[HN Gopher] Ratchet effects determine engineer reputation at lar...
___________________________________________________________________
Ratchet effects determine engineer reputation at large companies -
sean goedecke
Author : rbanffy
Score : 36 points
Date : 2025-01-06 12:30 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seangoedecke.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seangoedecke.com)
| somekyle2 wrote:
| This seems generally true in my experience. Another aspect of
| this, from personal experience: while it may be easy to move
| around in a large organization, you risk losing reputational
| capital. I had a habit of building reputation in some
| team/platform, then after I no longer found it engaging or there
| was enough turnover/focus shift, I'd ask to transition to a
| wildly different team for a new challenge. It _is_ fun, but if
| you opt to start as an IC and work your way up, you're sorta
| letting the ratchet slip, and if you do it every couple years you
| may have broad experience, but your reputation (and likely level)
| will be well below where it could be.
|
| Thus, unless you can ramp to expertise really quickly to leverage
| your skills developed elsewhere, I'd recommend (perhaps
| obviously) to try to move to peripheral teams where your skills
| and relationships transfer as much as possible.
| hinkley wrote:
| There is a time honored tradition of blaming the last person
| for all of your problems, or at least any they had proximity
| to.
|
| Somewhat awkward if you later see them in a meeting.
| somekyle2 wrote:
| Quite true! Having been fairly instrumental in a few areas
| that I'd eventually moved on from, it was always interesting
| to see some of my trademark accomplishments become The Old
| Thing We're Trying To Replace (or even just The Big Thing We
| Have To Maintain); gave me a lot of empathy for prior
| contributors of code I ended up inheriting. I tend to assume
| that the old thing seems dumb because of the constraints when
| it was written and changing requirements over time; if a tool
| made by one person in a few weeks seems hopelessly naive to
| the medium sized team investing a few quarters in replacing
| it a few years later, that seems to be a rousing success for
| the original author.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Problem for new hires is the onboarding process is very critical
| to determine if you'll be doing good work or not. Fighting
| against a code base all the time as you're left to your own
| devices is an uphill battle.
| hinkley wrote:
| A lot of places end up selecting for their own brand of crazy
| because of that.
|
| The people who think, "this is fine" tend to fit in better.
| From a team stability perspective that's fine? But echo
| chambers eventually eat themselves and new perspective can lead
| to new features or bug fixes.
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Last place I worked was like that. "Just embrace the chaos"
| but also "your new ideas aren't welcome here"
| malfist wrote:
| There's a very delicate balance to walk between chaos that
| works and a new idea that might be better or it might be
| worse or bring it's own type of chaos.
| danielovichdk wrote:
| Sidenote. Terrible reading experience due to the background color
| and shiny white font. Too bad for such fine content.
| r00fus wrote:
| Jeebus just use reader mode and move on.
| drfloob wrote:
| I work at a "large company", and I don't agree with most of this.
| Your write-up is highly subjective, and fairly pessimistic.
|
| Some people hit the ground running, and
| teams/organizations/companies can thrive if they find ways to
| embrace that. Sometimes people get hired at the wrong level, and
| everyone benefits if some sort of work demonstrates that quickly.
| I have seen promotions happen based on prudent choices around
| one's individual strengths, simply by choosing to do a bit of the
| right work and getting eyes on your capabilities. There is no
| "one size fits all" prescription for what someone should work on.
|
| Having a "shadow lead" can be one of the best situations for your
| growth, too. Not only do you get the experience leading a thing
| (for most of what that means, anyway), you may end up with a very
| strong ally when you knock it out of the park. I had a version of
| this experience, and I've watched others have it as well.
|
| I'm guessing most of the negatives here are based on your
| personal experience, and for that I'm sorry. Hopefully you can
| encourage positive changes in your company's engineering culture.
| janalsncm wrote:
| > you may end up with a very strong ally when you knock it out
| of the park
|
| I imagine this will be determined by the culture and the system
| of rewards which are out of your control. A shadow lead _could_
| be an ally, or they could pin any deficiencies on you. The
| author's comment is sound in my opinion: depending on
| altruistic behavior is a bad position to be in.
| QuiCasseRien wrote:
| ohoh, nice article. ohoh, there are others and they seems to be
| high quality. fucking ohoh, a rss feed, no add.
|
| In my feed and bookmarked.
|
| very good writer, experienced dev.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-01-08 23:00 UTC)