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Entitled "special" people are a problem everywhere.

Dev's who are labeled as high performers get greenfield projects that can be pumped out quickly / look good ... someone else does the maintenance, they get all the flack for an obvious bug that wasn't fixed even if they didn't make it.

The random executive who is thought to be highly successful who jumps from department to department spreading his fingerprint long enough to make an impact and leaves quickly enough to avoid any responsibility for the results.

I fear it is a human thing and people are really good at sensing when they can get away with things.

As time goes on, I more and more have the feeling that maintenance is 95% of the value in any software system.

A well-designed system at launch is not sufficient to provide sustained value, but competent ongoing maintenance is. Phrased another way, you can sustain value by maintaining a badly designed system but not by not maintaining a well-designed system.

Ideally systems are well designed and well maintained but we don’t always have that luxury.

Circling back to your point, it’s ironic that maintenance is the lowest-value activity in terms of big tech company reward systems.

Sometimes they can be well architected to a fault!

I worked on a periphery of a big mainframe system that was designed and implemented before I was born. I think release 1 was in 1975. It still runs really well and is hard to displace because operationally, even though the people who understood it fully are retired or dead, they left behind strong materials so a moderately intelligent person can run everything.

The “other” systems, old .Net, Java, etc that support the interfaces to the old app are hot garbage, and tend to steal the budget dollars that are needed to migrate off the 1970s stuff. My team had to fix one of these… argh.

When I worked tech support I got to know the "maintenance devs" pretty well. It was amazing how I'd end up on calls with the non-maintenance teams and they would insist X, Y, Z couldn't happen and no man ... maintenance devs knew it both could and was happening and would explain how and why.

God bless those other non maintenance devs, they were good, but man they could take an RFC and turn it on its head sometimes.

Yesterday I saw a post on Lamba The Ultimate that, while a bit long-winded, does a great job addressing this issue. The article picks up in the section headed The Labor of Care, and, for me, the money quote is: ”In order to care for technological infrastructure, we need maintenance engineers, not just systems designers—and that means paying for people, not just for products.”

It's well worth the read for the second half, and I made a post to HN because I'd love to hear more discussion on the issue. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37116593).

> But SO seems like an interesting case where they allow entitled behaviour of some devs to get out of control and it led to problems.

This is hard to quantify, and to make objective.

E.g. in a previous company HR once sent an email asking for feedback from employees, and one of my engineers gave some - polite, thoughtful, and clear. This caused quite an incident as the HR staff in question were not used to getting anything but encouragement in feedback, and I advised him to filter feedback through me, his manager.

Being "made to feel unwelcome" is both very real when you feel it, but looking slightly deeper it's not being made to feel unwelcome; it's feeling unwelcome. A mismatch of what's welcoming doesn't mean the person feeling unwelcome is correct; there may be no "correct" in that scenario. But it will be reported as though it is correct.

How would you have filtered feedback that is polite, thoughtful, and clear?

Good question :-) You start by remembering that a lot of people have constant praise - they bought a new Thing™? "Well done you!" Say their friends. Or "You look sensational today!" Or whatever it is. Hyper-positive praise is very common, and any hint of anything else may well be jarring.

Any improvement suggestions might need to either get thrown in the bin (even if they're valid and simple) or filtered through their manager, or have a guided conversation so they think they came up with it.

It just depends on the person and your relationship with them, really.

I guess what I am getting at is that, in this specific instance, I'm not sure there is anything to do. You either send it or not. It was polite, it was clear, and so on. Tonally, it was about as good as you can expect. So what is there to filter other than send/not-send?

I didn't mean I would literally filter the email into a shorter email. I just wouldn't send an email.

So, in this HR isn't getting any feedback because they've literally heard nothing but "Yay, you're the best!" for so long that any sense that they could do something, anything different is, comparatively, scathing and harsh criticism?

This just raises so many more questions, like why bother your employee to consider the question and formulate anything if the feedback doesn't reach HR? I can imagine being someone who actually considered the question, took time to write and re-write something, another pass for clarity, a check to make sure that nothing was going to sound accusatory. Writing the email, sending it off, and hoping that the time I took away from my actual job to do this would result in even the chance of a change. But it doesn't, it goes into the round file, apparently.

I don't know, I haven't had as many jobs as some people here, but I have been through all of those regime changes and heard "we want your feedback" over and over again, yet it never seems to go anywhere. I had months on a "strategic vision" committee where we were trying to formulate a mission statement by slurping up data, questions, and forms from employees, going through various iterations of it, but what came back had nothing to do with the content we had received.

Is this always just an exercise in making HR feel good about themselves, then, without hope of any improvement?

> So, in this HR isn't getting any feedback

No, I said I wouldn't send it in an email. Somewhat ironically, I wrote it clearly, but you took it differently and built a large rant on that incorrect foundation.

Next time I'll filter my comments on HN through my skip manager (-:

Nah, that's neither large for me nor a rant. It's a few paragraphs on the ongoing disappointment I have with the lack of honest communication up against the requests for honest communication. It's the "Does this dress make me look fat?" feedback request from HR.

I sometimes wonder what innovations would be required to make HR completely outsourceable.

You can outsource HR. I don't think it would make much difference if your HR person is a permanent employee, a contractor, or a consultant working for another company. Certainly it's not obvious that a change in contractual relationship would address anything you've been complaining about.

As a non-engineer user, I know I have regularly felt unwelcome in various ways.

corecursive.com is your podcast?

Yes! Please excuse the self plug. I find these culture issues interesting and didn't mean to highjack the thread.