[HN Gopher] No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage e...
___________________________________________________________________
No management needed: anti-patterns in early-stage engineering
teams
Author : tonioab
Score : 63 points
Date : 2026-01-13 18:54 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ablg.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ablg.io)
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| I'd like to add to this, only because it is an early stage item
| but maybe a little unrelated:
|
| If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a habit
| of talking about "competitors", run like hell.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| +1. and if they say things like "we're going to disrupt the
| industry," again, run.
|
| There were many things I did not like about working for Jeff
| Bezos, but one I did like is he kept repeating this.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| > If you are an early stage startup and your founders have a
| habit of talking about "competitors", run like hell.
|
| Why? Comparing what the competitors are doing can be a great
| way to come up with new ideas
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| because comparing yourself to your competitors will get you a
| faster horse buggy, not an automobile. if you're in a
| startup, you should be risking making automobiles. if you
| want to make faster horse buggies, go work for AT&T.
| charcircuit wrote:
| Good ideas need the right timing to line up. AT&T can
| afford to keep a research project around until the timing
| is right where a startup needs to find market fit
| immediately.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| i'm not sure that is true about AT&T. you may be thinking
| about Bell Labs, which effectively destroyed it's culture
| in the 90s or early 2000s.
|
| but i take your point to mean there are large companies
| that have budget to maintain projects that do not have an
| immediate need to be profitable. and agree that for
| startups, it's a great idea if you're building things for
| which a market is emerging. everyone talks about how
| Steve Jobs is a miracle worker. not to diminish his
| accomplishments, but he was also very lucky. he wanted to
| sell apple 2's into a market that was just starting to
| want to buy apple 2's. i'll give him the iPhone, however.
| i think he was smart enough to understand the forces were
| aligning to make a product that your average user would
| like.
|
| but apple didn't spend 30 years making the iPhone. they
| had to wait 'til the market was there and manufacturing
| costs were low enough and bandwidth was available. i'm
| mostly agreeing w/ you, but i think ideas can weave in
| and out of companies and organizations. CALO jumped from
| DARPA to SRI to Apple to Quato and motivated several more
| startups.
| SR2Z wrote:
| Ah, the mythical secret weakness of all startups: another
| startup doing the same thing.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| of course. how else would they get funded?
| zaphirplane wrote:
| Why
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| Scarcity mindset.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| lol. "don't motivate engineers." dude can't motivate engineers
| with money so he thinks you can't motivate engineers. that's
| actually funny. and a little depressing.
| mainecoder wrote:
| why don't you criticize the arguments his making instead of the
| person, he is basically saying hire people with autonomy not
| people who need motivation.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| the idea i am criticizing is, as explained, "motivation" _is_
| something which can be managed and throwing more money at
| engineers is not a universal motivation.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| Hire good people and trust them, they will build the best they
| can for the users they can talk to
|
| If you don't know what good people look like you can't win.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| And pay them well. If you want people to build you a thing that
| prints money, you better give them a sizeable cut. Otherwise
| enjoy "market rate" performance.
| systemtest wrote:
| When I read about 996-style culture I am happy to be European.
| That would not work here. 40 hours per week max and most
| engineers prefer to not work more than 32 hours a week. So you
| have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4 hours a week.
| alephnerd wrote:
| You don't have to work at an early stage startup - in fact most
| people don't. But some people do wish to participate in an
| early stage startup, and plenty do in Europe as well.
|
| > So you have a good work/life balance. I currently work 4
| hours a week.
|
| And this is why when I was a PM, we shut down our Amsterdam
| office and shifted it to Praha, Bucharest, and Warsaw. You
| won't find as many people who will complain about a 40 hour
| workweek while earning EUR80k TCs
| thesuavefactor wrote:
| Working more hours however =/= getting more done. In fact,
| some experiments show the opposite (within boundaries of
| course).
| alephnerd wrote:
| I agree, but the issue is the _impetus_ behind the
| statement. The tone which that poster took and the default
| negative assumption is a negative trait to most hiring
| managers - especially at the early stage. At an early stage
| organization, you want your employees to be self-motivated
| but also open to pull crunchtime if needed (eg. customer
| escalation, rolled up product launch, pivot)
| Nextgrid wrote:
| As usual, the problem is not 996 itself but comp. You can get
| 996, you just have to pay for it.
|
| The reason Europeans don't want to do 996 is because the
| extra effort isn't fairly compensated.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Not only is it rarely compensated, it's rarely effective.
|
| Software work is bursty and creative, not mechanical and
| hourly.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| you are lucky to have lived a career where that is true.
| it is largely true in the states and sometimes true in
| startups. there are corners of the world where it is less
| true than one would hope.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| and the quality of software produced that way shows
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > there are corners of the world where it is less true
| than one would hope.
|
| And it's readily visible in terms of software quality and
| technological capability of the company.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I think the occasional burst of activity can and does
| work, but it's a budget you need to spend strategically
| and let it recover. Constant 996 indeed won't work.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| if you surround yourself with people who are only motivated
| by money, you will believe that everyone is only motivated
| by money. if you surround yourself with people who are
| motivated by a creative urge to build something they can be
| proud of, you may start to believe that this is everyone's
| motivation.
|
| it is often useful to think of people as only being
| motivated by one thing, to see clearly how application of
| that thing might change their behaviour. but if you believe
| that is the only thing that motivates them, you will have a
| very simplistic (and eventually incorrect) model of how
| they are motivated.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Maybe 15 years ago I would've agreed because there was
| genuine innovation in tech where you could actually be
| passionate and proud of building it. "I want to work here
| because I want this product to exist" could've been a
| legitimate thing to say back in the day.
|
| Nowadays with every market being saturated and tech being
| a race to the bottom quality-wise, what's there to be
| passionate about and/or proud of? Do you think people are
| proud of building yet another OpenAI wrapper or
| advertising surface? If they actually are proud of those
| I would feel pretty sad for them.
|
| Also, the majority of landlords don't take payment in
| "passion" or "pride" and rents have skyrocketed since the
| glory days of tech.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| i think it's still out there, but yeah, you have to wade
| through an amazing amount of poop to find it. insert here
| the joke about someone digging through the muck in a
| horse stable and the punch line is "there's got to be a
| pony in here somewhere."
| mothballed wrote:
| Many people aren't motivated by money so much as wanting
| to spend as much time they can with their family, where
| they find their creative energies most rewarding.
|
| Making the most money per hour merely allows me to spend
| more time with my family rather than working more for
| less and giving my creative energies to greater society
| or an employer instead of directly to my wife and
| children.
| youngtaff wrote:
| I wouldn't work 996 because I like having weekends off and
| a life outside work
| pyrale wrote:
| > But some people do wish to participate in an early stage
| startup
|
| You don't need to push yourself into burnout as an employee
| in order to participate in an early stage startup.
|
| > earning EUR80k
|
| 80kEUR gross is not a lot for a decent SWE in western europe.
| The reason people complain in Amsterdam is not the hours,
| it's that your comp is shit.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| 140k AUD. In major cities in Australia that is a reasonable
| mid level salary. I imagine that is good in Prague.
| pyrale wrote:
| It's a much better salary in Czech republic, Poland, etc,
| yes.
|
| 80k a few years ago was the price point at which you
| would get few Western Europe remote candidate and many
| Eastern Europe ones.
| dcastm wrote:
| Which is why fewer and fewer companies are hiring in Europe.
| 1121redblackgo wrote:
| And why people are jumping out of buildings, actually and
| metaphorically, in 996 cultures.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| i think Amazon only had one person jump out of a building
| last year. it's not as common as you might think.
| amarant wrote:
| Are they? Do you have a source for that? My impression is
| that it's easier to find engineering work in Stockholm than
| in silicon valley atm, but I haven't measured objectively.
| dcastm wrote:
| I live in Spain. I've been in the industry for the last 10
| years.
|
| I've seen from a very close distance several European
| companies move a big part of their operations to India.
| Have had close friends laid off recently and seen them
| struggle for months to find a new jobs. Plus, I see tighter
| freelance market these days.
|
| This was unthinkable not long ago.
| youngtaff wrote:
| UK companies have been moving IT or other operation
| functions to India for decades
|
| It's the typical Western management behaviour of knowing
| the cost of everything but the value of nothing
| joe_mamba wrote:
| Stockholm is not representative of entire Europe same how
| SF isn't representative of entire NA. There's too many
| variables and shades of gray to give a simple answer, with
| closest to a correct answer being "it depends" based on
| where you live, how good you are and how in demand your
| skill set is to the demand of your local market, but the
| market is pretty much fucked in many high-CoL locations
| worldwide due to offshoring to cheaper locations and many
| businesses in Europe seeing orders fall.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| is that for startups or for the big guys like Ericsson?
|
| i have to admit i was surprised by how much startup
| activity was going on in Stockholm in the last 20 years.
| but disappointed by how few startups don't get B or C
| rounds or get bought after their A or B rounds run out.
| trgn wrote:
| I'd say the exact opposite. engineering is markedly being
| outsourced to europe.
| Macha wrote:
| There's sort of a rotation going on in a lot of companies.
| There were companies which had Europe as the low cost
| location compared to America are now moving the type of
| work that had been done in America to Europe and what had
| been in Europe to India. But also companies treating
| European countries as high cost now and looking for new low
| cost countries
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| we also sort of effed up a while ago with changes to
| section 174... suddenly software devs in the states were
| 10%-25% more expensive. once that happened it made sense
| to see if moving devs to europe for situations where you
| have a european based product and sales team made sense.
|
| in the states we've sort of repaired the damage of the
| section 174 changes, but i think they were rolled into a
| tax bill that sunsets in a few years. so we may see this
| again in 2029.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| not everyone in the states is 996, but yeah, there's a pandemic
| of bad management here. or rather... not so much bad
| management... but management by people who read articles about
| how Amazon, a company with tens of thousands of engineers,
| manages projects and then decides they're going to manage their
| startup of 4 people the same way because they think it's a
| "growth hacking" hack.
|
| just keep in mind that American tech startups are often just
| vehicles to evade estate tax. and certainly vehicles for
| converting VC money into more VC money by selling dreams to
| greater fools. there's also a down side.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| _> I currently work 4 hours a week._
|
| Which employers hand out 4h contracts?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Depends what one considers "work"; if you're only counting
| focused, active coding work then there are places where 4
| hours is the max you're going to achieve of that anyway.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| I count work the contracted time I need to be
| available/tied to my employer. Doesn't matter if I'm doing
| focused coding or not, it's still work because I can't be
| paragliding or swimming in that time, I need to be at the
| office or near my laptop, so it's not leisure, it's still
| work time.
|
| But let's say it's only counting "focused work", 4h/week is
| huge stretch, unless we're competing in slacker olympics.
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| 4 is very low. Kind of an outlier.
|
| I guess either you have wealth, very low costs or a great
| hourly rate, or you are the one person who got that Tim Ferriss
| book to work.
| everlier wrote:
| I'm in EU and I can't agree this describes most engineers.
|
| Overwork culture is also present here and exploited by a lot of
| companies.
| casparvitch wrote:
| I've found in (EU) academia at least that people essentially
| lie about how much work they do. In anglosphere it's far more
| common for people to be open/expectant of 80 hour weeks etc.
| Probably the lieing approach is better for society/culture.
| joe_mamba wrote:
| I second this. On paper Austria has below average working
| hours in EU statistics but I've seen a lot of overwork in the
| tech companies I've been at by some people, but which was
| never officially reported because the workers themselves just
| went along with it.
|
| Scandals in the papers around the crazy hours workers at
| big-4 consultancies in Vienna typically do, which again went
| unpunished by labor agencies, since there were no written
| orders from management imposing those long hours but workers
| just tactilely accepted it as part of the work culture there.
|
| Similarly, a mate of mine at major finance gig in Frankfurt
| noticed that they were working longer hours than their
| colleagues from NY. Heard similar stories from colleagues
| from Italy and France.
|
| So work hours are super dependent on local culture and
| industry. The meme about everyone in the EU being paid to
| slack off all day is not as common as people imagine, unless
| maybe you work for the government or got lucky to score a
| great gig in some dysfunctional monopolistic megacorp.
| hxugufjfjf wrote:
| How does this work though? Do you have around 4 hours worth of
| work you report on? Are you paid for more than 4 hours? I'm so
| curious when people throw completely alien statements like this
| out like it's something that doesn't even warrant explanation.
| systemtest wrote:
| I freelance. Occasionally I get called by former clients to
| work on legacy systems I was lead on. And I have some support
| tasks for former clients.
|
| For one company I log on once a month, I start a Renovate
| process which generates pull-requests for updated
| dependencies. Patch-versions get auto-merged after tests
| succeed, minor and major need approval of the current lead.
| Sometimes I need to manually tweak the code a bit because of
| API changes or to get tests to pass. I'm allowed to bill them
| four hours on it regardless of actual work, which is between
| five minutes (no manual intervention required) and two hours
| (need to rewrite some code).
|
| For another company I create a report once a month for all
| outages and which errors frequently show up in logging. I
| automated this to be a five minute task and it generates a
| Wiki page. I review the page to see if everything is ok. I
| bill an hour on this.
|
| The company is happy to not have to allocate engineer hours
| on maintenance so they can continue pumping out new features.
| Everybody is happy.
|
| I'd say that on average I work 4 hours and bill 12 hours.
| This is comparable to the income of someone in employment
| working around 24 hours. But I do run a significant risk
| obviously.
| chis wrote:
| I wonder how universal these stages are. All I can say is when I
| worked at a 15 person company, it was extremely clear to me that
| we needed more structure than "everyone reports to the CEO". We
| struggled to prioritize between different projects, milestones
| weren't clearly defined or owned, at times there would be long
| debates on product direction without a clear decisionmaker, etc
| etc.
|
| Not to say the article is so wrong. I think their advice to
| consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads is a
| great answer. We went with the path of hiring one dedicated
| "manager" of all engineers and that worked pretty well too.
| alephnerd wrote:
| Depends team to team and founder to founder. I've seen early
| stage startups where most ICs were able to self manage, but
| others where some form of structure was needed. At the stage
| that you mentioned, it's natural for founders to end up hiring
| an Engineering Lead.
|
| > consider elevating a few engineers into informal tech leads
|
| It is potentially risky - I've seen plenty of talented
| engineers flounder because they were thrust into an ill-suited
| management role too soon, but I think if someone is motivated
| and eased into the role they tend to be superior to an outside
| hire.
| jayd16 wrote:
| I think its clearly false that motivation is an inherent trait.
| That would imply that demotivation is also inherent, which I
| think is even more obviously wrong.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| it's not hard to de-motivate people. but here's the thing...
| not everyone is motivated by the same thing. the trick of
| motivating people as a manager is spending the time to figure
| out what motivates them.
|
| and if you could only de-motivate people, eventually everyone
| in your team would be de-motivated.
| tyre wrote:
| I think by the time you are hiring people at 27 years old or
| whatever, there is a noticeable gap in motivation. A quarter
| century of lived experience (which is "inherent" to the person
| you're hiring) is a lot, especially at the beginning of one's
| life.
|
| There are all sorts of things like depression, cynicism, past
| experiences, etc. that can lead to someone have a lower
| baseline of motivation. It's also highly contextual, which I
| think is what you're saying and I 100% agree with. Some people
| thrive in role A and would want to bang their head against a
| wall for 40 hours in role B. Others vice versa, others would be
| meh in either, etc.
| burnto wrote:
| > Motivation is a hired trait. The only place where managers
| motivate people is in management books
|
| Initial motivation is the hired trait. It's very easy to
| demotivate people. The trick is to not do that.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Yep people have all sorts of sources of motivations. One of the
| key ones is a sense of ownership. Many people join startups
| instead of BigCorp because they want voice and influence that
| they don't get in a larger company. I've seen so many founders,
| managers, leaders, etc kill that by not recognizing this
| fundamental fact.
|
| Of course there's also the problem that you can find and hire
| people who are motivated people but there's absolutely no
| guarantee people are going to be _motivated for your specific
| problem_.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| thank you. can i hire you to run one of my teams? i've been
| trying to explain this to my managers for half a decade.
| vjvjvjvjghv wrote:
| " It's very easy to demotivate people"
|
| So true. And really hard to reverse
| hahahahhaah wrote:
| Thw word hired is doing a lot of work.
|
| Is motivation intrinsic to a person.
|
| Or is it a person plus situation.
|
| Ot is it person, situation and reason (reason given in
| interview)
|
| I have been most motivated when there was an aha in the
| interview process. Or a "cooll!" feeling. For me usually about
| the end product over the tech stack. I like to work on things I
| like to use myself.
| tyre wrote:
| I think motivation is contextual. When I love the mission of
| the project I'm working on, I'll put everything into it. When
| I hit a prolonged wall of politics or poor leadership, I'm
| not going to operate at 100%.
|
| There's a trifecta that works well:
|
| 1. The job is what the employee wants to be doing (IC,
| manager, FE/BE, end product or mission, whatever).
|
| 2. It's what the company needs. (Don't let a high performer
| do something that's Priority 10 just to keep them.)
|
| 3. It's what the employee is good at. (This includes areas of
| growth that they have aptitude for!)
|
| People in those situations, in my experience, tend to thrive.
| It's great that you've recognized the kinds of products (ones
| you use) that give you that.
|
| Something I don't think hiring managers do enough is convince
| applicants _not to work there_. Have a conversation to
| discover what the person wants. If it 's not this role,
| that's totally fine! It's far better to help someone discover
| what they love than hire someone into something they won't.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| i stopped reading and upvoted this comment right after you
| wrote "i think motivation is contextual." i cannot agree
| with you more.
| loire280 wrote:
| I may not be using the same definition of "motivation" as the
| author, but understanding what motivates your people, putting
| the right mix of people together to work on the right problems,
| and knowing how and when to apply pressure to get people to do
| their best work are absolutely something managers can do to
| motivate their teams.
| al_borland wrote:
| A bad manager can turn a great employee into a good one. It's
| really hard to go back once that happens.
| tyre wrote:
| I'd go further: a bad manager can turn a great engineer into
| a very bad one. People look up to great people, and when the
| strongest performers are demotivated, that spreads.
|
| Commonly in the cultures that end up this way, leadership
| blames / gaslights the ICs. It's toxic and honestly kind of
| heartbreaking.
| al_borland wrote:
| If they are very bad, the company can let them go. If they
| are simple good or fine, the company lost their great
| engineer, and now has a seat filler that they can't justify
| firing.
| tyre wrote:
| For sure. At that point they have to fire them, even
| though it's the company / leadership's fault and hard to
| watch. Ultimately better for that engineer, as well, to
| move on.
| tyre wrote:
| Yeah this 100%.
|
| One of my core philosophies as a manager is that by default I
| should get the fuck out of the way. From there, identify the
| biggest issues and solve them.
|
| If you're successful hiring great people, I really don't
| understand the desire to micromanage them. Or do silly things
| that are demotivating, like 996 or trying to mislead them /
| market things / hide the bad stuff.
|
| Treating people like adults is that One Neat Trick that
| influencer bloggers don't want you to know.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| we used to say "employees don't quit jobs, they quit managers."
| i was very happy at Amazon until they moved me under a sub-
| optimal manager. i quit less than a month later. that manager
| got promoted. this will tell you everything you need to know
| about working at Amazon.
|
| maybe they were trying to get me to quit. maybe that area's
| director was incompetent. maybe both.
| Swizec wrote:
| > at 15 engineers, it is very doable for a single person to keep
| track of everyone's work and ensure alignment.
|
| All my past experience disagrees. Sure you have 15 engineers, but
| you're supporting a business of 150 people. This is a pretty
| common ratio.
|
| The noise gets very loud at that scale and it becomes almost
| impossible for self-managed engineers to make forward progress.
| At the very least you need super clearly defined ownership
| boundaries. That means business process and workstream ownership,
| not code ownership.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| it's worth reading Mythical Man Month WRT team composition. not
| because Brooks says anything new about the subject, but to get
| perspective on how long people have been trying to find a good
| idea for how to structure teams.
| tyre wrote:
| +111111
|
| I don't believe a manager can be effective at 15 direct
| reports. I think it's possible to keep things afloat, but split
| that team in half and hire another manager and you'll be in a
| much better position.
|
| What usually happens here is that your most senior members of
| the team are picking up management responsibilities instead of
| doing IC ones. By all means they should contribute to
| mentorship, direction, culture, etc. but there is way too much
| going on to have a deep understanding of those 15 engineers.
|
| The only times I think this work is when the leader sucks, so
| swamping them with reports means they have a more difficult
| time micro-managing. But they're probably getting in the way in
| some other fashion.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| This is all a bit messy to read, but seems TFA recommends against
| 1:1s and any kind of ticket management or any eng. management all
| when you have 5-6 engineers and this ... insane.
|
| People need to get on the same page. You don't need to be
| (shouldn't be) process insane or go SCRUM or whatever to do that.
| But having regular organized interactions and task definitions is
| absolutely imperative even early on when you don't know for sure
| what you'll be doing.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| yeah. i think you can get away with no 1-on-1's for small teams
| (like 4 people) but by the time you're at 6 or 8, it's probably
| a good idea. i suspect the OP has reason for believing this, so
| rather than say "they're wrong," i would say "i'm not sure they
| explained their environment sufficiently to explain their
| conclusion."
|
| as for ticket management. JIRA is not your friend. i would
| rather go with a stack of post-its than JIRA. JIRA does not
| help you understand what you are trying to do (in my
| experience.) once you've figured out specific tasks, JIRA can
| track those tasks, but so can BugZilla or (as my teams are
| using increasingly) text files checked into the repo.
|
| people often confuse the tool with the process and confuse
| following the process with making progress. the first rule of
| issue tracking systems is they should not get in the way of
| making tasks you need to do visible. JIRA routinely violates
| this rule.
|
| hmm... maybe i should write my own blog post.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| Agree about JIRA. It trends towards TPS Reports and form
| filling, substituting a workflow in the issue tracker for
| actual human processes and communication.
|
| We just rolled out Linear, and I'm gauging how I feel about
| it. GitHub / GitLab issues I don't find useful. Linear seems
| like a middle ground. And it's nice and fast. It also doesn't
| seem to let PMs go apeshit with custom fields and workflows,
| so that's good.
|
| I always crave for something closer to Buganizer we had
| internally at Google, which was just nice and minimal and not
| invasive. At least in its V1 form.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| thx for the info. i'm not familiar with Linear, i'll have
| to check it out.
| yfw wrote:
| I used to be very motivated to do the right thing but the culture
| at my company doesnt reward it and actually actively seems to be
| promoting bad practices e.g. not documenting. Now I also dgaf.
|
| You dont necessarily need managers but you do need someone to set
| expectations and keep the team accountable. Otherwise its a race
| to the bottom. There's no way for me as a single engineer to undo
| slop faster than its generated.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| "lift up your hearts. all will come right. out of the depths of
| sorrow and of sacrifice will be born again the glory of
| mankind."
| pyrale wrote:
| > I know several top 1% engineers in the Valley who disengage
| from recruiting processes when 996 or something similar is
| mentioned.
|
| A few years back, on this board, 996 was something people made
| fun of when it was reported that some Chinese companies did it
| [1].
|
| And now, the strongest claim this blog can make is that _some_
| engineers in the US would disengage from recruiting? That the
| issue with working on saturdays is daily standup? What happened
| in these years for such a change to happen?!
|
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19507620
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| What happened? Started with Musk purging half his staff ...
|
| I've been around long enough in this industry to see the
| pendulum swing back and forth a few times. The peak of
| 2020/2021 was the epitome of "spoiled tech worker" but now
| we're well on our way the other side, I'd say.
| Herring wrote:
| It's better to look at what _didn't_ happen: unionization.
|
| Americans often remind me of Steve Jobs trying to cure cancer
| using diets & acupuncture. You know what the solutions are, you
| just don't like them.
| bob001 wrote:
| Until recently American engineers made a lot of money at
| comparatively cushy jobs. A decent engineer in the US could
| make 5x their equivalent in most European nations. Staff+
| engineers at FAANG could make 5x that. People in a good
| position tend to not like rocking the boat.
| al_borland wrote:
| Not just that, but the union would likely end up capping
| their salary much lower so the wealth can be spread around.
| How hard is the 10x engineer on the team going to work when
| the compensation is the same regardless? This is where
| people end up working multiple jobs, if they can keep up
| with their peers only working one day per week.
| Herring wrote:
| Again see Steve. Something can look like a good position
| and still rapidly deteriorate.
|
| This one wasn't that rapid either, you had plenty of
| warning. I remember discussing inequality with friends in
| 2014, and probably knew about it since Occupy Wall Street
| (2011). Or earlier.
| bob001 wrote:
| Engineers were the privileged class. They were part of
| the group occupy wall street wanted to bring down. Not
| hard to guess why they didn't want that.
| mothballed wrote:
| I would say more precisely, engineers are closer to the
| managerial or capital wielding class; usually the
| adversary of the union.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| i disagree. i also disagree that most people developing
| tech solutions for startups are engineers or are applying
| an engineering discipline. but i would agree that the
| majority of people in valley tech firms are closer to the
| rentier class than they are to working engineers.
| tyre wrote:
| I would tell a recruiter directly that 996 is a red flag.
|
| Prior to that it was cracked (nee 10x (nee ninja)) engineers or
| sigma grindset or whatever.
|
| It's performative. If you bring people together to build
| something that they actually give a shit about, you'll out-
| perform a group of people who are grinding out of fear. And
| you'll _definitely_ out-perform the kinds of people who are
| buzzword heavy.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| i agree. but. there's something in the behaviour of these
| unicorns that should be examined.
|
| the idea that an engineer can be a ninja, 10x or unicorn
| independent of the processes of their environment and working
| group is laughable. i have known several people who were
| identified as "highly productive" and they all had some
| individual traits like a) they were very good with individual
| time management, b) were not afraid to say when they didn't
| understand something and c) were all pretty smart. (and d,
| knew how to give good code review comments without pissing
| people off.)
|
| but... they also needed an environment where they could push
| back and say things like "i do not feel participating in
| today's 1-on-1 meeting (or meeting with product management)
| is a good use of my time", where task design gave them chunks
| of work that were appropriate and they were given the freedom
| to identify (and avoid) "wicked" problems.
|
| which is to say... i don't think the story of the
| ninja/unicorn is complete fantasy, but management has to
| understand how it's real and craft an environment where an
| engineer's inner-unicorn can emerge.
| tyre wrote:
| I've been an early employee (sub 10 and 20) in two unicorns
| and another (a presidential campaign) that didn't have a
| valuation but did the equivalent. People did not work 40
| hours per week, and I feel comfortable saying that the
| companies could not have been as successful if people had.
|
| The common threads were:
|
| - incredible ICs
|
| - founders who spiked in the most important areas for that
| market
|
| - a mission that everyone truly believed in
|
| - a culture of people who deeply cared about one another
| but were comfortable pushing back (as you said!)
|
| It's incredibly rare to find all of these together. I agree
| that management is responsible for helping others thrive,
| but not necessarily that they should shape the environment
| to fit _any_ engineer. Some people want things (projects,
| challenges, roles) that don 't make sense in that company's
| context. It's okay, especially when it's hard, to agree
| that this isn't the place for someone.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _do not adopt all the "Scrum rituals" like standups, retros,
| etc. wholesale, and if you do, keep them asynchronous. There is
| little added value to a voiced update_
|
| I couldn't disagree more. I know it's an unpopular opinion, but
| when standups are done synchronously, everyone actually pays
| attention, notices blocks and helps with them. Things get
| surfaced and quickly addressed that simply wouldn't otherwise,
| _which is the purpose of standups_. When it 's async, people just
| put in what they're working on and mostly ignore everyone else.
| Standups need to be about 2-way communication, not 1-way.
|
| And retrospectives are about improving how the team works. Every
| team has challenges of every kind. Retrospectives are for
| surfacing those and addressing them. They take up a couple hours
| a week, but the idea is that after several months the team is
| more productive and it pays for itself in time.
|
| > _Organic 1:1s (as opposed to recurring ones): keep them topic-
| heavy and ad-hoc, as opposed to relationship maintenance like in
| the corporate world._
|
| Also disagree. 1-1's aren't about "relationship maintenance",
| again they're about surfacing issues that _wouldn 't_ arise
| organically -- all the little things that aren't worth scheduling
| a conversation over, but which need to be addressed for smooth
| functioning.
|
| At the end of the day, managing a team is managing a team. In
| terms of managing people, it's not fundamentally that different
| if you're a 10-engineer startup or a team of 10 engineers at a
| megacorp. These things aren't "anti-patterns" or "rituals". When
| done correctly, they work. (Obviously, if done badly, they don't
| -- so if you're managing a team, do them correctly.)
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| yes and no. "agile" has become doctrinaire and "one size fits
| all." i miss the eXtreme Programming era where standups, pair-
| programming, test-first, timeboxing, etc. were all "tools in a
| toolbox" to be applied as needed. i think the OP is
| experiencing a world where they're told "oh, here's AGILE. you
| have to do everything in this book," which i think i would push
| back on as well.
|
| but... if you're going to do standups and retrospectives... i
| agree with you. do them synchronously. the idea is to get
| everyone to listen to everyone else. the reason they're STAND-
| ups is 'cause everyone's supposed to be standing so there's
| motivation to keep them short. this often makes it difficult to
| do "follow the sun" development. i quit a job a couple years
| back because my management insisted my engineers on the US west
| coast be included in standups for teams in Pune (India).
|
| and that 1-on-1's are for surfacing issues that haven't come up
| elsewhere seems like received wisdom among my peer group. it
| seems to work well for me, so +1 on that too.
|
| the phrase "when done correctly" is doing a lot of heavy
| lifting here. i bet people who have bad experience with these
| practices were in situations where they weren't done correctly.
|
| one of my problems with environments where management thinks
| devs are interchangeable bots motivated only by money is that
| there is zero motivation for management to change their
| approach when it doesn't work. if they think the only thing
| that motivates people is money, they think they have to add
| more money or fire their devs and get devs that are
| appropriately motivated by cash.
| bob001 wrote:
| I disagree. In a company of 5-6 total engineers who are
| actually self-motivated and competent none of these things
| matter. If you need stand-ups for people to be aware of work
| being done then you're bandaid fixing a deeper issue. Same for
| retros since all of that should already be getting communicated
| in five other ways. If not then you've got bigger issues. Same
| for 1-on-1s. If the founders don't know these things
| organically then they have failed either in their own roles or
| in who they hired. The solution to that isn't rituals.
|
| In a large org where the most senior IC and the manager are
| both in 35 hours of meetings a week while the rest have 20 a
| week you need rituals. When all they are focused on in
| engineering then you don't.
| sailfast wrote:
| It seems like a tautology that high performers are turning down
| positions when 996 is mentioned.
|
| Who on EARTH would opt in to a system like that imposed by your
| management? (Barring the obvious compensation-related
| encouragement)
| everlier wrote:
| This is such a great advice overall. Many people are commenting
| about flaws in the overall approach, yet everything said is
| exactly what I saw working/not working in such early companies.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| i saw that people who wear black turtlenecks are lauded as
| visionary geniuses, so don't forget to buy some turtlenecks and
| yell at people on a daily basis.
| blinkbat wrote:
| I find a lot of this to also be true with sole engineers managing
| agents.
|
| I've now seriously approached vibecoding two nontrivial projects,
| and in each case using "safe tools" was a good way to get to a
| working stage, faster:
|
| - in one I insisted on typescript early and found it to be more
| of a hurdle than letting the LLM cobble js learning in and
| address bugs in a way an engineer might find uncivilized (trial
| and error over bulletproof typing).
|
| - in another, I found that using react was not offering much
| benefit to a given project, and asked the llm to rewrite in
| vanilla. while this mostly worked, it introduced new bugs that
| were not present when using react. switching BACK to react
| eliminated these and enabled the LLM to continue writing features
| at no (current) technical or performance cost!
| Animats wrote:
| If you need motivation, maybe the organization is designed badly.
|
| It was once said of the Roman legions "The Legion is not composed
| of heroes. Heroes are what the Legion kills." Field Marshall the
| Viscount Slim, who commanded in the China-Burma-India theater in
| WWII, once wrote "Wars are won by the average performance of the
| line units." He wrote negatively on various special forces type
| units, preferring to use regular infantry and training them up to
| a good, but not superhuman, standard. Arthur Imperatore, who had
| a unionized trucking company in New Jersey, is profiled in
| "Perfecting a Piece of the World" (1993) for how he made his
| trucking company successful despite a very ordinary workforce.
|
| There's an argument for winning by steady competently managed
| plodding. The competently managed part is _hard_. Steve Bechtel,
| head of the big construction company that bears his name, once
| said that the limit on how many projects they could take on was
| finding bosses able to go out to a job site and make it happen.
| Failure is a management problem, not a worker problem.
| ebiester wrote:
| This post is talking about very small companies. At that 20+
| person department, it's true. Once you have a team where the
| founder doesn't know everyone, the average matters a lot more.
|
| If you have 15 people, you can hire 15 people and they will be
| able to organically organize if you hire well. If they have a
| question, they know what everyone is working on. The code base
| is small enough that everyone can just figure it out even if
| the documentation is bad.
|
| The larger that group is, the more effort it takes to make sure
| everyone has the context they need to get their job done.
| That's where management matters.
|
| And honestly, when I was the first manager (team of 17) brought
| in, I was writing code and on my own project in addition to
| starting to build up the "what do we need to do to scale?" You
| bring someone like me in at 17 people because you're going to
| need to scale soon and someone needs to build the first set of
| processes that solve the problems of the next stage, and figure
| out the onramp because done wrong, they make everything worse.
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