Hacker News Reader

“I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business. Always late, always overstaffed, always endless meetings and poorly trained people that nevertheless earn well above the median wage so the incentive to improve onself is almost zero”

This was actually painful to read because of how much truth there is in it.

I would say I have seen two.

I would say that there is challenging work out there if you look for it. I’ve studiously avoided the kinds of places described here and it has paid off for me.

Entitled incompetents who are not only highly paid but expect scheduled promotions as if given a sinecure have really run amock in this sad sad industry.

It take a stabilization of the technologies and processes. In the early CG and VFX animation industry it was chaos too, but now many production studios are run tighter than a military operation. Experience in a moderately recent war feature with a good sized VFX budget, the military advisers remarked how the film set and following post production was better run than their real world military campaigns.

"In war everything is simple, but the simplest things are difficult."-Clauswitz. I would trust SNAFU exists for a reason.

I can say I worked on one.

But because it was well managed, small team, everyone listened to each other's areas of respective expertise and authority, we wrapped it up in a year on a 6 digit budget.

Meanwhile, a previous project elsewhere i have experience with, had a team of approx 30 cycle through, 10 to 20 external consultants (some flown in and put up in hotels, but who had no actual experience in the things they were consulting on) , had been running for several years, estimated 8 digit budget, and by the time i left had been running for several years with no discernable output compared to the status quo except reports and presentations taking about how good things would be one day in the indeterminate future.

I'm convinced the later is the norm, and it's even harder to go back to once you've worked on a project that 'just works', but I'm sure several people used the later one to land themselves high paying jobs by putting it on their resume using management speak to make it sound impressive, so I guess success depends on whose point of view you're looking from...

From my experience in consulting and internal, there are two major things you can do.

1) Use objective KPIs + encourage a culture of admitting, taking responsibility for, and being forgiven for failure

Failing to admit failure is incredibly toxic to ongoing corporate functioning, and a culture that doesn't allow for it endlessly moves goalposts until there is success (by some metric) without motion (by objective metrics).

2) Don't allow anyone to overscope sprints

If all the "team" can accomplish is a "Hello World" in the next week, then that's the goal. Better to be honest than slide down the slippery slope of lying to ourselves.

The irony is: how does a company that conducts itself thusly manage to retain people?

To which the answer is: pay well above median wage

The mind boggles.

One of my founding tenants for any company would be "Never assume work done in service of profit is inherently profitable work."

Product engineers may be a mess but infrastructure engineers in this industry are capable of incredible works of human achievement.

The product punks, fresh out of college, throw together all kinds of whacky code in the name of front end product — which to their credit becomes incredibly popular with millions of people. It’s usually also incomplete bug ridden nonsense.

The real magic is in seeing infrastructure engineers scale this to thousands of machines running across continents, always up, always connected, with non trivial caching, CDNs, cluster turn up, release engineering with automated testing and performance regression analysis on each diff before it’s even committed, let alone in production, and every other manner of instrumentation and tooling under the sun brought to bear on the product code itself.

When they run out of things to do that are awesome they turn their eye to building their own compilers, languages, hardware, and networking gear, all to maximize productivity and minimize cost.

It’s a zoo, and the zookeepers are some of the smartest people I’ve met.

This is kind of an amusing metaphor. But, if infrastructure engineers are the zookeepers, does that make the front end and mobile engineers the animals? And what about the backend engineers?

> "foo sucks but bar is actually great (btw I'm a bar)"

I'm a product engineer AND an infrastructure engineer in the common job-title sense, and if I had a dollar every time an infrastructure engineer/devops/full-stack introduced a complex service (elasticsearch/kafka/k8s/etc) without understanding how the service should be configured, maintained, or extended, I'd be able to afford a house in the bay!

Good product managers bridge the gap between engineering, sales, and the executive team, and can make a project successful just by managing the decision making process(es) well.

The bottom line however is that most companies have poor product management and poor infrastructure engineering which will lead to many more Theranos and Yahoo style messes in the years to come (and waste untold billions doing it!).

It’s worth pointing out that things like the Moon Landing, which we now see as the pinnacle of human engineering achievement, was once widely regarded as a “Moondoggle”[1], sucking up billions of dollars with delays and cost-overruns around every corner.

Apollo 11 was probably a few key decisions away from being one of history’s greatest lessons in hubris.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/09/moond...

I think the reason software pays so well is because the world is simply littered with computers.

Today's software developers are earning a fortune from the fertile soil that has been spread around in the form of computers in everyone's pockets. Making those computers x% more useful to y% of their owners scales as a function of the number of computer owners. The fruit keeps hanging lower and lower to the point that it's hard not to step on it.

It's easy money because most of the work is done as the byproduct of investments by other industries, like telecom, but the extra value is unlocked by the software developers.

It's generalizable and something I'm confused they don't teach kids in career counseling.

Max(salary) = unit_value * number_of_units_impacted

Software generates a high ceiling because number of units impacted can be huge, so unit value can be low.

In contrast, you can only pay teachers / doctors / firefighters / police officers so much, because their number of units impacted has a fundamental cap (the number of people they can physically interact with in a given day).

Which is... unfortunate. Because (IMHO) they deliver a lot more value to society, and work harder, than I do.

Bullshit Jobs includes an interesting section about the IT professions saying that 'noone wants to pay to develop a database that is amazing, but people will pay millions to someone who increases clickthrough on an ad of even a 0.1%.'

Congratulations. You just discovered the Baumol effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease

Hmm. I'd need to see some research to believe that's happening.

It seems like non-software folks are getting paid the same, leading to wider inequality.

> I've told myself countless times lately, that it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing, surfing fb and youtube all day long and then go buy cars and going to Greece as their very first vacation. Something, somewhere, just stinks badly.

What is this in reference to? Where do buying cars and holidays in Greece come into this article? Is there a stereotype of programmers holidaying in Greece?! And tech types mostly hate buying cars don’t they?

In reference to all the money being invested in questionable places.

I think we’re missing some part of your train of thought here.

But fundamentally tech graduates make a lot because the work they do makes a lot. You can’t argue the projects are both over staffed and pay too much at the same time! If there’s enough money coming into the company to pay that many people that much money then good for them? Looks like it is possible. Where should the money go instead? To the investors? That doesn’t sound better for ordinary people.

But I don’t think they use it to go on holiday to Greece, and I’ve never heard anyone talk about normal tech graduates being involved in international tax evasion of all things - they don’t earn that much and I think most of it goes on rent in many places!

You are missing the point, which is that incentives can change society, for better or worse. If we have problems assigning appropriate value to things as a society we go astray. If we place greater value on ad sales than we do in real scientific progress in the long run we all lose.

Doesn't make any sense though. Most people need a car to travel from A to B and a vacation to relax and be able to continue to work properly instead of quitting.

The OP is from Eastern Europe, and those 2 things he's mentioned are probably the local aspirations (Greece being not so far).

He's from Romania, where people don't usually afford vacations abroad, and when they do, Greece is the canonical choice. Also, a lot of people's existences there revolve around car ownership. In addition, IT people have relatively high salaries (they even have an explicit tax exemption).

Last year and this summer Greece was the trendy vacation location for millennials aged 23-30, most of which work in the tech space and thus can afford such vacations (often in lieu of retirement plans/savings though).

It's disheartening to read comments like this when I think of the graduates I've worked with over the years and the yearning for betterment and peer recognition I often see.

Some of this rings true, although I know some idealistic people in their twenties (I don't hang out that much in CS circles though).

But I would argue there are also legitimate reasons to choose computer tech over hard science. In the former you have the chance to potentially do some independent, self-directed work or at least achieve financial independence. This means you could do something with your agency. The latter puts you into the bureaucratic machine with fierce institutional, metrics-driven competition. You hardly can do anything without a grant given by some political or commercial interest.

Many people would also be anxious about what our current political and economic system could do with further major breakthroughs - on the scale of nuclear, say. More concentration of power is likely. This is also what the "communications-driven innovation" (per the article) seems to have brought, but this seems trivial compared to impact of biological engineering, tampering with the actual nervous system or whatever.

I truly enjoyed reading Saifedean Ammous ‘Bitcoin Standard’. Among other things he explores the relationship between the soundness of a monetary system, the establishment of the gold standard and industrial revolution and technological progress and what he calls ‘zombie industries’ kept artificially alive by loose money policies. Highly recommended.

> I've literally never seen a challenging and well run project in almost 10 years in this business.

I'm not sure the direction of causality here. Reminds me of "In theory, practice is just like theory, but in practice it rarely is."

I think your ideals are pushing you to great places, but your experience is showing you that it either doesn't exist or at least you haven't found it yet. I've been a part of projects that I'm very proud of that have all kinds of awfulness that I'd rather have not done. Still pretty good work in my opinion, and I'm not sure that good work is fully purposeful and correct at every point.

> [...] it is simply not possible for young graduates to come to work knowing basically nothing [...]

If there’s something that I’m really really grateful of, growing up in Germany, it’s the dual apprenticeship system. [1] And Germany also does a splendid job at giving students a glimpse of working experience at uni (if you are willing, at least)

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-16159943

I always wondered whether this phenomenon was something local or whether it holds true outside eastern Europe as well.

I saw that you're from eastern Europe and I checked out your website. You're in the exact same city I am in. I moved here a couple of years ago from western Europe. What a small world.

If these, and others of its kind, are the things that also keep you awake at night, feel free to get in touch. It's hard to openly express them around here (edit: here, meaning the city where I live, not HN) as I always seem to get into trouble for that. Thought police is always on the lookout.

But your original comment in this thread basically amounts to "damn kids these days, they earn too much and don't know shit". Plus random insults about how they think they deserve it all (and nobody else).

It doesn't take a thought police to reject that as almost surely greatly exaggerated and undeservedly disrespectful.

How much of this is due to venture capital? Like, if it were possible to make a billion dollars by investing in 100 plumbing companies even if 99 of them turn out to have been dumb, would plumbers make $250K out of college?

One can think of VC's as shooting canons full of money into the weeds and hoping they nail a unicorn.

Less flippantly VC funded companies succeed not because they hire more competent people but because they are vastly better funded than more normal competition.

My impression is not much; high salaries are instead driven by Google/FB etc.

Only if you figured out how to sell a self serve $15/month plumbing service or run advertising through the pipes