Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

53 points by hnthrow10282910 3 hours ago | 66 comments

The large companies I’ve worked at (including FAANG) seemed to thrive on kudos via performative actions. Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive while the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal.

Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team.

Anyone else notice this? Not sure if there’s a word for it, but it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers

cjbgkagh 2 hours ago |

What you are describing as performative I would describe as bureaucratic.

The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)

sethjgore 3 minutes ago | |

Makes me think of this timeless and excellent quote by Oscar Wilde:

“The bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.”

ryandvm 1 hour ago | |

Yeah, pretty much all systems of governance ultimately evolve until their primary purpose is actually ensuring the survival of the system of governance and anything else it accomplishes is kind of a side effect. It's probably some sort of informational axiom of rules systems in general whether bureaucratic or biological or whatever.

Hell, DNA is just rules about what you can build and it's primary purpose is just making sure the rules survive. All the wonderful complexity and diversity of life is a side effect of the little changes necessary to propagate the rules.

cjbgkagh 1 hour ago | | |

In a way the bureaucracy takes on a life of its own. I think it’s only external pressures that’ll keep the bureaucracy in check, as in if the organization is at risk of dying the interests are aligned so that a more symbiotic relationship is necessary. When organizations are not at risk, either through massive initial success or state intervention (ZIRP) then feedback loop is cut and the bureaucracy will run rampant.

mercutio2 1 hour ago |

The idea that 1:1s with devs adding very little value to the team is… pretty wild.

If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide.

But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?

Aurornis 5 minutes ago | |

1:1s add value to a point, but I’ve worked at one company where the fixation on 1:1s started replacing useful meetings.

Like you’d try to talk to someone about an urgent issue and you’d be told to save it for your upcoming scheduled 1:1 on Thursday because they don’t have any time until then. Why don’t they have any time? Because they have so many 1:1 recurring meetings scheduled each week that they don’t have time for anything else.

1:1s started as a good way to formalize manager to report communication on a predictable schedule. This is good if the team isn’t regularly talking organically. Some company cultures take it too far and turn it into an excuse to make recurring meetings the focus of all work. I was requested to set up 1:1s not only with my team, but with each of the other teams we interfaced with, team leads on those teams, designers, stakeholders, interns, product managers who wanted to interface with us, the security team, and an endless list of other people.

All the managers were just shuffling from one 1:1 to the next. They never had time to deal with issues from the 1:1s because they were so busy moving on to the next 1:1.

The worst were the managers who had silly agendas for every 1:1, like my manager who blocked out the first 10 minutes for us to talk about our weekends with each other in a performative manner, 5 minutes per person. I could be dealing with an urgent issue in prod and he’d get angry if I tried to rush past the forced chit chat about our weekend to get back to business.

If you haven’t seen calendars stuffed to the gills with performative 1:1s then this is all probably hard to believe, but it happens. Some companies got so fat with middle management that performative meeting rituals were the primary use of everyone’s time and you would be chastised if you tried to break the mold.

DanHulton 1 hour ago | |

Yeah, honestly, as one of those managers with calendars full of 1:1s, I was kinda surprised at this. They’re frequently the most-useful meetings I have all week.

The first ten minutes are usually kinda whatever, just catching up or chatting, but at around the halfway point, the REAL shit comes out. The things that were bothering them, or the task they were stuck on, or the team that’s been blocking them, or in better weeks, the ideas that have been really exciting them, or the people they’ve really been enjoying working with, or the tools they’ve been having success with, that kind of thing.

All of that stuff is INSANELY actionable for me. Sure, I can do project-steering work until the cows come home, but all these “little things” I find out in 1:1s that let me reduce friction or create opportunities, that’s gold.

JohnMakin 7 minutes ago | | |

Why does this have to take place in a meeting? Why can't it be in a team slack? What value gain do you give talking an engineer through what's bothering them? Are they not capable of that independently of you?

A middleman's value is quite limited, of course as a middleman, you don't see it that way, but I find these meetings extraordinarily unproductive, even anti-productive, depending on how bad the "manager" is.

eudamoniac 1 hour ago | |

Funny how high performing startups delivering real value don't have these meetings and they sort of appear out of the ether after the 1000th employee is hired.

ewidar 1 hour ago | | |

In startups with less than 50 people (and I am being generous on the number), everyone talks to everyone all the time, so there is no need for these moments to extract key info to fix/improve situations, identify topics to push, ...

But once the company is just large enough, there is no way you're going to interact with everyone in a meaningful manner (n^2 relationships and all that), and the simplest solution is intermediaries and 1-1s.

[also, being sarcastic is unhelpful.]

cadamsdotcom 42 minutes ago |

Sounds like you think there’s people that shouldn’t be needed? Are they on their way to a layoff or is the company happily holding on to them?

If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.

Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.

Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.

There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail...

Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.

quadrifoliate 2 hours ago |

> Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive

This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent.

I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.

wqaatwt 2 hours ago | |

It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.

analog31 1 hour ago | |

Indeed, and the third party may be someone who thinks the entire SWE department is useless. Most people have an equivalent understanding of what SWEs and high level managers actually do all day.

Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.

prepend 2 hours ago |

It’s hard to tell. I’ve worked on projects with 50 programmers and it seemed many did nothing and a few did negative work.

We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved.

He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done.

I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative.

That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.”

I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.

slibhb 2 hours ago |

Where I work, I don't get a sense that we "thrive on kudos via performative actions" but I would say that ~15% of the employees are doing ~80% of the work.

This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

loneboat 1 hour ago | |

Round your "~15%" up to 20%, and you've just discovered the Pareto Princlple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle, aka "The 80/20 rule".

creshal 1 hour ago | |

> as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

Are the 15% getting 80% of the compensation, though?

slibhb 1 hour ago | | |

No, but would you want this? People who contribute more should be paid more, but mapping compensation to contribution exactly isn't easy and comes with downsides.

Schlagbohrer 1 hour ago | | |

If that one person is the CEO or owner then yes, haha.

4lx87 1 hour ago | | |

No, those are the shareholders who don’t produce anything.

elric 2 hours ago |

> Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team.

Depending on the manager and on the team, 1:1s with people can be very valuable for all involved.

swiftcoder 2 hours ago |

That's pretty much how all sufficiently large corporations run. At some point, the number of jobs that exist purely to justify other jobs is larger than the number of people actually contributing to the bottom line. And the amount of paper-shuffling caused by the self-fulfilling jobs eclipses all other work being done.

Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.

analog31 1 hour ago | |

This may be an example of a counting problem reinforcing a moral panic. A shrinking fraction (now well under half) of college teaching is done by professors. Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff. Thus the professor-to-staff ratio is not a good metric of teaching activity.

I live near a major university, and a lot of my friends and relatives are academics, including adminstrators. I was an adjunct teacher for a semester, long ago.

swiftcoder 1 hour ago | | |

> Most of it is done by temporary adjuncts, who are counted as staff

This was not the case in my time/place - our adjuncts were all counted under the professors bucket, not admin. Grad students teaching classes (as I was at the time), were not counted in either bucket.

FinnLobsien 1 hour ago |

I think this dynamic is not specific to SWE and as old as time. As organizations grow, so does the aspect of work that's more "seeing and being seen", and rightfully so.

There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy.

But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged.

That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business.

But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists.

But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.

Schlagbohrer 1 hour ago |

The dynamic I saw at a FAANG-adjacent company when I worked there was wild between the contractors and FTEs. If an FTE could get one or two contractors reporting to them, they'd hand over all the work, put their feet up and take it easy, make fun of the contractors, and then if there were any good results jump in to take credit for those at meetings with upper management which the contractors were not invited to.

So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.

dormento 2 hours ago |

> Anyone else notice this?

This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc.

Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.

itsalwaysgood 2 hours ago |

There is always some form of social loafing going on in any large group of people doing work.

"The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases."

There is evidence of this in simple tug of war games.

But I think there is also truth in realizing work is mostly performative: the pareto principle seems to apply. 20% of the workforce sustains the other 80%. That's purely anecdotal, I doubt the numbers align that way. But it does always seem there are a few all-stars carrying others.

strken 1 hour ago |

The one time I worked at a large corporate, my time was split between failing to find useful projects that I was allowed to work on, and failing to deliver much on the useless projects I was given because I didn't understand that it would e.g. take six weeks and two review meetings to provision an extra half a terabyte of storage on a db cluster.

I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.

phyzix5761 2 hours ago |

Price's Law says that the square root of the total number of items or participants contributes to at least half of the results[0].

I've found this to be true in almost everything in life, including work and business.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law

polotics 1 hour ago |

Jeff Bezos covered these grounds well here already, with his mandate on how meetings must run, and about "day one". Check him out.

So sad that with the right incentive structure his work would be of immense value to society, instead of his current Wall-E prologue side quest.

moffers 2 hours ago |

I don’t know that this is something specific to workplaces. I think anywhere you have a hierarchy and incentives you’ll see people perform to those incentives. But, I am not a behavioral psychologist, so maybe there is something special to “corporations”. It could be that corporations have a lot more incentive to perform for.

ismailmaj 2 hours ago |

In my experience a lot of companies try really hard to be data oriented and try to find objective metrics for impact, sometimes it’s good, often it’s bad. Like LOC count, PR count, time in meetings or time spent at the office.

Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.

doctorpangloss 2 hours ago | |

on the flip side, try to get an open source maintainer to define what the criteria are for merging a pull request, or what a bug report needs in order to be fixed. they all say one thing and it is always another. it feels like pulling your hair out.

fasterik 1 hour ago |

This is one of the main reasons why I left the corporate software world. I love programming too much to spend my life climbing that ladder. I'm fortunate enough not to have to work right now, but if I ever go back to an organization I'm going to be very picky about finding one where the leaders are themselves technical contributors and they hold the team to a high standard.

adithyaharish 1 hour ago |

> Anyone else notice this? This is not just the big MNCs but this is happening throughout all organisation irrespecitive of SWE or not. I know its really heartbreaking and there is still not a KPI to measure productivity/performance in a right way? Did anybody come across any intressting KPI they were measured against?

Cheese48923846 2 hours ago |

Yes, everyone in the know knows it. That flaw is the edge start ups have. Fat, red tape, and bureaucracy is cut.

Replaced with a new set of problems of course. Like no money. And if the startup is successful it will eventually morph into a big fat corporate culture. The circle of life.

rvrs 2 hours ago |

Work is performance art

melozo 2 hours ago |

I worked at Amazon and I do think that more than anything we were overhired with little meaningful work. A lot of compliance goal chasing. Not that it’s performative to the top brass, but the work was very little and not usually very technical.

Schlagbohrer 1 hour ago |

All corporate jobs are performative, in the sense that there are many useless rituals one has to observe merely for appearances' sake and not because it benefits the company or accomplishes the work.

jameskilton 2 hours ago |

After a certain size, one of my favorite Civilization quotes kicks in:

"The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.

sethjgore 38 seconds ago | |

ironically i posted the exact same quote before seeing your post. I've found that whatever work that can be counted as meaningful often also signifies a certain amount of agency that does not exist in a larger bureaucratic system.

cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago | |

Agreed, but the small-company-doing-meaningful-work is also hard to find though.

Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders.

CalRobert 2 hours ago |

"including FAANG"

What would make them less vulnerable to this?

moralestapia 1 hour ago | |

I'd say they have people who have been doing software for as long as 30 years, and also all the human resources and billions of dollars to fix this problem if it was something that could be fixed with human resources and money.

And still ... there's a lot of this.

zug_zug 1 hour ago |

I've noticed this for big companies, and I've noticed it for large startups that hired people who came from big companies.

At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.

</rant>

IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.

ipnon 2 hours ago |

A company is like a bridge. The job of a bridge is to support the weight of what crosses it. But if a particular deck or arch or beam or joint or bearing fails to do its own job, the bridge can fail and will catastrophically. Perhaps some beams hold more weights than others, but can any bridge be composed entirely of decks or entirely of arches or entirely of beams? Perhaps, but we do not see many of them. It is always possible to innovate in the design of bridges, but if most of the great bridges in the world all have a mix of decks and arches and beams and joints and bearings, instead of simply being composed of solely beams or solely joints, then we might begin to wonder if this composition is not accidental to the proper functioning of a great bridge, but essential to it, even if we are not particularly interested in or proficient in the Art of Being Another Part of the Whole.

techdmn 2 hours ago |

Another way of thinking about this, is by thinking about who defines what is productive or what produces value. I tend to be a little old fashioned, I think that doing the right thing for customers produces value. (That's what my self-worth is based on anyway.) For other people, it's doing the thing that gets them the next raise or promotion.

Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?

sublinear 1 hour ago |

After some more experience at various types of workplaces, you'll discover that this hyperfocus on "productivity" is a mind virus trying to destroy all stability and long term value.

Trying to be a rockstar every day is the fastest way to burning out and making bad decisions. It ensures that you will be left holding the bag. How is that not more performative, if it's in the name?

OutOfHere 2 hours ago |

There is something to be said for having your own startup and keeping it lean, implying that everyone on the payroll must be a cofounder. It's a prerequisite for but not a guarantee of staying mission focused.

Henchman21 26 minutes ago |

You are so naive you don’t get it yet?

All of “adult” life is performative . Life is a game, a performance, a little play you put on for the benefit of all.

Consider this: if management thinks something is impressive, well that makes it impressive. Managers, by definition, manage people, and having 1:1 meetings helps with that. Are you supposing managers also make the same exact effort and contribution as ICs? Would they still be managers?

Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?

Henchman21 24 minutes ago | |

To add:

This entire post rubs me so wrong. It just feels so naive, so foolish. I feel I’ve been baited into anger.

jgbuddy 2 hours ago |

Yes

cmrdporcupine 2 hours ago |

This was my experience mostly in my 10 years at Google at a certain level.

But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it.

Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cautious development cycle where multiple levels of review covered everything. OWNERS, "readability", very uptight code review. And in order to survive in this environment you had to have a pile of code reviews all running concurrently because making progress on any single one could take days and days to get through review.

But that was kind of the point because pushing the wrong thing and breaking the money printing machine is far worse than moving slow.

But IMHO this didn't scale past 30k, 40k engineers. And inside Google, the culture shifted from one that was SWE/SRE driven to one that was PM driven. And the perf/promo culture for them had really perverse incentives.

Also I have a theory about Google in particular -- its founders and all its initial strong hires all came from academia not industry. And so its internal culture became biased towards a "publish or perish" structure, and "perf" performance reviews honestly looked more like a thesis defense committee for someone's masters/PHD than anything I'd encountered in the software industry before.

Schlagbohrer 1 hour ago | |

What did you see as the perverse incentives for the PMs there? Schedule optimization like cutting out testing? Cost cutting by under-hiring?

cmrdporcupine 1 hour ago | | |

My perspective is that promotion especially for PMs (and SWEs to some extent) involves pushing novelty / "demonstrating impact".

IMHO this in large part responsible for Google's ADHD around project cancellations/replacements.

Not restricted to PMs but it is especially pernicious when product direction gets pushed this way.

Cost cutting and underhiring were never a problem while I Was there. More the opposite. They overhired and then there was no good throughput on projects because every chef was in the kitchen at once.

If I recall, the turndown on e.g. Google Reader was more about finding it difficult to get SWEs who wanted to work on it. I think it would have been increasingly difficult to survive the performance review cycle if you were stuck on a "backwater" project like that.

myth_drannon 2 hours ago |

Yeah, there is a famous book on that called "Bullshit Jobs: A Theory" by David Graeber

dboreham 2 hours ago |

I think Elon noticed it.

Jeremy1026 2 hours ago | |

I think Elon pretended to notice it. Instead of taking his time and doing it right, he was performative in his own actions causing unnecessary problems. In doing so got rid of the important pieces as well as the bloat.

Schlagbohrer 1 hour ago | | |

It is actually shocking that twitter is still standing after his severe headcount cuts. I have not yet read an analysis of that. How was the system able to keep going with almost no downtime after such severe layoffs?