[HN Gopher] Why Your Best Engineers Are Interviewing Elsewhere, ...
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Why Your Best Engineers Are Interviewing Elsewhere, CodeGood
Author : rbanffy
Score : 47 points
Date : 2025-11-05 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (codegood.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (codegood.co)
| smcleod wrote:
| Across the clients I've worked with over the years it's often
| bureaucratic disempowerment that drives good engineers away.
|
| When they cannot affect change or encumbered with toil - be that
| from painful change management processes, restricted or privacy
| invading operating system controls, or a work from office policy.
| noir_lord wrote:
| That and/or a single bad direct line manager.
|
| One of the best managers I worked under when I was young used
| to say "people don't leave companies, they leave managers" and
| he was right.
| whstl wrote:
| This is the second best advice I ever got in my career.
|
| The best one was still "Listen to reports when they come to
| you, even if you're focused on your own task."
|
| I wish there was this kind of advice for dealing with
| unreasonable CTOs and VPEs. I got lucky in my last job, but
| it took years.
| esafak wrote:
| That's what skip level connections and surveys are for. The tools
| are there, for organizations that care to use them.
| whstl wrote:
| I don't know.
|
| I have seen CEOs and CTOs tearing apart feedback from surveys
| at all-hands meetings. To the point of mocking answers and
| saying people are "tripping", or that "in other YC companies
| people work 80 hours".
|
| And I've seen leads/managers leaving due to micromanagement as
| well.
|
| As long as the expectation is for managers to hide concerns and
| fall in line, the information will be hidden from C-levels.
|
| For example:
|
| _> A fintech company decided to build their own authentication
| system rather than use established solutions._
|
| I lived this exact scenario. Fintech wanted custom
| authentication! It was pushed into my team. I said no and put
| my foot down, VPE disagreed with me and gave to another team.
| That team failed to deliver after 6 months, and my team finally
| ended up being the one implementing a third-party solution in a
| couple weeks. That third-party solution costed less than $100
| per month, because of how little users we had.
|
| On my yearly feedback I still got knocked down a peg due to
| this incident. It really hurt my career at that company, even
| though I was in the right. That other team failed to deliver
| other projects too, and we got the same feedback I did, same
| salary increase. I got the yelling, I got the negative marks.
|
| Of course people will rationalize this with "you should have
| been more political".
|
| Well, that's what the people being criticized in TFA are doing:
| being political.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > tearing apart feedback from surveys
|
| That's amateur behavior. Real pros design the feedback forms
| in a way that only allows you to give them the answers they
| want to hear.
|
| "Which three company benefits are most important for you?"
| Frankly, all of them are meaningless, but there are ten
| checkboxes, and unless you mark three of them, the form won't
| allow you to proceed.
|
| "Do you understand how $buzzword can make you more
| productive? (on a scale from 0 to 10)" Answering "yes"
| implies that $buzzword is great. Answering "no" also implies
| that $buzzword is great, but you are too stupid to understand
| it, so you may be given some mandatory training on $buzzword.
| (There is no way to indicate that $buzzword actually makes
| you less productive.)
| dboreham wrote:
| Appreciate the time taken to write this, but imho the problem is
| a bit worse: you grew up in a context where analysis of facts,
| risks, knowing your stuff, were valued. That's your training data
| and reinforcement function.
|
| Here's the thing: the world in general didn't get that training
| data upload. They don't care about your reasoned analysis. They
| want a new boat. Like now!
|
| I bet there's an email thread at Amazon years back with someone
| saying "You're using DNS as a distributed database-- that's a bad
| idea". But even after crashing the entire internet for a day, the
| stock is up.
|
| I recommend starting your own company or going freelance. Then at
| least any organizational nonsense will be your nonsense. And if
| there's any boat coming it'll be yours.
| jjmarr wrote:
| The military has a parallel system of officers (managers) and
| enlisted/NCOs (sort of ICs).
|
| Even generals will have an NCO reporting into them whose job is
| to speak to the frontline and figure out wtf is actually going
| on.
|
| e.g. The Sergeant Major of the entire US Army used to post on
| /r/army. If someone in the 950,000 person bureaucracy was really
| getting screwed, he or his office would step in.
|
| https://reddit.com/user/sma-pao/?sort=top
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| > The decision was made: ship now, refactor later.
|
| I guess we already know how this ends. There will never be
| "refactor later", because there will always be a new feature to
| add, or a new product to ship. "Later" is merely a diplomatic way
| to say "never". When the project is decommissioned 20 years
| later, the refactoring tasks will still be in the project
| backlog; that is if someone won't delete them first.
|
| > The CEO approved 15% raises for remaining engineers. More left
| anyway.
|
| One possible explanation is that money wasn't the real issue. But
| another possible explanation could be that the 15% was not
| enough, but ironically it could have been the nudge that made
| people think again about their salaries.
|
| > Middle managers believe they are doing their jobs by "handling
| problems at their level."
|
| That is not necessarily a bad thing... unless they are handling
| them by ignoring them.
|
| > The monitoring system generated so many false alerts that
| engineers had learned to ignore it.
|
| That reminds me how I once told my manager: "If I get one alert a
| week, I will immediately drop whatever I was currently doing, and
| start investigating the issue. If I get several alerts a day, I
| will finish my current work first, and probably handle the issues
| in batch at the beginning or at the end of the day. If I get
| several alerts per hour, I will just mute my phone and ignore
| them."
|
| > They watch decisions being made that will cause problems, they
| raise concerns, and they are told to implement anyway. When the
| predicted failure occurs, they are blamed for not preventing it.
|
| Even better, they get assigned an on-call duty during evenings
| and weekends to fix the failures when they occur. The on-call
| duty is such a wonderful thing -- every time a bad technical
| decision is made, you know someone's evening or weekend is going
| to get ruined, but it is rarely going to be the person who made
| the decision.
|
| > If Sarah is leaving, maybe I should look too. Engineers assume
| departing colleagues know something they do not.
|
| I think this is a needlessly complicated explanation. More
| likely, Sarah was a good friend, and the colleagues who were
| already unhappy about their jobs procrastinated with leaving the
| company because of Sarah. Now that Sarah is gone, they realize
| they don't have any more positive job-related emotions.
|
| Of course the company can speed this up by giving them Sarah's
| work on top of the work they already had. Then everyone will
| start interviewing like crazy, because they will be scared of
| being the last person who stays at the company and inherits
| everyone's work.
|
| > The test: would a 20% raise keep them? If yes, it is
| compensation. If no, it is something else and they are being
| diplomatic.
|
| Or maybe it's compensation, and the other company offers them 50%
| more.
|
| > Regular skip-level conversations. Allocating several hours per
| week for direct conversations across all levels provides ground
| truth.
|
| I have seen a situation where a manager did skip-level
| conversations, but only used them to tell the engineers his
| glorious vision, not to listen to them. It's like most management
| advice -- even if the original idea is great, most people will
| just take the buzzword and do something else instead.
| dogleash wrote:
| I love the optimism that senior leadership is just in the dark
| and wouldn't agree with a high percentage of the bad dynamics.
| With the benefit of hindsight the causal link to attrition is
| highlighted. In the moment, how many concerns would have been
| brushed aside as nerds getting carried away with nerd priorities
| instead of business priorities?
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