Comment by anshulbhide
1 year ago
IMO most engineers completely forget or don't appreciate the importance of optics, especially when working with non-technical founders or management.
1 year ago
IMO most engineers completely forget or don't appreciate the importance of optics, especially when working with non-technical founders or management.
Yes but otoh that might be more of a “I refuse to accept a culture of optics on principle” kinda situation, rather than not understanding it. I liked the post because it’s honest and doesn’t put a value judgment on things, just explains how it works. It’s up to each and everyone to act accordingly, and one of those actions is to not participate in the lunacy that often arises in the higher echelons. Many people are fine keeping their integrity, mostly left alone to code, avoiding social deception games at the expense of not being promoted out of what they fell in love with in the first place. People are just different.
Refusing to accept a culture of optics is tantamount to not understanding optics though. The reality is that if you work on any kind of product, optics do matter - the perception of something working is often just as important as it actually working.
It can't possibly be "just as important" - in some cases, I will accept "almost as important", but any situation where the optics are "it works" and the reality is "it doesn't work" is eventually going to come crashing down on someone's head.
If it doesn't need to work, then it doesn't matter and the optics also don't matter. Of course, it might be more important for your promotion that the optics are correct, no matter what the ground reality is, and the crash could come down on someone else's head instead of yours, but in this scenario someone who is against a culture of optics rather has a point.
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"Appreciate" is a weird word. At least for me (not an English speaker) it has a positive connotation so with that in mind I sure hope nobody appreciates the importance of optics. The concept is dumb but it is important and we have to play the game to achieve anything.
Appreciate has at least three entirely different meanings that I can think of.
1. To be grateful for something.
2. To fully understand something.
3. To increase in value
I’m sure there are more.
I read this as option 2.
Why did you read that as 2 though? Is there a context clue I'm missing or is there some grammar rule I don't know of? Honest question, I'm Polish.
For me there's a huge gap between 1 and 2 so it might cause misunderstandings when used in a sentence. I despise a lot of things I fully understand and if I said I "appreciate" them - sounds weird.
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Correct.
Similar is "enjoy", which is almost always possible but sometimes can be used in a more... detached sense? "Perspectives in nature we rarely enjoy" as seen in The Far Side here, for instance.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/89/b2/2b/89b22b4b18dd3ed630a0...
Optics are not dumb. Corporates are very noisy. It is difficult to extract the signal from the noise if you're not working on a project full-time (as most people are, except for you, the tech lead), and it will definitely not happen by accident. That's why you need to manage optics.
I agree that they are very important but I still call it dumb in a "it's stupid that we have to do this because we suck as a human species" kind of way.
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Weirdly, optics have never mattered at all in small or startup companies. And they manage to do pretty well, ship a lot of product and become large companies.
Maybe the problem isn’t the engineers, but the need for optics…
No organization with more than 1 person is immune from the effects of optics. If you think so, you may be blind to it.
It definitely gets worse as the organisation grows. There isn't much room to hide in a five person company whereas it's hard to be seen in a 5000 person organisation.
In that case it's the optics with the customers that matter.
Which can be more rewarding to satisfy than the optics of just management. But still needs to be managed appropriately.
Nah, I think optics can matter at startups too.
For a lot of the ones that fail, yes.
It's a matter of scale. "Optics" (as a separate concern) don't matter at orgs that are small enough that everyone can see everything (and/or has full trust in the people who do). Visibility and trust don't scale, hence the necessary evil of pageantry
I wear glasses, so I appreciate the importance of optics every day.
What is optics??
It's a term that has been adopted to sound more professional than "keeping up appearances" which is an age-old concept. It is about how things are/will be perceived by others, rather than the truth of the matter.
The emotional perception of the quality of you, the worker, in the eyes of the leadership who pays you. It is distinct from your true value and contributions. It is maximized by you optimizing the visibility of things that boost reputation and minimizing the visibility of embarrassing things.
Perception is reality. (For better or worse.)