@sokoloff had a point i greatly love, in a post about being asked to work weekends. they said they love having major nerd out time on the weekends, unencumbered by the typical work bullshit. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862513
there's a chorus of agreements and heck yeahs. i love the highlight about a company that tries to let developers find their own interest, that tries to create autonomy.
this strategy of keeping the good people socially unblocked, giving them interesting problems, letting them do tbeir thing... it's the only winning move.
most organizations quickly disempower their employees, create reistance to good, and there's no reconciling it. we can keep padding the blows but the dissonance is going to keep growing, the drift between the organization which is asserting it's legitemacy while ongoingly doing delegitimizing & pointless acts.
it's problematic that we can sometimes all be right but have different conflicting views. dealing with other engineers is often like this- they actually somewhat get (& can genuinely assess) what another engineer is saying (unlike many other relationships an engineer might have) but there's different biases, different priorities, different comfort zones for different people. i generally feel like normative & safe & simple wins a lot, and a lot of times i get it, but a lot of times i want to stand up and scream- we are the geeks. we were supposed to be winning against the normie world, we were going to do better, go deepe, see & understamd further. dont reduce us to such normative & unambitious boringness, dont accept mediocrity. be bold, try for better!
but conservative sensemaking sells. it's much easier to socialize, to beat down better. i strobgly espouse democratic systems, but i also think, even when we do come together & vote, and individual still needs a lot of liberty, a lot of permission to try their thing anyways. perhaps/ideally in parallel. most organizations have an urge to commit, a desire to decide & pick, and i think a lot is lost in morale & just as much again in limiting what the org sees, in refusing experimentation & contest.
You gain money & perhaps some rank, but I reciprocally think the Alice's of the world will mostly encounter the same sad problems again and again and again, will rarely find paths of wholehearted engagement. Maybe they'll eventually luck into a high empowerment spot, a calling where they are unoccluded & can do the joyous good work. Good luck Alice & Alices.
This is the part everyone seems to miss when they say: just leave your job and go somewhere else. Go where? The vast majority of companies out there are doing virtually nothing, solving easy problems badly, run by narrow-minded narcissists, and trying to get their share of the dark-patterns pie by out-scummying each other with better adware, better privacy invasions, better user-addiction strategies. They're wannabe middlemen trying to do as little as possible to take their 2% of some other transaction. They're worthless, parasitic enterprises who write shitty code on a shitty stack with shitty developers and shitty managers and no willpower to change any of it.
How does shuffling around which logo is on the building you walk into supposed to fix any of these problems?
I broadly agree, highly. I do think it's at least worth considering a framing, that most product & orgs are closer to sales- their whole objevtive is to land new money, to find huge new revenue sources. There's some market competition, but even within markets the focus on competing via new big banner big splashes far overwhelms the deeper level of caring that engineers & those further down see. Dissonance, more dissonance.
The org generally lacks the ability to understand what is really possible, the value of what it can do, the knowledge of what it is. I do think there's hella shady terrible exploitative behaviors, and plenty of gloryhounding only interested in new splashy features, but underneath this all, tech is super impervious & they just have no clue. And how could they? I have the hardest time imagining how even the best intended company can have a hope of having anyone with an iota of power make a reasonable & informed decision- the org has to play pretend, operate as if it understands anything, because the fact that it knows as pathetically little about what it is & how it works is unmanageable. For small orgs this can be avoided, but so quickly fiefs spring up & we start limiting our scope, learning go think only of less, & not the whole.
> I suppose for most places, the way to grow is to hop around often?
Yes. It is very unlikely (but not impossible, there's always exceptions) you'll grow your income and skills at a single org as fast as you would switching jobs every 2-3 years. Large percentage gains in comp, new stacks and environments to learn. Similar experience to working at a consulting firm, but with way more upside (versus grinding and then burning out).
"Vote with your feet" as the saying goes. If you're managing someone talented similar to the person mentioned in the post, either empower them internally or help them into their next role, because they're leaving regardless if the relationship isn't mutually beneficial. Talented folks (such as Alice in this example) have options.
there's a chorus of agreements and heck yeahs. i love the highlight about a company that tries to let developers find their own interest, that tries to create autonomy.
this strategy of keeping the good people socially unblocked, giving them interesting problems, letting them do tbeir thing... it's the only winning move.
most organizations quickly disempower their employees, create reistance to good, and there's no reconciling it. we can keep padding the blows but the dissonance is going to keep growing, the drift between the organization which is asserting it's legitemacy while ongoingly doing delegitimizing & pointless acts.
this isnt the Gervais Principle exactly, but it's quite close. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
it's problematic that we can sometimes all be right but have different conflicting views. dealing with other engineers is often like this- they actually somewhat get (& can genuinely assess) what another engineer is saying (unlike many other relationships an engineer might have) but there's different biases, different priorities, different comfort zones for different people. i generally feel like normative & safe & simple wins a lot, and a lot of times i get it, but a lot of times i want to stand up and scream- we are the geeks. we were supposed to be winning against the normie world, we were going to do better, go deepe, see & understamd further. dont reduce us to such normative & unambitious boringness, dont accept mediocrity. be bold, try for better!
but conservative sensemaking sells. it's much easier to socialize, to beat down better. i strobgly espouse democratic systems, but i also think, even when we do come together & vote, and individual still needs a lot of liberty, a lot of permission to try their thing anyways. perhaps/ideally in parallel. most organizations have an urge to commit, a desire to decide & pick, and i think a lot is lost in morale & just as much again in limiting what the org sees, in refusing experimentation & contest.