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bicxHNSource author
Business & incomeExperience excerpt · English

Honestly that description of a manager’s motivation (how they are seen by others who control their …

… Honestly that description of a manager’s motivation (how they are seen by others who control their fate) is one that many engineers also adopt. In my experience, managers are actually focused on what you described for a worker (ensure the team generates value via revenue or reduced risk), while most engineers are typically focused on the quality of their craft.

Original discussionExcess Management Is Costing the U.S. $3T Per Year (2016)376 source comments · at import
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BA
badrabbitHN

I don't have strong opinions about this but the working strategy I have come up with so far, when it comes to implementing my ideas is to keep it a secret/hidden from management until all the ground work is laid out and only then take on responsibility for it and publicly pursue it. As soon as management finds out it gets mananged into the least risky form that threatens the status quo minimally. I had many good ideas that were managed to death or inefficacy. The problem of perverse incentives is a pandemic at this point. Even after whatever i did showed a ton of value for little cost of any kind, they will eventually find a way to manage it into an inefficient thing or replace it by something much less blame inducing. As a worker, my focus is on generating value. Either I produce revenue or reduce risk and liability. For managers, this is a distant secondary concern, they are worried of…

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AeolunHN

I think for engineers the difference is that they (good ones anyway) don’t think so much about what other engineers might think, but rather about what future them will think when encountering the same thing again in two years.

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BA
badrabbitHN

I used to be like that years ago but as you get more experience you start thinking about why you get paid so you can get paid more and/or keep your job. Which means the "quality" of my work is only meaningful if that in some way (even indirect) benefits my employer. There's a lot of fun things I can do, I use to take weeks writing something in C because I like the language and it is fast where there is already a python module that lets me do that in 20 lines. But when it comes to work, the slower python code is ideal because less technical burden and the speed benefit of C is marginal, it provides no competitive advantage in those specific scenarios. I am not one but I believe staff and principal SWEs start thinking more like this for comparison. (I am not a developer).

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