This isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems like the people who keep their eye on the ball and really try to make a great product are the ones who win out in the long run.
If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today.
Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy.
Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.
Believe it or not, some companies are run by people who just want to sell widgets and get on with life. Some of them even have morals! Shocking, I know. Smaller companies, sure, but they'll still pay you a good living wage anywhere but SV. Not every boss is a megalomaniac.
I think this can be true at the IC level and in situations where the organization's success depends on the product being good, but that's not always the case. Big companies with market control can go years, or perhaps even indefinitely make bad product decisions and still print money. Product development comes to revolve less around merit and more about appearances.
I've worked in big tech and had the sort of conversations with my managers where they say: "The work you're doing in X is great. I use it and it really needs work. But it's not a priority, or even 'impactful'. Your work on X is effectively equivalent to doing no work".
Sometimes it isn't even about getting a promotion, sometimes the implication is you should be worried about keeping your job. You can still do X which everyone knows is great and someone should do, but "on your spare time, as an extra" because Y is what your performance review will really revolve around.
The sad part is I can tell they mean it, and do agree someone needs to work on X, but it isn't their decision to make, because they have to show face and explain to their manager why an engineer earning XXX,XXX didn't meaningfully work on Y. Ultimately someone up the chain who you've never talked to is the person who decided X is unimportant; they don't want to kill it they just don't use it, or have a strategic reason to not care about it.
In the politics of upper management perhaps it was something an adversary used to vouch for, and now you have to prove the org can do without it. Or perhaps it's the ace in your pocket, and you wan't it to be lack-luster so when the big boss above you starts talking about retirement, you can show amazing wins in the area and be first in line for succession. Companies are not democracies. For better or for worse big companies are not democracies, they are feuds, so if the kingdom isn't in danger its future comes to depend a lot not on what's the best decision, but how a decision fits the game of thrones.
I had a side project going off and on for YEARS. I thought it was a great business idea with some interesting technical challenges.
I asked Claude and ChatGPT about it, and they both shot the idea down as a viable startup. It was a liberating feeling honestly! I have since focused my efforts on other projects and have been more successful with those.
I do that too. Wouldn't say it's relying on the logic. It's more hearing another perspective. Sometimes I think what it's saying makes sense, sometimes I don't.
I don't think it's bad code that's necessarily the problem - it's bad architecture and systems which will bite you! Often bad code can be easily replaced if it's easy to refactor.
Of course, bad business can ruin it all. I wrote a beautiful and reliable distributed rust agent, but was later laid off due to the company doing poorly.
I am staying away from sports betting, but I have done fantasy football a few times. I was constantly on edge from it all, even when I was winning! Constantly thinking of who I needed to pick up, who to trade, which matchups were good, it was a time sink.
And I ended up losing to my 10 year old nephew for the championship game!
That's true, but I think there is a gray area in between. As things scale up in one way or another, having high quality is important for both #1 and #2. Its hard to extend software that was designed poorly.
The question where experience comes in is when quality is and isnt worth the time. I can create all sorts of cool software I couldn't before because now I can quickly pump out "good enough" android apps or react front ends! (Not trying to denigrate front end devs, it's just a skill I dont have)
For better or worse, Claude is my intuitive interface to jq. I don't use it frequently, and before I would have to look up the commands every time, and slowly iterate it down to what I needed.
Business majors typically. I remember seeing a small graffiti in my engineering lecture hall that said something along the lines of "limit gpa -> 0: major= business administration"
I am not huge fan of Meta but I wouldn't dismiss them quite so much. I think reels is probably doing pretty well, and despite being cringeworthy FB itself is still going very strong. There are a lot of behind the scenes AI work improving their ads.
There are absolutely a lot of high profile failures though, with the metaverse being #1 (along with the name change to boot!)
Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
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