Hacker News Reader

Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

>> Now someone who has 10 years AND cares is rare but pure gold.

As someone who started programming from a young age and has almost 10 years of commercial experience, I have to say that being in this industry is horrible.

If they promoted people using a random number generator, it would be a step up from what we have now.

The most horrible thing is that in spite of your passion and experience, your ideas are constantly undermined by money-oriented snake oil salesmen who make extraordinary optimistic claims to become liked by management and get promoted quickly within the company; then, just before everything falls apart, they jump ship for a higher position in a different company and let other people deal with the consequences of their past actions. That's why it's really hard to find people with 10 over years who still care. Caring is a weakness.

View on HN

I was at a Big-4 consulting company at my first job. I once got passed up for promotion because they said "i didnt handle critical production situations with clients, analyzing them and planning to bring them to a close."

I explained...that is because I had such perfectly tested work that I didnt have any major Production issues requiring critical client meetings or mitigation plans. The success criteria there was almost encouraging poor delivery!

I was at a defense contractor early in my career, and the government had this idea that our CMMI-certified process was supposed to demonstrate that defects were being found and corrected at various stages of the review and testing process.

Implicit in this was an assumption that a certain number of defects were there to be found in the first place. As a result, if you were too thorough and conscientious before your reviews it actually reflected badly on your reviewers, because they weren't finding anything. As a result, we started pushing out intermediate WIP that we knew had problems so the defects could be "found" and "fixed".

"money-oriented snake oil salesmen" aren't the problem though. They're just selling stuff to earn your salary. The real problem are the bean counters and the managerial trends from 1980s onward.

For every manager who grew from the rank and file, understands what their teams are going through, and shields their teams from the BS, there will be another who went through business school and was indoctrinated that you should ask for more than what you want, to hell with the consequences and the corner cutting, and the rank and file will figure it out somehow to deliver what you want.

The bias for promoting people who build massive card houses is frustrating. I've found myself cleaning up the mess my manager left behind pushing through whatever feature he used to get promoted countless times. And then getting pressure by that same manager when there is too much tech debt in the code base they left behind.

Most companies promote based on the surface level “what you did” rather than “how you did it”. It’s not going to change. Be glad you don’t work for one of those companies that promote based on who you’re friends with.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com