I tried that strategy for a little bit.

I also tried the strategy where I prioritized hitting all the metrics (which usually takes very little work relative to your job) and then did my job.

The second strategy led to better reviews, faster promotions, being more well liked by my boss, and an overall more pleasant work experience. I recommend the second strategy.

There's a third strategy for the no-BS, independent types: opt out. Contracting/consulting avoids a lot of that. You're not a worker bee that the company "owns/rents", you are a vendor providing a service. It's usually fairly concrete what you're providing, and it's fairly clear if they are satisfied (if they aren't, they stop paying you). As a bonus, it's expected that you set your schedule (as a 1099 requirement), so you get a lot of flexibility.

Of course, if you're contracting for a company that thinks in terms of "resources" that will trickle down into contractors, too. Sometimes team perks like the quarterly see-a-random-movie are "members-only", which doesn't feel great. But then, nobody complains much if you take three weeks off to go hiking.

This has not been my experience consulting at all.

Unless you're working for a small company directly for the owner you will be dealing with someone who has to convince their boss the project was a success or you were responsible for the failure. And you need to care about a lot of metrics and outcomes to make that you are successful as measured by those metrics, or that it doesn't look like you are responsible for the failure.

Just doing a great job doesn't cut it. No client ever really wants on day 90 what they signed up for on day 1. For most clients the person who is signing your checks, the person you work with on a day to day basis, and the people who will be using your apps will be different people. They will all have different ideas of what success and failure are, and they all have other people they are responsible to. And all of these tensions need to be managed successfully, and this involves a ton of BS that is completely unrelated to what a naïve engineer would describe as "delivering value".

In a normal job your boss is usually your friend, and looks bad if he throws you under the bus. This is not the same for a lot of consulting engagements where people are highly motived to blame their failures on you.

>Unless you're working for a small company directly for the owner

These are the only clients I take as a consultant. As an individual, you aren't going to be able to have that many clients at once; there's no reason, then, not to target the ones that make the job more satisfying. You do often wind up working for small (<50 employees) businesses, but at the same time, this also means your work has a greater chance of having a bigger positive impact across the board.

Everyone has their different wants, of course, and there are plenty of headaches that come from being a 1099 worker. But there's no reason it has to be a slog, either.

It really depends. Like many "software" discussions on HN, it depends what type of software you work on. It depends on the companies you work for. It depends on your reputation and the types of jobs you take. You can have folks swearing that their 20 year consulting/contracting career was a breeze arguing with people who complain about bad customers and unpaid invoices.

I've had customers that want every minute accounted for. I've been pressed to cut my rate for time spent in meetings. I've also had years where the invoices were paid and no questions were asked. I often developed good, personal relationships with clients, even the ones asking me to cut my rate for meetings.

It depends what the company is looking for. It depends on if you oversold yourself, or failed to manage expectations. It's easy to promise too much to get the job. It helps to work with people who are current/former engineers because they understand realities better. That's not always the case, but generally.

" failed to manage expectations"

This is my point. If you think hitting some metrics on a annual review is hard because it's BS, managing the expectations of 4 different stakeholders is a whole different league of dealing with "BS".

Or to put it a different way, if you're entering consulting to escape politics you are in for a world of hurt.

*this mostly apply to the finding your own clients and running whole project version of consulting. The just showing up as an embedded 1099 worker by applying to or getting recommended to a job does involve a lot less politics.

At my current company, as an employee, I have 4 people I could call 'manager' and I'm not even talking about higher level managers and VPs.

I agree that being a 1099 hired gun can spare you from a lot of politics. It's nice to have a list of tasks the customer wants, bang them out, and walk away with a satisfied customer and a pile of money.

That said, I spent over half my career at two companies which did everything from staff augmentation to full product development. In my experience I did not detect a level of politics comparable to that at a large valley company. Granted, those companies were outside the valley and owned/run by a very smart, personable, experienced leader/engineer/salesman. It helps to do the investigative work up front and define success criteria in the initial statement of work. A lot of customers balk at paying for the upfront work, but it was a pretty firm requirement when you wanted us to take on a project. I was lucky to get hired into a design services firm early on and benefitted from the wisdom of a building full of independent contractors working for an engineering for hire company.

But, like I was getting at originally, I think it varies. There are some types of work that are hard to scope initially or where the customer exhibits child-like behavior. If you can, you can learn to identify those situations and avoid them. It helps when employment is tight and you can turn down work.

When you talk about the level of politics at the company are you talking about the internal politics dealt with by an employee or the politics dealt with my the account principal who was managing the account?

I've worked for two other consulting firms besides mine, one 150 people, one 36,000 and everyone I've talked to who managed client accounts in both those companies has similar experiences.

Sorry just incredibly curious how a company got around having to deal with politics, while doing consulting. Would make a huge difference to my current company.

Among employees at the consulting firm there were absolutely zero politics and it was by far the best crew of people I've ever worked with(author gazes wistfully off into the horizon). It was a group of very smart, somewhat cynical folks who really just concentrated on getting shit done. There wasn't a hierarchy or a career path. You were just a Senior Engineer charging by the hour. Things did get a bit weird when the owner hired a salesman to run the place for a while and he started over-promising and spending too much on marketing, but that problem sorted itself out fairly quickly.

I wasn't aware of any significant politics between us(account management, which I would say are sales, PMs, and the owner of the company) and the customers. There were political struggles inside big customers(i.e. DirecTV) when a VP would have to justify paying us, but that's not really something we got involved in. There were arguments over billing rates and such, but I wouldn't call that 'politics' it's just doing business. I consider 'politics' to be things like dog and pony shows, massaging peoples egos, playing one faction against each other, etc. There wasn't any of that.

It sounds like you were "an employee at a large/very-large consulting firm" as opposed to "1099 independent contractor one-man shop", and I would expect your experience to be the same as an employee.

Contracting/consulting comes with an entirely different set of problem/challenge, though.

I feel like this suggestion is akin to remodeling your house simply because the walls are the wrong paint color.

That no longer will be possible in the UK next year as government changed IR35 rules. Clients to be safe will declare you a deemed employee and as a bonus they'll be able to use tools used on employees plus you get no employment rights.

That legislation seems short sighted to me, the less flexible the workforce is the worse off we will be. If they were worried about losing tax revenue they should have started treating dividends as normal income.

Been there, done that; the problem is the hassle over unrelated overhead (like chasing payments, in one case for almost a year...) and the uncertainty (it’s feast or famine, most of the time).

A good part of the reason I'm independent these days is hatred of the annual review.

Of course the pay bump helps :)

I know autistic developers who are not unwilling but unable to use the second startegy. They cannot comprehend the insanity the manager wants from them. Regardless, they get shit done so it's the manager who has to change strategies. I say if you openly do not care and stick to #1, the world will align.

maybe it's the managers that are autistic

That is because the system (organization) prefers its nodes to be legible rather than illegible. It might hear that some nodes are "more productive", but that is illegible and unauditable from the system's point of view. In light of this, I see no reason why employees shouldn't conform to the metrics; yes, some "true productivity" is sacrificed, but that is the price of legibility. That has always been the price of legibility, whether you're a state or a company or a community. For large organizations, that is a price they often choose to pay.

Start by hiring good people that you don't need "legibility" from. Or fire managers who have no real use other than to "read".

What does legible mean?

its taken from James Scott's Seeing Like A State and in this context legibility is the characteristic of a supervisor to be able to ascertain all the characteristics they consider relevant at a glance.

If you work at a company where bullshit flows uphill it's a winning strategy. If your manager's manager likes those kind of stats it certainly makes their job easier. I don't know how long I'd want to work at a place like that though.

I've worked on 5 fortune 500 companies and every single one worked like that.

This was far less true at smaller companies where the owners/founders were directly involved.

Are there large companies where it doesn't work like that?

i've worked for 3 fortune 500 companies and have managed to get them all to either treat me like an individual, or to even change policies at a higher level. The trick for me is to always be open and honest while not coming across as hostile, but also showing no fear of reprisal. This means being open about your own weaknesses in front of your managers and team mates, which only works if your strengths outweigh those weaknesses. I don't think everyone can pull it off, but so far I've managed to get myself in a position where everyone I interact with is always willing to hear me out. I don't always get what I want, but when people listen to your ideas then sometimes they start to think its their own idea, and then it begins to spread.

I have a low tolerance for bs like this. I usually articulate why its bs to my manager to give them a chance to fix it and if they are unwilling to i get a new job. No point in staying to deal with that kind of bs, life is short.

Ah, if it's about faster promotions, I can be only happy that my pay was rising acceptably throughout years of using strategy #1. I briefly tried strategy #2 but it was a near-instant burnout for me, hence decidedly not a "pleasant work experience".

Are there many employers that do this? It’s crazy.

> For all metrics my rule of thumb has always been to just do my job as best as I can and ignore the metrics. If a manager ever says anything about them, I ask them what they think of my actual performance.

I was like this once. But metrics are not always going in pair with actual performance or logic for that matter. And sometimes manager's hands are tied, even though your performance might be good, manager sees your good work etc. That happened to me actually, long story short I was given a lot of complicated cases which resulted in "bad performance" based on case/time ratio and by newly implemented corporate performance enhancement program I was downgraded "temporarily" to do grunt work that I magine was like in primary school punishment: "so I had time to think about my behavior". After a month I've given my resignation letter, without even having next job (which turned out great move, but that's other thing) I was so fed up.

I think this works for some roles but not others. The CEO can choose what criteria to use, and so the people reporting to the CEO can make your argument. The manager of a team of CX reps might not have that power to chose the criteria, so the people reporting to that manager are just as powerless. Then there’s the whole spectrum in between.

This is actually one of the privileges I’m most thankful for. That I have been able to make it work in an industry where I (and my managers) have the agency to decide how I should be evaluated. I have friends who aren’t so lucky, even when they push hard for the people below them to be evaluated more sanely.

I agree with this. I think it's also important to regularly check it with your manager and ask about how your performance is being perceived and if there is anything they could suggest that you improve upon. Keep the feedback loop tight so that both of you can address any problems as quickly as possible.

Absolutely. I left that part out, but if there is something I need to change to do my job better, I most certainly do that as best as I can. The thing is that those conversations have never been directly tied to metrics.

Of course, they're almost always very qualitative discussions. If you have a track record of discussing improvement points, hopefully both you and your manager will be able to agree that any metrics that might appear during year end reviews are mostly extraneous.

f*ck that.

block as much as you can.

delve.office.com and I think it was vortex.data.microsoft.com

umatrix lets you block lots of other parts. Microsoft sites are a cesspool of tracking and cross-tracking.

I wish there was a comprehensive list.

I also wonder how much CCPA and other laws could help with these issues.

All privacy policies say you are entitled to make a privacy request, but none of them provides guidance or a form.

It would be nice to have CCPA advice or even form letters.

In the kind of company that uses that, you also don't get to install anything you want on your computer.

For example I can only log into my company's online office suite from the company-provided Chrome installation, and no addon can be installed unless whitelisted by IT.

Then a DNS Sinkhole it is! Pi-hole on the Raspberry Pi 0W is tiny.

I’d imagine the company owned laptop doesn’t let you set custom DNS servers.

what about filtering outnthose requests on the router?

You don't have access to the company's router obviously.

And you're usually not working from home in that case, and if you are you're connected to the company's VPN.

That won’t work on the company VPN I’m afraid.

Yeah since working from home I've seen a LOT of chatter blocked by my pihole when the VPN is off. Also browser.pipe.aria.microsoft.com, telemetry.microsoft.com, trafficmanager.net, hockeyapp.net, self.events.data.microsoft.com . And this is with uBlock origin also adding up blocked stuff constantly (so that's not even reaching pihole).

Some of them (like trafficmanager.net) do seem needed for proper operation but most aren't.

Even when I'm just working locally on a document... I really don't like this either. Nor do I like those 'helpful' O365 reports about my habits and how to spend my time.

I think the issue with this can be when the metrics are being consumed by people you don't directly work with

This can be applied to other areas in life too. As an example, Instead of using a smart watch for tracking sleep we can simply base our decisions on how our body feels, intuitively.

I feel like we are losing touch with our own bodies, feelings, nature and other people. We are relying too much on data for a lot of things where it doesn’t make sense