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.
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.
Your mileage may vary.
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.
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.
Hell, I nearly doubled my pay too!
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.
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.
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.
This goes for every type of relationship though.
Friendships, marriage, and employment.
But I'm very much a mercenary at this point, I have no loyalty to any company. I save my money, and I know I can get fired without cause at any time.
Instead of socializing at work, and having that social circle ripped from you when you get a better job.
Build your social circle via bars, concerts, and for more industry-minded people tech related meetup groups.
A family business is usually a place, but you should expect that a kin selection will prevail when it comes to promotions.
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 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.
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.
But to suggest that this is how you "get back at corporate America" is laughable. In fact, it's the opposite.
If you're not getting fired... you're either going to or you're doing as much as expected so everyone is happy.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/aug/06/quiet-quitting...
Reminds me of the Office Space "flair" scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ChQK8j6so8
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.
Go get 'em kid. :)
You haven't been wronged by “corporate America”. That's not even a thing that could have wronged you.
You've worked for or with people behaving badly. Did you call them out on it? If nobody calls them out on bad behaviour how will things get better?
Some people are being so bad that you just have to leave to avoid harm. Fair enough.
It's hard to imagine that this silent retribution does anything but make the problem worse.
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.
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.
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
That's the literal definition of dead weight.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
This doesn’t sound like a problem with minimum expectations. This sounds like a project management problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
If you want to do piecework/hourly work, you should be a contractor.
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.
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.
No.
literal definition
> the weight of an inert person or thing.
The metaphor refers to people that do nothing and are only a burden. Dead weight cannot positively contribute.
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!
Work planning should be a team effort.
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.
I think you missed the productivity porn thread posted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32335165
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/deadweight
Examples of literal in a Sentence:
" The literal meaning of “know your ropes” is “to know a lot about ropes,” while figuratively it means “to know a lot about how to do something.”
I was using the word in its literal sense.
The story he told was basically true, even if it wasn't the literal truth. "
Going above and beyond requirements is a personal decision.
But this isn't what a dead weight does.
You must not have worked in companies with actual dead weight.
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.
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.
Our industry is a burnout treadmill.
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.
FUCK working hard and FUCK doing "good" work.
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.
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”.
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
So, what is the benefit of working harder?
> 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.
Dead weight? Sounds more like friendly antimatter
GP:
> > 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
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.
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 3/80000 people do something, is the behavior significant or relevant?
Do only famous people matter? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
I don't know that subreddit; in general this sort of thing could become the thing being bragged about in a community, irrespective of reality.
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.
When there's little correlation between amount of effort and advancement as is very often the case, it's justified to just cruise.
I don't see it as "morally wrong but they didn't really want to be dead weight" when it is a justified response.
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.
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".
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.
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.
I wonder how successful a lot of companies would be if they openly cut required hours in half.
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.
It's also a problem with the Navy.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, you're bucking for CEO!
A lot of companies could have cut out four to eight hours of meetings a week and still maintained the same level of productivity.
Would you take that over $300k to work 40 hours doing something you actually care about? I don't think I would.
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.
$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.
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.
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?
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.)
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
Uh.. I think you got that backwards. Nearly anyone would recognize that as a major golden ticket!
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.
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.
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.
And not many pay $300K.
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.
I’ll take 4 hours a week at work, a livable salary, and 36 hours sitting in a coffee shop reading a book and shitposting on Reddit thanks.
Any fiction recommendations?
Still worth it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Having said that, 30 people is a lot of people, so I'm inclined to accept your assessment at face value.
This.
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.
Instead, I left.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Working in a +200 yr old manufacturer, and some entire teams may fit that definition.
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.
If you don’t reward and respect people who try to grow, why would they ever continue that?
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.
Very true. It's an unfortunate occurrence at many larger companies (not just in tech).
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Longer if you're CEO.
So yes, IMO Microsoft sits pretty in the no-longer-accurate acronym FAANG.
Amazon is hardly a FAANG
Hence the selection of companies.
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 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.
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 I can earn more on some side work or investment and those earnings are stable enough, then I too will not care about work.
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.
This kind of "development process theater" causes terrible cognitive dissonance.
I would guess that the vast majority of developers (I daresay 100% of them) posting on HN would not like to work at a place like that.
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.
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.
Frederick P. Brooks Jr., The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering
Admittesly so, you example so much more frequent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The typical expectation on salaried employees is that you spend your 8-5 in meetings and then you 5-midnight actually doing programming work.
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.
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.
Certainly there are techniques to mitigate this, but I see it, at least.
Senge, Peter M.. The Fifth Discipline (p. 16). Crown. Kindle Edition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
_glances nervously at FOSS, science, art, & philosophy_
"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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
In most companies agile/scrum meetings are make-believe work.
Scrum is waterfall micromanagement dressed in the verbiage of worker empowerment, and merely shortens the time between death marches.
Well said!
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.
Of course this isn't true.
Have you worked in Government?
edit: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26727803 for an example
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)
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).
There are probably many other reasons as well.
Yes, what I was getting at! Developers can coast and never be forced to improve or learn new skills. very very difficult to be fired.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.