What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic.
The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)
Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.
Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.
Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason.
I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs.
If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.
In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.
And that's why command economies fail. They fail in the same way that firms do, except that because the whole economy is one giant firm, you can't get the you need to remove entrenched bureaucrats until the situation gets so bad that you have a revolution or lose a war.
*Commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde. There doesn't appear to be any definitive source for it.
The quote actually reads like a summary of Parkinson's Law, that bureaucracies inherently tend to grow because officials create work for each other another and seek to increase their numbers. But the exact quote doesn't appear in Parkinson's original essay. Quote from that essay:
"Factor 1: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and
Unfortunately, real-world bureaucratic orgs of any meaningful size or age always include a third type of person - dedicated neither to the org's goals, nor to the org itself.
In general, one should speak more circumspectly about that third type.
> There was a point of equilibrium in any organization’s middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it. Tyren knew from experience that a shrewd official could find this pivot-point within the org chart and, once entrenched, enjoy near-complete autonomy with almost no responsibility.
The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild.
If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide.
But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?
With most of my managers 1:1 have always been a way for them to catch up with what I’ve been working on, despite doing a standup every single day so that the team knows what each other is doing.
I have standup every day so my manager knows what I am doing so my 1:1s are:
- General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team.
- Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my manager wants to join in on or promote to a bigger effort.
I used to be a believer in daily standup plus bi-weekly sprint planning, but lost faith with the (possibly cargo cult) methodology I was trying to follow.
Adding 1:1 in with that would be far too frequent, and probably far too little real content in each meeting.
Did productivity actually change dispensing with those meetings? Probably not by much, it's hard to say empirically because task estimation was always a wildcard.
Qualitatively, I think a good balance is twice-weekly standup, bi-weekly long form. It adds some structure and regular communication, I think it helps people feel better and have a bit more relationship. But I supplement this with frequent invitations to talk about product ad-hoc, talk about tasking ad-hoc if you feel you're not productive, and schedule more pointed meetings with me whenever I'm free. Which is almost all the time, because I need to not be in meetings in order to get work done or spend time thinking.
Honestly, I don't begrudge anyone a job. If people want to do SWE as a performative role, I'll detect that fairly quickly and let it be, even people under me if I were to climb the org chart beyond the first rung. They actually do serve some benefits to the company and to society, as long as they are amicable and respond positively to requests. I'm eventually going to tune them out for serious/urgent development work, and no one can make any guarantees about protection from layoffs, period. C'est la vie.
If people are driven to achieve more, love engineering products, and enjoy working with technology, it's going to be obvious. We will end up working together to solve problems like gravity creates stable orbits. But I can't realistically only hire those people, or run even a medium size company with only the vital few on payroll. It's statistically unlikely, that's why a unicorn startup is a unicorn. Statistically most SWE roles exist outside of that... right? Like after IPO, in big companies where some amount of bureaucracy is just a fact of the size of the machine.
EDIT: twice weekly standup, although I guess bi-weekly can mean both every other week and twice a week?
The general academic lab model is still the best I've seen and experienced. People sign up to present at the weekly lab meeting if they have something to present, 1 person per meeting. There's maybe 10 mins of quick bringing things up at the beginning of lab meeting before the presenter starts, if you have something short to share or general announcements. Specific project groups will have their own direct meetings on their own schedule that makes sense to them with the pace of incoming results to discuss.
When you do daily standups or mandatory everyone says something type stuff, it does something damaging psychologically. You end up scrambling to get things together for the standup to not look like you are a fumbling idiot, when it would have been better to take a few more days with a clearer head, less cortisol in your blood, and output and share better work.
1:1s add value to a point, but I’ve worked at one company where the fixation on 1:1s started replacing useful communication.
Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.
1:1s started as a good way to formalize manager to report communication on a predictable schedule. This is good if the team isn’t regularly talking organically. Some company cultures take it too far and turn it into an excuse to make recurring meetings the focus of all work. I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people.
All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.
Middle management was always congratulating themselves on the success of their 1:1s because they said it was when they heard about all of the real issues they didn't know about. They didn't realize that by making themselves unavailable except for the 1:1s they were forcing this result.
It was even worse when the problems involved multiple people or teams, which was almost always the case. Now you had to wait until Thursday to talk to your manager about it, who promised to add it to the agenda for his 1:1 with other team the following Tuesday. Then in that 1:1, the other team lead would say he'd bring it up with his schedule 1:1 with the person the Friday after that. It was like every communication queue only got processed once a week, so each hop added more delay. The managers would always tell is it wasn't supposed to be like that, but trying to direct would get you hit with "Let's talk about this in our next 1:1"
The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.
If you haven’t seen calendars stuffed to the gills with performative 1:1s then this is all probably hard to believe, but it happens. Some companies got so fat with middle management that performative meeting rituals were the primary use of everyone’s time and you would be chastised if you tried to break the mold.
> Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.
Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.
> I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people. ... All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.
Yes, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them. But what you describe does not sound like a 1:1. At most it's a cross-functional meeting, and should have multiple people from both sides.
> The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.
It sounds like someone got halfway through the ManagerTools guidance on 1:1s and decided they could improvise a better solution and failed. The purpose of 1:1s is to build and keep relationships, and they encourage this chitchat as relationship building, but the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. If you want to talk about work that's great! The best way to build a relationship is working towards a common goal, and work is pretty much the only expected common goal anyways. And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda -- if a manager wants time on a direct's calendar they can always ask for more, but the reverse is much harder.
Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week.
The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.
All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.
Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you?
A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.
Only a few people can adequately explain themselves through slack.
It doesn't help that a lot of managers are _bad_ managers, and don't/can't/don't know how to run a tight 1:1.
the point of the 1:1 is to provide a high bandwidth way of getting worries and steers from employees to management and direction back to employees. if there is nothing to talk about then cut the meeting short.
I am not against 1 on 1's, but making that a regularly scheduled thing as if that adds value is kind of what I am arguing against. If people don't feel comfortable voicing something unless it is in private to their manager, that suggests to me two things - the manager/leadership is not fostering a collaborative environment, or the person needs to work on that (with the assistance/support of their manager), which I see as a manager's primary value gain, empowering their employees.
Managing via 1 on 1's sounds (to me) like a complete waste of everyone's time and a little bit toxic. It also can create an environment encouraging people to go around each other and backstab rather than collaborate. I have been in a lead position before, I'd be very concerned and probably have a series of chats with any dev that sat on something like a blocker until we spoke one on one, or only felt comfortable speaking one on one.
Some things do need to be spoken privately, and they should feel comfortable doing so/scheduling it, but a regularly scheduled thing as a way of managing, unless I am completely misunderstanding GP comment, is crazy to me. Of course I am speaking strictly manager/lead -> developer. A manager managing managers is probably quite a bit different and does require scheduling 1 on 1's regularly to align and adjust, but I wouldn't really know, because I've never been in that role.
You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment.
You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting.
You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quickly figure out that any ad hoc meeting is going to be a problem for them and then have anxiety about those, even if its going to be a positive meeting for once.
Have you never heard people joke that their boss asked them for a quick chat and they thought they were getting laid off?
> The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out.
I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to.
At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved quickly. If it needed a meeting you got everyone together as soon as they were available or you messaged your manager to get it in front of the right people quickly. If you saved things up for the next recurring meeting then it was a problem.
When I joined a corporate-style company, that immediate and direct communication style was discouraged. Everyone was so busy with their meeting schedules that you were burdening them by bringing something up out of the regularly scheduled time slot.
The 1:1s had a performative agenda you had to follow with the classic ten minutes of obligatory chit chat or ice breakers before it was acceptable to bring up the work issues that you had been holding on to for 3 days for this scheduled meeting where it was permissible to bring it up.
All of the managers thought it was such a brilliant invention that this 1:1 format was surfacing the “REAL shit” that was “INSANELY actionable”, as if this was the only way to communicate. It seemed so absurd to me, having come from high performing startups where everyone just communicated to get their job done and was coached if they weren’t. Now I had to queue up all the issues and then follow the weekly ritual of chit-chat first, business second before I had a chance to bring it up in the culturally acceptable time slot.
I think these rituals are really comforting and provide a sense of routing and predictability that some people like, but I also think it can become a performative replacement for good communication when it becomes THE acceptable way to surface the real issues.
The thing is, "everybody just communicates" really does break down when the size of the organization grows past some limit. Everything is easy in a ten-person company, but that absolutely does not scale to a 1000-person company.
1:1 adds value if the managers spends most of the time actually managing and 1:1 is a place where he gets part of input for that. 1:1 with lead that spends most of the time doing 1:1 is pointless
> what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?
Actually managing. The listening to devs and sitting on meetings is pointless if you are not actively using those meetings to organize, prioritize, plan and execute parts of plan.
Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.
In startups with less than 50 people (and I am being generous on the number), everyone talks to everyone all the time, so there is no need for these moments to extract key info to fix/improve situations, identify topics to push, ...
But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is intermediaries and 1-1s.
But 1 on 1 meetings are not crossing team boundaries, they are always within the team which is pretty much always smaller than 50. There's no reason the team cannot "talk to everyone all the time" just because other teams exist. But instead this communication is replaced by meetings even though the ability to talk hasn't changed.
Managers DO cross team boundaries though, their peers are other managers. I can't talk to the 100 people in my department every week, but my manager can talk to their 9 peers, who each talk to their 10 reports.
Precisely! And this is true not just for managers but also higher-level ICs. Its ok for Senior and below to be team focused, but moving to the next level means broadening scope and that means talking with people, regularly!, outside your immediate team.
Startups don't have as rigidly defined team boundaries. It wouldn't be uncommon for people to take up tasks and responsibilities that would fall under some other team with a different manager.
In larger corporations, teams are insular - members aren't rewarded for doing work outside of their domain, and would be punished for letting another team do their job. Some members are so indoctrinated that they won't respond to any communication outside of their team, unless it's through their own manager.
Beautiful thought but really hard in real life. Do you talk to all members of the family, deeply, every day?
Most would say no, so you need to open the spaces to do so.
> Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive
This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent.
I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.
I feel like you've maybe had the benefit of working in teams where this didn't happen.
I've seen it first hand, people cotton on to EM's latest buzz word, find some space to shove it into and then show it off. EM is blown away despite the result being over engineered or poor fit for the solution.
Last time I saw this was a system decomposed to events when tight orchestration was necessary. 10 months later a single function app was dropped in place to replace it. Dev who did the original work got a promotion for their gift of technical debt.
You've never had a task in a job where it is obvious the task is entirely useless and stupid and a waste of time and exists solely because of process that no one in the chain of being involved has the authority to rip out and replace with something sensible? You guys hiring?
It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.
Indeed, and the third party may be someone who thinks the entire SWE department is useless. Most people have an equivalent understanding of what SWEs and high level managers actually do all day.
Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.
It is a property of any large bureaucracy that a large proportion of the bureaucracy exists to serve itself. And it's not BS, it's a natural consequence of growth. Imagine you start in the mode of "moving fast and breaking stuff". Eventually, you break enough stuff that someone says "enough". So you develop some launch standards and guidelines. Then hire a team to enforce them. Then someone to build a launch tool. Then you realize you also need to manage legal risks, have standardized UIs, make sure that production services have backups and redundancy, and all of sudden, you have ten review processes. And then, it gets so difficult to navigate the process that teams hire PMs just to coordinate. And on, and on.
And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off.
I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?
> Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?
1. that the existence of such very "chill" roles often leads to hiring of more mediocre people and diminishes the value of working at such a company (at least psychologically)
2. That little gets done / built with all these people and resources, which is seen as a waste of potential.
3. That bureaucracy itself may be more exhausting than doing real work.
Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?
If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.
Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.
Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.
> Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?
> If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.
I've been involved in a few projects where the value appeared clear at the beginning, but by the end there was little value.
In one case the project failed due to incompetence and mismanagement: Basically, the project dragged on and on until it missed its market window. (What stinks is it was basically a port of a Visual Basic sales tool to a more modern v2.)
In another case I was hired into a machine learning project in a company where everyone spent a lot of time justifying their jobs. The project ultimately didn't "improve" over the non-machine-learning approach, and devolved into a "solution in search of a problem".
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As far as why the company held onto the people involved? (I left after both projects.) That's harder to explain, but I like to think of an analogy to a king holding on to a standing army: It's there when you need it, and your soldiers aren't helping the rival kingdom.
A different way to say it: One of the downsides to working in a large company is that a lot of the people there are "warm butts on seats." The company could function without them. Many of the people you work with have competence issues. You're probably a "warm butt on a seat" too, and may have some competence issues. That's why I like working for smaller companies: they can't afford to be fat.
You're both criticizing management for not knowing who's doing important work, and also for spending time talking to engineers to understand what's going on.
Most solutions to understand what's going on, in detail, are naturally going to be quite time consuming.
It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked on projects with 50 programmers and it seemed many did nothing and a few did negative work.
We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved.
He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done.
I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative.
That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.”
I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.
I work almost exclusively in small (<100 employees) firms, usually no more than 20 developers, and it’s a complete mix here too.
One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care
It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.
My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.
Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.
The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.
There's that, and then there's the other kind of negative work, whereby a rockstar engineer develops something that works but only he understands, completely failing to document it well. When this engineer leaves, the project is unmaintainable by virtue of being incomprehensible. In both cases, the management has been clueless.
You can choose to be as charitable as you want with your lense on this. Incentives within all organizations lead to a certain class of worker taking over. From the "getting things done" perspective I like the lense of insurgents vs. gatekeepers from this interview:
Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work.
This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.
No, but would you want this? People who contribute more should be paid more, but mapping compensation to contribution exactly isn't easy and comes with downsides.
Yes, very much so, although I've come believe that the corporate jobs outside of SWE might be even more performative. It also seems like something that has become way worse since the late 2010s, in tech specifically at least.
Yeah it exists all over. Talk to your friends who were business majors in school what they are doing now. It is shocking what some of them actually do day in day out and they know full well it's bullshit jobs sort of stuff that just pays the bills.
TBH, large companies deliver tuned, complex products for long-term use by customers. The problem is not producing them, but getting it right all the time, because development costs are a tiny percentage of reliance costs by the customer.
Most of what you call performative is likely real, but even if it were purely performative, it would surface people who were not on board and possibly unreliable.
Similarly, a 1:1 with no apparent content could serve its purpose of looking you in the eye to see if you're of sound mind.
I think your concern is better framed as whether people are pulling their weight. The solution for that is to make them deliver something hard on their own every so often, and cycling people through teams to avoid free riders.
I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money.
YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.
In my experience, actual producing impact/value and being able to demonstrate that you've produced impact/value are pretty loosely coupled to each, and it is often possible to do one without the other (in both directions). And time spent on one often directly competes with time spent on another.
I'd imagine it's the people who are better at "demonstrating value" than actually producing it that are the target of the original post.
There’s quite a bit of this but the big orgs have created a machine where they can capture (1+x) times the value of what they pay someone. If you’ve made such a machine, the best way to make more money is to put as much input into the machine as possible.
And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking.
Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”
I think this dynamic is not specific to SWE and as old as time. As organizations grow, so does the aspect of work that's more "seeing and being seen", and rightfully so.
There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy.
But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged.
That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business.
But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists.
But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.
It doesn't help shareholders or customers in any way however so we should not celebrate it or even simply accept that this is "the way things are". It is an error to be corrected.
The one time I worked at a large corporate, my time was split between failing to find useful projects that I was allowed to work on, and failing to deliver much on the useless projects I was given because I didn't understand that it would e.g. take six weeks and two review meetings to provision an extra half a terabyte of storage on a db cluster.
I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.
Sometimes teams get a req to hire someone and it’s use it or lose it. They’d rather get someone in the seat that will hopefully be useful at some point, and simply retain or grow the team size, than to give it up and be short staffed down the road.
The dynamic I saw at a FAANG-adjacent company when I worked there was wild between the contractors and FTEs. If an FTE could get one or two contractors reporting to them, they'd hand over all the work, put their feet up and take it easy, make fun of the contractors, and then if there were any good results jump in to take credit for those at meetings with upper management which the contractors were not invited to.
So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.
You can get incredible value out of 1-on-1s with capable managers. Insight about where the organization and product is going that you would otherwise miss, you’ll get to rubber duck about your high-level problems with someone who understands them, and its your time to influence decision making. But it does require a capable and motivated manager and an organization that gives the manager actual agency
Pretty much anything coming out of middle management or "org leadership" is performative. Line managers and their reports are generally actually building products and keeping the lights on.
This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc.
Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.
there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more positive tone, make the information concise in a bottom-line up-front style, use a deeper voice (told to me by my wife and women colleagues), and pace the information in a way that lets people ask follow up questions iff needed. no one should _have_ to do all this, but it does change people's perception of how competent you are. I've seen both sides of this coin - amazing engineers that get no promo because they can't communicate, and mediocre engineers that get promoted quickly due to their ability to communicate. I'd almost even argue that this is how should be - as you climb the corporate ladder, communication becomes a lot more important than technical skills and ability
to your point about 1:1s: if you're not getting anything out of your 1:1s, that's a skill issue and is on you IMHO. even when I had bad managers, I was able to effectively communicate my needs, goals, updates, thoughts, as well as give feedback back; in doing so, I've been able to turn horrible manager-team dynamics into a positive experiences. and I'd always argue it came down to the fact that the people perceive you directly correlates with how serious they'll take your word
at the same time, I can empathize with the idea that some middle managers are just bodies that get in the way - everyone's had their fair share of that. but if you're actually good at your job and communicating , you should almost always be able to get around them when it's really necessary
EDIT: and this is coming from a person who is and will always want to stay as an IC engineer
That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done.
Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.
This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity.
I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.
> Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff
This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.
There is always some form of social loafing going on in any large group of people doing work.
"The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases."
There is evidence of this in simple tug of war games.
But I think there is also truth in realizing work is mostly performative: the pareto principle seems to apply. 20% of the workforce sustains the other 80%. That's purely anecdotal, I doubt the numbers align that way. But it does always seem there are a few all-stars carrying others.
With all the usefull applications and features I've built, I never gotten any kudos for that. When I just present stuff and claim braincells from my direct manager, I rise. So... is it really just SWE jobs?
I don’t know that this is something specific to workplaces. I think anywhere you have a hierarchy and incentives you’ll see people perform to those incentives. But, I am not a behavioral psychologist, so maybe there is something special to “corporations”. It could be that corporations have a lot more incentive to perform for.
In my experience a lot of companies try really hard to be data oriented and try to find objective metrics for impact, sometimes it’s good, often it’s bad. Like LOC count, PR count, time in meetings or time spent at the office.
Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.
on the flip side, try to get an open source maintainer to define what the criteria are for merging a pull request, or what a bug report needs in order to be fixed. they all say one thing and it is always another. it feels like pulling your hair out.
All corporate jobs are performative, in the sense that there are many useless rituals one has to observe merely for appearances' sake and not because it benefits the company or accomplishes the work.
This is one of the main reasons why I left the corporate software world. I love programming too much to spend my life climbing that ladder. I'm fortunate enough not to have to work right now, but if I ever go back to an organization I'm going to be very picky about finding one where the leaders are themselves technical contributors and they hold the team to a high standard.
> Anyone else notice this?
This is not just the big MNCs but this is happening throughout all organisation irrespecitive of SWE or not. I know its really heartbreaking and there is still not a KPI to measure productivity/performance in a right way?
Did anybody come across any intressting KPI they were measured against?
Yes, everyone in the know knows it. That flaw is the edge start ups have. Fat, red tape, and bureaucracy is cut.
Replaced with a new set of problems of course. Like no money. And if the startup is successful it will eventually morph into a big fat corporate culture. The circle of life.
I worked at Amazon and I do think that more than anything we were overhired with little meaningful work. A lot of compliance goal chasing. Not that it’s performative to the top brass, but the work was very little and not usually very technical.
After a certain size, one of my favorite Civilization quotes kicks in:
"The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.
ironically i posted the exact same quote before seeing your post. I've found that whatever work that can be counted as meaningful often also signifies a certain amount of agency that does not exist in a larger bureaucratic system.
Agreed, but the small-company-doing-meaningful-work is also hard to find though.
Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders.
I'd say they have people who have been doing software for as long as 30 years, and also all the human resources and billions of dollars to fix this problem if it was something that could be fixed with human resources and money.
A company is like a bridge. The job of a bridge is to support the weight of what crosses it. But if a particular deck or arch or beam or joint or bearing fails to do its own job, the bridge can fail and will catastrophically. Perhaps some beams hold more weights than others, but can any bridge be composed entirely of decks or entirely of arches or entirely of beams? Perhaps, but we do not see many of them. It is always possible to innovate in the design of bridges, but if most of the great bridges in the world all have a mix of decks and arches and beams and joints and bearings, instead of simply being composed of solely beams or solely joints, then we might begin to wonder if this composition is not accidental to the proper functioning of a great bridge, but essential to it, even if we are not particularly interested in or proficient in the Art of Being Another Part of the Whole.
I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies.
At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.
</rant>
IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.
Lean, fast, agile (not in that way, in the real definition of the word) start ups hiring people who are fleeing a FAANG, only to have those FAANGers implement exactly what they left will always seem strange to me
Saw it happen at a company I worked at. Company had flat org structure that took it very far, and worked well. Leadership rolled over, bunch of new manager blood came in, from FAANG, talked about how nice our systems were, and then proceeded to upset the applecart by implementing all the level systems and such, in such a way that the engineers who had been at the company before were never above an L4, and all the "staff" and "platform" were new blood. They then did one or two token promotions, and were astonished when half the legacy seniors quit within the year
Another way of thinking about this, is by thinking about who defines what is productive or what produces value. I tend to be a little old fashioned, I think that doing the right thing for customers produces value. (That's what my self-worth is based on anyway.) For other people, it's doing the thing that gets them the next raise or promotion.
Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?
After some more experience at various types of workplaces, you'll discover that this hyperfocus on "productivity" is a mind virus trying to destroy all stability and long term value.
Trying to be a rockstar every day is the fastest way to burning out and making bad decisions. It ensures that you will be left holding the bag. How is that not more performative, if it's in the name?
like with most things, these things are both overrated and underrated.
are there performative jobs|tasks|employees|cultures? yes.
are most of the things that engineers think are performative and useless actually so? nope.
some examples:
* managers managing upward - feels useless - is actually the most impactful bang-for-buck for managers to give their teams space to operate without micromanaging
* sales and marketing. The best software in the world won't get known, bought, or used, without good sales/marketing. There is no meritocracy on quality. Almost no business succeeds through technical credibility alone.
* 1on1s. They may not add any value to you, but 1) you'd miss them when they're gone, 2) i don't know how else you expect managers to stay on top of employee concerns - just know "inately"? 3) they may matter A LOT for your teammates, and them being happy means your team will be happy
There is something to be said for having your own startup and keeping it lean, implying that everyone on the payroll must be a cofounder. It's a prerequisite for but not a guarantee of staying mission focused.
The "true work" is sporadic. A business will need an engineer to work hard for long hours for a few weeks, then they won't need him at all for weeks more except to be on hand if something goes wrong. Then maybe some more work, and even longer lulls.
But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse).
Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).
This was my experience mostly in my 10 years at Google at a certain level.
But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it.
Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cautious development cycle where multiple levels of review covered everything. OWNERS, "readability", very uptight code review. And in order to survive in this environment you had to have a pile of code reviews all running concurrently because making progress on any single one could take days and days to get through review.
But that was kind of the point because pushing the wrong thing and breaking the money printing machine is far worse than moving slow.
But IMHO this didn't scale past 30k, 40k engineers. And inside Google, the culture shifted from one that was SWE/SRE driven to one that was PM driven. And the perf/promo culture for them had really perverse incentives.
Also I have a theory about Google in particular -- its founders and all its initial strong hires all came from academia not industry. And so its internal culture became biased towards a "publish or perish" structure, and "perf" performance reviews honestly looked more like a thesis defense committee for someone's masters/PHD than anything I'd encountered in the software industry before.
My perspective is that promotion especially for PMs (and SWEs to some extent) involves pushing novelty / "demonstrating impact".
IMHO this in large part responsible for Google's ADHD around project cancellations/replacements.
Not restricted to PMs but it is especially pernicious when product direction gets pushed this way.
Cost cutting and underhiring were never a problem while I Was there. More the opposite. They overhired and then there was no good throughput on projects because every chef was in the kitchen at once.
If I recall, the turndown on e.g. Google Reader was more about finding it difficult to get SWEs who wanted to work on it. I think it would have been increasingly difficult to survive the performance review cycle if you were stuck on a "backwater" project like that.
The reason why I distant myself from software even before AI is because of all the shenanigans the software people do, primarily silicon valley but it echoes quickly beyond that where other companies try to copy cat it. It feels like a cult, with all sort of weird rituals, if you are an individualist it’s hard to maintain it there.
All of “adult” life is performative . Life is a game, a performance, a little play you put on for the benefit of all.
Consider this: if management thinks something is impressive, well that makes it impressive. Managers, by definition, manage people, and having 1:1 meetings helps with that. Are you supposing managers also make the same exact effort and contribution as ICs? Would they still be managers?
Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?
I think Elon pretended to notice it. Instead of taking his time and doing it right, he was performative in his own actions causing unnecessary problems. In doing so got rid of the important pieces as well as the bloat.
It is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?
Why does everyone focus on this aspect? Why is this surprising? Do people think that 100% or even 20% of Twitter employees were SREs? Do you think that most large applications are kept alive by constant manual toil from SREs? (ok, ok some are - but still!)
What's funny is that Twitter SRE used to be horrible and the app probably would have collapsed entirely (rather than the little bit that it did) without hundreds of manual operators, but in the few years leading up to the "acquisition," massively improved to the point that they literally automated themselves out of a job.
Anyway, Twitter had thousands of engineers, salespeople, support people, and so on. They were working on tens of new products in an attempt to find more revenue (everything from clones of every single social media app you can imagine to becoming a sports TV network), and on the other side (Goldbird), selling and supporting ads, the thing that made Twitter money.
The metric to look at isn't uptime, it makes no sense that people keep parading this metric. The metrics are revenue and revenue growth and surprise! by most available metrics, the Elon strategy torpedoed those.
Twitter was, like almost every "web" company in ~2020, a very "fat" company because they were re-investing free ZIRP money in future growth investment. Elon turned it into a KTLO operation, and didn't even manage to succeed at the standard PE style "fat" company slim-down (where you chop growth initiatives and keep the revenue, like everyone else is doing now), because he also chopped the revenue side.
It's obviously hard to say how accurate these numbers[1] are, but it looks like Twitter has doubled their workforce from its lowest following their mass layoffs. It might be stable again now because they hired the workforce required to actually keep it running.
Is it really that shocking to you? Twitter is a very narrow company compared to Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Apple. The system was already up and running, they probably kept the employees that built or knew the system deeply and fired the others. Apparently it had around 7,500 employees at its peak. To me that seems excessive for something like Twitter.
What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic.
The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)
Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.
Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.
Assigning single purpose to things is not necessary. "Systems are what they do" is a quote for a reason.
I think in addition to rules survival and admin self-concern, people genuinely underestimate how much maintenance and effort go into accomplishing goals in an organized, communicable, trustable way. It is also why AI is not as successful as people thought it was going to be at taking over jobs.
If you think the only value add to a business is the business output, you are taking admin work for granted.
In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.
And that's why command economies fail. They fail in the same way that firms do, except that because the whole economy is one giant firm, you can't get the you need to remove entrenched bureaucrats until the situation gets so bad that you have a revolution or lose a war.
Makes me think of this timeless and excellent quote by Oscar Wilde:
“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”
*Commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde. There doesn't appear to be any definitive source for it.
The quote actually reads like a summary of Parkinson's Law, that bureaucracies inherently tend to grow because officials create work for each other another and seek to increase their numbers. But the exact quote doesn't appear in Parkinson's original essay. Quote from that essay:
"Factor 1: An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals; and
Factor 2: Officials make work for each other."
-- https://archive.org/details/parkinsons-law-the-economist
I suggest reading the book if you can get your hands on a copy. It's a short and highly entertaining read:
https://www.thriftbooks.com/w/parkinsons-law_c-northcote-par...
Unfortunately, real-world bureaucratic orgs of any meaningful size or age always include a third type of person - dedicated neither to the org's goals, nor to the org itself.
In general, one should speak more circumspectly about that third type.
> There was a point of equilibrium in any organization’s middle management, a fulcrum of responsibility that remained still while the upper and lower ranks of the bureaucracy moved around it. Tyren knew from experience that a shrewd official could find this pivot-point within the org chart and, once entrenched, enjoy near-complete autonomy with almost no responsibility.
From "Son of a Liche", by J. Zachary Pike.
The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild.
If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide.
But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?
With most of my managers 1:1 have always been a way for them to catch up with what I’ve been working on, despite doing a standup every single day so that the team knows what each other is doing.
I have standup every day so my manager knows what I am doing so my 1:1s are:
- General sentiment about problems with the team and company that bother me but that I don’t have a solution to yet or decided how to bring it up with the team.
- Fun / interesting projects I unilaterally decided to dedicate my working hours towards that I never asked permission to work on. Sometimes it ends up being something cool that my manager wants to join in on or promote to a bigger effort.
- About our lives and what's going on.
I used to be a believer in daily standup plus bi-weekly sprint planning, but lost faith with the (possibly cargo cult) methodology I was trying to follow. Adding 1:1 in with that would be far too frequent, and probably far too little real content in each meeting.
Did productivity actually change dispensing with those meetings? Probably not by much, it's hard to say empirically because task estimation was always a wildcard.
Qualitatively, I think a good balance is twice-weekly standup, bi-weekly long form. It adds some structure and regular communication, I think it helps people feel better and have a bit more relationship. But I supplement this with frequent invitations to talk about product ad-hoc, talk about tasking ad-hoc if you feel you're not productive, and schedule more pointed meetings with me whenever I'm free. Which is almost all the time, because I need to not be in meetings in order to get work done or spend time thinking.
Honestly, I don't begrudge anyone a job. If people want to do SWE as a performative role, I'll detect that fairly quickly and let it be, even people under me if I were to climb the org chart beyond the first rung. They actually do serve some benefits to the company and to society, as long as they are amicable and respond positively to requests. I'm eventually going to tune them out for serious/urgent development work, and no one can make any guarantees about protection from layoffs, period. C'est la vie.
If people are driven to achieve more, love engineering products, and enjoy working with technology, it's going to be obvious. We will end up working together to solve problems like gravity creates stable orbits. But I can't realistically only hire those people, or run even a medium size company with only the vital few on payroll. It's statistically unlikely, that's why a unicorn startup is a unicorn. Statistically most SWE roles exist outside of that... right? Like after IPO, in big companies where some amount of bureaucracy is just a fact of the size of the machine.
EDIT: twice weekly standup, although I guess bi-weekly can mean both every other week and twice a week?
The general academic lab model is still the best I've seen and experienced. People sign up to present at the weekly lab meeting if they have something to present, 1 person per meeting. There's maybe 10 mins of quick bringing things up at the beginning of lab meeting before the presenter starts, if you have something short to share or general announcements. Specific project groups will have their own direct meetings on their own schedule that makes sense to them with the pace of incoming results to discuss.
When you do daily standups or mandatory everyone says something type stuff, it does something damaging psychologically. You end up scrambling to get things together for the standup to not look like you are a fumbling idiot, when it would have been better to take a few more days with a clearer head, less cortisol in your blood, and output and share better work.
1:1s add value to a point, but I’ve worked at one company where the fixation on 1:1s started replacing useful communication.
Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.
1:1s started as a good way to formalize manager to report communication on a predictable schedule. This is good if the team isn’t regularly talking organically. Some company cultures take it too far and turn it into an excuse to make recurring meetings the focus of all work. I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people.
All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.
Middle management was always congratulating themselves on the success of their 1:1s because they said it was when they heard about all of the real issues they didn't know about. They didn't realize that by making themselves unavailable except for the 1:1s they were forcing this result.
It was even worse when the problems involved multiple people or teams, which was almost always the case. Now you had to wait until Thursday to talk to your manager about it, who promised to add it to the agenda for his 1:1 with other team the following Tuesday. Then in that 1:1, the other team lead would say he'd bring it up with his schedule 1:1 with the person the Friday after that. It was like every communication queue only got processed once a week, so each hop added more delay. The managers would always tell is it wasn't supposed to be like that, but trying to direct would get you hit with "Let's talk about this in our next 1:1"
The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.
If you haven’t seen calendars stuffed to the gills with performative 1:1s then this is all probably hard to believe, but it happens. Some companies got so fat with middle management that performative meeting rituals were the primary use of everyone’s time and you would be chastised if you tried to break the mold.
> Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.
Dude, a a weekly 1:1 should be 30 minutes long. And managers should have at most 10 directs, so 5 hours total out of a 40 hour work week. Something has gone haywire and it's not the 1:1 thats the problem.
> I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people. ... All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. Many never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.
Yes, managers go to meetings but they're not all 1:1s and if they are, the problem isn't too many middle managers, it's not enough of them. But what you describe does not sound like a 1:1. At most it's a cross-functional meeting, and should have multiple people from both sides.
> The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.
It sounds like someone got halfway through the ManagerTools guidance on 1:1s and decided they could improvise a better solution and failed. The purpose of 1:1s is to build and keep relationships, and they encourage this chitchat as relationship building, but the key thing is that the direct goes first and gets to talk about _what they want to talk about_. If you want to talk about work that's great! The best way to build a relationship is working towards a common goal, and work is pretty much the only expected common goal anyways. And if your manager _wants_ to talk about their weekend, they can, but the recommendation is to always let the direct set the first 10m of the agenda -- if a manager wants time on a direct's calendar they can always ask for more, but the reverse is much harder.
Any good thing can be done wrong, and if it can be done wrong, the it will be done wrong.
Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week.
The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.
All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.
Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you?
A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.
> Why can't it be in a team slack?
Only a few people can adequately explain themselves through slack.
It doesn't help that a lot of managers are _bad_ managers, and don't/can't/don't know how to run a tight 1:1.
the point of the 1:1 is to provide a high bandwidth way of getting worries and steers from employees to management and direction back to employees. if there is nothing to talk about then cut the meeting short.
Usually people clam up and are not vocal during group meetings. I am not one of them but it's super common. 1-1s allow people to be more candid.
I am not against 1 on 1's, but making that a regularly scheduled thing as if that adds value is kind of what I am arguing against. If people don't feel comfortable voicing something unless it is in private to their manager, that suggests to me two things - the manager/leadership is not fostering a collaborative environment, or the person needs to work on that (with the assistance/support of their manager), which I see as a manager's primary value gain, empowering their employees.
Managing via 1 on 1's sounds (to me) like a complete waste of everyone's time and a little bit toxic. It also can create an environment encouraging people to go around each other and backstab rather than collaborate. I have been in a lead position before, I'd be very concerned and probably have a series of chats with any dev that sat on something like a blocker until we spoke one on one, or only felt comfortable speaking one on one.
Some things do need to be spoken privately, and they should feel comfortable doing so/scheduling it, but a regularly scheduled thing as a way of managing, unless I am completely misunderstanding GP comment, is crazy to me. Of course I am speaking strictly manager/lead -> developer. A manager managing managers is probably quite a bit different and does require scheduling 1 on 1's regularly to align and adjust, but I wouldn't really know, because I've never been in that role.
You are working against human nature if you think most people are not going to feel more comfortable talking about private matters in a 1:1 vs a public environment.
You're also an asshole manager if you're giving any sort of negative feedback on a person in a public setting.
You could always just schedule a meeting when someone needs a course correction, but then your employees who are clever little humans, will quickly figure out that any ad hoc meeting is going to be a problem for them and then have anxiety about those, even if its going to be a positive meeting for once.
Have you never heard people joke that their boss asked them for a quick chat and they thought they were getting laid off?
Yeah, if blockers are coming out in 1-on-1 meetings, that’s a really bad sign
For the company, yes. But not for the manager - who now has insanely actionable stuff.
> The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out.
I worked at a range of startups before joining my first corporate style company. This 1:1 meeting ritual was hard for me to adapt to.
At the startups, particularly the high performing ones, issues were addressed immediately. If a problem arose you talked to the people involved quickly. If it needed a meeting you got everyone together as soon as they were available or you messaged your manager to get it in front of the right people quickly. If you saved things up for the next recurring meeting then it was a problem.
When I joined a corporate-style company, that immediate and direct communication style was discouraged. Everyone was so busy with their meeting schedules that you were burdening them by bringing something up out of the regularly scheduled time slot.
The 1:1s had a performative agenda you had to follow with the classic ten minutes of obligatory chit chat or ice breakers before it was acceptable to bring up the work issues that you had been holding on to for 3 days for this scheduled meeting where it was permissible to bring it up.
All of the managers thought it was such a brilliant invention that this 1:1 format was surfacing the “REAL shit” that was “INSANELY actionable”, as if this was the only way to communicate. It seemed so absurd to me, having come from high performing startups where everyone just communicated to get their job done and was coached if they weren’t. Now I had to queue up all the issues and then follow the weekly ritual of chit-chat first, business second before I had a chance to bring it up in the culturally acceptable time slot.
I think these rituals are really comforting and provide a sense of routing and predictability that some people like, but I also think it can become a performative replacement for good communication when it becomes THE acceptable way to surface the real issues.
The thing is, "everybody just communicates" really does break down when the size of the organization grows past some limit. Everything is easy in a ten-person company, but that absolutely does not scale to a 1000-person company.
1:1s are designed for 1000-person communication. They're used by small groups of people like a manager and their team.
1:1 adds value if the managers spends most of the time actually managing and 1:1 is a place where he gets part of input for that. 1:1 with lead that spends most of the time doing 1:1 is pointless
> what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?
Actually managing. The listening to devs and sitting on meetings is pointless if you are not actively using those meetings to organize, prioritize, plan and execute parts of plan.
Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.
In startups with less than 50 people (and I am being generous on the number), everyone talks to everyone all the time, so there is no need for these moments to extract key info to fix/improve situations, identify topics to push, ...
But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is intermediaries and 1-1s.
[also, being sarcastic is unhelpful.]
But 1 on 1 meetings are not crossing team boundaries, they are always within the team which is pretty much always smaller than 50. There's no reason the team cannot "talk to everyone all the time" just because other teams exist. But instead this communication is replaced by meetings even though the ability to talk hasn't changed.
Managers DO cross team boundaries though, their peers are other managers. I can't talk to the 100 people in my department every week, but my manager can talk to their 9 peers, who each talk to their 10 reports.
Precisely! And this is true not just for managers but also higher-level ICs. Its ok for Senior and below to be team focused, but moving to the next level means broadening scope and that means talking with people, regularly!, outside your immediate team.
And at larger companies, teams and groups are often geographically distributed if only in other buildings and office locations.
Startups don't have as rigidly defined team boundaries. It wouldn't be uncommon for people to take up tasks and responsibilities that would fall under some other team with a different manager.
In larger corporations, teams are insular - members aren't rewarded for doing work outside of their domain, and would be punished for letting another team do their job. Some members are so indoctrinated that they won't respond to any communication outside of their team, unless it's through their own manager.
Beautiful thought but really hard in real life. Do you talk to all members of the family, deeply, every day? Most would say no, so you need to open the spaces to do so.
I would hope that people, having dealt with LLMs for a few years would understand that its all about context.
In a 25 person company, context is easy, assuming even half arsed communications. Its possible to hold the state of the entire company in your head.
That scales to about 50. after that it becomes hard. then you start having team meetings and the like.
Even at my old startup we had 1:1s when we were ~25 people. it was a great way to get additional context that was otherwise hidden
> Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive
This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent.
I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.
I feel like you've maybe had the benefit of working in teams where this didn't happen.
I've seen it first hand, people cotton on to EM's latest buzz word, find some space to shove it into and then show it off. EM is blown away despite the result being over engineered or poor fit for the solution.
Last time I saw this was a system decomposed to events when tight orchestration was necessary. 10 months later a single function app was dropped in place to replace it. Dev who did the original work got a promotion for their gift of technical debt.
You've never had a task in a job where it is obvious the task is entirely useless and stupid and a waste of time and exists solely because of process that no one in the chain of being involved has the authority to rip out and replace with something sensible? You guys hiring?
Working at FAANG, acutally the stuff I was doing was mostly bollocks. Nothing of real value, apart from a few projects was delivered.
> This is arrogant thinking typical of developers
typical for a lot of knowledge workers. "engineer's disease"
i am good at solving problems in X domain, and believe that carries over to all domains. it's just so simple, they're so dumb, etc.
these guys get to management and then crash out.
It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.
Many are not doing anything obviously meaningful and useful. However that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful or useful, only that you don't know.
Indeed, and the third party may be someone who thinks the entire SWE department is useless. Most people have an equivalent understanding of what SWEs and high level managers actually do all day.
Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.
> This is arrogant thinking typical of developers.
Also very typical of hn. Prevailing sense of anyone not physically coding adding no value
It is a property of any large bureaucracy that a large proportion of the bureaucracy exists to serve itself. And it's not BS, it's a natural consequence of growth. Imagine you start in the mode of "moving fast and breaking stuff". Eventually, you break enough stuff that someone says "enough". So you develop some launch standards and guidelines. Then hire a team to enforce them. Then someone to build a launch tool. Then you realize you also need to manage legal risks, have standardized UIs, make sure that production services have backups and redundancy, and all of sudden, you have ten review processes. And then, it gets so difficult to navigate the process that teams hire PMs just to coordinate. And on, and on.
And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off.
I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?
> Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?
1. that the existence of such very "chill" roles often leads to hiring of more mediocre people and diminishes the value of working at such a company (at least psychologically)
2. That little gets done / built with all these people and resources, which is seen as a waste of potential.
3. That bureaucracy itself may be more exhausting than doing real work.
Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?
If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.
Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.
Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.
There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail...
Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.
> Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?
> If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.
I've been involved in a few projects where the value appeared clear at the beginning, but by the end there was little value.
In one case the project failed due to incompetence and mismanagement: Basically, the project dragged on and on until it missed its market window. (What stinks is it was basically a port of a Visual Basic sales tool to a more modern v2.)
In another case I was hired into a machine learning project in a company where everyone spent a lot of time justifying their jobs. The project ultimately didn't "improve" over the non-machine-learning approach, and devolved into a "solution in search of a problem".
---
As far as why the company held onto the people involved? (I left after both projects.) That's harder to explain, but I like to think of an analogy to a king holding on to a standing army: It's there when you need it, and your soldiers aren't helping the rival kingdom.
A different way to say it: One of the downsides to working in a large company is that a lot of the people there are "warm butts on seats." The company could function without them. Many of the people you work with have competence issues. You're probably a "warm butt on a seat" too, and may have some competence issues. That's why I like working for smaller companies: they can't afford to be fat.
You're both criticizing management for not knowing who's doing important work, and also for spending time talking to engineers to understand what's going on.
Most solutions to understand what's going on, in detail, are naturally going to be quite time consuming.
It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked on projects with 50 programmers and it seemed many did nothing and a few did negative work.
We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved.
He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done.
I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative.
That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.”
I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.
I work almost exclusively in small (<100 employees) firms, usually no more than 20 developers, and it’s a complete mix here too.
One firm might have the most dialed in effective team you’ve ever dreamed of. The next four are average or OK. Then you get companies run by absentee owners and half the developers are stacking a $150k a year paycheck and literally not working at all. The company itself is highly profitable so the owner doesn’t care
It’s just a mixed bag all over everywhere you go. No generalities to be found in size but only in culture and outcome.
My whole career (15+ year) is built on orgs (Fortune 500s, academia, government, and even startups) hiring me to actually get something done that an employee spent months "working on" that ended up useless and scrapped. It's everywhere, all the time.
Additionally, you can be productive from a development sense, ship functional software that is to spec, and everybody is happy - and it still never gets used, or gets canceled, and does nothing for anyone. This too, could also be considered performative.
The money does put food on the family dinner table, so be it.
There's that, and then there's the other kind of negative work, whereby a rockstar engineer develops something that works but only he understands, completely failing to document it well. When this engineer leaves, the project is unmaintainable by virtue of being incomprehensible. In both cases, the management has been clueless.
Good point. There’s lots of kinds of negative work.
I was thinking more of people burning stuff down.
There’s also people burning the furniture for immediate warmth.
And there’s people you mention who are doing things that look good but have time bombs inside them.
You can choose to be as charitable as you want with your lense on this. Incentives within all organizations lead to a certain class of worker taking over. From the "getting things done" perspective I like the lense of insurgents vs. gatekeepers from this interview:
https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transc...
Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work.
This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.
Round your "~15%" up to 20%, and you've just discovered the Pareto Princlple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle, aka "The 80/20 rule".
> as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.
Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?
No, but would you want this? People who contribute more should be paid more, but mapping compensation to contribution exactly isn't easy and comes with downsides.
If that one person is the CEO or owner then yes, haha.
No, those are the shareholders who don’t produce anything.
You think stock dividends pay out 4x the amount of money that the company pays for salaries?
Yes, very much so, although I've come believe that the corporate jobs outside of SWE might be even more performative. It also seems like something that has become way worse since the late 2010s, in tech specifically at least.
Yeah it exists all over. Talk to your friends who were business majors in school what they are doing now. It is shocking what some of them actually do day in day out and they know full well it's bullshit jobs sort of stuff that just pays the bills.
TBH, large companies deliver tuned, complex products for long-term use by customers. The problem is not producing them, but getting it right all the time, because development costs are a tiny percentage of reliance costs by the customer.
Most of what you call performative is likely real, but even if it were purely performative, it would surface people who were not on board and possibly unreliable.
Similarly, a 1:1 with no apparent content could serve its purpose of looking you in the eye to see if you're of sound mind.
I think your concern is better framed as whether people are pulling their weight. The solution for that is to make them deliver something hard on their own every so often, and cycling people through teams to avoid free riders.
I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money.
YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.
In my experience, actual producing impact/value and being able to demonstrate that you've produced impact/value are pretty loosely coupled to each, and it is often possible to do one without the other (in both directions). And time spent on one often directly competes with time spent on another.
I'd imagine it's the people who are better at "demonstrating value" than actually producing it that are the target of the original post.
There’s quite a bit of this but the big orgs have created a machine where they can capture (1+x) times the value of what they pay someone. If you’ve made such a machine, the best way to make more money is to put as much input into the machine as possible.
And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking.
Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”
I think this dynamic is not specific to SWE and as old as time. As organizations grow, so does the aspect of work that's more "seeing and being seen", and rightfully so.
There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy.
But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged.
That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business.
But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists.
But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.
It doesn't help shareholders or customers in any way however so we should not celebrate it or even simply accept that this is "the way things are". It is an error to be corrected.
> Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team.
Depending on the manager and on the team, 1:1s with people can be very valuable for all involved.
The one time I worked at a large corporate, my time was split between failing to find useful projects that I was allowed to work on, and failing to deliver much on the useless projects I was given because I didn't understand that it would e.g. take six weeks and two review meetings to provision an extra half a terabyte of storage on a db cluster.
I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.
Sometimes teams get a req to hire someone and it’s use it or lose it. They’d rather get someone in the seat that will hopefully be useful at some point, and simply retain or grow the team size, than to give it up and be short staffed down the road.
The dynamic I saw at a FAANG-adjacent company when I worked there was wild between the contractors and FTEs. If an FTE could get one or two contractors reporting to them, they'd hand over all the work, put their feet up and take it easy, make fun of the contractors, and then if there were any good results jump in to take credit for those at meetings with upper management which the contractors were not invited to.
So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.
You can get incredible value out of 1-on-1s with capable managers. Insight about where the organization and product is going that you would otherwise miss, you’ll get to rubber duck about your high-level problems with someone who understands them, and its your time to influence decision making. But it does require a capable and motivated manager and an organization that gives the manager actual agency
Price's Law says that the square root of the total number of items or participants contributes to at least half of the results[0].
I've found this to be true in almost everything in life, including work and business.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law
Thanks for posting that, I'd never heard of it. I thought of n(n-1)/2 and coordination issues initially but nah.
Pretty much anything coming out of middle management or "org leadership" is performative. Line managers and their reports are generally actually building products and keeping the lights on.
> Anyone else notice this?
This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc.
Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.
there is a lot to pull apart here
there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more positive tone, make the information concise in a bottom-line up-front style, use a deeper voice (told to me by my wife and women colleagues), and pace the information in a way that lets people ask follow up questions iff needed. no one should _have_ to do all this, but it does change people's perception of how competent you are. I've seen both sides of this coin - amazing engineers that get no promo because they can't communicate, and mediocre engineers that get promoted quickly due to their ability to communicate. I'd almost even argue that this is how should be - as you climb the corporate ladder, communication becomes a lot more important than technical skills and ability
to your point about 1:1s: if you're not getting anything out of your 1:1s, that's a skill issue and is on you IMHO. even when I had bad managers, I was able to effectively communicate my needs, goals, updates, thoughts, as well as give feedback back; in doing so, I've been able to turn horrible manager-team dynamics into a positive experiences. and I'd always argue it came down to the fact that the people perceive you directly correlates with how serious they'll take your word
at the same time, I can empathize with the idea that some middle managers are just bodies that get in the way - everyone's had their fair share of that. but if you're actually good at your job and communicating , you should almost always be able to get around them when it's really necessary
EDIT: and this is coming from a person who is and will always want to stay as an IC engineer
That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done.
Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.
This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity.
I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.
> Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff
This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.
There is always some form of social loafing going on in any large group of people doing work.
"The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases."
There is evidence of this in simple tug of war games.
But I think there is also truth in realizing work is mostly performative: the pareto principle seems to apply. 20% of the workforce sustains the other 80%. That's purely anecdotal, I doubt the numbers align that way. But it does always seem there are a few all-stars carrying others.
part of the universal scalability law: the cost of coherence scales quadratically as workers are added.
everything else is downstream of that
> the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal
Consider yourself lucky. This part is missing in some places.
With all the usefull applications and features I've built, I never gotten any kudos for that. When I just present stuff and claim braincells from my direct manager, I rise. So... is it really just SWE jobs?
Promo-driven culture. Engineers and managers optimize for promotable work.
Depends on where you are within those companies. These companies are not monocultures.
I don’t know that this is something specific to workplaces. I think anywhere you have a hierarchy and incentives you’ll see people perform to those incentives. But, I am not a behavioral psychologist, so maybe there is something special to “corporations”. It could be that corporations have a lot more incentive to perform for.
In my experience a lot of companies try really hard to be data oriented and try to find objective metrics for impact, sometimes it’s good, often it’s bad. Like LOC count, PR count, time in meetings or time spent at the office.
Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.
on the flip side, try to get an open source maintainer to define what the criteria are for merging a pull request, or what a bug report needs in order to be fixed. they all say one thing and it is always another. it feels like pulling your hair out.
You forgot the gigachad gif.
"Doesn't merge PRs."
"Doesn't fix issues."
"1m downloads."
Work is performance art
The only place where the work I did was performative was government contracting. Not technically waste, but certainly useless.
All corporate jobs are performative, in the sense that there are many useless rituals one has to observe merely for appearances' sake and not because it benefits the company or accomplishes the work.
This is one of the main reasons why I left the corporate software world. I love programming too much to spend my life climbing that ladder. I'm fortunate enough not to have to work right now, but if I ever go back to an organization I'm going to be very picky about finding one where the leaders are themselves technical contributors and they hold the team to a high standard.
> Anyone else notice this? This is not just the big MNCs but this is happening throughout all organisation irrespecitive of SWE or not. I know its really heartbreaking and there is still not a KPI to measure productivity/performance in a right way? Did anybody come across any intressting KPI they were measured against?
The stuff you think is performative and useless is most likely the consequence of letting a couple "all stars" do what they want for years.
Yes, everyone in the know knows it. That flaw is the edge start ups have. Fat, red tape, and bureaucracy is cut.
Replaced with a new set of problems of course. Like no money. And if the startup is successful it will eventually morph into a big fat corporate culture. The circle of life.
I worked at Amazon and I do think that more than anything we were overhired with little meaningful work. A lot of compliance goal chasing. Not that it’s performative to the top brass, but the work was very little and not usually very technical.
After a certain size, one of my favorite Civilization quotes kicks in:
"The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."
This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.
ironically i posted the exact same quote before seeing your post. I've found that whatever work that can be counted as meaningful often also signifies a certain amount of agency that does not exist in a larger bureaucratic system.
Agreed, but the small-company-doing-meaningful-work is also hard to find though.
Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders.
"including FAANG"
What would make them less vulnerable to this?
I'd say they have people who have been doing software for as long as 30 years, and also all the human resources and billions of dollars to fix this problem if it was something that could be fixed with human resources and money.
And still ... there's a lot of this.
Jeff Bezos covered these grounds well here already, with his mandate on how meetings must run, and about "day one". Check him out.
So sad that with the right incentive structure his work would be of immense value to society, instead of his current Wall-E prologue side quest.
A company is like a bridge. The job of a bridge is to support the weight of what crosses it. But if a particular deck or arch or beam or joint or bearing fails to do its own job, the bridge can fail and will catastrophically. Perhaps some beams hold more weights than others, but can any bridge be composed entirely of decks or entirely of arches or entirely of beams? Perhaps, but we do not see many of them. It is always possible to innovate in the design of bridges, but if most of the great bridges in the world all have a mix of decks and arches and beams and joints and bearings, instead of simply being composed of solely beams or solely joints, then we might begin to wonder if this composition is not accidental to the proper functioning of a great bridge, but essential to it, even if we are not particularly interested in or proficient in the Art of Being Another Part of the Whole.
I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies.
At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.
</rant>
IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.
Lean, fast, agile (not in that way, in the real definition of the word) start ups hiring people who are fleeing a FAANG, only to have those FAANGers implement exactly what they left will always seem strange to me
Saw it happen at a company I worked at. Company had flat org structure that took it very far, and worked well. Leadership rolled over, bunch of new manager blood came in, from FAANG, talked about how nice our systems were, and then proceeded to upset the applecart by implementing all the level systems and such, in such a way that the engineers who had been at the company before were never above an L4, and all the "staff" and "platform" were new blood. They then did one or two token promotions, and were astonished when half the legacy seniors quit within the year
Another way of thinking about this, is by thinking about who defines what is productive or what produces value. I tend to be a little old fashioned, I think that doing the right thing for customers produces value. (That's what my self-worth is based on anyway.) For other people, it's doing the thing that gets them the next raise or promotion.
Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?
After some more experience at various types of workplaces, you'll discover that this hyperfocus on "productivity" is a mind virus trying to destroy all stability and long term value.
Trying to be a rockstar every day is the fastest way to burning out and making bad decisions. It ensures that you will be left holding the bag. How is that not more performative, if it's in the name?
like with most things, these things are both overrated and underrated.
are there performative jobs|tasks|employees|cultures? yes.
are most of the things that engineers think are performative and useless actually so? nope.
some examples:
* managers managing upward - feels useless - is actually the most impactful bang-for-buck for managers to give their teams space to operate without micromanaging
* sales and marketing. The best software in the world won't get known, bought, or used, without good sales/marketing. There is no meritocracy on quality. Almost no business succeeds through technical credibility alone.
* 1on1s. They may not add any value to you, but 1) you'd miss them when they're gone, 2) i don't know how else you expect managers to stay on top of employee concerns - just know "inately"? 3) they may matter A LOT for your teammates, and them being happy means your team will be happy
There are other things like that.
Yes
There is something to be said for having your own startup and keeping it lean, implying that everyone on the payroll must be a cofounder. It's a prerequisite for but not a guarantee of staying mission focused.
The "true work" is sporadic. A business will need an engineer to work hard for long hours for a few weeks, then they won't need him at all for weeks more except to be on hand if something goes wrong. Then maybe some more work, and even longer lulls.
But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse).
Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).
This was my experience mostly in my 10 years at Google at a certain level.
But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it.
Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cautious development cycle where multiple levels of review covered everything. OWNERS, "readability", very uptight code review. And in order to survive in this environment you had to have a pile of code reviews all running concurrently because making progress on any single one could take days and days to get through review.
But that was kind of the point because pushing the wrong thing and breaking the money printing machine is far worse than moving slow.
But IMHO this didn't scale past 30k, 40k engineers. And inside Google, the culture shifted from one that was SWE/SRE driven to one that was PM driven. And the perf/promo culture for them had really perverse incentives.
Also I have a theory about Google in particular -- its founders and all its initial strong hires all came from academia not industry. And so its internal culture became biased towards a "publish or perish" structure, and "perf" performance reviews honestly looked more like a thesis defense committee for someone's masters/PHD than anything I'd encountered in the software industry before.
What did you see as the perverse incentives for the PMs there? Schedule optimization like cutting out testing? Cost cutting by under-hiring?
My perspective is that promotion especially for PMs (and SWEs to some extent) involves pushing novelty / "demonstrating impact".
IMHO this in large part responsible for Google's ADHD around project cancellations/replacements.
Not restricted to PMs but it is especially pernicious when product direction gets pushed this way.
Cost cutting and underhiring were never a problem while I Was there. More the opposite. They overhired and then there was no good throughput on projects because every chef was in the kitchen at once.
If I recall, the turndown on e.g. Google Reader was more about finding it difficult to get SWEs who wanted to work on it. I think it would have been increasingly difficult to survive the performance review cycle if you were stuck on a "backwater" project like that.
The reason why I distant myself from software even before AI is because of all the shenanigans the software people do, primarily silicon valley but it echoes quickly beyond that where other companies try to copy cat it. It feels like a cult, with all sort of weird rituals, if you are an individualist it’s hard to maintain it there.
You are so naive you don’t get it yet?
All of “adult” life is performative . Life is a game, a performance, a little play you put on for the benefit of all.
Consider this: if management thinks something is impressive, well that makes it impressive. Managers, by definition, manage people, and having 1:1 meetings helps with that. Are you supposing managers also make the same exact effort and contribution as ICs? Would they still be managers?
Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?
To add:
This entire post rubs me so wrong. It just feels so naive, so foolish. I feel I’ve been baited into anger.
You really think the work you do matters and is not performative?
Meta, OpenAI, etc. could disappear overnight and I think most people would say good riddance (apart from those needing jobs).
I do not think that. I mistakenly responded to myself -- so you're responding to my own echo. :)
My personal thoughts on the matter are: we should burn this society to the ground and begin anew. Life will grow from the ashes of the Capitalists.
Yeah, there is a famous book on that called "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber
I think Elon noticed it.
I think Elon pretended to notice it. Instead of taking his time and doing it right, he was performative in his own actions causing unnecessary problems. In doing so got rid of the important pieces as well as the bloat.
It is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?
Why does everyone focus on this aspect? Why is this surprising? Do people think that 100% or even 20% of Twitter employees were SREs? Do you think that most large applications are kept alive by constant manual toil from SREs? (ok, ok some are - but still!)
What's funny is that Twitter SRE used to be horrible and the app probably would have collapsed entirely (rather than the little bit that it did) without hundreds of manual operators, but in the few years leading up to the "acquisition," massively improved to the point that they literally automated themselves out of a job.
Anyway, Twitter had thousands of engineers, salespeople, support people, and so on. They were working on tens of new products in an attempt to find more revenue (everything from clones of every single social media app you can imagine to becoming a sports TV network), and on the other side (Goldbird), selling and supporting ads, the thing that made Twitter money.
The metric to look at isn't uptime, it makes no sense that people keep parading this metric. The metrics are revenue and revenue growth and surprise! by most available metrics, the Elon strategy torpedoed those.
Twitter was, like almost every "web" company in ~2020, a very "fat" company because they were re-investing free ZIRP money in future growth investment. Elon turned it into a KTLO operation, and didn't even manage to succeed at the standard PE style "fat" company slim-down (where you chop growth initiatives and keep the revenue, like everyone else is doing now), because he also chopped the revenue side.
You must have forgotten about how bad Twitter was after the takeover/purge.
December 2022 - https://mashable.com/article/twitter-down-elon-says-works-fi...
February 2023 - https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-outage-elon-musk-cos...
March 2023 - https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64811286
And yet, it's up NOW.
It's obviously hard to say how accurate these numbers[1] are, but it looks like Twitter has doubled their workforce from its lowest following their mass layoffs. It might be stable again now because they hired the workforce required to actually keep it running.
[1] https://www.demandsage.com/twitter-employees/
Is it really that shocking to you? Twitter is a very narrow company compared to Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Apple. The system was already up and running, they probably kept the employees that built or knew the system deeply and fired the others. Apparently it had around 7,500 employees at its peak. To me that seems excessive for something like Twitter.
Because it does not take 7500 employees to keep a website online. It never did and it still doesn't and Twitter is not special in this regard.