[prepend]

It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked on projects with 50 programmers and it seemed many did nothing and a few did negative work.

We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved.

He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done.

I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative.

That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.”

I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.

[01284a7e]

My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.

Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.

The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.

[ryandrake]

The most shocking thing about entering Software as a career was the enormous number of "Brillant Paula Beans"[1] that are out there silently working, doing meetings, participating in all the software rituals, but producing useless and ultimately scrapped work product.

1: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/the_brillant_paula_bean

[hilariously]

Yeah, the second one is really the most bitter pill - work for a year or more, see that the PMF or the actual product isn't going to meet the needs; raise red flags, nobody cares (or worse, people actively fight you and torpedo you) and then you get to see it literally do nothing in production.

I have seen this a lot in the mid sized business (<300 employees usually) and its the "we have enough money and no accountability and terrible processes to even understand the world" but my favorite one is my friend spent six months building a product offshoot from a core product, got pulled into meetings with directors to tell him to shut up about how it wasn't going to work for the target market, and when he finished they sold 4 units.

4 units.

[sph]

I’ve been in such a work context for the better part of two years, as a contractor, and by God it is soul crushing to give your best to do a good job, and to see it ultimately ends up in the bin.

I quit weeks ago, and they are already begging me back because I was good at what I was doing, to work on yet another hallucination from the higher ups that will be scrapped in 6 months.

The good money doesn’t make up for the existential pain. Maybe I’m too old for this shit. (20 year career and a burnout that made me reassess the value of my time on earth)

[antonymoose]

I work almost exclusively in small (<100 employees) firms, usually no more than 20 developers, and it’s a complete mix here too.

One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care

It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.

[OutOfHere]

There's that, and then there's the other kind of negative work, whereby a rockstar engineer develops something that works but only he understands, completely failing to document it well. When this engineer leaves, the project is unmaintainable by virtue of being incomprehensible. In both cases, the management has been clueless.

[prepend]

Good point. There’s lots of kinds of negative work.

I was thinking more of people burning stuff down.

There’s also people burning the furniture for immediate warmth.

And there’s people you mention who are doing things that look good but have time bombs inside them.