Hacker News Reader

Comment by thecleaner | Hacker News Reader

I kinda applaud OP for sharing their personal story. However, I personally never understood why people give a shit about objectives which aren't tied to business objectives. I mean the build improvement of 10x is great, but so what ?

Also, Stripe is barely profitable. As an engineer in big tech, I wouldn't even consider applying. You're better off targeting Principal engineer at Big Tech since it implies doing some really ground breaking software work. At that point, you probably don't have to worry about middle management and that bs. Outside the big 4 I had an experience where the manager read a Software engineering management book and would follow the things down to the letter like a superstition. It was a stupid exchange but ChatGPT really helped build my repository of meaningless corporate soeak. I find it to be a very useful skill.

View on HN

But that's the problem with the OP's job - "first hire onto the brand new JS Infra team".

That doesn't sound like a customer/external developer-facing position.

It can be hard to make a visible impact when your work is hidden behind many layers. But that's the nature of their job - it's not a "rainmaker" position, it's a cost centre.

But it sounds like they wanted to have a job that had more visible impact.

I'm glad someone else mentioned this, i think too often engineers think they've done something huge because it was technically challenging but how does any of this impact the business? why would speeding up dashboard builds by 10x matter at all?

Focusing on things often causes you to get worse at them, so businesses intentionally keep most employees away from profit or from thinking about it. In ZIRP land this might be because they're banking tech workers so they won't start their own startup, or in case someone comes up with a better thing for them to do.

Instead you do artificial projects and it either impresses people enough to get you a good performance review or it doesn't.

This often produces customer surplus (like when companies release cool open source projects they didn't need to write) so it's a good thing, maybe.

This is an interesting idea I haven't heard before. Specifically on "Focusing on things often causes you to get worse at them" are you saying that's due to a Goodhart's law kind of effect?

Having trouble thinking of examples of this from my own experience but they're all mostly social/political (often trying to hard in these realms can be to your detriment)

can you say more? maybe i read to much into a snarky remark but i think your idea is interesting

Reply on news.ycombinator.com