points by voncheese 3 days ago | 0 comments
I'm old enough to have experience in alot of great office environments (and some terrible ones too), the good for sure outweighs the bad!
Your comment about Amazon sucking resonated as I recently talked with them about a job, but walked away being super disinterested. I do not think this is an Amazon problem (fwiw, I worked at Microsoft for a super long time), I think it's a "problem" with the massive success of technology in the world.
Back in the day of NeXT, Be and early Apple, it was alot about building something cool and fun and a less about the huge money that could/would be made. Now the whole world relies on technology and there is so much money that the environment of a tech company is alot more about the business than it is the technology.
I personally don't think thats necessarily a bad thing, it's just evolution of the technology business.
[–] hylaride 3 days ago
[–] andrekandre 2 days ago
> work tracking styles (agile, KPIs, etc)
I think this is how best to sum it up. We (tech workers) had agency back in the day as we were on the vanguard of something new and there were no best practices in how to manage us. These companies were run by and for tech workers. Today, you'd have all sorts of "stakeholders" telling us what to do. Product managers, various management and/or work tracking styles (agile, KPIs, etc), and top-down oversight.
At my previous job, I was literally dressed down for doing work on the side to resolve some technical debt that was hindering other work because it wasn't properly pointed. Didn't matter that I did it on my own time - showing initiative beyond the current story board was a no-no. How is one supposed to be happy in such an environment?