> The politics, from the second I joined, were so over-the-top. It was like Wrestlemania. Everyone was smashing eachother and throwing elbows and it was like a spectator sport about who could club who first and the loudest.
This is phenomena I've seen played out in organizations which are flush with cash and want to hire "only the best", yet end up having multi-layered management building fiefdoms in order to affirm their importance.
Bored smart people will find a way to make their days feel important. If it is not in the work they do, then it will be the political fights they have.
There's probably less than 50 such places, total, on Earth, where every single engineering position is occupied by a bonafide, legitimate, super-genius. It's a small enough group that the posers can be immediately identified.
What are these places?
Outside of a research lab, even if you had infinite money and hiring power, would you even want to staff a company where "where every single engineering position is occupied by a bonafide, legitimate, super-genius"?
If you're doing engineering (as opposed to pure research) the reality is that there's always a lot of unexciting work. Your super-geniuses don't care to do that, what you need is people who are smart enough, but more importantly reliable and willing to keep showing up and doing the work even when there's zero chance it puts them on track for a Nobel price (or field equivalent).
Ignoring that for a moment (although we shouldn't, different fields are different), their jobs page lists an opening for a Web Programmer that pays 143k-159k range in NY (i.e. very little). I'm guessing this role doesn't require notable publications and they're not looking for a "bonafide, legitimate, super-genius" to fill this role.
(Or if they are, they will never ever fill the role with that salary. They'd be fools to try and I assume they are not fools.)
That was my point. Companies will hire top talent for the revenue-leading roles but quite rationally don't need to do that for every single engineering role (as OP claimed) because there are plenty of jobs where a trustworthy responsible adult who gets the job done is exactly what they need, even if they don't have a Turing Award.
The ones that try and claim it but have salary caps 100% cannot claim it. You cannot have leveled pay bands (IC3-IC8) and claim the best. You also cannot have percentile based pay vs the market and claim the best, you have to pay at 99% percentile.
I think there's a flipside to the argument too. If "good work" isn't enough, it means that those responsible for managing the employees doing "good work" aren't paying enough attention and that creates the need to self-advertise for promotion, as the article describes. But if there's an attention vacuum is it not also possible to hide, to some extent: as long as you continue to do good enough work to stay off the "bad" radar, then fit whatever you want into the spaces in between: Alternative productivity.
I have a current theory about the application of KPIs and OKRs for measuring performance: they're to take the responsibility of actually managing people off the managers who are meant to be managing people; Outsourcing the management, oddly, to the managed.
I'm currently three months through an experiment to see what happens when the vanilla "standard" OKRs I've been given aren't added to, ticked off or reached, or really measured against at all. I feel that I do good work, but I don't feel the need to prove it beyond the doing of it.
I understand the extensive overheads for things like backups and disaster recovery. I don't understand per-employee administrative overhead to measure contributions to "delighting the Customer" (actual example).
If I don't get a pay rise, or worse, as a result of this experiment, then it's been a success in helping to make an important decision.
I once read a book that management is purely about surveillance. They are purely there to watch you. Narcissists, as a personality trait, are people watchers who like control. So basically you end up creating a class of people who are almost guaranteed to be narcissistic in nature.
Corporations are veritable laboratories of mind control, psychology and propaganda. It is really quite complex and weird about how it actually works. It is otherwise totally illogical.
Where it really stirs up the concepts into a fine mud is that, in order to be able to make decent decisions, you need to know both business direction from above as well as decision / direction practicality from below, and the more that management becomes removed from on-going engagement with below (eg. outsourcing performance monitoring, lack of involvement in SCRUM) the further their decisions are removed from understanding the practicality.
Surveillance, as the terminology used, is loaded to create fear, which probably serves the needs of bad managers. Good managers should be engaging with their reports to know what they're working on, and to know them psychologically, so they know to ask more probing questions if someone is hiding an issue for fear of upsetting "the boss". Good managers know up the ladder and down the ladder and should be constantly working on finding the balance between each in order to maximise both the productivity of their reports and the progress made in business directions.
One of the reports I had (albeit briefly) was very emotionally attached to his work, and took it personally even when there were requests to make changes to fit it into changing requirements. I love the guy, but he needed fairly regular vent-sessions to talk him through, and out of, the (unnecessary) emotional state in order to reach "oh, this is what I'm paid for".
(funny story: I once got so exasperated with him that I called him my son's name - man that was embarassing for both of us).
When people ask what L1 managers do and why are they necessary, this is the thing that hits the hardest. ICs don't understand that there are 1000s of issues like this that need "managing" to get productivity out. It is exhausting and most managers I assume don't want to have to do this, but it's required.
I prefer small companies.
I've known a number of great people who have at one point in their life had a string of bad luck due to bad people, and do you know what's the worst, most assholish thing you can say to someone who's in such a fragile state? "Could the problem be you?"
Tech is one of those places that have an unstable enough common culture as to attract every yabo with a theory of management. So you end up with many shitty cultures, where shitty people thrive (and the odd gem).
"Management" is a dirty word in this industry, and the answer most people give is "Oh, we're a flat organization" or "Oh, we run like a family" etc, which just hides the hierarchies and fosters dysfunction. The industry really has a big problem, and strings of bad employment experiences are a symptom.
If the people you pick keeping treating you like shit, maybe you are picking the wrong people, in that case maybe it is you.
I like this approach better because it creates more agency vs just other things happening TO you.
The politics, from the second I joined, were so over-the-top. It was like Wrestlemania. Everyone was smashing eachother and throwing elbows and it was like a spectator sport about who could club who first and the loudest.
I had just gotten out of a super toxic prior employer and had zero motivation to engage in corporate politics so I just decided to wait and watch and try to understand how to be effective.
I waited. And watched. And waited. And watched. And raised some ideas. All shot down. Finally I came to the realization that if I wanted to "play this game" I would need to get into the ring and start shutting people down, throwing elbows, telling other people their ideas suck etc.
After thinking about it a long time, I decided:
(a) I didn't want to do any of the above (b) I cared about building things good for customers (c) I hated the VPs involved and had nothing in common with them (d) I didn't want their jobs, because it would require doing what they were doing
I ended up leaving for a startup.
It was a very good company. I still think about if it was the right thing to do. But I was not growing, not getting to do anything, it was antithetical to my personal and career growth, I wasn't learning. It was just a wrestling ring with morons yelling at eachother and acting out their insecurities loudly.
I couldn't do it.
Contrast to prior employer: EVeryone was political, but in a sneaky, underhanded way. It was all covert assassination.
At a startup, there was no bullshit. It was: There is the work, do the work. The end.
No politics.
With remote work: Politics is even worse in my opinion. Remote workers are at a huge disadvantage.