They have context into why you are doing something, even if you don’t.
Large companies have huge inertia. And these days we also have low average CEO tenure and frequent executive position changes. The upshot being that what a given executive does can be almost entirely disconnected from productive improvement without notable short-term harm to the company. In that kind of an environment, an ambitious executive can put the bulk of their energies to seeming effective without much worry as to actual effectiveness. Or just to indulging their personal predilections, like feeling important or in control.
It's generally assumed/understood that the higher you go the more control you have, but conversely the slower any change you try to effect is. So it's sort of like the old 3 envelopes school of management joke. They get 6-12 months to settle in. Then they do a reorg to bring in their team over the next compensation cycle. Next compensation cycle their team brings in their teams, and so on. About 3 years in and then people may start taking a long hard look at the progress or lack thereof. Finally because C-suite doesn't commit fratricide, they are given a tap on the shoulder and managed out with a nice severance, a process that may take another year.
So I've been at shops where the guy at the CTO was clearly not succeeding, didn't have stakeholders buy-in, and lacked the grunts respect. Nonetheless they got 3-5 years of very fat paychecks during which they hobbled the entire org.
At the IC level I've seen people bounced within their 90 day probation.
Or worse. Yet what you just described is something I recently witnessed at a Fortune 5000. So I can corroborate your point of view entirely.
Also, I once was let go the day after coming back from Christmas vacation (planned, whole office was out) as well as let go once a couple weeks before Christmas. The more time you spend in the industry, the more BS like this you’ll come across. These incidents were 13 years apart, but it goes to show that it’s the same, no matter when.
In many orgs measurement of work takes precedence over actually achieving work.
It's depressingly easy to end up in a situation where the line employees are overworked and underpaid, the first level managers are stressed out trying to really manage well their half-dozen direct reports while still producing work themselves, and the Directors and VPs end up passing reports back and forth all day, every day.
Rather write some code than deal with a chickenshit leader who wants 100 iterations of project plans for work we will never do or generating reports that no one will ever read.
Being paid to sit at a computer and not doing real work all day is more torturous than simply having actual tasks and work to do.
The person generating project plans is motivated by the same. They need to look busy outputting to obfuscate how busy you are.
No one cares that much about your code, either. You engage in vacuous attention seeking toil just like management.
What you're missing is that organizations ultimately have people that they serve, human needs that they fulfill. There is actual meaning to them, and we can measure various labors by how much they help create value for people.
Code can of course be pointless or valuable. As can managerial activity. But the further we get from direct value creation, the more skeptical we should be about value creation, because the feedback loops get more tenuous and corruptible.
I did not say all code is useless.
You generalized based upon a specific conversation. Generalization I have heard over and over from speakers who, when measured, do not measure up as highly as they think they should.
I am aware of various studies that measured what technologies are increasing productivity. The variables were too numerous to make meaningful conclusions.
We cherry pick and make small models at jobs to obfuscate and debate who is pulling their weight. But it’s just toil to stay employed. The future value of any given for loop is zero; it’s just hustle to crank them out regardless of their use case, and denigrate others cranking out senseless reports.
There is no model that says the poster I replied to, or you, are outputting more value. It’s just toiling to make it appear so at a small scale (within the business).
14% of working adults in the US has better than a bachelors. Public opinion polls indicate the public thinks it’s almost 40% of working adults have better than a bachelors.
What your missing is how deluded the general public is about its accomplishments.
If you thought logins didn't matter, you'd create one and stick with it. You're going to extra effort because you know they do.
And still, you dodge the question. You claim to be incisively dissecting other people's motivations via various negative assumptions and broad-stroke insults. But you can't even glance at your own motivations, even as you work to hide them under a series of new accounts. Which tells us a lot about your game.
Don't launch any projects in a firm direction because if they fail, it's a failure of commission. Wastes lots of time churning what-if scenarios, blocking things & generating reports no one wants in case he gets asked for them, so he can't be accused of a failure of omission.
It's the 3d chess played by someone who forgets what their actual day job is - getting shit done.