I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.
But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!
Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem.
And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building.
"Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight."
I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company. The larger the team/company, the more chances of those people being around. They pretend to be always busy and doing something but don't actually get anything done. Seen it all for 18+ years.
Having said that, there are plenty of people as well who would LOVE to do something meaningful but are stuck with red tape. I was one of those and quit my high paying Investment Bank Tech Job to start my own thing. I was getting paid big as a consultant and once my main project finished, they just wanted me around because traders loved me. I literally had to find things to do every day otherwise it was soooo boring unless something broke.
I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification.
Some told me they felt wronged by the company somehow. For example they had experienced bullying, or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases. Now didn't feel they owed the company anything. Yet others said the pay is not enough to really get them invested in the work.
The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight.
I personally have done a few projects that turned out to be purely compliance based, and had no merit whatsoever. I remember the feeling of wasting my life to be absolutely soul crushing and I have been avoiding that kind of project as if my life depended on it.
I am not a dead weight and I’ll never be, but I also do absolutely bare minimum to not get fired. And by bare minimum, I mean, I will always finish my work in the time it is expected to be finished. And if the expectations are higher, I’ll move on to another job.
I do this as a way to get back at corporate America. Too many companies get away with sucking out their employees dry and firing them once they can’t meet the unreasonable expectations that are set for them. You could be dying of cancer or have lost a child, and they will get rid of you the moment they can do so without breaking the law, and in some cases even break the law in the hopes that you’d not pursue any legal action. Nah don’t work hard, work smart, for yourself.
>You could be dying of cancer or have lost a child, and they will get rid of you the moment they can do so without breaking the law, and in some cases even break the law in the hopes that you’d not pursue any legal action. Nah don’t work hard, work smart, for yourself.
Amen, once upon a time I worked for a company and I didn't miss a single day for almost 3 years. Then at the moment I needed to work remote due to a family member's terminal cancer, I got oh so sorry to hear that, but by the way you f*** something up last week.
You sure you really need to work remote, can you work remote like one day a week. Are you sure, it's like terminal terminal.
Eventually they agreed to let me work remote but then they hired a replacement behind my back .
Luckily my childhood taught me not to trust people. When someone shows you who they really are, believe them. So I already had a better paying job lined up.
Yep, I lived this and it really woke me up. The day my dad died my boss called to ask "your going to be in tomorrow right, since you don't have to take care of him anymore"
Not to mention things like "are you sure its terminal" "Do you know what terminal means? just checking maybe you didn't understand the doctor"
To a company you are a number and nothing more,treat them the same. The people in charge got there by ruthlessly focusing on that fact. Trying to get sympathy from work is like trying to explain to a debt collector why you can't pay. They don't care at all and never will, everything you say will be used against you and they are hoping you will slip up.
Its as pointless as a mouse trying to debate a hungry cat as to why he should not eat him.
I don't care about my employees at all. Their family lives are meaningless to me, distracting and dull.
However I always pretend to care, always make sure they're well paid, have clear growth in development and pay, feel looked after, that they don't need to hesitate to ask if they need a cash advance or time off for an emergency, etc.
You can be ruthlessly focused and unempathetic whilst also being sympathetic and helping people love what they do. They're not mutually exclusive.
To be fair, I have had some compassionate employers offer me a couple of extra days of PTO after an emergency.
But this is offset by the fact that since I never took PTO, I had stopped accumulating it almost a year ago.
Something I love about remote work, is it encourages people to actually build real social circles.
I make my friends at bars, concerts, and industry meetups. I don't make work friends, I'm not trying to be buddy buddy with my manager
Because that same manager who was like. Yeah good job. You just saved the company $30,000, here's a $400 bonus
The moment something happens, like you know your dad dying, is going to tell you. If you don't get back in shape they'll have to look hiring someone else.
Work to maximize your income, try not to be mean to people at work, but you should never treat work as anything but a transaction.
My wife had a Big Crunch at her job so I needed to leave early every day to pick up my son instead of my wife doing it. My job gave zero fucks and wanted my butt-in-seat until 5pm. I still left 30 minutes early every day and got fired for it, but not before lining up another job. Some work places seem great, until real life hits you in the face. I wish there was some way to detect empathy of a workplace before joining, without coming across as sketchy.
A family business is worse. You will always be considered an outsider.
The idea of greater sympathy is a fallacy. You are simply closer to the people with power, they don't want to seem cruel because that drives away talented/hard workers, they have to make concessions. They don't have the resources to make people expendable yet. They don't get the luxury of having 6 layers of mgmt to shield them from being remorselessly cruel. As soon as they have those layers you will see what they really are. Ask me how I know...
You get the added bonus of some borderline mentally challenged family member will be put in a position of power. The other family members know but don't want to hurt their feelings. Then you get to be drawn into awkward family squabbles when you have to appeal to the other family members that their actions are hurting the business and need to be corrected, basically babysitting your own boss for them. Without the benefit of ever being in charge yourself.
I get back at it by getting paid as much as I can for as little work I can do. Like I said, I’m not doing nothing, but I’ll never sell my soul for marginal increases in wages and that occasional promotion.
I get back by having a life after 5 pm, Never going in to work on a weekend, taking time off to spend it with family and never letting stress and bs from corporate world affect my private life.
Yeah, that's how corporate America works, buddy. You give up on finding fulfillment at work or striking it rich, and just do what they tell you without thinking too much about it. In return, you get to clock out at 5 and take a nice vacation every year.
As oppose to what? Spending 20hr of unpaid overtime in hopes to get noticed? Or starting a company and betting your (and your family) whole future to be next facebook?
They are doing 9-5 and then do whatever they want with their life. Maybe they are working on a side to break from corpo world, maybe they have no other choice or wants.
Oh, I'm definitely not saying they should do otherwise. One of the great things about large corporations is that they can provide a stable work environment that doesn't interfere with the rest of your life.
But to suggest that this is how you "get back at corporate America" is laughable. In fact, it's the opposite.
That’s nonsense. It’s extremely hard to fire people in many corps. I’ve personally seen it take years even when everyone agreed (including management) someone needed to go. And often the paperwork threshold is so high that even people producing negative work aren’t fired; you just hope they eventually move on since you’re not giving them raises etc.
That’s when an org really starts to collect dead weight (actual dead weight).
Don’t get me wrong, shitty managers need checks and balances, but when an org loses so much trust in itself that it makes it impossible to remove pretty much anyone (except those trying to improve things usually, despite the rules), it’s going to get pretty bad soon.
I dislike that framing. It seems disingenuous to call "doing what I'm required to do by my employer" any variant on "quitting". It's explicitly not quitting, after all. If the employer expects that you do more, it should require it.
The only way your claim of "as little work I can do" is accurate is that if you spent one minute less working, it becomes the trigger point where you'll get fired.
But it sounds like you're just a normal corporate worker who does exactly what is stated in your employment contract and no more (and no less) -- but I suppose you should know that there are many people who do much less work than is formally required and get to keep their job.
There is a pain threshold for most managers to fire an employee. They have to spend time and money on recruiting and training a new replacement, so in theory if the cost of you slacking off is lower than the cost of finding a replacement, they might not actually fire you.
“Ambition” is tricky. New grads become a “Senior Engineer” or a “manager” in 5 years these days. And most people don’t climb corporate ladder beyond a Senior Staff Engineer or a director. So you have almost 40 years worth of career left to climb two more levels.
Working your ass off continuously in pursuit of that ambition is pointless. If that’s the only thing in your life, then maybe it’s not, but ambition can be found outside of corporate America.
Forget the compan(y/ies) for a moment. In a decade or two when you look back will you feel your time was well spent?
The companies, much less corporate America in aggregate, will have assuredly not noticed your protest. But will you notice your lack of professional accomplishment?
Being wronged extracts a price, through vengeance you can pay it twice.
My argument is that professional accomplishment can be achieved while just meeting expectations. I’ve seen people who are at the same level, work harder (read longer) than I do and yet get paid less and not get the promotions they were trying for. The system isn’t a perpetual growth machine, otherwise all of us would be VPs and CEOs. I never said I don’t do any work, I still work on things I want to and take great pride in every single thing I do. I just don’t do it for free or at the expense of other parts of my life. Ambition needs to be checked with reality.
This isn't an irrational reaction, but it also isn't always as clever as it seems. Working this way can suck the soul out of your life in the same way that failing to exercise yourself mentally or physically will eventually eat away at your fitness. Is it terminal? Of course not. But it does take a toll on you. And it eats away at your sense of fulfillment and happiness.
Could it be something like diabetes, where it won't kill you today but it will kill you tomorrow? Maybe. Only you can figure out the answer for that for yourself. I know the answer for myself by now, which is yes. I'd much rather work for a company that gives me the opportunities to stretch myself, do work in a space I actually find interesting, and mostly get rewarded and advance even if they extract an absolute larger percentage of my surplus labor than other companies, than vice versa. And that is because I am getting a worse deal in today terms, and a better deal in tomorrow terms. I've been burned by this attitude before, but I've also had exceptional outcomes I'd never take back or redo any other way. YMMV.
agree with this. have been trying to get to this point for a few months. I usually am a friendly person but I’ve learned to limit to personal relations and not let it flow into my work ethic. I have some other issues to be ironed out though like overzealous colleagues, and some flexibility needs
This is what has become the default that our current system works to incentivize in real terms, but with a lot of marketing to discourage following this path. I work in India, but with a corporate American client atm, and have seen this in operation,(luckily it's a fairly small/medium company so not too much). Having worked in a few startups(with ESOPs) from India before this, I really, really wonder how a global/multi-national company can work with equity based incentives at this point, and if it will help a bit to improve the incentives.
This is the "pieces of flair" debate. If their manager asks for fifteen tickets a month, and they do exactly fifteen, the manager sits them down and asks why they don't do twenty, like their colleague over there.
They ask the manager, "If you want twenty tickets, just ask me for twenty tickets. Why do you set fifteen as the standard, and then try to use cheap psychological tricks to get me to do twenty tickets?"
I have managed teams going back to the nineties. If I want fifteen tickets, I ask for fifteen tickets. If someone just does the minimum, they just get paid the minimum, but I have set my expectations such that their work is a net benefit to the company, so they keep their job.
If things change and I need twenty tickets, I will ask for twenty tickets. It's not complicated. The "bare minimum" is still enough to keep a job. If it isn't, it's on me to establish a different minimum such that the "minimum" is exactly that: The minimum needed to remain employed.
"Dead weight" is someone whose work is not a net benefit to the company. If I as a manager set a minimum, and someone does the minimum, and they are not a net benefit, WTF am I doing as a a manager setting fifteen tickets as the minimum?
Employees meeting expectations but not being a net benefit? That's a management problem. And if it's across the org, that's a SYSTEMIC management problem.
So if this person is meeting the minimum, either they are NOT dead weight, or there is a management problem. Either way, they are not the problem.
As a manager myself, here is the problem I see in what you're saying: Most often, the time estimates are set by engineers themselves. I don't tell them "Do this task in 3 days" -- I ask them how many days/week it will take, and we track against that. This relies on my trust that they are working hard and not half-assing it.
The "minimum expectation" is therefore hard to concretely define. It's not "everyone should fix 3 bugs a week" or "everyone must implement 2 features a month," because the work is always going to vary depending on the specific issues and project needs.
The variability of coding work can make it hard to explain to under-performers that they're falling behind their peers.
If you're a manager and are not capable of seeing an overestimated timeline for what it is, you have one or more problems: 1) you do not know your employees, 2) you do not understand the work they're supposed to be doing, 3) you do not understand your product. Either of these or all of them or any combination in between still means you're the problem.
If you look at a problem and you estimate a timeline, you'll underestimate sometimes. so when an engineer brings you a significantly longer timeline, ask them to justify it, ask them to show you what they mean. This will eat a few extra minutes out of your day, but it will help you separate the bullshitters from the genuine people, and it will help you understand what they do better. And if you just can't add those extra minutes to your schedule without causing trouble, then the problem lies with your boss, not you. It's your job to know your people and understand what they do, and if you're not given the leeway to do that you'll never be effective.
You're describing a scenario where an incompetent manager is both clueless about the technology and doesn't spare even a few minutes to do their job. I'm sure that happens, unfortunately.
But, the point that I was making was simply that trust is an essential part of software work, and people who pride themselves on doing only the minimal amount of work, risk messing up this system of trust for everyone else. We all want a manager who trusts us when we say a problem is hard and it will take time. And managers want engineers who when they say they're working on a problem, they're actually putting time and effort into it.
In the (hopefully very rare) case where an engineer puts in a measly amount of effort during the week but pretends they're hard at work, this trust is broken, and in the worst outcome, the manager or company overcorrects and it becomes a shitty place to work.
Yeah, but this is where knowing your people comes in. If you've got a bullshitter on your team and you know it, you need to be figuring out how to get them not just off your team, but out of the company. If you don't know it, you're not doing your job.
This can be hard I know with the way contracts are, labor laws, severances, and often times it is easier to just offload the employee to another team, which compounds these problems and makes them systemic. That's the only sticking point I think that takes the blame off management. It should be easier to fire bullshitters.
If you don’t trust their estimates, Look up estimation poker. The whole team plays. It’s a good way to keep everyone honest with regards to estimation and allows everyone to learn hidden things that someone else may see.
Is this comment section to devolve into a discussion about software engineering practices? We could now write thousands of pages on that topic or we can cut down to the chase. If the manager can't tell whether his project is on track or not, remember nobody gives a damn whether it takes 50000 lines of code or 500 or that you closed X tickets, then the project has either already failed or the project manager is taking a huge risk with a greenfield project where he is just throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.
I've been lucky to only ever work at places with very technical managers, who don't blindly accept estimates, and actively work with the developers to figure out how to work faster.
But, the usual pattern for people who work slow, is that some new complication always comes up. And it's not easy to know when the complication is legitimate and will take time to figure out, or something that could easily be dispatched in an hour's time.
Currently a manager, you wrote exactly what I would say, only in a much more robust manner. "Meeting standards" should not be cause for alarm. If it is, there are many things wrong with the company.
The problem with this line of reasoning is you’re assuming everything required to keep a company going can be reduced to a job description, but there’s millions of small, impactful ways employees can contribute that fall through the cracks. Being pleasant to your coworkers is rarely part of the job description, but it can make or break that coworker’s productivity for a whole day.
If you aren’t willing to do these extra tasks, that’s fine, but you’re doing nothing to keep the company surviving and someone else will have to pick up your slack. It’s in everyone’s best interests to keep the company surviving as long as possible so it can keep paying salaries.
Of course the C level has a lot more to gain, but everyone has to work somewhere so why not do your reasonable best to make a positive impact.
True; I see your point and mostly agree with you, with the caveat that I'd file those traits as "being a decent human being with a reasonable level of emotional maturity" - things that I personally filter for in the interview stage.
Since when is a software engineer's output measured in "tickets" per month?
That said I agree with the idea that someone that adds value that is some reasonable multiple of their salary gets to keep their job. If they're not adding value because they can't perform their job or don't care they should not keep their job. If they're not adding value because of how they're managed their manager should not keep his job. If this issue is endemic in the company that probably means the CEO shouldn't keep their job... In an ideal world anyways.
This is the best response. I used "tickets" as a rhetorical device because it maps very neatly to pieces of flair from Office Space.
In reality, trying to measure software development productivity objectively always makes me whip out a little venn diagram that shows that what matters and what can be measured have but a small intersection.
But abstracting away from tickets, as a manager you set some kind of expectation for "the minimum." However it is you rate people from "not meeting expectations" to "meeting expectations" to "exceeding expectations," my contention is that it's the job of a manager to make sure that "meeting expectations" means that an employee's work is a net benefit to the company.
Whereas, "dead weight" describes someone who is a net loss to the company. So to me, someone who just meets expectations should not be "dead weight." If they are, I suggest there is a management problem.
I got reprimanded for not posting enough comments on issues and then was compared to another engineer.. who didn’t post timely comments on issues. At some point it’s not about trying to determine if you’re an underperformer but just that they want you out. Lots more tales from that crypt but I’m happy where I am at the moment
Finally saw "Office Space" recently! Now I know about "flair". 15 is the bare minimum. Look at <dedicated-employee> - he has what, 35 pieces of flair! Don't you feel like a slacker, barely achieving minimum expectations?
As to the parent thread: I make about half what I would be making if I had gone the FAANG route -- but I get to choose what I work on. That is a fair deal in my mind. Working on things that fascinate & inspire me make me a 10x rockstar. But if I'm asked to keep dead code limping along zombie-like, I need to work harder and longer because in that scenario I am a 0.5x sleeper. YMMV
Exactly, most employees aren't in a position to allocate their own tasks. The entire point of management is to algin what happens in the company with the interests of the owners of the company. If management makes a mistake in allocating work and there is no flaw in execution by the employees the real dead weight lies in management.
Dead weight would be people doing nothing. After those come the negative contributors: they do stuff but is all politicking and scheming, or just waste others time. Doing strictly what you are really paid for is bad now?
“Enough” is not in the vocabulary of corporate vampires. Doing your job to the requirements should be acceptable, and that only works if your org is run by empathetic, reasonable leadership, you don’t tolerate the abuse of being squeezed, or you have a union. If the bar is never enough, you’re being gaslit, and that’s psychological abuse.
And I think that's exactly the original commenter's point: if the company he works for ever decides that "enough" isn't sufficient to satisfy his boss, he's he'll move on.
Working to rule involves malicious compliance, which may very well be harder work than actually being productive. Just being unenthusiastic is not the same thing.
No, dead weight is someone who does little or no work, should be fired, but manages to fly under the radar somehow in order to keep their job.
Someone who does the bare minimum in order to buy get fired is just a... satisfactory employee. Never gonna get big raises, never gonna get promoted, but gets their work done and doesn't go above or beyond.
Apparently you have never continually excelled at your job and been rewarded with zero raises, zero promotions, zero added trust, and zero added authority or influence.
Every place I have ever worked has taken advantage of anyone who does more than they are asked. None of those individuals were ever rewarded for going above or beyond. Not a single time.
Doing the bare minimum is what employers do. Why should employees do any more?
I believe it is our moral duty to improve ourselves. I do not believe it is our moral duty to donate effort to an unthankful entity.
The problem is when you tell your manager it'll take you X number of weeks to finish a task, and your manager trusts that you're working hard and that the task simply requires X weeks of work... but in reality you're barely spending any time on it every day, and could easily have done it in a few days. Meanwhile, the rest of the project is moving slowly because they need your piece to complete.
If, on the other hand, the manager's trust has no relevance here, because you are not setting your own time-work estimates, then have at it!
This is kind of a wild take. Estimates should be reviewed like anything else on a team, and if the estimate doesn’t fit the timeline, the team should try to either split up / parallelize the work, drop scope, or look for a creative solution (usually involving taking on some strategic tech debt).
This is completely consistent with what I said. Even as a team effort, you want your manager to trust when you say something has some non-obvious complexity. And the manager wants to trust their team members.
But my comment stems from someone above who said they do the minimum amount of work possible. This sucks for the team, who is working hard and trying to make progress, meanwhile this person is barely doing any work every day in between gaming or reddit or whatever, but (presumably) still joins stand-ups and Slack to chime in with whatever "complication" he's having to work through that day, and always gives the impression that their work is super tricky.
You might be misunderstanding what "minimum amount of work" means. The OP might simply be referring the minimum amount of work achievable without overexerting oneself via extra hours, working weekends, under stress, etc. Someone's minimum amount of work can be hard work. They literally said "I will always finish my work in the time it is expected to be finished." So if that amount of time is not satisfactory, it is up to the manager to ask for the time to be shortened- and then that becomes the new minimum.
It’s also a problem when the manager can’t tell if an estimate is bogus or not. It could be exaggerated. It could also be overly optimistic. To be a decent dev manager you need a feel for whether it’s in the right ball park. Or know when to bring in someone else who does.
IMHO (having managed small teams) a manager of technical team members needs to be able to accurately estimate how long something will take and the variance on that estimate. This is a core part of the manager's job. If a manager isn't technical enough to know how to do the tasks themselves if they had to, that manager should not have a job IMHO. This is part of what sets engineer-led companies like SpaceX apart from their "dinosaur" competitors and why SpaceX seems to be 10x better in output.
No, the LITERAL definition of dead weight is "
1: the unrelieved weight of an inert mass
2: DEAD LOAD
3: a ship's load including the total weight of cargo, fuel, stores, crew, and passengers"
Sometimes it’s the even worse folks - the people who do things that are net negatives and need to be drug around by everyone else like they’re an anchor around the companies throat.
Is it? I'd interpret dead weight as being... well a dead weight, say an anchor holding back progress. Or being generous at least not contributing anything even they aren't actively holding things back. Doing "the bare minimum" isn't dead weight though, they are still contributing
That is the exact propaganda I don’t buy. My 20 year long career that pays quite well would think either you’re wrong or most of corporate America’s management is not “Competent Management”.
Your comment upsets and disappoints me. In large part because it's true: at my previous workplace, I was casually told that CME is a polite fiction and all employees are expected to exceed expectations.
> or didn't get promoted when they felt they should have been, or they had contributed something and then it got cut from the product, something like that in most cases
Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead. For a lot of people, it takes only a few instances of this to switch to "I'll do the bare minimum not to get fired - why sacrifice much of my life and mental energy for this?"
I've been there a few times, and to speak to your point: I decided that instead of being a dead weight I should just look for another job where I don't feel this way. I can say that amongst my peers, that behavior is an exception. Most people who become deadweights will remain that way. It's work to find a new job, and you may have to move, etc. Amusingly enough, Leetcode style interviews are effective at ensuring deadweights remain so.
> Amusingly enough, Leetcode style interviews are effective at ensuring deadweights remain so.
yep. They also ensure that anyone wanting to move on will probably be doing most of their day Leetcoding. Because you're going to stay at a tech job 1-2 years max and it takes most people probably 6+ months (kids, family, etc.) to ramp up from nothing. Once you have LC down and did the hard part, you need to retain it. Which means constantly doing problems.
> Can definitely speak to these cases - especially where you do great work and have a narrative that it was unappreciated - and clearly see lesser performing or less impressive colleagues getting ahead.
I did great work for a company and got fired... because I took a freelance w2 contract in my spare time. The company didn't even know that I'd taken on the role, and the role had actually finished, when they somehow did find out and I got my marching papers.
Personally, I think disallowing other work should be illegal. Having said that: What was the policy at your workplace for other work? In my company it's clearly allowed if it's in a different industry - although they've not given clear guidance on whether I need to disclose it in those cases.
W-2 “freelance” in addition to W-2 “non-freelance” at the same time? In other words, you violated your employment agreement and got fired. The sad part is you still don’t quite understand the basics of W-2 and why you got fired in the first place.
Apparently you don’t either. In the US at will employment doesn’t mean you can’t have another job. There may be a clause in an employment agreement that says you agree to not work for any other company, but I’ve only seen this clause once in 10 jobs. Do you know what this clause is commonly called?
In Clerky, you will find it under the section “Outside Activities.” Custom contracts may have a different name for that clause. 1 out of 10? Maybe if you’re in Hollywood or some other highly specialized vertical. In tech, it will be 99 out of 100.
I turned into dead weight once during a hostile takeover of the company I was working for. It was pretty shit, and I'm glad I moved on after a few months of being unproductive. Management removed our ability to move forward on any existing work, and allocated no new work, and rejected any proposals from anyone from the 'old' company.
Wound up spending most of my (remote) work day occasionally checking my work laptop for emails, working on personal projects on my personal laptop and gardening or doing some DIY fixes on our old house.
Felt bad the entire time and finding a new job was a huge weight off my shoulders.
Through a weird sequence of events, a group of us ended up working through a consulting company re-billing arrangement for a large financial services company that was closing our office. The “suits” needed us on payroll to feel secure that our code would keep working, so we got promised our annual bonus (substantial) if we worked until X date. The tech leaders at HQ hated that we existed at all and so gave us no work. We might have worked 40 hours in 4.5 months (total, not per week).
Bonuses eventually hit our account and we all resigned serially; literally a line outside the manager’s door waiting to resign.
It sucked; was so bad that one colleague didn’t want to Google something one evening “because he needed something to do tomorrow at work”.
I had a coworker who ended up in a similar situation. At one point they were almost literally being paid to do nothing. They eventually stopped even going in to the office all while collecting a pay check. As nice as that sounds, it was still not a great situation because they didn't know how long it would last and figured eventually, without warning, they'd be dropped. They ended up leaving on their own to actually do something and have a more stable job.
Another concern that is very prevailing is rewards. I could work 2 times harder in my current position, however what is that going to bring me?
Promotion or bigger bonus - it’s the same as playing stock options with your time, you are better off playing office politics for a much better RoI.
Self value? Senior engineer in FAANG is almost never going to have REAL impact, so I can only enjoy thinking that someone cares about that tiny piece of software that I work with. Again, getting drunk is a better RoI.
Same with self improvement… where side project usually allows one to grow more
My millage is that it's not absolute "dead weight". It's more wanting limited responsibility and tasks that require limited scope/time spent, but does actually contribute, just a much smaller scale than others.
> The fact that they needed these excuses tells me they felt what they did to be morally wrong and didn't really want to be dead weight.
My guess from your comment is that you judge them for being slackers, and the feel obligated to explain to YOU that its not morally correct. Personally, I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps while collecting a nice paycheck.
> > I have no qualm with those that want to drift around megacorps
For me, that depends on what the company is doing. Let's say it's mobile games or quant trading -- then, slacking at work in a way just gives people more time away from the computer (fewer games to play?). And changes which ones of the rich people, get richer.
Then what does it matter.
Whilst if one is working for a hospital or a stopping-online-manipulation department, then, in such cases, slacking is sad, not good for society, right
> Whilst if one is working for a hos, pital or a stopping-online-manipulation department, not good for society, right
Oh definitely. I'm under the (maybe wrong) assumption that the majority of people are not doing this. I believe most my peers in the silicon valley bubble I live in aren't really moving needles that benefit humanity.
People will always make up reasons if the tone of the conversation feels adversarial, but just spend a week in r/cscareerquestions to see the unfiltered sentiment: lots of people literally bragging about working 30 or even 20 hours per week as a full time employee, or who explicitly call out "slacking off" as a reason for preferring WFH. "Rest and vest". Etc.
I think it's pretty common that when someone says "nobody does X", that's shorthand for "there is probably a very small number of people who do X, but not enough to make much of a difference".
Sure, there are some people who abuse WFH, but I suspect it is far fewer people than Zuckerberg and Pichai suggest, and there are other, more important reasons for productivity losses. Reasons that have more to do with management and poor strategy than the actions of individual employees.
If you view people as dead weight, that is the problem. Few folks that make a decent salary want to do the bare minimum. Only managers that treat them as such will call them 'dead weight'.
Note that I'm not claiming you to be a manager, however your viewpoint of these employees reflects some of the managers I've dealt with. I once worked at a company who provided zero training, zero documentation, very poor pay, and no possibility of anything despite offering the world when I joined. I was told by my manager that I was dead weight. I was fired by HR. The situation did not end well for them, legally, or in terms of coworkers leaving.
In my experience working in software development, I've encountered only one person who was dead weight, and he ended up leaving on his own. I've been doing this for close to 20 years mind you. I've seen many accused of being dead weight, and sure, some could have tried harder, but most simply struggled with the mess that was the code we were working on. The symptoms were common: no documentation, hostile management demanding tight deadlines, and poor communication.
People who do things they know are wrong will always conjure up an explanation that absolves them of any culpability. They'll even believe it themselves.
For example, people who steal office supplies from work always have a good reason they tell themselves.
For another, all the people who post on Hackernews justifying cheating in college. My favorite bullshit excuse was cheating was justified because the professor didn't expend much effort with countermeasures.
Was going to disagree, because you portrayed this as as "unjust personal affront". I mean like everyone who ever got fired from McDonalds thinks "my boss irrationally hates me."
But on reflection this happens frequently, not due to personal reasons, but due to corporate politics. Side A won the war, so side B just punches the clock until whenever they get around to layoffs. In any big company, there's going to be a bunh of teams where "they know, but we haven't told them yet".
> I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification.
This isn’t true at all in my experience. I’ve contracted at many places that simply had a culture of avoiding work. Where a majority of the permanent employees hardly do any work, their main focus is coming up with reasons why problems are somebody else’s problems to solve, and avoiding accountability for anything that goes wrong. The pandemic and WFH has made this a lot worse in many companies. Out of the dozens of large orgs I’ve contracted to, far more of them had these problems than didn’t.
> I have met a few of those people, but every single one of them needed a justification.
Nah man. They just want to chillax. I know because i was one of them at some of my jobs. I don't get any satisfaction from crud/etl type jobs at all. I just want to a paycheck to fund my lifestyle and hobbies. I know tons of people like me , like 50% of my friend circle. Ppl just don't give a shit.
or, they felt being a dead weight was wrong, but wanted to be one, so came up with a justification. If they actually didn't want to be dead weight they'd work in spite of their situation.
If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important".
I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.
Yeah it’s the “pretending to work” part that’s soul crushing. If you could be explicit that “this is what I need to do this week, it’ll only take 4 hours. The rest of the time I’ll be available but I won’t do make-work”, that’d be awesome.
Also a lot of people don’t realize that being available for questions or if something comes up IS work - it severely limits what you can do with that time even if working remotely.
So were you near your computer 9-5 today and could respond on short notice? Well then you worked 8 hours basically. And that availability itself is hugely valuable to employers.
Not only is the availability, but so is the image. I had a CEO who loved the image of an office full of people all day, all week. I've been working remotely since then. I think he just wanted to feel important.
More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime and for maintaining peace on the seas. There are some. Acquisitions has been fraught with problems and weighty opinions of captains and admirals who want to feel important on enormous ships. Enormous ships which aren't as useful in the day to day operations in the Navy and would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry.
A lot of what gets done around the world is heavily influenced by how a decision will influence the feelings of people in power.
>would be extremely vulnerable at war with modern weaponry.
the point of those enormous ships is to minimize the chances of war happening.
>More, smaller, near-coast ("littoral") ships would be much more effective tools for wartime
Russia lost the big ship on the Black Sea and have the situation you're describing - ie. their fleet is several missile frigates, and such their situation is very weak. The fleet can't really operate. (And with recent successful attack on a Russian airfield in Crimea the air support for those remaining ships is expected to dwindle which will be a clear show case of how [in]capable fleet without air support (which we do actually know since WWII really), and that air support usually, until you operate near your shores, can only come from aircraft carriers)
The US litoral ships are 3500 tons 115m length. Russian Black Sea frigates 4000 tons 125m (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admiral_Grigorovich-class_frig...) Black Sea is deep everywhere, ie. there is no "litoral" area where those frigates wouldn't be able to operate due to their size. And their roles there are currently mostly those of "litoral" ships, like the land attacks.
At a FAANG and I can tell you it's not nearly so positive as this.
It was shocking coming from startup world.
It's not so much "gee I only have 4 hours of work to do this week"
It's...well, it's impossible to say how long it takes to do anything in particular, so I shouldn't feel stressed trying to get it done...
oh there's actually no real management style/pressure to get things done here?
Promo is seniority-based?
There's silly unspoken rules like after you get promoted, you're _guaranteed_ a middling performance rating because its an easy horsetrade to do?
Your manager doesn't have to argue $X was super important and strategic and this newly promoted character needs a better rating, and the other manager doesn't need to argue $Y needs to keep a high rating to show continued momentum in his growth, they just do it.
There's no way to rebel against this system, or work within it, other than transfer companies?
It's a rather horrific situation and I don't think it's helping anyone or anyone is particularly satisfied with it. The problem is, any other solution is worse and will hurt The Vibes in the short run. Interesting to see Zuck move towards Dark Zuck and say things I've never heard at FAANG
I have a bad habit of working on important things that don't actually glitter, unblocking other teams and people constantly and recommending against shiny cool solutions, so promotions this year went to my two colleagues who took a glittery project, recommended a shiny shit idea, and have now delivered shit covered in glitter that is immediately getting sales/support feedback like um but it doesn't do what we needed and it is missing what we asked for.
I complained about a bug that blocked our CI for a week, which I'd shepherded around; that the company needs people to be prepared to work on things that they "don't own" because surprise, we don't have anyone assigned to owning the interaction of those six systems! Actual response: well, you didn't have to do that work.
Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.
I was in a team like that. One person in particular would pick ambitious tasks, do a completely inadequate implementation, reject all feedback and then leave everyone else to deal with the production outages.
Unfortunately management only saw the “picks ambitious tasks” and were blind to everything else.
You can’t really blame people for responding to absurd incentives in absurd ways.
Ya know what sitting in the manager chair other than not taking feedback I would probably give them kudos too.
Being the person who comes up with mediocre solutions to hard problems is way more impressive than the guy who has expertly designed solutions to easy problems. One of the devs on my team is like that. Everything he writes is like 30% broken from the get go but all his stuff ships and nobody else has the moxy to blindly charge into the unknown and not get stuck because their afraid to cut themselves on edge cases.
>Now let me go back to waiting for anyone to respond to any of the EIGHT CRs I have out, just as well I'm working from home so I can use the time to clean the toilet.
There's nothing like being annoyed at waiting for a blocker to motivate me to do the dishes. Second best motivation is being in a boring meeting I'm not really needed in.
I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing.
Working under conditions of pressure and stress provides few long term benefits and is the refuge of those who don’t have the smarts to perform well and need to look like they do.
At Google, which I'm pretty confident the parent comment was describing, promotion is supposed to be recognition that you've already been consistently performing at that level for a long time. So someone newly promoted is not actually up-leveled, they're just no longer down-leveled.
Not in this case, here, my claim is the role was very clearly grown into, and the rating reflected the fact that these decisions are mostly tenure-based, + or - 2 or 3 years, and the rating was always going to be average even if I cured cancer, as was explicitly spelled out later. That disincentives putting in effort because it doesn't matter. Creates an uncomfortable nihilist atmosphere that can be suffocatingly depressive
Yeah...in at least one part of Google, as recently as last year, getting a rating higher than "meets expectations" in the second perf cycle after promo required a VP to approve an exception. Part of why I left.
> I don’t see how giving an up-leveled employee time to adjust to a new responsibility scope is a bad thing.
It's not a bad thing, but the parent you are replying to never said otherwise. They were talking about a fake performance rating that is given for political reasons.
Anyone who thinks that performance ratings aren’t dog and pony shows have drunk the corporate Kool-Aid. Either you have a manager that likes you and will play the game to give you the best politically feasable ratings because it’s the tool they have as middle management to keep you around or you will toil to meet whatever arbitrary expectations someone with authority but no power has and you should run.
From my experience with a temporary 4 day work week: the people who want to appear busy will still find a way to schedule in the same amount of pointless meetings into the fewer hours.
If those people have control over the schedules of other workers, then those workers lose their focus time.
You need guardrails to prevent org & overhead from overwhelming everything else.
I am more than capable of finding other things I value to do with my time. Not everyone is that way, especially when peoples lives are set up from a very young age to "work" for a third of the hours in their life.
For me it's less about "find a hobby/enjoy life" or more that we're likely in this field because we want to feel necessary and useful.
I WFH with amazing TC and WLB. I do my hobbies all day and then work just a few hours. But I feel like an absolute piece of shit just coasting at work. Doesn't matter how well my hobbies are going, I'll always have the quiet stress of not contributing what I'm capable of doing. The times I feel good about myself are when I actually ship something cool with my team.
People working 4 hours a week still have to pretend to be productive for the other 36 hours though. They still have to sit through meetings, and justify their time, and answer Slack messages, and have reviews. They're not free to work on their own projects - they're just 'not working'. That sounds far worse than spending time working on something you actually care about even if it's not your own idea.
The comment that kicked this off was “ If somebody wants to pay me $300k to work 4 hours a week, I'll happily take the deal. As long as that's the actual acknowledged situation and not "most of your job is pretending to work and making people think you're important"”
$300k is (around here) over 7x the mode of income [1]. That's a significant amount (basically the yearly income of 7 "regular joes") and raises (to me) the ethical question of whether I'd deserve it. For a full 40-hour workload, perhaps a case could be made.
But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society. And that's not something I would want.
Note: this, by itself, does not imply no one would deserve that sort of compensation. It simply raises the bar - perhaps to a level that is beyond human reach, perhaps not.
> But for a 4-hour workload? The only way I'm getting that sort of compensation for so little work is if I'm a parasite on society.
That isn't the case with the power of scaling. If the product you happen to be working on 4 hrs a week happens to have X billion users, your tiny contribution gets multiplied by 9 orders of magnitude.
There's still something arbitrary and random about it, but it's not accurate to say you aren't producing net value for your employer/users/society/whatever.
This is the age-old ethical question "do people deserve more reward for their time when they do higher-leverage work?"
It's not as obvious a "yes" as I first thought. I do high-leverage work, but that just means my work builds on the work of many others. I couldn't do anything near what I do now we're it not for thousands or even millions of other people doing low-leverage work that provides the fulcrum for my work. It's society that allows me to do my high-leverage work -- why should I personally collect the pay check for it?
Also I won the genetical lottery to have the interest and intellectual capacity for this work. Is that something I should be rewarded for? Or is it an unfair advantage that other people should be compensated for not having? There's nothing about my personal effort that has given me that advantage.
Not to mention the education and relaxed upbringing that allowed me to reach this potential. That's also a gift from society to me. Should my response be to not repay? To hoard the rewards alone?
I don't know! That's the system we live in. But is it the system we ought to have?
> This is the age-old ethical question "do people deserve more reward for their time when they do higher-leverage work?"
Indeed. And I would argue that society answers this question already, in the form of teacher salaries. Teachers have the mightiest of levers: the not-yet-capable enter and the capable to highly capable leave. Any high-impact individual was molded by them.
Granted, there's not a trivial 1-on-1 relating between future excellence and a particular teacher. On the other hand, every person who had an outsized impact on the world had teachers that helped him/her along that path.
So I'd say society is pretty comfortable with a big "naah" here: teacher salaries are nothing special. (In the West - I remember reading about rock star salaries for good tutors in some Asian country.)
Few people understand how much of a golden ticket this would be…
Do you have any aspirations to build something of your own at all, whether profitable or not? Well you’ve now been given 300k/year of funding without giving up any equity, with the only condition that you put in 4hrs/week for your “job”
Or maybe you like fixing houses? Same thing, etc etc
I dunno, have you seen some of the other replies here? =)
Seems like lots of ppl still can’t fathom something better than an interesting, high paying, but still fulltime job as their “ideal”, or don’t have any passions they’d rather spend their time on.
IMO one reason why so many haven’t found any passions is precisely cause all their time has been spent working, which is sad, honestly.
Yeah, agreed. It would be ideal to perfectly align your life passion with what you can get paid for, and a some people do manage to do that. It's not the only way though, despite what adherents of "success culture" seem to preach.
There is definitely a lot of work out there that needs to be done that isn't going to be anyone's passion. Still needs to be done, and it can pay well, and then you can do all kinds of fun things that you'd never be able to get paid for on the side.
A lot of people aren't monogamous in their passions either, which is kind of what you need to be in order to turn it into a career. Personally, I can't imagine every being so focused on one thing that it's all I'd want to do. I like my work, and I also love a lot of things that aren't my work.
I've come to enjoy doing things other than coding more than I enjoy writing code, but they don't pay nearly as well when done professionally. I'd rather code for four hours and then do those things with the free time.
Maybe? But not until I’ve spent a while doing the whole 4-hours thing.
If I’m working 4-hours a week, that’s a 4-days a week I can be skiing. And reading, and hanging out with friends, and working on actually interesting code projects that aren’t beholden to the whims and timelines of a company. I’d absolutely do that for a while.
In addition to the good points made in other replies, there just aren’t many jobs like that available! “Something you actually care about”, I mean, rather than just “something that’s reasonably interesting to work on and not actively bad”.
I would take virtually any job that paid what I make now (nowhere close to $300k) and required 4 hours a week over the very best job that paid what I make now and required 40 hours a week. Don't even have to think about it.
I can fill 36 hours a week of my time better than anyone else can. If the money's equal and the time difference is that steep, I'll take the shorter time commitment.
Not parent but absolutely. There isn't a single thing I could do 40 hours a week long term without at least getting kind of sick of... but 4 hours per week means I wouldn't get sick of it, plus I'd have all that flexibility and energy and time to devote to several things that do interest me
Depends on if the 4 hours a week was all time I had to be at the office or the time I could do something useful but still had to be there 40 hours. For the first option it might be ok. I could find other things to do, maybe start my own little company, spend more time with the family and so on.
Sure those people exist: but there are plenty of people who aren't that way.
I've worked a couple of different places where the systems, processes and structures in place effectively rendered me as deadweight. In both cases it was incredibly stressful and had a profoundly negative impact on my mental health. In the first case I hung around for quite a while hoping things would get better (because they had been better in the past) but, actually, they got worse, so eventually I left. In the second case I stuck it out for only a few months before leaving. Not soon enough unfortunately: I think it was a significant contributor to losing a relationship.
For a lot of people I've worked with over the course of my 20-odd year career not being able to make a meaningful contribution is intolerable over the medium to long term, and not much fun in the short term either. Of course, there have been useless layabouts, but they've been vastly in the minority, and tend to be spotted and managed out.
"There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company."
One of my favourite corporate laziness stories was a friend of my brother's who would regularly nap for most of the working day in some unused basement room. After a while, his preferred room got converted into something else and he had to find a new sleeping spot.
He eventually found a room where a large laundry hamper would be left full of towels until they were washed or folded. Perfect, he thought. Secretive and soft! He went to get in and go to sleep, only to find someone else already in there asleep.
> There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company
Not really. Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. Middle managers love to schedule irrelevant meetings, but they will provide some business justification to themselves and to others. You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves.
It's very rare that employees are just twiddling their thumbs and doing nothing all day. Specially if we are talking about a highly skilled workforce. I've seen that more often on boring entry level jobs - because the jobs are already boring by nature, so doing nothing and doing something is not much of a difference anyway.
> Even they will carve out some niche and pretend (even to themselves) to be doing useful work. ... You'll find the odd developer that's maintaining some internal app by themselves.
In my experience, internal apps need far more love. Maintaining internal apps is far more useful than most 'real' work, just because it can be a multiplier on so much other 'real' work.
I probably know north of 30 people in sales, all in my somewhat close friend circle. They all brag about not working and making money. I think it's part of the sales culture. It's like a badge of honor to not work hard and make money. Hell, I don't blame them. Visit any golf course since covid and you'll see tee time and tee time stacked with people 'working from home'.
I usually assume that I can't take sales people at face value. If it's a badge of honour, they're incentivised to say that they don't work hard even if they are in fact actually working hard (this includes pretending to enjoy golf).
Having said that, 30 people is a lot of people, so I'm inclined to accept your assessment at face value.
The two types you describe can also be the same person at different times.
At my last company, my workload started to thin out considerably. Initially, it was pretty great having so much free time, even as I made my extra bandwidth clear to my manager (while being careful not to overstate the case!). There was a period of novelty to coasting, but after a few months, it began to wear off.
My ideal workload may not be being plugged in a full 40+ hours a week, but I learned I also need something far north of 4 hours a week. When a combination acquisition and spinoff took even more off my plate, it looked like I'd have months ahead of very nearly nothing at all. With a promise of no layoffs post-transaction, it looked like a coaster's dream.
I have seen it in many places. It's like you can watch the emergence of Orwell's Animal Farm in every human setting. A small fraction doing more and more, which in turn let the others do less and less.
Force the others to do less and less. I’ve seen this a million times, you have one dev going absolutely buck wild building a cathedral of abstractions that only they can understand. The rest of the devs struggle to implement basic features because, and I can’t overstate this enough because it’s true every time the code is a horribly written tightly coupled shoddily architected ball of chewing gum of twine spooky action at a distance with no isolation between components (usually because “DRY”) which is impossible to reason about unless you wrote it.
That dev becomes insanely productive in that codebase, the hero of to all managers, and everyone grinds to a halt gets demotivated because they can’t tackle anything ambitious.
I've been that person in a couple of projects, and it wasn't just because I went off and did my own thing. In at least one case the other people on the team were simply not very capable. As in... I've been building web applications for 25 years, and some of the other folks on the team came out of a bootcamp. And... they don't talk.
"Please, joe, let's connect and you can follow along with what I'm doing". Silence.
"Hey, dave, I see the PR is only a few days late. We still have some time left, can you write a test for it?"
I can get stuff done or I can 'corral and build up' the others, but I can't do both. If you want stuff done by a deadline, and you will not discipline the non-contributors (discipline doesn't mean fire, but it might mean "you have to come to these meetings and pair and follow along and document and write tests")... what's left?
FWIW, I know the difference between decent teams and non-decent teams. The non-decent ones were poorly managed, largely because management could not determine who was skilled and who wasn't. The decent teams I've been on were situations where I still generally had more overall experience (function of age) but the other less-experienced people will still good, engaged, and already contributing, and were measurably improving month to month.
It is one thing if they don't talk. It is even worse if they have no experience but thousands of suggestions that don't work. And you have to debunk every of these suggestions to management while keeping the progress going.
Often, if the work horse leaves, no one is able to keep the project going or rewrite the project from scratch. They should be able to do the latter if their suggestions are so great and they have been kept back. But they cannot.
I've got a colleague with similar history - 24+ years of tech experience - software, hardware, networking, etc. He's built systems that processed tens of millions of dollars, has single-handedly reworked legacy crap spaghetti in to testable, documented, well-functioning stuff. He came in to a company, then covid hit, and no one else on the team has anywhere near his level of experience. One guy graduated high school 18 months ago and loves kotlin. Every meeting is him trashing everything saying how cool kotlin in. He's rewritten existing working image processing libraries from C (which my colleague wrote and were working in production) in to Kotlin because "kotlin is faster". Guess what's broken now?
They have multiple meetings per week where people argue about what encryption library they should use for JWT token signing. Like... 5 people - none of whom have ever written encryption, nor written a JWT, arguing based on all the blog posts they've collectively read. That's just one example. This happens constantly. And the manager is of the view that "everyone's opinion matters, everyone should be heard". So the person with decades of experience who's already written (and written docs and tests) for the system they're trying to migrate to has to sit and listen to people who can not spell SQL talk about how 'bad' his system is because it's not in Kotlin.
That feels like an extreme example, but the more I talk with other folks, it doesn't seem to be that uncommon. Probably 15% or so of folks I connect with seem to have wildly imbalanced skill levels in their teams which are not acknowledged as such. It's fine for someone to have less experience. It's not fine to pretend that your 6 months of CS-101 homework is equivalent to someone else's decades of experience and working/documented/tested code.
in my experience the team needs critical mass of decent developers. And by 'decent' I don't mean all-knowing experienced beasts. I mean adequate devs with ability to listen and to be wrong. If team has it, better devs naturally get listened more and everyone gets chance to improve from it.
It doesn't mean that you just don't let juniors express their opinions (everyone should be able to talk), but the 'weight' of dev's opinion determines by his track of previous cases. And obviously every opinion comes with responsibility for the result. If you forced your approach you need to be able to deal with the results.
ah yeah, the mythical 10x dev. He, who has the permission and authority of management, to completely eviscerate any and all process to get whatever management wants done. I know a guy like that. He recently commit a massive code change without so much as a code review or a Jira ticket. 100s of new files. No one knows what the fuck they do. Wonder of wonders.
People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile. It's amazing. If you're doing code reviews, proper unit tests, Jira micromanagement bullshit, it's an impossibility to get a 10x dev. We have WIP limits for fucks sake! WIP!! You literally cannot merge enough code to be a 10x without management favoritism.
> People still believe in 10x. People also believe in agile. It's amazing.
I'm not sure it's the same people who 'believe' in both, or... there's more nuance.
I 'believe' in the '10x' thing, because... at times, I've been the 10x person, by many metrics (bugs closed, docs written, tests written, lines of code, tickets addressed, etc). And yes, I'm aware that metrics like that can be gamed in some fashion. I never did, mostly because it's not really apparent at the time there's an output imbalance, but looking back at some numbers like those, I was the '10x' person on a team. It said as much or more about the rest of the team than it did me personally. I've been on other teams where I was decidedly not a 10x, and do have memories of being the -2x person a few times.
I 'believe' in agile, but only to the extent that it supports and enhances an already functioning team. I've seen it played out in a team from a few years ago, and it was as much of a 'well-oiled machine' as you could get while being a growing startup expanding and hiring a lot. That said, the skills and people together would have worked decently and productively together absent any formal process. Obviously just 'imo', but after decades in software, you sort of get a sense of skill levels and ability. We/they were a decent team, and would have been without 'agile' - that was some extra layers of process and ceremony which no doubt helped some people with visibility. That benefit was largely ancillary to the delivery of working software. One could argue the 'repeatability' and 'onboarding' benefits of 'agile', but I've not seen it be a huge boon in most teams I've seen adopt 'agile'.
I did such thing at least twice (unintentionally). Usually there is a quite simple way to overcome this - cultivate review process and some some of tech meetings, where your '10x dev' can talk about their approach and others have chance to criticise it. If other devs don't care enough to challenge 10x and just roll with it, well then they have it coming.
As a current FANNG employee, I have seen so many dead weights here, especially the new-hires after COVID. They took advantage of the lenient WFH policy. Some travels around the world for a year; some becomes a social media influencer; some comes up with all sorts of excuse like wife/kids/parents being sick to take unlimited sick day.
It pains me to see how a great company gets abused like this. The cycle to put people on PIP is so long that they can coast at least a year before anything can be done.
Our org doesn’t have daily standup. We have weekly meetings but they dial in with camera off. When asked to give updates, they usually mention some small change, being blocked by other teams, or waiting for test result/releases. When you look at their code review, they often take 1 day to reply to comments so each diff could take a few days to submit.
So why do you put up with that? I'd absolutely be bringing that up as an issue with the coworker first and if that went nowhere with our manager if it was regularly causing issues within the team.
So these are devs on base salaries over 160k+, presumably considered to be somewhat senior, and their teams just let them get away without contributing their share? Not even showing up to stand ups or whatever regular team meetings there are? Something seems very off for that to be the case.
I think it varies widely by job. I've met few programmers, percentages wise, that want to be dead weight. At generic office jobs (where my SO works) it seems to be the norm, and it's a problem for her because she's not like that and people load her up with work because they know it will be done right and on time.
It’s really sad when people who want to be meaningful, are stymied by the floaters.
The floaters stick around by inserting themselves into an essential process that needs non-advocate reviewers infrequently, this is usually supply chain, quality assurance, and security. Then they collude by scheduling meetings for each other, which is really just socializing.
When meaningful people need to use a process, and engage the floaters. They find that they are impossible to engage because they are in meetings. And if there’s special considerations that need to happen in a process, which is a given when you’re innovating, it means that the floaters have more opportunities to schedule more meetings, and sap the productivity of the meaningful people.
Not only do the floaters succeed in slowing down the productivity of the meaningful people, they also impose an opportunity cost, which is that the meaningful people cannot engage in another activity while the former activity is going through process. They have to also spend time engaging the floaters in meetings for the process to continue.
"Plenty" is not a good measure, and often seems more based on role and type of firm than just related to a lack of drive.
I've observed whole teams that are effectively 'dead weight' and ones where there is all killer, no filler. Of the DWs I've seen, many are DW not always by choice, but because other factors shove them into odd corners and they can't figure out (or are too constrained by other factors)
You are never going to 100% all-in motivation even from top performers in perpetuity, and even anecdotally most people don't want to be moribund for decades on end, and certainly not the majority of workers.
In particular, people who never really figured out how to do more than bare minimum technical work tend to fail upwards into primarily "collaborative" roles.
Unless I actually have substantive impact — like truly meaningful like people not one bacon distance away from me really feel it you’re getting the bare minimum.
This is the downside of trying to make knowledge workers a commodity and replaceable — work gets coasting and my side projects get my real creativity.
> people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company.
Jim Keller had an interesting perspective on how you should think if you are in managing position and need to fire people https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TmuJSbms9c he and Peterson discuss it somewhere in the middle
>> "Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight."
> I disagree. There are plenty of people who would love to be dead weight just to float around in a company.
No, the parent is right. Psychological research shows clearly that people don't want to be dead weights. They lose motivation and become burned out for many reasons.
And it's entirely the company responsibility to address the problem.
I think the dead weight is a given, in either circumstance. It's not about motivating them, that's a sunk cost.
It's more about making the 90% of folks that aren't dead weight not suffer under the burden of the stuff OP mentions that overtakes day to day life as organizations get bigger. That's the issue.
I disagree with this. An entire business day is a long time to do nothing. I've always loved jobs where there was enough strategic direction to know what to focus on but enough latitude where you could actually do it. I can't think of anyone (not suffering from pure burnout) that didn't devour meaningful work that had well written requirements.
I have seen the “floaters” but it’s rare. What is worse are the occasional people (and some companies have lots more of this than others) that are a net negative impact to the productivity. There are different reasons but sometimes they believe that their work adds value but in the end it’s really just creating inefficiencies (like creating processes for process sake, work about work etc). That’s how large companies with everything going for them can easily start loosing their edge - when there’s more “no” people than “yes” people!
I think spending about 20 minutes on r/antiwork will get most folks to agree with you.
I think most people want a purpose. Many are perfectly happy for that to be something other than their work or means of earning an income. Nothing wrong with this of course but try be the person where some of your purpose is tied up in your work on that forum, or even this forum at times, and you get accused of having Stockholm syndrome toward your employment captors.
People want to grow, they want to do better. They also, crucially, want recognition and to feel valued for it. That means they must (must) be treated with respect by their employers, and rewarded or at least recognized when they achieve personal or professional growth.
If you don’t reward and respect people who try to grow, why would they ever continue that?
They are not 'pretending' in most cases. They are busy, and think they are adding value.
So do their managers.
Also - sometimes the inverse! I've caught myself feeling 'useless' at BigTech until some feedback/situation made me realize 'OMG this matters' kind of things.
It's hard.
That is maybe Management's #1 job is to get people focused on things that matter.
I have worked in one of those companies. Most were lazy and did barely any work. They were there for a paycheck and it showed. Not everyone works in a mission driven startup where the employees are intrinsically motivated to contribute. Many are just free riders and hide under a middle manager hoping they don't get noticed. Such B teamers need to be weeded out quick.
Then I switched companies and everyone was motivated and hard working. The leader there hired better (less stragglers to begin with) and fired better (fired stragglers within 3 months).
I'm surprised to see this is the top voted comment because it is completely off the mark in this case and anyone that has spent any amount of time reading Blind (a website dedicated to... I'm not sure what exactly) knows it.
While Facebook/Meta, Google, and others have always paid comparatively well, in the past 2-3 years the pay shot up even higher and the only price of admission is supreme obedience to "grinding LeetCode." This hysteria created an entire culture of pay chasers that congregate on that Blind website with little regard for anyhing other than compensation. These people, who I consider to be among the most toxic people in tech, have a singular focus on pay and it is not at all surprising that when put in minimal supervision environments they choose to merely exist and collect said paycheck. CEOs lamenting this are merely reaping what they sow.
Honestly I've been in markets where this worked out. You pay a lot of money to get someone good who's motivated and does great work. Tech recently though has been a game where you get a high paying job and you just spend a year trying to get the next one rather than working.
Blind is interesting. I'm grateful for the insights into total compensation it granted me, and Blind combined with a managerial stint gave me a very solid feel for both industry and company-specific bands. I also got notice of an impending reorg that was coming my way, and started early in looking for another home.
On the other hand, it only exacerbated the cynicism and burnout covid and WFH brought. Trolls are rewarded with attention through "engagement" with their incendiary posts, misinformation and speculation passed as dogma are rampant, and as you mentioned the collective priority in "the community" is this egocentric worship of money. It reminds me of the subreddit /r/relationships, where the number one piece of advice is to obviously break up or divorce because you're getting screwed over. Blind's number one piece of advice is to obviously grind leetcode and start interviewing because you're getting screwed over.
Blind is full of people from the Bay Area, where if you are the very best in the world at wringing the corporate ladder for everything it’s worth, you might just maybe be able to buy a home for your family one day.
One thing remote work might bring us is a little more chill about compensation, as people live in regions where people not optimizing for TC can be comfortable and secure.
I just know of at least 20 people left my previous company because we had nothing to do. Every meeting was trying to figure out what the direction was. As an engineer when the company gets to the size of 1000+ you are largely not at all empowered to solve this problem but have to rely on your manager or in some cases your managers manager.
But come time for performance review you get bad marks. If you think that many people are just lazy for no reason you have no right to be managing or running a business.
Sitting around pretending to work all day is a recipe for depression and burnout. No one wants that.
The biggest lie I ever got told at work was "all teams have equal opportunity for impact". They don't, and team+org is about 80% of your potential performance.
At the time my org had a "mission & building" group and a "maintenance & operations" group. I was placed in the maintenance group.
Every single project in the maintenance group went the same: good idea, planning & initial prototype, gets noticed by management, you get permanently blocked or management pilfers your star players and you start again or scope down. All our projects were tiny or failures. Meanwhile the people in the mission group got showered with raises and promotions.
It was soul crushing, I had never been so unhappy. I had no (opportunity for) impact on the business, so my reviews were always that I was technically strong but didn't demonstrate impact. You can get stuck in a real feedback loop there, you get burned out at constant failure.
I'm sure we all looked lazy from above, I certainly felt lazy, but the org structure simply quashed any attempts at progress and we were all powerless against it.
I ended up leaving that role, it gave me a strong focus on impact only roles which was the best career move I ever made.
That sounds like a dysfunctional organization and a good example why trying to measure "impact" in the sense you're describing is not a good idea. Let's say you're on an internal tools team that's building tools that others in the organization rely on to build whatever products your company is making money of. You might say your direct "impact" [edit: is small/zero] but your indirect impact is definitely not. In a well run company those people would be highly valued for their indirect contribution.
You're absolutely right that how a company is organized, and its culture, is directly linked to those outcomes. The ability of individuals to make impact is also very related to their being in the right position to utilize their strengths aka role fit. In a well run company managers try to optimize for all these things. Ofcourse the best intentioned managers can't always place everyone in the perfect spot and lots of projects have work that isn't super shiny but is still important.
Sounds like you made the right decision in leaving.
It sounds to me like you were in a bad fit for the role. Projects definitely have a life cycle. Prototype, build, maintain. And you typically have different types of people doing these different roles. You may not have enjoyed the role that you played - but some people really do enjoy each of those roles.
>But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!
As long as you're not mean, you can hang out at most companies for at least 6 months just doing nothing.
I've been reprimanded before , when I took the initiative to try and start building out a framework. I literally had nothing else to do, but I was later told I should have waited until a committee could be formed.
Even if you barely do anything, at least you're not causing trouble. In my career. I've worked with several abrasive angry people, I've seen folks confront C level employees.
Developers who cry about having to use a PC to write some.net code and throw a temper tantrum. Threaten to just walk out because some legacy code needed updating and they're so used to having a precious Mac to code on.
That said, I actually really like him how limited social interactions are with remote work. I don't need to know your political beliefs, I don't need to be your friend, I don't want to get drinks with you, I want to do what is necessary for my job.
Corporate fluff plays a role. I imagine Google develops products that will never be profitable just so they can look at their shareholders and say, looky we do stuff aside from search.
What I noticed is it is not employee laziness but the FAANG companies have ton of dead weight in terms of future projects or project features which never get released. One of my co-workers was working on a feature which was shelved after working 2+ years on it. He lost motivation after that and coasted the rest of the time doing minimum work. I think FAANG companies have lot of PMs and top management who are as clueless and lazy as engineers.
Let me guess- the management that ultimately nuked the project paraded it around to get promoted before moving to another org and doing the same thing?
The acronym FAANG was made up/popularized by Jim Cramer, a TV finance guy, intended to be "these companies are going to DOMINATE tech with the BIGGEST MARKET CAPS". Today the market caps are (in billions) 479 (Meta), 2719 (Apple), 1450 (Amazon), 300 (Netflix), 1566 (Alphabet) + 2166 (MSFT). Cramer tried to make an updated version happen in 2021: (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet) because Netflix did not explode and Microsoft did not disappear in the way he had predicted.
So yes, IMO Microsoft sits pretty in the no-longer-accurate acronym FAANG.
Better pay? Not for new hires. Most recent reports I have seen (blind, levels.fyi) and my own experiences have shown Amazon skyrocket to the top paying FAANG, with the first two years heavily skewed toward cash and backloading RSUs. I am surprised out of all the FAANGs you picked the generally lowest paying one as the counter example.
I really have trouble understanding why ppl should dream about labor / fulfilment at work.
There are so many ways to find a real meaning.
Be a great person, help others, read a book, do yoga, help kids with homework, plant a tree, build something with own hands, grow food, clean-up trash.
So many things to keep you busy. Work is just a necessity to do something that actually matters in the longer run (for majority at least).
Ppl that deeply care about the company and product are such a tiny minority.
I don't know how to not care. I've been writing software since I was a teenager and it's always been a central part of my life. I've always cared and that care is partly what made me successful (or so I believe). But it definitely is also what's stressing me out... I've always seen work as basically being able to be paid to practice my hobby though as well all know(?) your fun hobby becomes less fun when it's work.
I remember having lunch with a co-worker who was saying something along the lines that he's never really wanted to code and the only reason he's doing it (got a degree and a career) is for the money and I didn't understand how that was even possible ;)
I assume because you literally spend most of your life there, and if it doesn't mean something, that is ... awful?
I mean, there have been times / places in history where you work so that you have enough money to not die; and you enjoy your life with whatever pittance is left afterward.
I doubt anyone reading this website is in such a time or place.
Basically every corporation you can work for will have you doing something meaningless (and is dedicated to a meaningless pursuit besides). As the world population shrinks in the deep future, perhaps that will change - but right now it definitely will not.
As such, I have trouble seeing why you'd think any work you do means anything. Most likely it doesn't and that's okay. It is not within your control to have meaningful work available. It is within your control to have a healthier attitude towards your workplace and your work.
If you find your work to be meaningless, who am I to argue. But I've had a number of jobs at different companies at various places along the 'meaning' gradient. It's not all the same. Though I also agree that meaning is, to large degree, yours to make, at least as much as it is a property of the situation.
Part of the problem is also the incentives and performance axes that are defined to evaluate work/productivity.
At a higher experience level, you are expected not just to churn out code but also to demonstrate performance on axes such as influence, scope, leadership etc. In fact, if you just churn out code and not perform on other axes, you are under performing under other axes. So, I could solve a particular problem for my team quickly with no dependencies with other teams/people, but I am now forced to go to other teams and look if they have similar problems to solve and then work on getting alignment on a common solution which would work as a common framework for both team's use cases. While this in theory is good to have one generic solution for a set of similar problems, once a huge company has incentivized this, lot of people are trying to build the next standard/framework and as you'd expect adoption becomes a problem because everyone is trying to evangelize their own framework. The end result, you suddenly have to work with x number of people and let everyone align with what you are doing, that takes time, then you implement something and now have to convince others to use your framework, which again takes time. Add these dependencies and you have what you currently have, a mechanism that moves slowly with most people involved feel helpless and think if it was just up to them they would have it all done in a few days.
I'm intrigued by this statement. Maybe we run an unorthodox version of Agile, but I'm a solutions architect with imposter syndrome (which is why I clicked this link) and I spend about 3/4 of each day in meetings with PMs and SSTs (Business Analyst) generating a backlog and acceptance criteria that's structured and detailed enough that our developers are generally happy if they get to choose the variable names.
I think it's a mix of both - I'd kill for anyone at my current job to spend more than a bare minimum of time on their acceptance criterion so I don't just feel like I'm writing code and hoping it does vaguely what the person wants. What the GP is describing feels a bit too far in the other direction, but I'd almost rather it trend towards having an over-prescriptive ticket I can push back on then playing telephone with another department because they gave me 3 sentences of writeup for a month/quarter long project.
At a product company, the lead engineer(s) and the product manager, who is a direct everyday member of the engineering team, collectively own what the product is supposed to be. There’s not someone else two departments away who is a more legitimate authority on what to build.
Not getting rid of "legacy" stuff that doesn't work is a, IMHO, a version of throwing good moneybafter bad money. Instead of acknowledging that the unusable code, or whatever, was a crucial part of understanding the problem, and throw it out once the problem was understood, people tend to build upon those not fit for purpose things...
Some of the most valuable work I've ever done was spending a month creating something, throwing every byte away, and then spending two weeks creating the same thing, much improved.
The key to rework like this is you have to actually be able to finish it and get rid of the old, instead of spending months or years maintaining two half-baked versions of something instead of just one.
Almost every single thing I build I throw away at least one of them, sometimes two.
The finished projects tend to stick around forever and, if they need maintenance, it’s adding a feature or two or updating dependencies.
I do backend work so this kind of workflow probably doesn’t work for customer-facing projects that need to iterate on finding traction. But for something where the problem is generally well defined and not likely to change drastically in the short or medium term, it’s amazing. I have multiple projects I’ve written that run on virtually every machine (server and workstation) at my company (former unicorn, current Fortune 500) that are effectively “done” and only need to be redeployed a couple times a year for dependency updates and preventing bitrot in general.
Having worked like this, I can confidently say I will never again remain on a team where this isn’t the normal state of affairs.
Even coming from an attitude of being big on abstractions and generalized/scaled solutions, I cannot overstate the importance of writing a throw-away version at the outset. Hit the highlights, write it fast & dirty, use it, extend it a bit as you start to understand the system — then throw it away. Use that knowledge to design and build your real system, from scratch, but informed by your earned knowledge.
>>agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on.
And to this in the GP post, I think he identified a fundamental problem with Agile. Its entire bias is to write code fast, when the bias should be to avoid writing code — code is slow and habitat for bugs. Obviously everything requires code, but it should be minimized, not maximized. Of course, writing code quickly and seeing it run is satisfying, but developers' dopamine hits shouldn't be the primary driver of design & mgt - end performance should be, and that takes careful thought of what can be eliminated, and basing that thought on knowledge of a throw-away-version-1 is very useful, and pays benefits to both the dev team and to users for years.
> The management question, therefore, is not whether to build a pilot system and throw it away. You will do that. The only question is whether to plan in advance to build a throwaway, or to promise to deliver the throwaway to customers.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
replacing the prototype is important, but you need enough power in your org to be able to throw it away. 'nothing is as permanent as a temporary solution'
Until your boss doesn't understand this concept and thinks your prototype is a finished system, even after explaining the fact it's just a demo that you made to help gather requirements time-and-time-again.
It's not just meetings. I spend 80% of my energy fighting internal resistance, in the form of moronic decision, moronic policies, short signtedness and incompetence. It's not even bad will or people deliberately sabotaging the business. Just frictions grinding the organisation to a quasi standstill, people taking principled approaches to cover their own ass irrespective of the consequences, or being so far remote from the ground that they have no idea of the consequences of their decisions. And in the middle of that you have some courgageous busy bees trying to make things happen despite this internal resistance. Many have given up. I am somewhere in the middle.
A pretty well known ticketing company bought our startup a few years ago, and after the first week of parties, raising salaries and hyping us the reality struck us very hard. It was impossible to do any work at all. Anything you wanted to do would require tons of meetings, there was always a few people blocking any initiative you could have.
And then the freaking Agile By The book (with agile coaches and all!) I couldn't stand for the life of me. We'd have like 10 ritual meetings a week and the joke was that those meetings were to discuss "What we're going to do, what we're not doing, and what we didn't do".
Worst part, is that *everything* pushed you to just stay at your desk watching online courses or reading stuff on the internet and do nothing, and as long as you showed up to your scheduled meetings, all was good. You'd even get promotions by just smiling around and being nice to others.
I left that and now I'm at a company about 3 times as big. The difference is that here we're 100% remote and 100% async, written communication. Literally ZERO work meetings a week, just one "hang out" to not forget about the faces of your coworkers. No Agile, no Jira, no bullshit. A shared "to do" list to show others what you're on and weekly reports of your progress. I just can't believe how well this works.
I worked at a company where I'd have at least 2 or 3 days a week where we had 4 hours of meetings. It was pure hell. Half the time I wouldn't even pay attention. I'd be browsing reddit or HN.
You hit the nail on the head with agile. I remember writing some code only to have the whole thing ripped out "next sprint" because nobody bothered to think a couple weeks ahead. Or starting an integration project with a third party, only to find out they're not ready, so we have no API that actually works. So we waste time mocking it out, only to find out the docs they gave us don't match reality.
> Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight
I read loads of blogs and posts where people are loving WFH, doing very little and openly recommending tech career to others because its so great. They might not think they're a dead weight, they just think thats what modern working is like.
There were coffee-mug-carriers and hall-wanderers back in the office as well. I don’t think it’s new in WFH, but at least now they bother fewer people with their “checking in”.
I swear one guy must have gotten 15K steps/day in just wandering around the building.
One job I was at had four of us working in one room. A guy from a completely different department would wander in with his cup of whatever and talk at us for at least an hour. He was both dodging actual work and interrupting us. Since he didn't report to our manager there was nothing we could do. His boss was a piece of work as well.
It's these useless people that make open plans so toxic. It's bad enough that the general noise and visual distraction decreases your ability to concentrate and get anything done, but the wandering trolls of gossip and sports talk just add an extra booger icing on the shit cake.
I spent about a year and a half being dead weight. I was so completely burned after working months of 70 to 90 hour weeks I just couldn't do anything. Things that used to take me an hour to code now took me days. Complete mental block. Luckily I had built up such a good reputation prior I was able to coast and it was a weird project. In a new job / role now and it's better. Only work 40 hours max. Still not back to normal but 75% of the way there.
> It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!
IMHO, if you're a developer and have more than 8h of meetings a week then you are no longer a developer. In the worst case, you are a body to fill a seat in a meeting to fluff the self-importance of your management. In the best case, you're on track to being management yourself.
There is a disease where people add lots of people to meetings that don't really have to be there. Then people have a compulsion to go to every meeting they are invited to.
One of the best decisions I ever made was deciding to stop going to meetings unless I knew I had to. Turns out, nobody really cared, and if they really needed me they could also message me on slack and I can pop in.
I moved jobs recently and this has been a minor issue for me. I get invited to all the meetings, including those where neither my input nor attendance is required, but I don't know that until a few minutes in. At that point I either sit and listen to something barely related to my role or awkwardly drop off.
Except that's not a reasonable ask when you have a global presence and meetings into the evening. Saying no to an over-scheduled calendar is the mechanism by which you gain control of your life.
My measure of a meeting's worth is: if you were shackled to a chair for the scheduled duration of this meeting, would you get anything useful done, from a discussion perspective? If not, simply decline the invite; your brain is not important enough to have been productive in that context.
When I've shoulder-surfed my managers and PMs for roughly the last ten years, they're all like that: wall-to-wall meetings. Any technical work they do (and here at least, (T)PMs are expected to potentially contribute technical work) is done outside 9-5.
Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.
A former coworker called these people professional meeters. Had an EM like that. Either he was in a meeting or he was walking around and talking the ear off of whichever unfortunate soul he bumped into. Tangible output was basically 0.
Material affluence for the majority has gradually shifted people’s orientation toward work—from what Daniel Yankelovich called an “instrumental” view of work, where work was a means to an end, to a more “sacred” view, where people seek the “intrinsic” benefits of work. “Our grandfathers worked six days a week to earn what most of us now earn by Tuesday afternoon,” says Bill O’Brien, former CEO of Hanover Insurance. “The ferment in management will continue until we build organizations that are more consistent with man’s higher aspirations beyond food, shelter and belonging.”
Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle Edition.
I thought the point of iterating early is that sometimes writing code is the best way to gain understanding of the problem (depending on the kind of problem). You're supposed to throw that stuff away... it's iteration...
Measure the product before measuring productivity.
across the board execs complaining about productivity turn out to be poor at defining product ("its just a website, how long could it take to build, Jeez").
Any productivity comparisons between software and other manufacturing processes should begin with a few minutes spent to compare software specs and the said product's spec, see how hard it is to change its spec ("add a button to accept payments" v/s. "add a knob on the car's dashboard")
provide a technical spec first, then we can talk about productivity.
That's one take, but if you hang around on Blind (which is an anonymous forum heavily populated by FAANG), you will find many who gloat about how little they work.
I've seen companies where the leaders will only trust the opinions of the consultants. Even if they are the same conclusions of existing employees.
Hired talent isn't magical but for some businesses the consultant workers have an glow about them. The result is the business effectively making their own workforce redundant because they fear relying on them. And then morale tanks, and people leave.
>And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need.
I once spent two months trying to get my technical lead to do a code review for a PR I raised. Eventually the business informed us they didn't actually need the feature that the PR implemented. At that point, my technical lead immediately approved the PR so it wouldn't be (seen as) a waste.
> And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need.
Not entirely true. I don't mind that one bit. I can voice my opinion on what "we need", but ultimately that's not my decision and there are people hired to do that. I get paid to write it, I'm happy in that spot, and if I end up not having to deploy it, go through whatever baroque testing cycles are in place, or do the job of 3 with the salary of 1 by having to do sysadmin, DevOps, or whatever other fad du jour is sweeping the industry with fancy terms just trying to keep the CEO's in their millions, fine with me.
The sad part about excessive meetings is often they are not enough on their own. In between all of the the pointless meetings, smaller, less formal, often unscheduled, real meetings where actual decisions are made still need to happen.
> The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem.
I've seen this increase proportional to the number of employees. People start trying to worry more about perception of progress by tracking proxy metrics, because the large the company, the harder it is to prove how each one contributes directly to the bottom line.
Large corps are propped up by intellectual property law and economies of scale. They do not hold their market positions on their own merit. If we remove IP laws, we will have another golden age of tech innovation tomorrow.
Another factor here is that companies will hire more people as a growth strategy without having any clear idea of how to deploy them. Even if they have a high level idea they may not know how to translate that high level idea to something actionable. They have a high P/E. There's cheap money. They need to somehow grow. The only way they know to grow is just to hire more people. As you say, no wonder they don't have anything to work on. Maybe the idea is that if they're working for you they're not working for the competition. I donno.
This iteration through pseudo productivity comes from management's real world problem of demonstrating progress on their projects. The promises of visibility on your development team's productivity always turns Agile into a steaming pile of burn-downs and story points.
"No one has done true Agile" is the "No one has done true Communism" for software engineering. Because, in the real world, no one uses Agile in an ideal environment free of pressures like deadlines or budgets.
I think my department was Agile, doing the stuff on the left (good) side of the Agile Manifesto [1], even as we didn't think we were doing Agile. We made deadlines, had smooth deployments, and any bugs in production were not that bad. Then new management came in (company was bought) and started pushing "Agile" on us, which is doing the stuff on the right [bad] side of the Agile Manifesto. Now we've missed deadlines, rarely have a smooth deployment, and are now constantly finding bugs in production. When pressed, upper management has stated that "Agile" is to make it possible to work faster than we were.
exactly. the sales department has targets for the quarter and they won't give 2 damns about how many story points your team got through this sprint. They want on this date or else.
I find this attitude among developers frustrating to say the least.
Apparently developers are just helpless sheep being ruled by an amorphous entity called “management”.
Supposedly developers are important enough to command 3-400k in salaries, but not important enough that “management” would be open to all of them pointing out that maybe that 1 daily meeting is costing too much in employee time and not giving enough value and could be reduced to 2-3 times a week.
Leadership signs off on hiring. Leadership signs off on installing far reaching processes that inhibit devs from making contributions.
I'm sure some people try to find ways to cheat the system. But I find it hard to believe that it's a wide spread problem. Even people doing the minimum work possible probably have a ton of other interests or ideas and would rather be engaged with their work somewhat and learning things than idling.
> "and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees"
Come on! This is straight up impossible. Anyone who has worked for any length of time in the tech industry has come across people that simply don't do anything, and are totally fine with that. It is *very common* and its borderline dishonest to say otherwise.
Is it really? I haven't worked at that many companies but I've seen it maybe once or twice out of hundreds of workers. I have see devs that were incompetent but tried. I see a lot of pms, managers, business analysts etc who seemed to always be collaborating with each other but contribute very little to the actual product. But the truly lazy dgaf dev is very rare in my experience.
I wish this were true but most of the people I have worked with in the past 3 years are just lazy and will pretend to be doing a days worth of work for 2 weeks whenever they can get away with it
> The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on.
Remote working has been around forever. The pandemic opened the doors to a larger set of candidates. None if it changed human nature. There are people who do well on their own. I think most don’t.
I know someone who has had remote jobs for probably 35 years. How does he spend his time? Re-roofing his home, upgrading his bathrooms, fixing his cars, etc. Not working. And these are six figure jobs. Watching this first hand —for decades— has not made me a huge believer in remote work for everyone. Not sure how to define who does well and who does not.
I’ve personally never witnessed this, and I’ve worked in government and know people who work in government in other contexts, and I haven’t ever heard of an actual anecdote to that effect either.
I’m sure it exists, but the meme seems overblown. From what I’ve seen, government is more frugal than the private sector day to day, the main difference is that the government ends up supporting unprofitable programs and has additional burdensome regulations that drive up costs (eg buy American)
I definitely saw a lot of dead weight and waste in government work, more than I have ever seen in the private sector.
Part of it comes down to fact that it's harder to fire people.
Another part of it is that bureaucracies end up becoming dominated by people who serve the survival of the bureau (and it's budget) at the expense of its actual mission.
Another part is that government agencies are just not as easy to hold to account - with a private business your customer can often take their business elsewhere (and if they can't, well, the government just might be the reason for that). In theory the democratic process should hold these agencies accountable, but the democratic process is more indirect than voting with your feet. And there is generally a tendency to resist democratic influence (otherwise the agency would become political).
I hate this take of "gobernment bad, capitalism good". As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.
We'll, it is true that our "ownership class" and its media and political mouthpieces have spent the better part of the last two generations drilling this notion into people's skulls will all the considerable power at their disposal.
I’ve held a job ever since I was 12 years old. And I worked before that under the table to pay for my things as a child. I’ve worked at many multinationals now that I’m middle aged. Yes, I’m American. And my view on this is completely contrary to conventional wisdom. Private enterprise is not only less efficient than government, it’s destructive.
Private enterprise doesn’t care about doing a good job or delivering quality product. It only cares about making money. It’s a perverse incentive that drives everything down to the bottom almost every time. The only way to circumvent that perverse incentive system is to have someone in charge that cares about something other than profits. And there just are not enough Steve Jobs or similar characters out there that cared about quality and legacy enough to make blind participation as a buyer in your favor.
Of course someone will say, that’s how you make money is by delivering quality. But that’s not true. You deliver money by monopolizing, putting in barriers to entry, or simply by cutting costs. By definition, if something you buy was cheaper to produce than the price you paid, you’re getting a bad deal. People just don’t see this because they have no other choice.
Now all that said, I also believe that it is the worst system, except for all the others. I think with sensible regulation to counterbalance abuse, the system is as good of one as I’ve seen.
This has been my experience too. As a youth I worked as a lifeguard, first for a company and then for the county government. The private company gave us an initial 8 hours of training once every three years. The government trained us every single weekend. In an emergency I would have been useless at the private company because I was so poorly trained. At the government I would have been very prepared to deal with the situation. It comes down to incentives, the company wanted to maximize profit, cutting training helps that. Emergencies are rare situations that can easily dealt with by shifting blame to the front line workers. The government didn't have these incentives and were able to invest in training.
Not saying gov good, private bad. Just saying that it is a lot more complicated than gov bad private good.
I see that in my own job. We don't do any training. That's on my own time and dime. It has definitely hurt my productivity. Software is a great example of cost cutting to death. There's a couple sayings that apply. "What if we train people and they leave? What if we don't, and they stay?", and "slow down to go fast". For the owner, he's getting rich, so anything that works at all is good for him.
Most software joints I've worked at essentially need to be hiring top experts because otherwise there's no real support system to carry you when necessary. Everyone is overloaded with work, many are underpaid for how qualified they are if they're on visas, and most people are in really bad moods. My current place of work is largely toxic. It's just not the right way to go through life.
I've worked at exceptional workplaces that ran like a top, John Deere was one. I realize they have some right-to-repair woes. :) But the vast majority were pretty bad and definitely examples of slash-n-burn capitalism.
Another thing worth adding to this conversation is that privately owned enterprise tends to be better than public. Maybe not in how they treat employees, because the boss is closer to you usually in privately held companies. But definitely in the quality of the product. Public companies are the worst. While I'd prefer to work at a public company in general, I would almost never buy product from one, given the choice.
We really need more worker owned cooperatives. You have to work there to own a share, and one share equals one vote on matters. They may not work for venture capitalism, but for proven business models that aren't innovating, it really makes no sense to me why 7-Eleven out of Japan dominates our convenience stores. As opposed to those shops being owned by the people that work there. Proven business models have to move to that.
My goal in life, which I may never achieve, is to start a business, stabilize it, make my money and then sell it to my employees if they want it. Turn it into a democratically owned workplace. I think this is the only way to get the best of both worlds: high quality product, and fair treatment for employees. I'm a strong believer that people need "skin in the game" or they just won't care about the quality of their work. This model of 1 person taking it all really should only be done for unproven business models.
Cheers to a fellow child labor participant. I was grinding down spot welding tips before my paper routes that I got at 12. Grocery stores at least then let you bag groceries at 13. I worked on a farm. Done it all and I think it's a uniquely American experience. And probably Bangladesh.
That’s not the take, that’s just how you read it in a knee jerk reaction. It’s a comment about government employee productivity, not whether the government is bad.
You can both believe that government employees are extremely inefficient and that the government is good to run certain things.
>As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.
Absolutely not. Apart from catastrophic budget crises, a government doesn’t risk bankruptcy and a department has no need to bring in more than it costs. There is no real floor for how slow employees can be because the agency is getting its money either way.
> As a consultant having worked for both large government agencies and large corporations, they are all the same.
Large corporations are often indistinguishable from government agencies in part because all large, centralized organizations suffer similar problems, and in part because they become intertwined. The only difference is often whether your prison walls are gray or beige.
But capitalism is not just "large corporations". Capitalism is also startups, freelancers, small businesses, "mittlestand", cooperatives, family farms, etc. It is respecting property rights, and managing behavior through contracts and social norms rather than reams of regulations. Those things definitely are superior to government.
RE: your example, what exactly does that example have to do with the federal government? The guy threatened to sue, those laws apply the same in the private sector.
> I was told by our HR department that we could get rid of him, or at least demote him, if he failed two annual reviews in a row. Eventually he did, but we were then told by HR that he had to fail two annual reviews in a row in the same way; if he failed twice, but differently in the second year, that didn't count
Government HR processes make it _very_ difficult to be fired.
I have seen many companies with very poor productivity, and in zero of those cases was it laziness of the employees. In fact they usually would have loved to be more productive. Nobody wants to spend their life being dead weight.
But as companies grow they install more and more rules and regulations that end up making sure nothing ever gets done. It is not unusual to meet "developers" whose company calendar is 80% filled with meetings. Well no wonder they don't get anything done!
Also remember that this is only half the problem. The other half is that agile makes you iterate through pseudo productivity before you actually understood the problem, accumulating cruft that you need to maintain and extend as you go on. I wouldn't be surprised if of the productivity that is left, more than half gets wasted on crufty software structures and writing code before you understood the problem.
And then nobody wants to throw code away that turned out to be not what we need. Wasting yet more productivity on working around bad decisions from before we knew what we are actually building.