Comment by gernb | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gernb | Hacker News Reader

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It's crossed my mind in the past that there are companies where often devs run things and companies where devs are just support for the real business. I don't think I ever want to work at a company where devs do not run things only because my spoiled experience has entirely been at companies where they do and I selfishly don't want to just be support staff for the real business.

You might disagree with these examples but:

A stock trading company, IT stuff are support for the real employees, the traders. You have a trader, you have a trading company. The programmers are just support for them.

Animated Movies (even pixar). Sure, there are important software devs but the real staff at pixar are animators. They can ship animations with off the shelf software or paper and pencil. In house software devs are super important but at the end of the day if all they had was animators they could still ship animation.

Lawyer firms, Medical Facilities: Yea, they need IT staff to help run things but they can function with just lawyers or just doctors.

VS say Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft. No devs, no company.

Video Game companies used to be and probably mostly still are this way. No software devs no product ships. That might be fraying as tools get better.

Fully agreed with your overall position, but I got a small correction in regards to what you said about fintech.

While you are correct in that at a lot of finance companies, devs just act as "support for the real business" (e.g., Goldman Sachs). But there are others where devs and quants pretty much harmoniously run the show.

Look at something like Jane Street and their tech blog[0]. Their annual "what our interns have wrought" blog posts grab my attention like nothing else, and from everything I read coming from them, it seems like engineering there is not just "support for the real business". And there are quite a few companies in fintech like this, they just won't be flashed in the mass media due to their relatively small size, but everyone in the industry (and plenty of people on the outside) knows about them. Out of all things, they are known as one of the largest contributors to OCaml language and its ecosystem.

Jane Street was just a singular example, and there are other fintech firms of a similar engineering-focused culture.

0. https://blog.janestreet.com/

> but I got a small correction in regards to what you said about fintech.

Market makers like Jane Street are not fintech. They are trading companies.

Jane Street in particular is still very much gut-feeling point-and-click trading, compared to Jump and Citadel Securities.

Fintech companies are more related to payments: Stripe, Gusto, Plaid, etc.

Another difference is pay/TC: trading companies pay significantly more than fintech and MAANG, even for SWEs.

Since you mention videogames. I used to work at EA and one thing I found was that the company culture was not as developer oriented as you might expect. Obviously, they invested a lot in developers, artists, and other content producers.

But the overal company culture and the upper echelons of leadership very strongly reflected EA's history as a software publishing company founded by business folks, and not a group of game makers who set out to build their own company. It was very much about producers, money, marketing, etc.

I used to joke that EA was in the business of selling disks and that the games on them were merely an annoying chore that they were obliged to do in order to get people to buy them. It often felt like they considered the entire dev team to be a cost center.

Ex-gamedev and this totally rings true.

We had one title I worked on where the "interviews with the dev team" was all just interviews with the external producers(aka PM who came in from the publisher to keep everything "on track").

Never happened to us but the best one I heard was that the publisher puts a clause in your contract that they get the source+IP if you go bankrupt(protect their investments, their taking huge risk, etc....). However about 2/3 through development when the studio is at peak HC burn they would start denying milestones for trivial things. One, two milestones go by and the studio burns through all cash, folds and publisher gets source+IP. Publisher then hires the dev team, who just lost their jobs, at a reduced rate(most gamedev a don't have great savings...) to finish out the game, avoids paying any royalties and picks up the IP.

Happy to be out of that industry, some really interesting technical challenges and driven people but the whole thing is similar to the recording industry in the way they exploit people and passions for their own gain.

A stock trading company, IT stuff are support for the real employees, the traders. You have a trader, you have a trading company. The programmers are just support for them.

Not the norm, but I suspect it probably happens more than it should...but this is the sensation I'm feeling about "Devops engineers" in the last few years. Which, yeah, we could sit here and talk all day about whether or not "Devops engineers" should be a job title at all, because Devops is a "way of working" or whatever but that's kinda the self-fulfilling problem isn't it?

Devops was supposed to be a way of working and somehow it got turned into "Help Desk for the App Developers" in way too many environments and orgs, where too many great Developers with Operational capabilities end up being on the receiving end of "the devs are working on feature x, we need someone to do this, and we failed to really figure out our engineering resourcing needs, so uh, I dunno give it to the Devops team to deal with".

Feels like the opposite to me. A lot of ops teams got turned into ‘devops’ teams overnight without any change in mode of operations, leading to skewed expectations from developers that actually know what the ‘dev’ part is about.

At least, I was fairly surprised by how our devops team looked at what I was trying to push onto them until I learned their origin story.

Chesterton's fence is a real bitch, ain't it?

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