Hacker News
points by turpentine 3 days ago | 0 comments
> From my experience, it's definitely drifted away from a bunch of nerds solving problems to something more towards emotional/personal/politics. I recently saw someone cry when a person very kindly asked them to explain a discrepancy. "Back in my day" people would just state facts, point out flaws, and argue a bit, and have fun doing it, for better or worse.

In the last few years, I ended up at a bigtech co through an acquisition, and had been someone who was a go-between for solving issues across teams by having a good understanding of everyone else's codebases, tests, build processes, deployment, infrastructure etc. This papered over the culture of siloed development, refusals to think beyond single services etc. I would submit tests and patches, along with tickets describing the bug, impact statement, fix, test coverage, risk, and make myself on-call or directly supervise deployment, etc.

Attempting to continue that in an org x25 larger was met with people firing off angry emails to executives saying their authority was being undermined and made to look bad, when long standing issues were made trivial and fixed by "someone they had never met before", and wherever they came from can they please go back to. I have no idea what a lot of these people were spending so long doing, their commit history was often full of changes that would make you go think "???". I guess it's lucrative to run out the clock year after year on a 180k package, attending meetings where you argue that things are difficult and lets meet again in 3 months? After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.

[–] locknitpicker 3 days ago
> After becoming highly visible for bringing things to attention, I was offered a package to leave, I assume so they could go back to a culture of top down authority and silence.

If we asked your coworkers to tell us what happened, would they say "he was easy to work with and so generous with their time by fixing issues all over the org"?

Or would they say something completely different?

[–] n0on3 3 days ago
Being “easy to work with” is unfortunately often confused with supporting other people agendas. Rising what’s necessary even if it makes people uncomfortable doesn’t automatically make you an ass, but odds are it will make you one that doesn’t play ball.
[–] locknitpicker 3 days ago
> Being “easy to work with” is unfortunately often confused with supporting other people agendas.

I don't think this is hard or complex. It's an easy question with a simple answer: do you like working with user foo? Whether you answer yes or no, why?

If virtually all your coworkers answer no, and the org feels it's in their interest to kick you out, then what lesson do you take from that?

And let's not forget that someone going around inventing fires to put out that he alone can put out is also something that fits the description of an agenda.

So no, sometimes the world is not our to get you. Sometimes you cause grief to everyone around you, to the point that it's a net benefit to get rid of you.

People need to stop confusing geeks and nerds with being socially awkward and outright sociopaths. Enjoying tinkering with things doesn't require you to be abhorrent or lack any social skills. You're not smart or intelligent if you believe it's a good idea to go around telling others to fix problems they don't have and being obnoxious about it. Being able to fix a bug does not change that.

[–] n0on3 2 days ago
I’m not sure what triggered such an out-of-proportion response, but I get the feeling a personal anecdote is leaking out of it. Nobody mentioned one being abhorrent, obnoxious, awkward or a sociopath, I’m sorry if you experienced some people like that (I mean it, been there) but that was not the parent comment picture (or at least it did not look like that to me). I was just contributing from my experience sometimes one gets labeled “difficult to work with” when honestly trying to do good by the org/team/mission/whatever just because that affects some people individual agenda or their cozy work situation.
[–] gregglain 3 days ago
I actually have seen good coworkers get chopped down because they cared more about the system than others egos. It saddens me when management supports egos more than the product. It shows up years later to the customers.
[–] wallst07 2 days ago
How do you measure 'care'. If it's a tech org, it either works or it doesn't?

You might 'care' to add features nobody asked for? Or 'care' to spend longer than necessary to refactor something that doesn't need it.

[–] restalis 2 days ago
In this context, first and foremost, it's "care" in the sense of maintainability. When the projects get big and weighty, it doesn't get harder to find fast solutions for implementing individual requirements or getting something fixed locally. What's hard and slows down the development is the need to find solutions that won't leave the project worse off in the long run.
[–] gregglain 2 days ago
This and yes also excessive refactor (I'm guilty).

One case I recall was an SRE that was quite intelligent asking smart questions and management took it as insubordination. The thing is he was fighting against shipping crap that later would ruin oncall.

Another time a coworker solved a big problem, saving time. But because management was not too involved, she got a pip.

One would assume making the system more reliable would get rewarded, in some contexts this is true. Others, it has to be blessed otherwise it can cut against.

[–] wallst07 1 day ago
I understand this and agree, but how do you measure it objectively.

Usually it's one outspoken engineer with lots of experience and anecdotes but not a link between cause/effect.. just a lot of war stories and slowing others down.

[–] locknitpicker 2 days ago
> I actually have seen good coworkers get chopped down because they cared more about the system than others egos.

What does this even mean? This sounds like an euphemism for someone being a jerk just because they wanted to unilaterally push changes to the code.

> It saddens me when management supports egos more than the product. It shows up years later to the customers.

Management are hired to support the people that maintain the product, and help them work together. If a developer fails to work together with coworkers, it's the manager's job to either help that developer right their wrongs, or support other developers by getting rid of the problematic one.

[–] turpentine 3 days ago
I had plenty of backing under the original org to operate that way, but acquisition restructuring often means managers at multiple levels exiting. When I was put on garden leave pending payout, several of my colleagues reached out distressed asking if they should be threatening to quit to force a reversal of the decision, or start looking for other work out of dissatisfaction, and others offered to provide references. I of course thanked them, but said they should look after their own interests as nothing was likely to change.
[–] mike_hearn 3 days ago
They would say something completely different and be wrong, most likely.

If you've seen it you've seen it. If you haven't, it'll be tempting to interpret this as some kind of garbled or one sided story.