Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

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"Alternatively, maybe it was as bad as it sounds"

I'm sorry but in what world is improving the performance of the product you're working on 10 fold "bad" ???

Yes, it was probably a shock for the team. But those kinds of moment are also a huge opportunity to realize there was something wrong with the way you were working.

I've had a senior engineer erase the entirety of my code once in front of my eyes and rewrite it from scratch in a few hours, still in front of me. Well, i still joke about it with friends that experienced the same thing from the same guy, but it was definitely the kind of things that motivates you to improve the quality of your work.

Of course, the senior guy was a friend and it was all done with smiles and laughs. He didn't make it sound worst than it was.

We don't know that the team was actually dropping the ball.

But even if they had been, addressing it in a way that sounds like you're saying "you clowns, I can throw out your months of work, and do it myself 10 times better in a weekend" (whether or not that's accurate) from the PM... sounds like a good way to ruin morale of a team, and seed a toxic engineering culture throughout the department/company.

You do ask - if the performance was not great before with a team of 10, what was the culture like before? Sometimes, the only way to improve matters is to build up a new team and sideline the previous one where it can't do more damage.

« Whether or not that’s accurate » is not a minor detail. Some people need to be told when they’re doing shite work, otherwise how can they learn ? The forever supportive culture has some limits and sometimes a bit of spanking can be a great boost, and help you make the required radical changes in your life that you need.

I have no idea what the background is in this particular case; but where I work I‘m sick and tired of people „improving performance“ of systems which are not critical at all, at the cost of code, architecture and infrastructure complexity. So sometimes it can be bad.

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