On some level this is just a technicality. When people talk about politics they almost always talk about bad politics because good politics doesn’t feel like politics. It just feels like things are working correctly.
It is a technicality, but an important one IMO, because using bad terminology causes unnecessary confusion. I would definitely say that most of what the article describes as "good politics" is not politics at all, but more like just the soft skills part of a normal engineering job.
Compared to the money that tech companies make, way underpriced.
The reason that companies pay engineers more than in other industries/countries, is that in general companies in other industries/countries don’t make nearly as much as SV companies.
The implicit contract goes as follows: You pay ~50,000 engineers around $400,000/year, and you essentially get a money printer and get to be one of the richest people in the world. Who wouldn’t take that trade?
In general, you can’t do that in any other country or industry.
Big tech doesn’t generally make money by selling software.
They make money through monopoly effects on their social networks and ad platforms. They need some devs to build/maintain that platform of course, but devs are not as core to their business as they think they are. The monopoly status is the money printer.
Of course, but how do you become a monopoly? By selling your software, often implicitly through eyeballs and clicks. I disagree that devs aren’t important to this process. You want to make your software as ridiculously low- friction as possible. If making your software 10% faster/smoother/better is going to result in more users, you should be willing to throw as much money (within reason) at that problem as it takes until you have strong network effects.
Once you have a monopoly it becomes less necessary to do anything, which is maybe where we find ourselves today.
Big Tech companies make money by extracting value from other parts of economy. Not only developers are normally not the ones creating that value, they are also not the only part of the mechanism that extracts it - sales, marketing and legal are at least as important
I strongly disagree. Big tech got to be big because they made better products than their competitors, at least initially. I don’t think google/Facebook even used to run ads in the early days.
I don’t think AI slop is inherently mandatory, but I worry that the narrative around AI will devalue engineering work enough that it becomes impossible to avoid.
I wasn’t mentioning fiber internet as a reason people couldn’t afford a house. I mentioned it as a recent example I personally ran into, where keeping up with the Joneses was explicitly given to me as a selling point, and I found it ridiculous. If people are worried about this on something as trivial as internet speed, it’s going to carry through to where they live, the car they drive, the clothes they wear, etc.
"You think the kids today can’t afford houses and families because they’re buying too much fiber internet.. and bragging about it?"
Small things add up. When you buy the latest phone, best Internet connection, booze, weed, latest video game, and online subscriptions, You certainly can't save for a house. Many of the younger generation are really in an extended state of childhood.
I'm not even close to a boomer, and sacrificed all of these things to save for a house/my future. While I was doing this, friends I knew had the latest phone, went partying every weekend, and spent money on their hobbies.
Guess who can't afford a house now?
"You just sound horribly out of touch and given your anecdotes don’t know what poverty or hardship was back in the day or is today."
I’ve been thinking a lot about how the software we write tends to reflect our beliefs about the world. For example one of the best developers I’ve worked with had this unshakable belief that software could solve a lot of the worlds little problems. He was constantly coming up with these little programs that would solve some nit that he had in his day to day life.
I think a lot of people have lost faith that technology can improve the things that they care about. Even open source doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in preventing, well anything bad in the last few years.
If we want to have a better dev culture there has to be a reason for people to believe that the software they make is actually going to improve people’s lives and not just accelerate the profits of multi billion dollar corporations.
I think you’re just arguing for nepotism in a roundabout way.
My senior staff engineer can’t code at all. He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager. You might say “well that’s nepotism then since he’s under qualified”, but I’m sure he would make the argument that he got the job because of his “stellar reputation and extensive network”.
It’s an abhorrent situation to be in. Everyone knows he can’t code but because he got hired at such a senior level he’s making high level decisions that make no sense. Give me a qualified rando any time of the day.
I agree, some of the worst employees I've seen were hired that way.
I haven't hired anyone recently but btwn 10-20 years ago I did hire a lot. Of course we reached out via our network of connections but that gets tapped out fast, so you have to rely on job postings. It was always hundreds of applicants per opening. Back then it wasn't 1000's but it might as well have been because I didn't have enough time to sift through them all. That's ok, you can just approach it like "the dowry problem" (also known as the secretary problem [1]).
But the job market and hiring is way worse now, and it's pretty horrible for job seekers atm.
This situation is very weird to me. In my experience, referrals got your foot in the door, but you still always had to pass the same hiring screen/interview process as everyone else.
I recommended an engineer once who I thought was great - he was a total "get shit done" kind of guy. But he did poorly in the interviews (I won't say they were leetcode-type problems, but you did have to have some algorithmic skills - I warned him beforehand to brush up on some of those types of programs.) As much as I liked the working with the guy, we couldn't hire him because he was a pretty solid "no" from the other interviewers.
I've never worked in a company that hired people based on the referral of one person, and honestly that sounds like a pretty f'd up company.
Yes we have the same interview process. This is something that no one knows about as I don’t know who interviewed him but my cynical guess is that if someone has enough power in the org and happens to sit on the hiring committee, it doesn’t really matter how well they do.
In another much better incident, we once hired someone that did poorly in some interviews because I happened to present a project they made the week before. He turned out great, and he was doing some really cool stuff, just didn’t do coding interviews well.
I think you're projecting your negative past experiences and trying very hard not to understand the GP's point.
It doesn't matter what the person hired thinks. The important part is whether those making hiring decisions are hiring people with "stellar reputation".
In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation. If we apply this scenario to what the GP said, no company would have hired a person where "everyone knows he can't code".
You said "He got hired because he was friends with our engineering manager." That's nepotism.
GP says hire somebody with stellar reputation. That's a totally different situation.
I understand just fine. There is no objective descriptor of a person. The engineering manager probably thinks he’s a perfect candidate.
> In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation
Yes that’s what we figured out after he got hired. He obviously didn’t have a reputation within our org before he got hired. All we had to go off was the engineering managers opinion.
Are you guys really shocked that given the freedom to, people would rather hire their friends and people they know would do them favours rather than the “objectively best candidate for the job”?
By overweighting network and reputation all you are doing is turning every career into a political game.
> > In your case, "everyone knows he can't code", so he doesn't have stellar reputation
> Yes that’s what we figured out after he got hired. He obviously didn’t have a reputation within our org before he got hired. All we had to go off was the engineering managers opinion.
Right, *he doesn't have stellar reputation*, and he got hired. The comment you replied to said "hire people with stellar reputation". I'm still not sure what you're missing here or why you think this is an applicable scenario.
> Are you guys really shocked that given the freedom to, people would rather hire their friends and people they know would do them favours rather than the “objectively best candidate for the job”?
I wouldn't be shocked, but I also don't think that what the "GP" advocated for. You might say this would lead to people using it as an excuse for nepotism, but if the engineering manager is the kind of person who has poor or malicious judgment and can't make a correct hiring decision by himself, then you're cooked no matter what.
