mhss

What does this mean to you? I've worked remote and in office, I never felt like I had to stop acting like a human, so I'd like to understand how has it been for you.

> earn some arbitrary pieces of paper that only benefit us because life has been turned into a commodity by the parasites who benefit from this arrangement: the shareholding class.

I mean, I see Capitalism in dire need of adjustments but living costs some effort. You need to shelter yourself, feed yourself and your family, keep them healthy, safe, etc; all of that takes effort. Capitalism or not. I think Capitalism needs adjustments. There should be limits to how much profit owners can capture and should be distributed more fairly among employees, etc; but physical presence to do some types of work will continue to be needed for quite some time. We won't reach Asimov's 'Solaria' state anytime soon.

> ironically, the person who is arguably the best B2B customer, making tons of money, lots of bandwidth, pretty sophisticated, is the person most likely to use a simple open source invoice PDF generating tool

That doesn't make any sense to me. If you have a thriving profitable business you usually just pay for invoicing software. Why would you invest time fiddling around with an OSS tool? just because you have the bandwidth doesn't mean you'll use it on that. Most people will prefer spending the time on something else that is core to their business or just their personal lives.

Open source thrives for many reasons. I hardly see what you described as one of them.

You can google many things easily. Understanding the answer and knowing how to apply it to different problems matters a lot more. I still expect some concepts and definitions to be remembered if you’re claiming expertise in a topic.

Heck. Sometimes going into topics “not relevant” for the job is revealing. If their cv says they spent 5yrs writing Linux dev drivers but the position is to write golang web services I may still ask about device drivers if I can get a domain expert. Good people tend to understand very well the things they’ve worked on.

Traveling to visit family in Mexico for several weeks is way better now thanks to AirBnB.

If you are basically saying we should throw our hands up and give up at any kind of project management, then yeah, a significant part of engineering management is not needed. You seem to be basically saying all can be solved by http://programming-motherfucker.com/ and I get it, sometimes as a sw engineer that's all I wanted to do, but the reality is that often you need coordination and project management to get results you (or the organization) wants in a timely fashion.

> Democracy works differently - people will take an interest when their votes directly influence which stupid project gets ten million this year.

Democracy is super slow for decision-making and not everyone is equally qualified or invested to have a vote. I'm not talking about even "board meetings" here. I'm talking about having a freaking doc with 10 potential projects a given team could tackle this year. Who is going to curate those 10 projects? justify why they are needed or relevant that we should spend time on them? who is going to decide who works on what? as I said, democracy and consensus-building is slow and often will just mean "the most opinionated or stronger personality wins". You need a skilled eng manager to navigate complex conversations and keep everyone aligned on why a given project was picked.

> And finally - no. aligning incentives is easy. Pay me.

I guess this sums it up. You personally may only care about being paid, but that's not everyone. Your whole view is a simplistic take on what it takes to make you specifically happy and that's why you think is easy.

I wish there were a consistent answer to this, but part of the reason management is hard (and I won't deny there's plenty of useless managers) is that people is very variable and you need to adjust your approach depending on the organization composition.

> So planning. yeah it's important. Have a clear goal and work out what you need to achieve it. Frankly the new intern can achieve most of that in one day, and all the senior team can easily do it. And prioritise it.

There are plenty of teams and situation where this is hardly "easy", particularly at very large companies. Relative priorities are not always clear, many teams demanding your team's attention and understanding what is "best" for the company and company goals, the team and individuals is non-trivial. You need to align all of those. It requires constant communication (hence why managers spend time on meetings, reading presentations, reading roadmaps from other teams, 1:1s with their team to understand their personal goals, etc);

> and if instead of giving it solely to managers you just published it to the whole org such logistics would be available to increase discussion and awareness (ie the workers would understand the plan better and not need managers)

Even in organizations where the information is open and all documentation, meeting notes, spreadsheets, etc; are open people struggle to understand and some just want the summary (I'd say most); they don't want to know how the sausage is made outside maybe have an understanding of the process (and some not even that).

> Aligning goals ... that's incentives. That's easy - pay me. Otherwise ... looks a lot like coercion.

Maybe is that easy for you. A lot of people want something else from their careers and as a manager you have to align what the organization wants with what the individual(s) and teams want as much as is reasonable to maximize their satisfaction (retention, performance, etc; is better if you achieve this).

As you're starting to notice, if you don't gain more IC experience some roles will pass you on. You can still find success, but your profile will be somewhat less attractive in some companies and roles that will want to see that deeper IC experience.

I've gone from IC -> EM -> Director twice in my career, but admittedly I always kept doing some programming on the side, even if a little (either consulting or open source). I did not transition from Director back to IC because of career concerns though. I did it because I wanted to enjoy coding again and worry less about my calendar.

Feel free to reach out if you want to chat more about career development.

Problems that could arise from classic Seinfeld: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEMWMsy0DgU

I never really learned assembly properly for example beyond toying with a few programs early on my career.

Sure, you can take the stance "they should know", but then don't complain when even well-intentioned managers can lose perspective or miss some of your accomplishments when is time to recognize your efforts (promo, raises, etc).

I consider myself a "well intentioned" manager, I care about my team and their work, try to keep up with the details, etc; but there's just too much going on at a large organization and I'm fallible. I may forget, or fail to see the complexity and value of something someone did (even my own accomplishments). There's nothing wrong with advocating for yourself and making your manager aware of your stance. If there's disagreement about how valuable something I did is I'd rather know when having that conversation. I may learn my manager cares more about x/y/z and not something I thought it was valuable but turns out is not important for the org or my manager for some reason I wasn't aware of.

I've had plenty of good career dev chats with my manager (and my reports once I became a manager) following a review. This should be happening all around in 1:1s, but the semester or yearly review is a larger retrospective summary of the work we do, what we're proud of and what we feel could have gone better. If there's no trust however, this exercise is moot.

Even if my manager did not read it, writing about it has been valuable to me and makes me realize more clearly what I've done, whether I feel I'm being valued or not, and if it's time for me to move on.

I think you were downvoted because the ratio hardly tells you anything conclusive about the qualitative aspects of the org that are more important. Getting to know the org chart definitely helps ask questions that will reveal the culture during the interview though.

And yeah you said it well at the end. There are many other things that I believe are more relevant than the process, but you do need a process teams can follow.