Things I Want to Say to My Boss

This is what the AI boom is really about, removing more power from labor. Its why all the AI hype largely markets itself in this way "how AI can replace or minimize X role" as opposed to "This is how you can use AI to empower your workforce in the majority of discourse I've seen around it.

This isn't the norm in most STEM industries. Most of us were IC level engineers at some point before either beung given progressively more responsibility and/or being sponsored by our employees to participate in a PTMBA like Wharton, Booth, Fuqua, or Haas.

Networking and hustling did ofc play a role, but lacking domain experience would limit how high you could climb.

I used to work for a small business and I decided I would have to quit one day when my boss said, on the phone to a client, "yes, I've got a resource for that".

There were four of us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Stock_Brokerage_Commissio...

The equivalent in the UK — the Big Bang — was very much fresh in the minds of my leftie economics teachers in 1990 :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang_(financial_markets)

On top of the creation of NASDAQ and subsequent NYSE reforms that opened up electronic trading and allowed banks to start selling stocks, these things meant that ordinary people, individuals, etc., developed more of an interest in the stock market and of "business" as an abstract.

This did two things: first it means that there's so much more heat around IPOs and so much more interest in them. But there's also an amateur/individual obsession with quarterly performance over the slower, institutionalised trading that went before it.

That changes the culture of business, Wall Street and London so much that it fuels the market for business schools, MBAs, economics degrees.

Then once you have the broker-driven (and exchange-competition-driven) obsession with the hunt for IPOs, you start to see the modern venture capital market, and thirty years later after a few crashes, the reactive rebirth of private equity.

But before these reforms, people on the streets in either country did not really have access to the stock market, and stock trading was sort of a gentlemen's club: they were absolutely furious that the fixed commission era was ending.

Fixed commission regulated by the SEC is such an alien concept now.

But I can't help but think this isn't at all a measure of productivity. A hugely productive org that isn't overcharging its customer base will always look less "productive" by this metric than one that is successfully overcharging.

Poor metrics lead to poor business decisions.

Somewhat, sure.

It's also managers who tell you you're being laid off, but good news, not for three months. And, oh, by the way, if you leave early no severance.

And why are you being laid off?

Your duties are being offshored.

_You_ aren't being offshored because they need three people to replace you, but your duties are.

Ostensibly this saves money.

Despite what you see on r/cscareeerquestions, if you tell anyone outside of tech that you work at a FAANG, they just shrug.

I was a hobbyist for 10 years before I got my first job. I was a short (still short), fat (I got better) kid with a computer, what else was I going to do?

But by the time I graduated in 1996 and moved to Atlanta, there were a million things I enjoyed doing that didn’t involve computers when I got off of work.

I’ll be in my 30th year next year. My titles might have changed but part of my job has always been creating production code.

I have never written a line of code since 1996 that I haven’t gotten paid for. It’s always been a means to exchange labor for money and before that, to exchange labor for a degree so I could make money

I figured out rather quickly to do the least amount of work, stay off the radar, do the cool stuff on my own time and saw my role as a corporate code jockey as nothing more than a way to pay my bills and keep a roof over my head.

All of my romantic ideas of being a developer, writing beautiful code and getting the pat on the back for such a great job? It all evaporated within the first two years.

Its just not worth it any more and you completely nailed it why.

... which doesn't really matter anymore either as long as it's profitable, see Facebook, Twitter, Boeing...

They pay you to increase their profit. As you see yourself running a business, it's important to understand what your customers actually care to pay for.

If you want your pay to go up, they need to see the impact you can make or are making to their profit.

A lot of engineers think they are paid to work through tasks assigned to them and what not, or to increase code quality, or to add a feature to the app, or backend, etc. As they focus on that, they can find themselves really surprised when they're told they aren't performing or are going to be let go. "I did everything you asked me?" Yes, but none of that was what they were interested in. To them it felt like they had to step in and find things for you to do otherwise you'd be sitting idle while they pay for nothing, which is work they had to do that they'd had rather not have too.

What they actually want you to do, is immediately begin understanding what makes them money, immediately start engaging with ideas to maximize that, and immediately start focusing on how the tasks you pick up and how you get them done maximizing that impact to the bottom line, by figuring out if it's the right thing or not, if it's worth doing it well or doing it quickly, etc.

> Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest".

I'm not fully going to disagree here, but most engineers are not paid for "hours-in-seat" at least in big tech. They're salaried, not hourly wage workers.

And what you say is true if you consider "working hard" to be the same as "pretending to work a lot of hours."

Putting in lots of hours is actually quite easy, if at the sacrifice of your personal time, but anybody can do it.

Actual hard work though is often quite engaging, fun, and rewarding. Many engineers look for opportunities to work on hard problems for example.

It is very difficult to create an environment that makes people work hard. Meaning, having them truly tackle innovation, truly raise efficiency, truly prioritized on what matters, truly in the loop of what they need to solve for, truly assigned to what they are best at, etc.

It is very easy to create an environment that makes people work longer hours or weekends, but on a bunch of easy irrelevant things and with procrastination throughout.

> without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this

That you must be willing to take risk, believe you are the best, willing to play dirty, willing to stomp on others, and so on, yes for sure to some extent.

But out of all those with some of that, most of them are average or below average leaders even with respect to being a tyrant and everything else required.

Sometimes applying a bit of pressure, dangling a carrot, a bit of a threat, it does motivate people to put on more effort and try harder and it does extract more value out of them (at no added cost).

And a good manager will do that, and you should expect it. But going back to your business analogy, customers do the same. They complain, they want more for less, they threaten to go to your competitor, etc.

But this part is the easiest one to do. And because it's so easy, you'll find it's what most managers do to try and be a "good manager". That makes it average at best.

Beyond that, a really good manager will do everything else I mentioned.

I'd want to assume that it would be the same except that they are even less likely to know it's good for their profit and therefore to not properly invest in it.

For well established tech companies, my experience is that still aligns with maximizing profit, but two things happen:

The company has so much buffer to be inneficient, they can also brute force their way into new territories or markets. They can hire more, they can contract out, they can buy up other companies, they have existing leverage from their current customers or other products, etc.

They are more focused on reducing cost than growth. They turn their current tools and products to "maintenance mode", and that requires less excellence to achieve and is more mundane work, sometimes all it takes is just more hands on it or people willing to work off-hours or long hours to get the ticket queue down to 0, which means running it like a sweat shop can meet their needs.

And wasting a lot of time on the not-so-good liars. We've recently taken on someone for an infrastructure management role and apparently things are much much worse than they were last time we needed that sort of resource (about five years ago). Padding CVs was always an issue, but completely making them up, or getting ChatGPT to do it for you, now seems to be the default behaviour.

So just by doing a little pre-interview prep, I found out that this person (if it was a real person and not a persona of some kind) had a resume with one career timeline and two LI profiles with two separate and different career timelines.

Fed this to my bosses who proceeded to have an extremely awkward and brief interview with the person (or the person posing as the person) about "so, in 2022, were you at $FIRST_COMPANY, $SECOND_COMPANY, or $THIRD_COMPANY?" I mean, you have to pass a background check to work at my company even if offered; why do people do this?

About this part:

    > Number of public holidays.

Nitpick, but this is a contradiction.

Contemporary fiction doesn't mean "current" (or least it didn't used to) it means "set in the time it was written".

I guess the word contemporary has been misused to the point of just meaning current or modern and I shouldn't nitpick it!

AI has it's demons, for sure, but there is an awful lot of jumping at ghosts these days.

No thanks. How would you find violators, with AI detectors? Might as well go back to throwing people into lakes to see if they float.

Fortunately communication is usually conceptual like a metaphor.

You're saying it's hard to communicate that, but you've just done it really well. If you were to tell me a bit about those trade offs so I can also consider them the next time, I'd be a perfectly happy camper even if my idea isn't being picked up.

I think this is also a really important counterpoint -- sometimes the person who "cares too much" is simply wrong, and is causing problems that should be avoidable. In other words, without more details it's hard to know if it's the manager or the direct report who is really the problem here.

The thing I liked most is that when my clients would ask me to do things - I would often propose things more reliable and less time to implement solutions. They would then opt for the less optimal thing sometimes for good reasons. If I was an exempt employee that would have meant me spending my personal time on the extra work to meet deadlines. The contractor me would bill them for the hours:)