that is allowing many of us to escape the grind of working under ownership that doesn't care and doesn't share the value we create

[BiteCode_dev]

Also, this is why we still gravitate toward FOSS communities. It's the last vestige of a dying era. A circle where people like that have a chance to hang up together and keep the warm feeling of being human.

[hinkley]

FOSS is a bit like blogging in that a lot of it seems to be motivated by a desire to win an argument you lost once already.

I’m a maintainer on one library in small part because of an argument I had with a maintainer of a similar library years ago. And nearly a maintainer on another one. I voted with my feet and made improvements to DX an/or performance because I can’t pull down a wrongheaded project but I can pull up a better one.

(Incidentally I looked at his issue log the other day and it’s 95% an enumeration of the feature list of the one I’m helping out on. Ha!)

[aquariusDue]

I've never thought about it this way but now that you mention it both blogging and FOSS once stripped of substance seem like L'esprit de l'escalier externalized.

Do I go soul searching now or start a blog?

[BiteCode_dev]

Never put it this way before, but it's exactly why I started blogging. I was fed up with how bad Python content was online.

[ian-g]

It isn't entirely that.

Somewhat, sure.

It's also managers who tell you you're being laid off, but good news, not for three months. And, oh, by the way, if you leave early no severance.

And why are you being laid off?

Your duties are being offshored.

_You_ aren't being offshored because they need three people to replace you, but your duties are.

Ostensibly this saves money.

[dominotw]

what do we do now?

[gdulli]

Why does having different values imply intolerance?

[whstl]

For me it isn't much intolerance, it's more of a lack of patience for the careerists.

Working with people that love what they're doing can be very chill. Working with people angling for a promotion, taking shortcuts, one-upping the co-workers and still not pulling their weight is exhausting.

This is not a new phenomenon, in the past this kind of dev also existed. Lots of people studied CompSci but didn't want to be a "lowly developer" for long and were just making time to "become a manager". Of course they never put the work for that as well. Today it's half of the people I interview: they never got good enough to become a manager, and never become good enough to pass most interviews in the market of today.

On the other hand, I got a couple manager friends who love coding and are trying to become individual contributors, but keep getting pulled into leading projects because of their expertise.

Don't get me wrong, though, everyone wants to make money and have a good career, I just prefer working with a different kind of person.

[flatline]

I do think there can be element of snobbishness around it, but that's not really the point. The overculture of corporate America has finally overtaken the hackerish (relative) meritocracy of early tech, of Getting Things Done and Building Cool Stuff. Rewards are increasingly tied to metrics decoupled from useful outcomes. If you want to get paid a big tech salary you need to go through the leetcode grind, and do things like project sufficient "masculine energy" (lol). Management performance is measured by hiring and expansion more than product delivery and success. The ethics of what you are doing are completely secondary to shareholder value. You still need technical skills, but they are somewhat less important, there are many more competing incentives than there used to be, and the stakes are higher. This has been happening since the early days - cf. Microserfs, written all the way back in 1995 - it's just that tech has worked its way so thoroughly into the fabric of corporate existence that the two have more or less completely merged.

[raw_anon_1111]

I got my first job as a software developer in 1996. It was never negative it was just a job.

Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.

I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?

But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.

I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.

I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money

[ajkjk]

imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.

[burningChrome]

You just encapsulated my 20 years being a developer - mostly on the front-end side.

I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.

All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.

Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.

[Aurornis]

> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".

I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.

"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.

This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.

It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.

We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)

[kermatt]

They have it right. Goals are short term, jobs are ephemeral. Hell, maybe careers are ephemeral now as well.

If the individual's focus is on short term income or career growth, then they align with the company's goals.

Solid engineering practices and product quality don't matter anymore (except in FOSS), and will likely be viewed as antagonistic to the KPIs, OKRs, or whatever metrics measure what is considered success.

Stated as someone who has been in various forms of IT since 1985, and has experienced most of software engineering turned into an MBA value extraction mindset. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

[mghackerlady]

I'm very much not an experienced engineer but I lean that way. I think the modern profit-above-all-else attitude of modern engineers comes from the whole "learn to code" movement and promises of a good paying job. These people aren't motivated by their passion for the craft but instead because it was seen as easy money

[venturecruelty]

Hard not to be motivated by money when simply being alive requires so much of it. It's easy to be principled when your bills are paid.

[eddieroger]

I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions, not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs - it's not if there's another, it's when.

[venturecruelty]

Well, it's hard to do anything else when management doesn't let you, and when your entire life is on the line. Nobody's going to risk homelessness (or worse: a lack of health insurance) on principles that are simply not rewarded anymore. There is an entire generation of programmers who wouldn't recognize software quality if it bit them on the Electron app. It's not their fault, but it's the way things are now. Unless and until this relentless obsession with hoarding wealth changes, we will continue to get the software we deserve. Selah.

[getpokedagain]

If this were good for stock go up 9/10 startups wouldn't fail. While cutting corners can be needed at times doing the wrong thing doesn't. Eventually the wrong thing also pisses off the market and turns your company into a joke with a bad reputation.

[frm88]

company into a joke with a bad reputation

... which doesn't really matter anymore either as long as it's profitable, see Facebook, Twitter, Boeing...

[the_snooze]

It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.

[eric_h]

Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)

[hinkley]

The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office.

I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”.

But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work.

Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware.

The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.

[bongodongobob]

It is. Our "security manager" has a dashboard that just literally counts the number of "security policies" we've put in place. Anything that isn't a box to tick is completely ignored as irrelevant. So we are essentially counting how many group policies we can implement and just disregarding the effectiveness of them for mitigating relevant threats and ignoring the added complexity and cost it incurs by making everyone's life more difficult. Systems password management/MFA? Who cares, can't make a graph out of it. It's the dumbest shit I've ever had to deal with.

[forbiddenvoid]

Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.

[Aurornis]

> these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.

I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was hard to get any work done.

These were people who had read 20 different management books and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work. They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets they would give us.

They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored" you about things you knew.

The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily in implementing all of the leadership material they could consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing they could.

The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing important got done and the VC money bled out in between team lunches and off-site bonding experiences.

So any extreme is bad.

[eleveriven]

But I don't think the people in the article "took things too literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make it obvious they don't

[exasperaited]

Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity.

The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.

Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.

Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.

[slashdave]

I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.

[exasperaited]

I struggle to find things in the modern business world that cannot be blamed on the culture of the MBA. What you are talking about — boards not caring about the welfare of employees — is a fundamental result of the culture of the MBA, which has suffused through all business thought in a way that casually depersonalises and humiliates.

I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".

There were four of us.

[quesera]

This one trips me up. Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?

Literally nothing about the word "resource" has negative connotations for me. Resources are finite and precious. They are protected and important.

Sometimes they are exploited and undervalued, sure. What isn't? Certainly not humans or employees.

Every project requires resources. Some of them are human. It's just a category.

Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?

I don't use the word, and the first time I heard it, I thought it was a little impersonal. But then I thought about it more, and I just don't understand the strength of reaction.

It might help that, in general, my goal is not to be seen as a living human being with real human complexity and needs and desires, at work.

[exasperaited]

> Would you be less bothered if he said "I've got a human for that"? Or "I've got a worker for that"? "The staff to handle that need is available"?

"I've got a worker" is still somewhat dehumanising. "I have the staff for that" is somewhat less dehumanising.

But, for example, "yes we have someone here that can work on this with you" is so obviously less dehumanising.

I find it surprising that people would ever be confused about this. Perhaps it is because I am British and that sort of language is impolite, rude and arrogant. Or perhaps it is rejection-sensitive dysphoria (a real problem for me) making me sensitive to descriptions of myself and people I care about that reduce us to interchangeable allocatable units.

But again, the basic thing here is: there were four of us. Only one of us was ever going to do that job because there were four of us and we had four different jobs. So why ever lurch towards the language of interchangeability, in earshot.

Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category". And you should never use a word for a person that can also be used for a photocopier or a dictionary. A person can be resourceful; they are never a resource.

[quesera]

How about something like "Yes, we have the resources to handle that project"?

> Four people in a small business cannot really ever be a "category".

Sure they can -- they are all employees, for example.

I agree that "resource" is an impersonal word when used for "staff" (largely because it can apply to non-human things). I just don't feel the need to be considered more than a resource at work.

I bring special skills and knowledge, I have no concern that I am an interchangeable cog in the wheel of industry -- and yet at the same time, I have no illusions that I cannot be replaced (on some possibly-inconvenient timescale for business operations, although certainly that has varied over time in my employment history).

Actually that raises an interesting question, I think. When I was in high school, I worked a few summer temp jobs as unskilled labor. If anyone had called me a "resource" then, it would have felt patronizingly euphemistic to the point of absurdity. I was just a body. So in that case "resource" would be a silly upgrade.

So I guess it comes down to context. I can see where a four-person company, especially if you've been there a while, has a much higher expectation of personal relationships.

You mentioned that your boss was on the phone. The other party to the conversation might have been further removed (org chart-wise) from their staff. They might think only in resource allocation and not know any names or capacities at the productive level in their own org, never mind yours. Since they are a client, your boss may have mirrored their language, even though he was speaking about a full human, and within earshot of that human.

I don't know, maybe your boss was just a jerk in general, and this word was enough to make you feel like it was a summary of how he thought about you.

But maybe it was just a word. Neither incorrect, nor intentionally offensive.

Obviously, words can be triggers. I'm in the camp that believes they should not be, for all sorts of logical reasons, but I'm not an absolutist. Some words are intended to be triggering, for example, and although I think it's a mistake to give them that power, I understand it's not that simple and that I speak from a position of privilege.

However, I don't think that "resource" has reached the point of social awareness that it is actually offensive to some people. I think that most people who use the word intend no offense, and are not thinking in a way that, if fully explained, would be offensive.

[dogleash]

>Why are we sensitive about the word "resource"?

It's simple dehumanization. It's not outlandish or anything, it's just really easy to notice. And the sophistry to try make them equivalent terms is also easy to notice.

For a business to need resources it means a category of stuff that can include people, tools, raw materials, etc... Using the name of a category to mean one thing inside it instead of explicitly naming that one thing is concealment. Just like how I might say "fertilizer" instead of "cow shit."

The better question is why we started concealing it. Why are we so sensitive about the words person, employee, or personnel?

[frm88]

Because starting from the 1980's corporate organisation was focused on managing resources, of which humans were a part that had to be dehumanized to fit with the rest of the theory. There was a brief phase where it was called HCM - human capital management, but that never caught on widely; so HRM it is with a focus on managing as opposed to organising and supporting. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/evolution-hr-terminology-why-...

[coldpie]

> when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".

Hahaha, I got hit with that, too, also working for a small company. Luckily it was the client who called me "a resource", not someone from my company, but good lord what a way that is to talk about human beings.

[amarant]

Aren't contemporary boardrooms generally stuffed to the brim with MBA's though? Or is that just my preconceptions talking?

[slashdave]

The Board represents shareholders, at least in principle. More celebrities really.

[ambicapter]

What were the "the US stock market reforms of the 1970s", roughly?

[exasperaited]

OK so I am not an expert here at all, but my broad contention is that much of the modern way business works traces back to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio...

The equivalent in the UK — the Big Bang — was very much fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990 :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)

On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract.

This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it.

That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees.

Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity.

But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending.

Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now.

The startups I worked for in the late 1990s in the UK simply could not ever have happened before the Big Bang. The entire culture of venture capital changed.

[ambicapter]

So it seems like kind of a mixed bag of democratizing access, but which also created a little more individualized, selfish pressures on the way the market behaves.

[didibus]

> Profit at any cost

Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...

You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.

Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.

Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.

Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.

What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.

What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.

Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.

It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

[no_wizard]

>Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.

I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem in leadership.

I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years, there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've contributed a great deal to engineering strategy, particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.

The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain) don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of a director.

[0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this excellent website: https://staffeng.com

[1]: As in having the power to put plans and/or actions into effect

[Sohcahtoa82]

> But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.

True for a tech company startup, almost absolutely false for a well-established company, especially a non-tech one.

[didibus]

I admit for a non-tech company I do not know, that's a blind spot for me.

I'd want to assume that it would be the same except that they are even less likely to know it's good for their profit and therefore to not properly invest in it.

For well established tech companies, my experience is that still aligns with maximizing profit, but two things happen:

The company has so much buffer to be inneficient, they can also brute force their way into new territories or markets. They can hire more, they can contract out, they can buy up other companies, they have existing leverage from their current customers or other products, etc.

They are more focused on reducing cost than growth. They turn their current tools and products to "maintenance mode", and that requires less excellence to achieve and is more mundane work, sometimes all it takes is just more hands on it or people willing to work off-hours or long hours to get the ticket queue down to 0, which means running it like a sweat shop can meet their needs.

[dominotw]

luck is probabilistic after being selected for sucking up.

[stuffn]

> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.

To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.

> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.

> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.

[didibus]

> Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business.

They pay you to increase their profit. As you see yourself running a business, it's important to understand what your customers actually care to pay for.

If you want your pay to go up, they need to see the impact you can make or are making to their profit.

A lot of engineers think they are paid to work through tasks assigned to them and what not, or to increase code quality, or to add a feature to the app, or backend, etc. As they focus on that, they can find themselves really surprised when they're told they aren't performing or are going to be let go. "I did everything you asked me?" Yes, but none of that was what they were interested in. To them it felt like they had to step in and find things for you to do otherwise you'd be sitting idle while they pay for nothing, which is work they had to do that they'd had rather not have too.

What they actually want you to do, is immediately begin understanding what makes them money, immediately start engaging with ideas to maximize that, and immediately start focusing on how the tasks you pick up should be done in order to maximize the impact to their bottom line, by figuring out if it's the right thing or not, if it's worth doing it well or doing it quickly, etc.

> Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest".

I'm not fully going to disagree here, but most engineers are not paid for "hours-in-seat" at least in big tech. They're salaried, not hourly wage workers.

And what you say is true if you consider "working hard" to be the same as "pretending to work a lot of hours."

Putting in lots of hours is actually quite easy, if at the sacrifice of your personal time, but anybody can do it.

Actual hard work though is often quite engaging, fun, and rewarding. Many engineers look for opportunities to work on hard problems for example.

It is very difficult to create an environment that makes people work hard. Meaning, having them truly tackle innovation, truly raise efficiency, truly prioritized on what matters, truly in the loop of what they need to solve for, truly assigned to what they are best at, etc.

It is very easy to create an environment that makes people work longer hours or weekends, but on a bunch of easy irrelevant things and with procrastination throughout.

> without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this

That you must be willing to take risk, believe you are the best, willing to play dirty, willing to stomp on others, and so on, yes for sure to some extent.

But out of all those with some of that, most of them are average or below average leaders even with respect to being a tyrant and everything else required.

Sometimes applying a bit of pressure, dangling a carrot, a bit of a threat, it does motivate people to put on more effort and try harder and it does extract more value out of them (at no added cost).

And a good manager will do that, and you should expect it. But going back to your business analogy, customers do the same. They complain, they want more for less, they threaten to go to your competitor, etc.

But this part is the easiest one to do. And because it's so easy, you'll find it's what most managers do to try and be a "good manager". That makes it average at best.

Beyond that, a really good manager will do everything else I mentioned.

And so, my point remains, if all your manager is doing is just telling you why you're not better and things aren't done and to try harder, they're a bad manager, as that's just going to be what the average or below average manager will do, since it's literally the easiest thing to do as a manager.

[pwillia7]

I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class.

If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people?

I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

[phantasmish]

The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.

[no_wizard]

Deep professional understanding of a problem space that a business solves is way undervalued. Institutional knowledge, experience, and domain expertise have been devalued precisely because the managerial class (particularly executives and VPs) actively learn and live the idea that labor is always bad and to be minimized as much as possible.

This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.

[dragonwriter]

> This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.

Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about, the same way every productivity improving invention has been marketed to corporate buyers even if a major actual effect is increasing the value of each labor hour and driving wages up. (Which is largely isomorphic to reducing the number X role needed in the production of Y units of a good or service.)

Its also sold as a labor productivity increase to independent creators. And the two things are, after all, different sides of the same coin.

[nosianu]

> Arguably, AI is largely marketed that way because that's what corporate buyers care about

Why "arguably", that is exactly what he wrote

[dragonwriter]

No, he wrote that it was marketed that way because that is what the “AI boom is really about”, in opposition to something else, which I also discuss in the post you excerpted this from. Not sure if you didn’t read the whole post and just kneejerk reacted to the first part of the first sentence out of context, or if you just didn’t understand how it sharply differs from the claims in the post it responds to.

[elzbardico]

The System's purpose is what it does.

As capitalism moved towards financialization, the societal incentives moved from "profit from doing things" in the long run towards "profit from trading ownership of entities that eventually do things" in the short term.

This requires a completely different kind of management. I don't need someone who deeply knows what it takes to create and manufacture planes as a CEO anymore, I need someone who can make the most out of the numbers to make the speculators happy during this quarter.

[alephnerd]

> Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm)

This isn't the norm in most STEM industries anymore.

Most of us started off as IC-level engineers before either beung given progressively more responsibility and/or being sponsored by our employees to participate in a PTMBA like Wharton, Booth, Fuqua, or Haas.

Networking and hustling did ofc play a role, but lacking domain experience would limit how high you could climb.

[alephnerd]

It is a variation of the principal-agent problem, and recognizing had helped me climb up the ladder in my career.

[pwillia7]

Tell me more

[alephnerd]

When I was in the policymaking world and was considering grad school/academia, an underlying theme in my research was that the principal-agent problem is a reflection of misaligned incentives which leads a stag-hunt dynamic to become a Nash Equilibrium.

Long story short, incentives matter, and understanding how to align your initiatives with the incentives of veto players helps build coalitions that you need to get initiatives out the door. That said, these initiatives also need to be executed successfully, becuase organizational dynamics are inherently multi-agent games.

Essentially, I made sure to understand how to speak (ie. Understand the incentive structures) of multiple stakeholders (eg. How to convince Mgmt and IC Engineers, PMs, salespeople, customer success, and customers) and also how to execute successfully on initiatives (ie. How to successfully launch products, lead a round, land customers, or manage an M&A event).

This meant both building domain knowledge about each of the stakeholders fields as well as building domain knowledge in a handful of fields I knew I could specialize in.

Basically, understanding incentive structures and being able to show how your interests and goals align with those incentives is critical.

For example, back when I was an IC level engineer, if I wanted to get tech debt prioritized, I made sure to:

1. Show that it was tied to active issues to customers that matter - eg. fixing a bug for a customer who spends $20k a year at a company generating $100M a year in revenue is a misallocation of resources for EMs and PMs

2. Show that it is tied to speeding up feature delivery: it converts a conversation around "maintenance" into a conversation around adding new capabilities that are assumed to generate revenue, thus aligning Sales, PM, and Leadership

A lot of people on HN neurotically and reflexively don't care to understand how organizations work or how to make a case. A number of them assume that just because it's a technical problem it should actually matter to the top line of a business. In most cases, it does not if you cannot make a case for it. A number of them also don't care to leave a bad organization if they are in one (I have worked in 2 in my career, and made sure to leave).

I have no MBA, I just have an undergrad CS degree (and a secondary in Government). Even though my current day job doesn't demand it, I can still code, but I also taught myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience research, and other functions. If you want to survive and thrive in the tech industry, nowadays you will need to build industry specific domain experience, technology specific domain experience, and basic product management, sales, and user experience chops.

[breppp]

> but I also taught myself how to do basic FP&A, marketing, user experience research, and other functions

Any recommended resources?

[alephnerd]

FP&A is useless for most ICs (I only taught myself when I transitioned into a leadership role with P/L responsibility some time ago).

For marketing and pricing strategy, probably "Monetizing Innovation".

For UX research, CS160's content [0]

For sales strategy, "Blue Ocean Strategy".

For launching products, "The Lean Startup".

But most critically, start having sincere conversations with stakeholders and understand why they do what they do.

Ofc, if you don't work in a major tech and startup hub like in the Bay, Seattle, NYC, TLV, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Shanghai, Beijing, London, Prague, Warsaw, or Bucharest, much of this is moot because the kind of organization that would allow you to grow doesn't exist outside of those hubs.

[0] - https://kwsong.github.io/cs160su23/

[css_apologist]

> last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35

ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s

[theideaofcoffee]

Easy now, I think it's pretty easy to see that he's talking about "three decades" generally, a decade in his own experience and two or more generalized out. You can know about things that you don't directly experience.

[jayd16]

I gave it a pass for those decades being in "recent memory" even if the experience wasn't first hand.