from Hacker News

Managing Up

by dvaun on 4/29/24, 5:54 PM with 18 comments

• by mattgreenrocks on 4/29/24, 8:02 PM

  > Silicon Valley will continue to suffer as long as we entrust the future to management consultants and showmen who don’t build software.

  The management fetish is quite apparent.

  If I understand it right, this is codified on IC ladders: E4s/E5s are doing the vast majority of actual software development, with E6+ contributing here and there but being a mix of PM/engineer/quality control. Staff eng's are often reminded if they're coding "too much" that they're probably Doing It Wrong and not maximizing impact and should have broken the task up into smaller chunks and distributed them among the team.

  It's just gross: actually doing the work is made to seem a bit gauche because hierarchy needs something to distinguish itself otherwise.

  Maybe I'm missing something here?

• by CRConrad on 5/2/24, 1:09 PM

  > This is the man running one of the most important tech platforms in the world

  Sounds like what he really meant to write in that gerund was "ini", not "nni"...

• by ProjectArcturis on 4/29/24, 8:11 PM

  Boy this is a long screed by someone who doesn't seem to understand that companies' main goal is to make money, not great products. Yes, we are in a period of enshittification, and yes this names a lot of the people and processes responsible. But if you don't understand that the owners and investors are extremely happy with how this has gone so far, you're just shouting at clouds.