Hacker News Reader

Is there a trade off between depth and breadth here? While not the SV tech scene, I remember working for an aerospace company that had some people in the same positions for a couple decades. For the administrative positions it seemed to breed complacency, but for the technical positions it seemed to provide a very deep level of technical expertise that would be difficult to cultivate within a couple years

View on HN

the other side from my experience at a previous engineering job is that it can also breed deep defensive layers around bad engineering work.

the same 3 core people stayed on the project for 11 years from the begging and hired and fired around weither you're a threat to their position. managers would come and go, they were helpless and held no real power in the project, until they settled for a puppet manager who would defer every decision up to them and act as a secretary.

the result was a huge pile of tech debt that only they could touch and they kept getting raises because the project couldn't afford to lose them, until the project died of it own weight.

same, i joined a place where it turned out a small group of people basically held all the power and had created a byzantine system only they could reason about. management was also trapped because the devs who knew the system held all the power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com