Comment by Sevii
3 days ago
For how much power they have over team organization and processes, software middle management has nearly no accountability for outcomes.
3 days ago
For how much power they have over team organization and processes, software middle management has nearly no accountability for outcomes.
Is it middle management that has no accountability, or executive? Middle and line managers are nearly as targeted by layoff culling as ICs these days in FAANG. The broad processes they're passing down to ICs generally start with someone at director level or higher.
In my experience it is the constant shifting of goal posts due to execs chasing the next shiny thing, or demanding a feature that they saw somewhere, or heard from client (singular, not plural)
I've seen plenty of incredible engineers let go because of "performance issues" that were just poor project management and goal posts that moved so fast waymo should study them to improve their self-driving capabilities.
Shit rolls downhill and there's a lot more fuss when an engineer calls out risks, piss-poor planning, etc. than any actual introspection on why the risks weren't caught sooner or why the planning was piss-poor.
> For how much power they have over team organization and processes, software middle management has nearly no accountability for outcomes.
Can we also address the fact that “software spend” is distributed disproportionately to management at all levels and people who actually write the software are nickel and dimed. You’d save billions in spend and boost productivity massively if the management is bare bones and is held accountable like the rest of the folks.
that's how the inner sanctum engineering in Apple worked, just like you proposed, at least from 15 years ago to within the last 10 years. i could have been in a very lucky time window to have had that luxury, but it had been an Apple mandate to not have deep hierarchies at least in engineering.
Maybe is because of what Steve Jobs mentioned about talented programmers having more power than CEOs as they can easily switch jobs.
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The real question is why would smart competent people continue working under management with blatant ulterior motives that negatively affect them?
Why let their own credibility get dragged down for a second time, third time, fourth time, etc…?
The first time is understandable but not afterwards.
Astronomical salaries probably has something to do with it.
Yeah that could convince smart competent people to grind their teeth and take a second chance under the same management.
But I don’t think a self respecting person would do that over and over.
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There's a high switching cost with substantial information asymmetry. Good places are hard to find in some absolute sense and it's hard to evaluate whether a new team is actually going to be good or not. And even if you do find a good team, there's no guarantee it'll last past the next reorg.
In today’s market it’s mostly because of the lack of other options to earn a livelihood
serious answer - you find a team with a good direct manager who handles all the upward interactions themselves, and then you basically work for that manager, rather than for the company.
Rent wont pay itself. Switching jobs has costs.
If you think our ability to measure developer productivity is bad, look into what we can do to measure manager productivity.
TL;DR your realistic options are snake oil that doesn’t work, or nothing.
Keep that in mind next time anyone’s talking about managing through metrics & data or whatever bullshit. All that stuff’s kayfabe, companies mostly run on vibes outside a very-few things.