Honest question. Should we expect senior engineers to manage up properly? That means having mature and level headed conversations about where managers can improve in a way that makes both parties feel psychologically safe.

I would say yes, and that the author failed to do that here. I would also say the manager was clearly very weak, and that Spotify's bureaucracy may be producing suboptimal outcomes.

I would say definitely - the OP did fail to manage up properly.

I think it is less of a part of the role for a senior engineer - Principal and over it is pretty much a core of your role - but it is something you should be doing.

The groundwork for doing it effectively comes from both sides however, and everyone sucks here for that.

> Should we expect senior engineers to manage up properly? That means having mature and level headed conversations about where managers can improve in a way that makes both parties feel psychologically safe.

I don't think we should expect miracles. But, based on this article, it seems to me that author was nowhere near that line. The mocking jira ticked seems like open hostility. You can be immature in reactions and still better then that.

I’m a senior engineer and I agree with the sentiment that the blog writer brought this whole thing on themselves.

Well yes, obviously if you always shut up you can never get in such trouble. That's a truism, no? I thought the issue in this discussion is whether it's worth going through such trouble or not, from various points of view. I think the answer is yes and no - it depends. If somebody thinks it's part of how they see themselves in life, how can I argue against it? As long as it's not about violence or heavily negatively involving other people who did not ask for it I see it within their right. Even with a blog post, and even if we had a response from the other side, we still can only listen, such situations are highly... situational. I don't mind it becoming public, if people don't think they can't get anything out of it they don't need to read. Humans just love talking about this kind of stuff, so there should be some evolutionary benefit overall, even if we can't assign one to any one concrete discussion. I think we as reader could relax a bit as well, for us it's more of a brain game, since we are not involved and only have the very limited public information. Meaning, most of our points will be based on our own imagination, interpretation and life experience.

I'm a senior engineer in a leadership role and don't agree, so what?

Contractors are there to provide value for the company, not to please some managers personal feelings. Their benefit to both, meaning to them and the company, is that they do not need to play politics, and a relevant part of their value stems from this (= being an third party opinion that can say things that employees may not want to due to aforementioned politics).

It naturally isn't a black and white thing, but IMO their job shouldn't always be to dance as told from a manager, whom often don't even know how to give that close "dance directions" to pull that puppeteering off.

The writer had already done a successful contract at the company and produced tooling still in use by multiple teams there, and still got called out after this whole affair, so I think we can see it as established that they can be useful and provide value to the company and that the teams they worked with weren't exactly unhappy with the personality and/or work ethic, otherwise getting the second contract quite probably wouldn't have happened in the first place. On the other hand there's a new manager and a black hole of higher ups, one doesn't get much info here about any reasoning of their behavior, but if we can trust in at least a basic level of objectivity (i.e., the rough edges of the story are as told) it's hard to see the full blame at the contractor.

Don't get me wrong companies can certainly do this and this is just describing the smaller safety net contractors have, weighting against their bigger flexibility, bigger pay, but no guarantee in stability of that. That said, it still feels a bit odd for the company to react this way, certainly off-putting, albeit that's not meaning much as I never planned to work there, nor in other such "big-HR" places, as contractor nor as developer anytime soon for completely unrelated reasons. The creating an extra side to this story has IMO a bit of oddity too, but domains are cheap and in the end it's not much practical difference compared to hosting it at an existing site.

congrats I guess? Every company needs mindless worker bees.

The rules are different for contractors, they get paid a lot to STFU and do what's asked of them.

I mean, sure, but they are not paid more because they are code monkeys, they are paid more because they have less stable employments, and in europe at least have a lot overhead costs they are responsible for that the employer would normally pay.

From the sound of it, Spotify was treating them like employees - most places would definitely not have contractors do hack time, or put code monkey contractors in the path of major feature estimations

Well, they get paid to be terminated much more easily. Typically at companies where that's "harder" for employees.

But the entire idea of contract + senior/architect is somewhat bizarre, given how much of the latter's jobs are consensus, relationship-based, and political.

Now we probably know also the reason why.

Agreed. I'd never really thought about it that way. I have been contract architect... and while it was a better position, I would say the work suffered for my personal lack of intra-company relationships.

Going forward I would probably avoid contract work with those responsibilities.

On the other hand, call me a consultant, hire me from a higher level sponsor, and at least I have a clear remit.

Eh, I don’t know this persons position, but typically they’re not really paid more than ftes. The hyper expert high paid consultant does exist, but most contractors are just compensation wise a lower tier or at parity. But there are advantages in other ways. I liked thinking in the short term (just doing this for a year, then maybe change up career path a bit), and I went from interview to work in about a week, consulting companies move fast on getting you working.

If you’re working for a consulting company then you’re not a contractor. You’re not being paid by the client, but by your employer.