[tombert]

During my exit interview at a BigCo, when they asked why I was leaving I said "I just don't think it was a very good fit", which I believe is the most polite way of saying "I just didn't like the job".

The manager doing the exit interview started getting defensive and blaming my "attitude problems" [1], and eventually I started explaining that it felt like the entirety of the culture at BigCo, particularly amongst management but even with engineers, came down to "try and justify your existence in the company". Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, and then drop constant references to your management about how hard what you're doing is.

The manager didn't like this response, and got more defensive, we ended up going back and forth, and eventually the interview ended and despite taking a pretty considerable paycut I was ok with my decision.

I didn't know the term "Resume Driven Development" until after I left, but that was a pretty accurate description.

[1] Not completely wrong, but that doesn't absolve them of their sins.

[arwhatever]

Yeah I've worked at enough places that could generate vastly more software feature ideas than they could ever implement, to find the "justify your own existence"-type places utterly insufferable. And I absolutely refuse to suffer them and everyone else should too.

[tombert]

I've never really figured out a test to tell if the company is going to fall into that category without actually working at the company.

It's not as simple as "BigCo" vs startup; I've worked at startups where layoffs were frequent enough that it devolved into existence justification, and I've worked at BigCos that actually did give a fair bit of leeway in how you do things (within some degree of reason).

The closest thing to a "rule" that I've come to is if they use a less-mainstream language; if they're routinely using Haskell or something, they're probably a bit more onboard with experimentation, but that's still not a hard and fast rule.

[arwhatever]

"How about YOU justify my existence BEFORE making the decision to hire me in the first place?" - I've never quite said but have come close.

(Sorry, you struck a nerve with your BigCo depiction. :-)

[tombert]

Genuinely not the guy's real name, but let's say that this manager's name was "Steven".

When I said that the job boiled down to a lot of people trying to justify their existence, Steven said "do you really think that people are doing things to justify their existence in the company, Tom? Really?"

I responded back with "Yes. I think some managers, STEVEN, really like to schedule meetings to make it look like they're doing important work, STEVEN, despite the fact that most of these meetings are useless and could have been handled over slack STEVEN. I don't want to name names STEVEN, but I have observed it on the management side. I suppose you'll need to figure out who I am talking about STEVEN".

This was several years ago so I'm paraphrasing, but barely. I really disliked that job and when he wouldn't just let me answer with "it wasn't a good fit" I got (maybe irrationally) angry and it ended up being an excuse to air all my grievances. I could tell that he was getting upset when I started basically resorting to thinly-veiled insults. Not my proudest moment, to be 100% honest, but I also can't really say that I'm sorry either because I meant everything I said.

[twosdai]

As an outsider of Big co's. I always felt that if youre not on one of the 10-20 awesome product teams. Eg, Google maps, aws lambda, windows core os. Something along those lines. It seems like a territory for justification Olympics.

Just my view as a dev who's largest co was like 500 people. ~100 engineers.

[nunez]

Couldn't be more on the nose.

Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (a) in sales with a clear path to hitting/exceeding quota, (b) a strategic revenue generator, or (c) a super hot and extremely well funded corporate initiative (basically all AI projects right now).

The money tap is always on, you get all the cool toys, travel perks are great, and you get to work on amazing stuff without as much red tape.

[tombert]

Yeah, I was working on more of an infra thing (involving caching and indexing). Certainly important given the size of the company, but not something that gets lots of hype or sexiness.

There were occasional bits of ambition to occasionally work on interesting stuff, but it was mostly a “keep the lights on and then figure out how to make yourself seem important”.

One of my biggest pet peeves is when engineers say that we can’t do something because we would have to learn something new. I got into several arguments because I wanted to rewrite some buggy mutex-heavy code (that kept getting me paged in the middle of the night) with ZeroMQ, and people acted like learning it was some insurmountable challenge. My response would usually be something to the effect of “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that we were engineers, and that we had the ability to learn new things”.

As I said, complaints about my attitude weren’t completely unfounded, but it’s just immensely frustrating for people using their unwillingness to learn new things as an excuse to keep some code in a broken state.

[8n4vidtmkvmk]

I think i found something even better. I'm just adjacent to the big money maker. We keep folks on the page a little longer but don't need to concern ourselves with revenue and ads. Just make it good so folks stick around but important enough that we won't get axed.

[locknitpicker]

> Big companies are significantly better to work in when you're either (...)

You're basically stating that people who are hired to staff projects that are superfluous secondary moonshots are more likely to be fired than those who maintain core business areas. That's stating the obvious. When a company goes through spending cuts, the first things to go are the money sinks and fluff projects that are not in any key roadmap. This is also why some companies structure their whole orgs around specific projects and even project features, because management limits the impact of getting rid of entire teams by framing that as killing projects or delays in roadmap.

[locknitpicker]

> Instead of doing things ways that are easy and straightforward, you instead were incentivized to make your code complicated so you can brag about how complicated it is, (...)

I see this as a red flag, and an attitude problem typical of toxic employees. I'll explain why.

More often than not, I see this sort of complain from junior developers who either completely miss key requirements behind constraints or are completely oblivious to operational constraints. They invest little to no effort to try to understand the problem domain and what problems are fixed, and instead they redirect all their energy arguing for major rework that they claim makes things simpler albeit their analysis is superficial and simplistic as they are oblivious to the actual constraints. But that doesn't dissuade them.

This analysis failure ends up creating problems within the team because they conflate any lack of support for their half-baked ideas as an irrational opposition to their personal initiative, and thus somehow a part of the problem. Consequently, you start to see those types lashing out at team members and throwing accusations and being an all around pita. They pull these stunts at every single occurrence of any minor inconvenience, as if it automatically means anything else is always better than what they have.

The worst comes if these egregious types get their way. They roll out a change that they depict as a silver bullet for all inconveniences, except that even in ideal circumstances in the real world there are always minor inconveniences. When they surface, these egregious types get all defensive and throw tantrums to bully the team into suppressing any sort of criticism that they themselves spent their time creating for others.

There are many reasons why some companies impose and enforce principles such as "respect what came before" and "disagree and commit". No one wants to work with the assholes who don't follow these principles. Their output is always pristine and the shit shortcuts they took are always thoroughly justified, but he'll forbid if someone else's changes have anything that pricks their sense of taste.

It's a red flag. Clearly an attitude problem. Throwing a whole organization under the bus is a clear tell. If everyone around you is an asshole, the ugly truth is that you are very likely the only asshole around.

[tombert]

I didn’t dispute attitude problems. If you had finished reading the comment you’re responding to you would have seen that. I also stand by what I said.

I wasn’t trying to rework everything and I am not 100% sure how you reached that conclusion. There were just plenty of times that for certain things there were clear simpler ways of doing things but those weren’t sexy and you were only incentivized to constantly do things to make yourself seem important instead of actually doing work.

I’m not an idiot, I know that you cannot rewrite everything in a 20+ year old codebase, and I wasn’t suggesting as much. At BigCo, instead of actually doing work, you instead were expected to hold several meetings about every minor change you were going to make, come up with a million classes and abstractions that serve no purpose other than to increase your LOC count, and then have a bunch of things to point to at your end of year self-review.

I am pretty sure most of my teammates liked me just fine, because I was generally not critical of any individuals code, because I felt like most of these issues were top down. Management created a situation that if you wanted to get a reasonable yearly pay raise you had to be able to point to a bunch of “big successes” (their words) in your yearly “self review”. Great if you have big projects to point to, but if you’re working on a “keep the lights on” team like I was, you start running out of new proper nouns to list. Instead have to constantly rebrand any small small thing you do as an “initiative”, and you point to the dozen meetings you called for it, and maybe even literally mention the LOC written for it.

Companies that have been around for awhile will always have cruft, and I agree, a lot of seemingly “stupid” code actually has a good reason for being that way, and I knew that even at the time. The code quality itself wasn’t really what I was complaining about, it was the politics around it.

But please go on about how you think that I shouldn’t be able to express my frustration at a corporation’s idiotic policies at an exit interview.