> Don’t show me the random code you built that makes a users like history load 500 milliseconds faster, talk to me about how to make the product better/more engaging/monetized!
Honestly, if I were the CEO, I would ask for the former if I were looking for the good programmers to keep since these are the things that make the technological base of the company run.
The answer is of course likely different if I were looking for the managers to keep ...
I mean, again, $44bn is on the line here and 'well functioning app' is not why things are worth that much (what share of YC's value is Hacker News for example?).
Companies release financial statements for a reason.
First: there is of course an incentive not to admit this.
Second: I do believe that many people on HN really deeply care about technology/hacking topics and have detest for office politics. On the other hand, the people that the article discuss are good at office politics/marketing themselves and often don't have such a deep knowledge about programming. Thus, I would indeed assume that the typical HN reader/writer less likely fits into the "highly overrated people" pattern of the article.
> Second: I do believe that many people on HN really deeply care about technology/hacking topics and have detest for office politics.
I think it's more accurate to say that they have a detest for dealing with people in ways that require persuasion, or more generally situations without an "objective" right answer.
You want to do A, someone else wants to do B, you can't do both, you both think you're right, boom, "politics."
A lot of the time, the person who takes this stance tend to forget that execution matters more than the idea being objectively correct. Good "politics" is about persuading the actual people who have to own and execute that idea. There are bad situations where you find yourself opposite people who add little value that is obvious and yet demand they be persuaded or else they will stand the way of your idea. When the emotional burden of fighting such battles crosses a certain threshold you feel burn-out and give up. This threshold is high for people who can do office politics well and it is low for most self-described techies. This does not mean that latter kind of people don't create the same emotional stress for others through their own political schemings (yes, even without knowing consciously, we are all political animals in our own ways – we wield what powers we have to attain our agenda, in however good or bad ways we do it).
There are so many interactions at work outside of politics, which I would define as the advancement of your personal agenda before that of the organization and of anybody else.
I have such rich interactions with my colleagues. Sometimes we work together on a project. Sometimes it's purely social, like the first few minutes of a meeting with someone I haven't talked to in a long time. Sometimes they need my support or I need theirs. And sometimes (rarely) it's about having an uncomfortable conversation because something didn't go well. But none of these is about politics. I love where I work, in big parts because of the lack of politics.
It can turn into office politics fast. Maybe you say the wrong thing and now you and your coworker have an awkward tension.
IMO it's almost never worth trying to make friends with your coworkers. Be nice, be helpful, and do a good job but keep your friends and work life separate.
In my experience most close friends vent about their jobs to each other. Something that I very rarely feel comfortable doing with coworkers. I think I've met about 2 coworkers in my whole career who I felt that level of comfort with.
Where is the line for you? Is a meeting with a sales team “office politics”? What about a meeting with software developers?
The problem is that there’s no reasonable definition of “office politics” that frames it as a positive thing. You’re approaching every interaction negatively as something you can win/lose.
> Yes because if you look at it objectively those people tend to be lying, manipulative people with big fake smiles on their faces.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. There’s nothing objective about what you’re saying here. You just paint a huge group of people with a very broad (and very negative) brush.
If that’s what helps you feel superior to other people, I guess there’s not much I can do about it. But I’d encourage you to reexamine how you see the real people around you.
You misunderstood what I was saying. What I meant was that lying and manipulating are generally considered objectively bad by most people. However, that behavior is considered normal in corporate cultures. It's even part of the job if you're in marketing or sales!
And no, I won't stop judging large groups of people who's jobs are built on deception. And I won't stop judging people who are naturally drawn to those jobs. I've had enough of this whole system and I'm done apologizing for saying negative things just because these behaviors and jobs are normal.
Sexualizing products. Creating cute jokes during the super bowl. Implying that if you buy this product, you'll improve your social status.
Am I expected to believe that these things are about communicating value? I'm sorry but that's a steaming pile of BS.
Using power tactics with your customers during sales calls. Creating a sense of urgency. Bending the truth to make your product appear more favorable in general and vs competitors products.
Am I expected to believe that these things are about communicating value? I'm sorry but that's a steaming pile of BS.
This is a false equivalency. Most software engineers aren't working on weapons, but most sales and marketing people engage in deception and other amoral practices.
Not to mention that software engineers literally build the products. Sales and marketing's job is to shove it down people's throats.
To the contrary, I think paulcole made a great point. It doesn’t need to be weapons. A programmer who makes a social media feed more addictive isn’t necessarily moral. But a salesperson/marketer can promote something generally seen as good, or at least far more good than the example programmer.
Ad campaigns can remind people to vote, encourage people to quit smoking, or convince people to avoid drunken driving. A marketer is behind for the design and distribution of these public advocacy campaigns.
No it's not a great point. It's a point made to distract from the real issue. It's a debate tactic.
If you read the conversation carefully I'm trying to discuss the fundamental nature of the professions, not the specific products they are building or selling. That was something paulcole brought up.
The fundamental nature of sales and marketing is manipulating people for personal gain. You could be selling hugs or whatever warm and fuzzy product you can imagine, but at the end of the day the sales person's job is to be the best people manipulator they can be.
And I've seen it countless times through my career. I've met many sales people, I've sat in on sales calls, and I've heard them discussing their trade. It's honestly disgusting.
On the other hand, the fundamental nature of engineering is building things. It's bringing something new into the world. It couldn't be more different from sales and marketing.
It sounds like this is a difference in personal values. You can certainly assess the morality of one’s work based on its methods, but it’s also valid to assess the morality based on outcomes.
On outcomes: You framed building things and creating new things as inherently good, but entire fields of the philosophy of science question whether technological progress is inherently good. Is AI-generated art necessarily good if it causes artists to lose jobs? Are ad trackers necessarily good if it increases engagement at the loss of privacy? Are hackers/crackers seen as more noble than salespeople, as they create new exploits that make hospitals pay ransom, and expose people’s information? If a new chemical weapon or bioweapon is created, are its developers inherently noble for creating something new? Even Einstein expressed deep regret for his role in developing the atomic bomb (and Feynman went into a depression) after its usage.
On methods: most methods start as morally neutral. A person training to be a soldier may or may not end up doing immoral things, depending on what they do in their career. Research scientists may or may not do moral things (though nowadays most abide by research ethics, in the past and likely the present, many studies have caused far more suffering than their benefits). Lawyers can go on to defend fundamental rights, or end up filing frivolous lawsuits or chasing ambulances. Developers can create something genuinely useful, or cause people to lose jobs or get killed due to bugs.
To be charitable to your point: yes, I intuitively have a deep sense of respect for the discipline required to become a good software developer and create something new. But it’s completely separate from a moral respect and moral judgement: I have to know what that developer is actually creating, and how that will impact real people.
You can use the utilitarian argument to justify anything. According to your logic hugging people isn't good or bad because technically you can hug someone to death. Engineering is a form of human expression and human expression is generally good, even if it can be used for evil.
A sick society corrupts good things and incentivizes bad things. Yeah sure, a sales person can sell hugs and use their money to donate to charity but that doesn't change the fact that their job exists because our society creates perverse incentives and I definitely judge people who are naturally drawn to these positions.
Most people would be happy if sales people were no longer needed in society. They are a necessary evil.
I think the soldier comparison is interesting. At least with soldiers there is plausible deniability because being a soldier doesn't automatically mean murder. It's not like soldiers have a daily murder quota. However, the same isn't true for sales. Sales people have sales quotas. Their entire job is shoving products down peoples throats.
They are also the reason why you have a job. Without sales you have nothing. Without marketing you don't know what to build. Building stuff that no one wants is useless.
Understanding politics that way is common and understandable. It's also an unfortunate cultural construction of the term, because this understanding is deeply incorrect.
Politics is what happens when people disagree about what should be done, or how it should be done. That's it. That's what politics is.
There are principled and corrupt reasons for disagreement. There are forthright and deceptive/manipulative means of engaging disagreement. All of that is politics.
When someone is advocating for a better PTO policy either because they personally would like something more advantageous for themselves or because they think it'll boost morale and productivity, that's politics.
When someone manages their office relationships to increase their chances or being hired into a higher management position either because they personally would like to advance their career or because they think they can help the business run more effectively, that's politics.
When someone attempts to spoil management on tech stack X and talk up tech stack Y, that's politics whether it's because they know both well and are sure which will suit the business & problem domain better, or because their personal expertise is more with Y than X and it'll increase their value to the organization without further investment.
The problem with assuming "politics" refers to inherently underhanded activity is that it shirks the work of engaging disagreement productively and instead pathologizes disagreement in one way or another -- usually by either pathologizing an opposing position or class of people.
Good faith disagreements are not politics, they're negotiation.
Politics is when one person/group tries to sabotage/undermine another person/group out of self-interest, even though it harms the project and reduces value.
Their self-interest becomes their top goal.
My personal take is that there are two extremes of culture. One is dedicated to engineering and management excellence. Everyone contributes. Even if there's vigorous disagreement the engine runs smoothly and Things Get Done.
The other is a snake pit of back stabbing, drama, competitive ambition, and narcissism which spreads from the c-suite down. Things still get done, sometimes, but they're poor quality - or at least much poorer than they could be. If they make it to market they'll be overhyped and oversold. (Contempt for customers and employees alike is a good tell-tale.)
No org is 100% one or the other, but those are the competing tendencies, and - of course - they're very different to work in.
Negotiation is a form of politics, not a separate thing from politics. Good faith negotiation is a principled and often relatively productive form of politics, but it remains politics nonetheless.
> out of self-interest
It's important to note that politics is as frequently driven by values as interests. This is true both in the office and in nation-states. And given that differing values often produce differing visions of excellence, a commitment to excellence doesn't spare people from the efforts/rigors of politics.
A lot of decent management books indicate politics are natural and your job as manager is to manage them. Pretending they don't exist or can be done away with is unrealistic and counter productive.
Politics in this sense is kinda negative but not really - acknowledgment that different people and groups may reasonably or unreasonably have different priorities, goals, perspectives, preferences, methodologies. I've spent most of my life under the Delusion of "reasonable people will agree if we just sit down and talk", but I no longer think that's the case (not the least because otherwise eventually you have to label everybody but yourself "unreasonable" :).
As techies often we want full, comprehensive, correct unmutable requirements, full understanding for all issues encountered, and flexibility of schedule to reach out architectural and technical goals and standards, and everything else is "office politics".
Difference exists.
Politics is trying to reconcile different perspectives priorities methods and goals. Hidden motives and deception are not necessary part of it.
>
Although some kernel driver developers have testing clusters with real hardware (like GPU drivers devs), there is no effin way Linux could be effectively tested without someone paying a lot of money to set up real hardware and people to keep it running.
Just crowdsource this testing: I am sure that there exist some people who own the piece of hardware and are willing to run a test script, say, every
* night
* week
* new testing version of the kernel
(depending on your level of passion for the hardware and/or Linux). I do believe that there do exist a lot of people who would join such a crowdsourcing effort if the necessary infrastructure existed (i.e. it is very easy to run and submit the results).
I think you are vastly overestimating the willingness and capability of volunteers and underestimating the effort needed to coordinate such an effort.
And having any kind of manual intervention required will almost certainly reduce the reliability of the testing.
This is further complicated by the need to reboot with a different kernel image. Qemu and virtual machines can't do all kinds of hw testing needed.
And in fact, the kernel is already tested like this. Just very irregularly and sporadically. The end users will do the field testing and it is surprisingly effective in finding bugs.
> I think you are vastly overestimating the willingness and capability of volunteers and underestimating the effort needed to coordinate such an effort.
> And having any kind of manual intervention required will almost certainly reduce the reliability of the testing.
Perhaps I am underestimating the necessary effort, but the willingness and capability problem can in my opinion be solved by sufficiently streamlining and documenting the processes of running the test procedure.
If the testing procedure cannot be successfully run by a "somewhat experienced Linux nerd", this should be considered a usability bug of the testing procedure (and thus be fixed).
The NixOS community would be perfect for this, since "nothing" (i wouldn't wanna do experimental filesystems) can break my system, I just atomicly roll back to my previous generation and report it broken :)
> Enough people say it wrong it eventually becomes right. There's nothing definitive about language except for usage...
This is a view that is common among English speakers. Among many German native speakers it is instead common to love to analyze words and tell why some word is wrong even if it is actually in common use sometimes for decades.
> Amazon is unusable at this point, and I don’t get how they have so many customers.
At least in Germany, using Amazon is often the easiest way to buy copies of foreign-language (often, but not always English) textbooks about scientific topics.
> This happens in other markets just fine, one that springs to mind is oscilloscopes. Often you will find that a the hardware in one model is the same as the hardware in scopes in the same "family", what differs is software / locks set.
There exist quite some makers who solve this "oscilloscope tiering" by installing a hacked or alternative open source firmware on the oscilloscope.
My personal fav (while not a scope) is the Flir hacking years ago (Not sure if they have locked them down since). Things like converting a Flir E4 to an E8 via software alone (and vastly improving the resolution) https://www.eevblog.com/forum/thermal-imaging/flir-e4-therma...
> and so that begs the question why not make twice as much working as a software developer and not have to sort out these types of messes?
You partly answered your own question: perhaps you pay the librarian/documentation writer too little? ;-)
Seriously: letting the documentation to be written by such a person won't be as much a cost-reducing measure, but instead mostly an approach to improve the documentation quality.
>The fact that care and education cause change in the behavior
If you don't have free will there's no change in behavior. You have the same predetermined behavior you'd have all along - the care is incidental, would have happened or not happened anyway.
No free will == deterministic universe. Everything that is to happen can't change, and is already "schedulled" in a causuality cascade from billions of years ago.
If you don't have free will, you can't also decide to have "care and education" or not. Whether you will have them or not have them is already a done deal.
Honestly, if I were the CEO, I would ask for the former if I were looking for the good programmers to keep since these are the things that make the technological base of the company run.
The answer is of course likely different if I were looking for the managers to keep ...