There’s a hero element here that so think is what irks me.

The reality is, most of the time when you “ship” your software, executive management neither notices nor cares. Even if you get the “attaboy” from a manager, they will forget it 10 minutes later.

You ship your software because you care about work, and maybe because you care about your users. In a big software company, shipping is not going to get you noticed unless you are literally the guy delivering gmail or google maps.

If a ship happens in the forest and nobody at company notices, did the ship really happen?

To be clear, the pathway to management noticing is not you going around the building loudly blaring that you did a thing, it's that churn went down, or ARPU went up or CAC went down or uptime went up or something management cares about.

But the essential thing to also understand is that this doesn't just happen for free. Figure out what metric your ship is meant to affect, put monitoring in place and proactively notify those above you about how your ship impacted that metric. If you don't do this last step, you didn't ship.

> The reality is, most of the time when you “ship” your software, executive management neither notices nor cares

your reality might be different than mine, but things that got shipped definitely get noticed because they are used as a bargaining chip for promotions, funding and for visibility of the entire team, that's one of the main concerns of a manager (unless they've checked out and are searching for another job)

Not necessarily. You can have upper management chieftains, who view the rise of a "new" one- as a threat and will actively try to prevent "upstart" new sources of income, to protect the dependency on "whoever" pays the bills for decision making.

You will not get a product thats not search off the ground at google.

You will not launch something else then windows / now cloud at microsoft.

Even if it makes money. The old chieftains domain has to wither and be in retreat first, before something new can be started with all the resources available.

Its really exotic, if cross domain success is achieved. Amazon logistics and then AWS is such a example. If you look under the hood, the companies that allowed for that- are often more conglomerates, basically smallerish independent companies within a brand-trenchcoat pretending to be one large company. Youtube is also such a thing.

My pet theory is, that its company internal value chains, the chieftains depend upon that allow for such things to form. Like search is advertising and needs data. And data comes from the engagement guys down the hall in the other building.

Search is not Google's golden goose. It's Ads.

There was a time, upto 10-15 years ago when tech company culture was largely anti-corporate.

Now corporate-y things like playing office politics is order of the day in medium to large tech companies.

My (maybe uninformed) hypothesis is that tech made so much money that it brought in the MBA and HR types who brought their corporate culture with them.

Even the smaller tech companies are now mimicking big tech culture as the standard.

>My (maybe uninformed) hypothesis is that tech made so much money that it brought in the MBA and HR types who brought their corporate culture with them.

This is some strange engineer's fantasy, that every company was ruined by "MBA types". Meanwhile, as evidenced in places in this thread, "software types" don't even understand basic business principles. They like to believe that if they were just left alone they'd churn out brilliant product, as if a large business isn't far more complex than that. Someone needs to count the beans (MBAs) and someone needs to deal with the people (HR).

>The post points out that if the project launches and users love it and it makes the company a ton of money

That's when all the people like the article's author crawl out of the woodwork and start claiming responsibility for your work.

I do hate the game. I hate it so very much.

I have seen the opposite happen a lot though, even if a project is successful you will get numerous people coming to you asking “who approved this? Why was I not involved in the decision?” And the ballooning aftereffects are why it takes months to push a simple button.

Big companies are like government bureaucracies now.

> Big companies are like government bureaucracies now

Large organizations are, by definition, bureaucracies regardless of being public or private. Big companies were bureaucracies 100 years, and they will be bureaucracies in 100 years. I never understand why people expect private enterprises to be free from the inefficiencies inherent to coordinating lots of people and things

The only winning move is not to play :)

Generally the game is created by external forces, not the players. If you’re an independently wealthy individual you can afford to work for pleasure. The rest of us? We like to eat and live in comfortable dwellings and take care of our families, so we play the game of pleasing our superiors in return for the money to live a comfortable existence.

Then you would expect to see inversion of behavior at the higher levels, especially at big tech, when one does become independently wealthy, but that's pretty obviously not the case.

I see your reply as strawman levels of uncharitable. They never said any such thing for either of your claims and the only reason I see for your statement is that you are playing.

The lack of accountability and introspection is frustrating, which is what I read from GP comment.

I think it's fair to let them vent that.