Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

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)

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?

> 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.

It is a property of any large bureaucracy that a large proportion of the bureaucracy exists to serve itself. And it's not BS, it's a natural consequence of growth. Imagine you start in the mode of "moving fast and breaking stuff". Eventually, you break enough stuff that someone says "enough". So you develop some launch standards and guidelines. Then hire a team to enforce them. Then someone to build a launch tool. Then you realize you also need to manage legal risks, have standardized UIs, make sure that production services have backups and redundancy, and all of sudden, you have ten review processes. And then, it gets so difficult to navigate the process that teams hire PMs just to coordinate. And on, and on.

And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off.

I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?

TBH, large companies deliver tuned, complex products for long-term use by customers. The problem is not producing them, but getting it right all the time, because development costs are a tiny percentage of reliance costs by the customer.

Most of what you call performative is likely real, but even if it were purely performative, it would surface people who were not on board and possibly unreliable.

Similarly, a 1:1 with no apparent content could serve its purpose of looking you in the eye to see if you're of sound mind.

I think your concern is better framed as whether people are pulling their weight. The solution for that is to make them deliver something hard on their own every so often, and cycling people through teams to avoid free riders.

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.

You're both criticizing management for not knowing who's doing important work, and also for spending time talking to engineers to understand what's going on.

Most solutions to understand what's going on, in detail, are naturally going to be quite time consuming.

You can get incredible value out of 1-on-1s with capable managers. Insight about where the organization and product is going that you would otherwise miss, you’ll get to rubber duck about your high-level problems with someone who understands them, and its your time to influence decision making. But it does require a capable and motivated manager and an organization that gives the manager actual agency

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.

There’s quite a bit of this but the big orgs have created a machine where they can capture (1+x) times the value of what they pay someone. If you’ve made such a machine, the best way to make more money is to put as much input into the machine as possible.

And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking.

Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”

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.

Promo-driven culture. Engineers and managers optimize for promotable work.

> 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.

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.

I don't know which FAANGs you have experience with, but the companies and teams I worked for were very numbers- and impact-oriented. No amount of posturing and politics would help you at performance review if you couldn't show that you accomplished some goals and moved some KPIs that ultimately made the company money.

YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.

Pretty much anything coming out of middle management or "org leadership" is performative. Line managers and their reports are generally actually building products and keeping the lights on.

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.

part of the universal scalability law: the cost of coherence scales quadratically as workers are added.

everything else is downstream of that

With all the usefull applications and features I've built, I never gotten any kudos for that. When I just present stuff and claim braincells from my direct manager, I rise. So... is it really just SWE jobs?

> the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal

Consider yourself lucky. This part is missing in some places.

> 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.

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.

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.

there is a lot to pull apart here

there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more positive tone, make the information concise in a bottom-line up-front style, use a deeper voice (told to me by my wife and women colleagues), and pace the information in a way that lets people ask follow up questions iff needed. no one should _have_ to do all this, but it does change people's perception of how competent you are. I've seen both sides of this coin - amazing engineers that get no promo because they can't communicate, and mediocre engineers that get promoted quickly due to their ability to communicate. I'd almost even argue that this is how should be - as you climb the corporate ladder, communication becomes a lot more important than technical skills and ability

to your point about 1:1s: if you're not getting anything out of your 1:1s, that's a skill issue and is on you IMHO. even when I had bad managers, I was able to effectively communicate my needs, goals, updates, thoughts, as well as give feedback back; in doing so, I've been able to turn horrible manager-team dynamics into a positive experiences. and I'd always argue it came down to the fact that the people perceive you directly correlates with how serious they'll take your word

at the same time, I can empathize with the idea that some middle managers are just bodies that get in the way - everyone's had their fair share of that. but if you're actually good at your job and communicating , you should almost always be able to get around them when it's really necessary

EDIT: and this is coming from a person who is and will always want to stay as an IC engineer

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.

The only place where the work I did was performative was government contracting. Not technically waste, but certainly useless.

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

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.

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.

Work is performance art

The stuff you think is performative and useless is most likely the consequence of letting a couple "all stars" do what they want for years.

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.

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.

> 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?

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.

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.

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.

"including FAANG"

What would make them less vulnerable to this?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

Yes

The "true work" is sporadic. A business will need an engineer to work hard for long hours for a few weeks, then they won't need him at all for weeks more except to be on hand if something goes wrong. Then maybe some more work, and even longer lulls.

But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse).

Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).

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.

The reason why I distant myself from software even before AI is because of all the shenanigans the software people do, primarily silicon valley but it echoes quickly beyond that where other companies try to copy cat it. It feels like a cult, with all sort of weird rituals, if you are an individualist it’s hard to maintain it there.

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.

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”?

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

I think Elon noticed it.