Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done.

Simple tasks can take 3 weeks because there are 7-9 dependencies throwing sand in the gears.

This not only provides plenty of cover for not getting stuff done it also saps the motivation to get it done quickly. Like, if X team sits on your request for a week that prevents Y feature from getting out are you really gonna be motivated to push it to production the second it's unblocked? Or could it wait another couple days?

Contrast that with a small startup where you barely need sign off to do anything - it's much easier to get into that pleasant loop of code -> deploy -> see customers use it -> dopamine hit -> motivation to code some more.

> Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done.

early in my career i once worked for a spinoff of a very large tech company and was involved in a collaboration with the mothership, so to speak.

my boss pulled me aside and explained to me. "here's how this goes. time here does not work like time there does. what happens in one day here takes two weeks there, and if there's anything missing when you ask them for something, that two week timer will reset. so make sure when you communicate with them, you send them absolutely everything they need and then some. then be prepared to wait. for a long, long time. they will either cancel or eventually deliver something. whether the thing they deliver is relevant remains to be seen, but be prepared for it not to be. if this starts sapping your time and energy, bring it back to me."

he was absolutely right.

Absolutely mirrors my experience when our small company was acquired by a large multinational of French origin. Why is France significant? Because their corporate culture is extremely hierarchical and centralised, similar to how their country is centralised like few others. Used to be we could turn small web apps into production in the course of a week. Nowadays even the most minuscule of features of an existing app will take a year to implement, because "central" will involve several project managers, somewhat related staff, external consultants, etc. etc. into the mix who spend a few months creating power points and excel tapestry under the banner of "change management" before even involving one programmer. Then, when they finally decide that the coders must be involved, stuff gets done quickly and without fuss, and often much less complicated than what was planned for us. Then they spend another few days sending each other congratulatory emails about how successful the project ended, apparently ignorant to the fact that they managed to spend a year on a feature that could have been implemented and tested in a week if they hadn't been involved.

Sounds like successful bureaucracy to me. At some point, change is difficult for a large organism. It became large by doing what it is doing and doing that well. The reality is that change is oftentimes destructive; what is so much clearly "better" to you is not clearly better to the organism. Slowing things down, getting many people to consider the new, is all purposeful and quite useful in reality.

Are you French?

Reading this is making me sick. I am working on leaving my large company for a start up for this exact reason. Something as simple as changing a tag on a server requires submitting a request -> waiting for the reply that they are working on it -> getting someone contacting you 1-3 days later -> Confirming the changes you want -> finding the changes in place the next day -> telling them the ticket is closed.

You missed some steps between confirming and finding: seeing that it was done wrong, reporting that, wait 1-3 days for a response, repeat at least once.

:(

I’ve been trying to get adequate access to Veeva Quality Docs API in their sandbox environment from some team at my job for two months, incrementally getting more permissions every couple weeks. My point of contact in that team is out all of December.

This is so I can build a POC of a feature that they can evaluate to tell me if they’ll give me prod access. No documentation or ui mock-ups will suffice for them to determine that. It must be a functional prototype. I’ve got two hours of working time overlap with their time zone.

Ultimately I expect it to take 6 months and be told no.

> Large companies have a tendency to throw up all sorts of impediments to actually getting shit done.

This. People get tired of the enormous overhead everything has, and gets lazy in the end.

I work for an ISP and I have my days, but some weeks I can't care less. I tried so many times to drill into people's minds how to not get tangled by complexity and then watching them just do the opposite...

Now I'm teaching myself programming so I can get out of this, but It seems I'm only going to upgrade my pay and be bitten by the same problems.

That's still an improvement, IMHO. And the degree to which you get bitten by the same problems depends on the size and culture of the company you're joining. Small, agile (usually young) companies tend to be better in this regard but you trade off other things like experienced management.

Yes, and no. In both cases it can be still something of a lottery. In particular, I think you may find good management at small companies too, and I know you can find coasting incompetent managers at huge companies.

I hope so. I enjoy programming for myself, and taking some challenges in Python currently, I'm not sure how it will go as a job. Hope is confy enough to not regret the change, I'm pretty tired of having a low pay but high complex job.

This is spot-on.

I'm used to small, get-things-done environments (startups, small dev shops).

Transitioning to working within a much more "corporate" environment (not that the actual dev team is any bigger) I struggled with the endless gatekeeping and bureaucracy because it was impeding us ... getting stuff /done/.

Once you realise they're not optimising for that goal, I feel less frustrated and have scaled back my efforts accordingly.

Want to do everything via PR, and have andless code-janitoring stylistic bollox ? Fine, I'll do that - but I'm not going to chase you to close it.

Want to spend hours in planning guff and pointless retrospective naval-gazing? Great, I can join the call on mute and get on with something else.

About 10-15 hours actual work per week is fine. "Office Space" is just as true today as it was when it was filmed.

I’m struggling with exactly what you describe. I literally LoLed at your code-janitor and pointless meeting comments. Something that would take a day at a small shop takes a week. It’s sad. I can’t do it for much longer.

Wow. A mere 3 weeks to get something done.

I worked somewhere once where it took 8 months to implement a two page sign-up process, and I counted about 60 people involved. A colleague said I didn't know the half of it and that there were actually more than 100 people involved.

I didn't last very long.

One of the reasons I left a company recently, despite it getting better, was how it took over a year before I could start working on SSO (despite it being critical, super-duper-high priority item) because it took 3/4ths of a year before we started getting user data necessary, then I spent fixing stuff that atrophied due to similar issues.

We were also over a year into "how do we setup direct access between on-prem and cloud" where I stopped attending meetings because within two or three meetings we always got back to starting point, whereas I joined the first meeting with reasonable, implementable solution.

> where I stopped attending meetings because within two or three meetings we always got back to starting point

This is a reliable litmus test for company dysfunction: how many people are in meetings & do meetings end with clear, concrete decisions?

I repeat these exact same words on each retrospective of my new scrum team with 16 people. The amount of overhead is insane and I've simply started not showing up to some meetings and just asking for conclusions. Usually, there aren't any or it has been concluded that another meeting is neccessary.

I remember a certain retrospective and being called out for not participating enough.

I was one of the few people dealing with outage at the time, which was known to project management... (And we had to deal with said outage with laptops on knees in overfilled conference room)

At a previous employer we had an extremely urgent escalation from a very large customer which had made its way even to the CEO given the visibility. Meeting is scheduled with customer, problem reviewed, initial action items identified.

Also, the next sync up meeting is scheduled by the customer... for about 5 month later! So much for urgency.

OTOH, there's great life balance when everything isn't a mad rush to complete everything by tomorrow. A lot to be said for a sustainable pace of work that can be maintaned for an entire career, instead of the agile sprint model where you're expected to be running at 100% mental utilization forever. Which isn't sustainable by any human, so just leads to burnout in a year or three.

impressive!

Whrereas I (alone) finished two client projects this month (programming) and am starting the third. Help colleagues with their stuff, and am supposed to work on an internal project ( client projects are merely a distraction from the internal project ). I'm also supposed to make a certification ( I'm not sure whether in my free time or not ). I'm paid for 24h a week. And I have bad concience every standup because I didn't manage to finsih more the day before.

It took us five years to get our customer (the Oligarchic Cell Phone Companies) to add some additional information to one SIP header we consume.

Yep. Or never mind dependencies: you're simply getting interrupted so many times that between zoom calls, slacks, and emails, that a 2 day tasks turns into 2 weeks.

Slack culture is very toxic to productivity. Numbers of channels grows forever and at least in the places where I've been that use it, there's an expectation for a reponse to everything within a minute. So one ends up all day just looking at it, can't get any work done with interruptions every couple minutes.

Yeah. And if you don't respond immediately, you starting getting friendly reminders. "Have you found the problem yet?" "What do you think it is?" "Can you fix it soon?" Ugh.

I see this regularly at small companies, too. They add process they think is necessary but don't have the human resources necessary to ensure these don't become blockers.

It's usually a result of cargo-culting: companies think that if they imitate what the big boys are doing they'll see the same kind of success. You also see that with hiring practices or adopting technology such as microservices or Kubernetes which are overkill for their real needs.

It's called: arbitrary. Someone in power makes up a new rule or policy based on what they think. Authoritarian government.

Three weeks? It took me 6 months to get a dependency installed and they didn't even install the version that I requested.

Oh man, the relatability of this made me laugh

Until just recently, I couldn't increase the disk and filesystem of a server without waiting for weekly approval. And there had never been an instance of someone using lvm breaking anything... Same with adding RAM (these are VMs). If you haven't read Pournelle much, he calls this the Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

the startup i just left did this. they have about 300 employees, and are pre revenue. the process to add a field to an api response was incredibly tedious and sapped my motivation completely.

Adding a simple endpoint to an existing API somehow ended up being a 3-day back and forth in my latest GitHub PR. Worst part is that I knew beforehand that was going to be the case, since it happens all the time. Can't se myself lasting long here.

But what exactly was the problem here? That the PR took 3 days? The back and forth comments? That you needed to make a PR in the first place?

Because any of this things seem pretty natural to me, specially if you are a new dev in the team and are not familiar with the style they use.

But there may be some details missing that will explain the situation.

One thing that can reduce the PR back-and-forth is to use linters in pre-commit hooks and/or pipelines. For example, if you are using Python then run flake8/black etc automatically on the committed code so you don't end up with bikeshedding over stupid things like line length and bracketing style. This can be enhanced by automated services such as Sonarcloud to catch potential security issues, code repetition and so on.

> I know a few of those developers, and they sit right near me...

In fact, this is so common that I can name the exact people at several jobs I've had. And I could mention them to my coworkers and they'd know exactly what these people's reputation are.

Our feeling toward them is a mix of being impressed and being embarrassed. Impressed because there's something to be said for someone who works the system to their advantage like this. Embarrassed because it's hard to understand how they couldn't be more ambitious at work. It's not that companies are that great at rewarding getting things done (sometimes they are…), but it's that getting something cool done is rewarding in its own right. Why don't they want that feeling… ?

>but it's that getting something cool done is rewarding in its own right. Why don't they want that feeling… ?

Cant speak for everyone, but in my case, Ive done the grind to get something cool done in my younger days. Ive designed, programmed and tested a differential braking system for a sizeable unmanned aircraft technology demonstrator, from hardware to drive the master cylinders, to the software with control of stepper motors following dynamic control laws, and then sat in a control room at a US Air Force base and watched the traces as the real thing was landing and purely steering with the brakes after touchdown (to test nose wheel actuator failure).

At my current company, when I got hired, I specifically said upfront that my goal is just to become a subject matter expert, and to have a more consistent and chill workload. I did what I was supposed to, nothing more, but I did it correctly, and put in extra hours when crunchtime before deadline came. I got promoted to senior after 4 years, and now Im pretty at very minimal hours of actual work per week.

But, because Ive been on the same team for so long, can answer questions about the entire tech stack, I can debug things, I am happy to sit in meeting and talk about high level things when managers don't want to, so my value is still fairly high. I no longer care to really put in hours to build something cool, instead I am focusing on things I didn't have time to do when I was younger and grinding, like travel and fitness.

To me, your current situation is ideal. I've been here for 5 years and I'm ready to transition slowly to something a bit more hands-off since I have (sole) familiarity with nearly half of our apps since I helped build them while many of the others have since left the company, but we're severely understaffed as is and so my responsibilities are growing responsibilities, and they're growing fast and throwing on new things all the time. I love the work but I don't like being one of the ones holding it all together. I'm exactly the OP now -- minimal work, just getting by.

I could be completely wrong on this, but I think there's a bit of positive punishment at work.

If you do something quickly, and it is of high quality, it will probably get noticed, and your reward in addition to a sense of satisfaction, is more work. The satisfaction high won't override the punishment of more work, although salary will. However, salaried employees don't get paid more to do more work (bonus notwithstanding.)

Knowing that, it's not a far jump to realize that you can minimize your work but keep your salary, so long as your work output doesn't dip enough that you get fired.

Yeah this was a huge revelation to me. Spend months of long days to complete a record milestone for the company with hundreds of people involved…get a couple celebration dinners and it’s immediately into meetings to scope out the next months long, record milestone. Corporations will continuously push you, they never run out of work to do, and the better their documentation the more disposable you are (although they’ll never realize it). If you’re in the mood, fine. But it’s not a lack of motivation if you’re not…it’s being realistic and having self worth. Milestones and the share price and the late night meetings are a fun game if you have an interest and spare time, not something intrinsically great and motivating.

I've encountered this so many times myself, and I still get burned on it, but mostly because sometimes the work you're doing is so technically interesting that the "reward" is the work itself. Then, when you finish, you somehow expect everyone to celebrate and take it easy but then they shove more work at you.

You couple that with maybe one day your project gets cancelled, and not due to the quality of the work itself but for other business reasons, and all of a sudden you just don't care anymore. This is something that just happened to me recently and I find it incredibly hard to get motivated to work hard on anything. I just can't "logic" my way into doing more than the bare minimum.

Not an engineer but definitely seen and experienced that. I want to exceed expectations, just not to the point where I'm carrying the cognitive load equivalent of 10 mediocre people on the regular just because I've proven that I can on occasion do it

Indeed, I made the mistake of working too hard early on in my tenure at my last job, and was quickly rewarded with more responsibility than I could handle, leading to burnout. This time around I'm trying to be more tactical in my rate of exertion.

But is keeping a chair warm really how one wants to spend the precious few years one has alive?

Of course it can be, especially if one can work remotely or can do other things they are interested in. I mean, for sure it sounds bad (parasite!), but it does not feel right at all to me this (very US- or US-driven) attitude that one's contribution to the world is through work or family.

Let's say I am the daughter of rich parents and I inherit a fortune. It happens, am I right? For some (intuitively "right") reason, it is not considered as bad as getting "free" money from a corporation, which has intrinsically zero control over spending at the individual level. Paraphrasing some Blade Runner here, "I have seen people paid...". And while the fortune is inherited just for sheer luck (I don't think anyone has chosen their parents), most of the time those cushy positions are coming after years or decades of hard study and hard work. How many of those inheriting good money said, "I don't want it, I have no worked for it". Some, for sure. But the vast majority pocket the money, maybe do some charity or some work, and carry on.

Sure, one feeling the need to work effectively can change jobs, we all can do it. But there are many other opportunities to have a good time and good impact on the world outside of a corporate job. If the money is coming in and who's distributing the money is ok, who am I to say no to good fortune?

I think coasting ain't as bad as many people think. That's because a) you are doing your job good enough, so you are not a burden on your team and b) you have a better chance to stay healthy than if you're overworking. Also, you're probably a better team player because of your healthy/peaceful state of mind. I think if you can find the line between overwork (burnout) and boredom (boreout) then you're good (even if it means only working 20h instead of 40) and your employer can be satisfied for a long time. But really, we must not discount healthiness. Health is the most important part of being a successful cog in the machine.

I would rather be kind of poor but having a good time (like other people paying for having a good time) than have a very good salary and have miserable days. Maybe accept some temporary misery if this means some personal development that I like.

But I can fully understand a decision not to change to a much less paying alternative as it decreases the quality of life for an other part of every day. Considering the frightening fact that when you move away there is probably a chance that you cannot come back that easily. This may present a fear of trying out the alternatives.

Of course not. I bought a heating pad and now the chair keeps me warm.

No, but keeping your family housed and fed usually is.

If you've got kids to look after, and a mortgage to pay, it's very likely you're stuck doing whatever your doing, whether you think the work is worthwhile or not.

Most parents won't put their kids in the poorhouse because they hate their job.

Sometimes that feeling has been beaten out of us by various means.

I had a ton of ideas in many a job, rarely if ever I could get into conditions where I could even start working on them - usually the interesting stuff happened in secret side projects, off the company time.

I think this is a big one, there comes a certain point where the bureaucracy simply squeezes the ambition and desire out of you. I hit that at some points, I just didn't want to work anymore excelling at my job made no difference to me or anyone else because even if I stood out and did excellently it wouldn't matter because I had to go to other teams or get other approvals to actually acomplish something.

I found myself spending time on leetcode, or learning emacs because I could justify those as improving my abilities. To quote Office Space "I have 4 different bosses, my only motivation is to not get hassled, that and fear of losing my job. But you know what Bob, that gets someone to work just hard enough to not get fired."

As my old boss would say: "Why would I push that rock up that hill".

It's both remarkable and incredible saddening how relevant Office Space still is.

I want to be ambitious and enjoy my work, but most of it is REST or similar level work. Those rare times I have an interesting project I end up stuck waiting for information or eventually code review (for days).

Nowadays I just want out. I'll get that feeling doing my own thing with no blockers but time and myself. I'm not at all convinced this is generally possible at any company (based on what I've heard from friends and read on HN and elsewhere). There's always something in the way.

I used to feel the same. The work I was doing at the last startup was just REST level work. Work at current team at Amazon was fun at first with new serverless technologies, but I ramped up in a month and it's now data pipelines and full stack development and integrations that is better than REST level work but still getting boring. The engineers are all much better and processes are solid, but I wanted out.

Now, I'm joining a systems/kernel team working right above hardware that drives EC2 servers.

Believe me, lots of good work is out there. Join a large company and look into internally transferring into an interesting role. I heard back from DynamoDB, Lambda, and so many other cool teams while I was considering transferring out of the current team. There's loads of interesting work at the bigger companies.

There is good work at some startups too, I'm sure, but it's easier to try different teams at a FAANG than switch between small companies.

I'm curious to know how different the work feels on your new systems/kernel team than when you were working on the full stack REST stuff. Of course, the subject matter is different, but does the work feel different? Like more rigorous, interesting, meaningful, clever, etc? Does it challenge you more? Do you feel like you're more able to explore your full potential on the new team?

I'm quite curious how different it is.

I've also seen such behavior occur because of burnout/depression. Sometimes the person themselves is unhappy and embarrassed about it too.

"Embarrassed because it's hard to understand how they couldn't be more ambitious at work" If everyone was aggressive at work, there are still only a limited number of promotions available. Why cram at work for something that reality dictates is unobtainable for most.

"it's not that companies are that great at rewarding getting things done (sometimes they are…), but it's that getting something cool done is rewarding in its own right. Why don't they want that feeling… ?"

So they finish the task and then what? Move on to the next task and then the next until retirement. There is no real purpose to it, its just a treadmill.

This guy gets it. Those might be the smart employees, the ones getting a better deal.

I make plenty of money, I don't need any "promotions." I leave the glorious cool stuff to the kids who are still on the treadmill (and don't mind going down some AWS rabbit shit hole).

Getting promoted is not going to make me happy. It is likely to make my life worse. Management often doesn't know what to do with me. I am productive with relevant skills, offer no drama (except for scoffing at yearly evals), and I don't need any carrots, nor do I want their job.

The only thing they can offer me is a good team and meaningful work--which is usually outside of their grasp.

Exactly I've reached the point where I make good money, and to make an additional sum of money that would change my life I would have to try and land a sr. role at a faang style company and study like madness to pass the interview and then do actual work for a few years. Not interested I would rather just keep earning what I make, work 4 hours a day and then try and find the motivation to spend the other 4 hours on myself and then call it a day. No interest in the additional stress that comes with promotion or going after a substantial amount of money.

> Embarrassed because it's hard to understand how they couldn't be more ambitious at work.

Boss makes a dollar, I make a dime. That's why I'm poopin' on company time.

Most companies don't meaningfully incentivize ambition. At most companies, even tech companies, if you save them a million dollars you'll be lucky to get a used Red Lobster gift card. If companies want ambition they should incentivize it rather than only rewarding the corporate ladder climbing sociopaths.

I worked on a project that saved 8mil and got a pat on the back. I basically paid for my self for the next few years to do nothing.

Also for a lot of companies millions isn't a lot when profits,expenses,revenue are near billions. I don't really worry about cost savings anymore, the numbers are so huge all around, individual impact is always almost a rounding error.

My first project at GE was working with an engineer who was trying to classify the degradation rate on a bunch of used engine parts to free up warehouse space--saving the company $20MM.

She told me none of it matters (after working on it for years) when management had just written off $16B for Baker Hughes (a lemon of a company they purchased that had to be sold off for pennies). It was a prelude to a string of even more meaningless work.

They may well get that feeling outside of work. Maybe they like making music but couldn't make a living as a musician. Maybe they're writing a novel. Whatever it is. Most of the things most people in the world enjoy doing are not the things they are made to do for their job.

> but it's that getting something cool done is rewarding in its own right. Why don't they want that feeling… ?

I mean it just... depends? I've been on both sides of this. Sometimes getting something cool done is super rewarding even without getting a raise, bonus or promotion. But I'm at the point now where if someone is going to tell me what to do, and force me to be "at work" for half of my waking hours, the compensation bit far outweighs the "this was cool to work on" factor for me.

Don't get me wrong; when it comes to personal projects, I find plenty of reward there. But for those I get to decide exactly what I do, how it gets done, and when it gets done.

"getting something cool done is rewarding in its own right. Why don't they want that feeling… ?"

I'm getting something cool done on some stuff I actually care about, like my gym gains. You can see other examples in this thread: family, their own coding project, etc.

They used to be ambitious and they kept getting their hand smacked. They already did the things you think are "cool" a few times. Nothing left but slogging through bureaucratic busy work.

What’s the point of building something cool just so your CEO can have all the credit & profits while you’re stuck with a shitty market rate salary and some stock options if you’re lucky?

Potentially leverage, if you can swing it.

These people have settled into the behavior learned from the repeated signalling to work like this.

I have worked in startups and small companies and after a recent aquisition have worked in large companies for the first time in my career spanning 30 years. I am absolutely blown away at the environment and the behavior it breeds. I have lost most respect for the human race that continues to endure this as though it is acceptable. So many managers, so much busy work: remediating vulns that have no impact, CBTs, forced collaboration and sharing, layer upon layer of shared services, arbitrary policies, byzantine draconian change orders, and all the crap that the afore-mentioned cause.

Every problem results in a new arbitrary policy (authoritarian bureaucratic reflex) that gets layered on top.

It must have been a couple of months because...

> I keep this link sitting around and enjoy dusting it off every couple of months or so

> https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

LOL this came to my mind too. And also the more tech-centric treatment it gets in 'Developer Hegemony' is well wroth a read.

OP is making a perfectly rational decision.

I first was driven mad by people like this... 5 days work and 2 lines of java code committed modifying class visibility etc. then I slowly became them after realizing busting my ass everyday for a corporation was not worth it. (also reading gervais' piece on losers/clueless/sociopath triad in orgs)

Same here. Once I realized that my efficiency in output only helps my immediate management look good (as opposed to me getting promos/bonuses), I lost all motivation to go above and beyond.

The only time I felt like doing my best was for a manager who genuinely wanted to get me promoted, and he did it smartly.

interesting, thanks for the reference to https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

"Chaotic-neutral I'm always fuckin' coastin'"

It's first best to realize sociopaths drive from the top in the same fashion. NO employer gives a damn about you, they control you in ways to squeeze the value out of you and will dispose of you at the very drop of a dime.

Those of us that "fail up" within companies and update resumes and move on, throw the ball back in their court by also manipulating them.

I had a coworker at a government job that clocked in doing no work for 6 months. They were going to PIP him when I left but he's still there now.

reminds me of this gem on a previous thread similar to this from 8 months ago:

> My supervisor said to me "This guy can spend 100% of his time trying not to get fired. You can spend maybe 2% of your time trying to get rid of him. Who's gonna win?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803

It's also the government. There are generally more barriers to firing someone than to hiring them.

It had been done before. Most people were packaged out though.

> Yes exactly this, especially at larger companies. I know a few of those developers, and they sit right near me...

I find it a somewhat comforting thought ... if I ever get overworked then I can always become one of those guys ...

Maybe that's why nobody ever calls them out.

What is IC? Google tells me Interstitial Cystitis, but my hunch tells me it's something else.

Individual Contributor.

Means that you're only writing code, not managing people at all. It's the opposite of a (pure) Engineering Manager, who only manages and writes no code / produces no design.

Most mid level people (for example L6-L7 at Google/Facebook) are simultaneously managers and engineers, thus somewhere between IC and EM.

Almost all low level people (L3-L5) are ICs, almost all high level people (L8+) are managers/directors/executives that produce no technical solutions themselves.

I was working at a fairly enlightened (said all the right things) corporation that had a principle engineer track--or whatever it was called--that fooled engineers into thinking they could be a bad ass developer/mentor/architect without being responsible for managing staff. When I left the managers were using these guys to drive (as in micromanage the fuck out of them) the troops. All they were doing was staring at vulnerability reports that would make your eyes bleed and nagging people in slack for one of their five daily 1-on-1 updates. Everyone they were doing this to were top grade devs--a few left for Google and AWS.

Thank you for the answer! Much obliged.

Adding “tech” or “tech meaning” to the end of an unfamiliar abbreviation can help refine the searches. In my case “tech meaning” brings up a Quora question that answers this.

Alternatively, you can Google “what is an IC hacker news” and you can find previous threads where this was asked and defined.

If you have a question about an abbreviation being used in HN (Hacker News), it’s probably something others have asked about before.

Individual Contributor - Someone who isn't managing others.

My reaction to these situations is - if someone will me for half days, spend the other half shopping for higher pay for actual full days. You're not going to get anywhere near double, but don't settle, use the time to pursue something better.

> If it was a smaller company they would be called out

Don't be so sure. It is HARD to get fired in this job, sometimes. You have to be actively toxic, or your boss has to have a buddy they want to hire in your position.

I still remember one guy who did that and he'd pass work to me I complained to my manager and nothing happened. I work a lot and am super driven. Don't like people like that.

I can assure you, the feeling is mutual. If you are the type who overachieves, would complain to a manager, and enjoys meetings, you should realize those fed up with banality and fake niceties of corporate office work that do just enough to get by really do not like you, either.

I don't overachieve or like meetings? I work normal hours and get stuff done. You're reading a lot into me without knowing anything about the situation. I don't have time to overachieve I have children and a wife with a career. Also smd

Trust me, this also applies to smaller companies.