Yeah this. One of my friends is a PM for mostly government contracts. He also gets serious commissions for any mid project add ons so they're incentivized to low ball and win contracts then get customers to pay more later.
The fact that you didn't see what he was ACTUALLY referring to is actually funny in that it means you don't really understand what having an ADHD brain is actually like.
He isn't saying this is literally the situation. He's referencing the fact that this is what its like having an ADHD brain. Your BRAIN is the one constantly interrupting you, all the time, bringing you focus away from what it SHOULD be focusing on and onto other random things, making doing consistent DEEP and thoughtful work really hard.
The "workplace that isn't suited for the type of work" you refer to is just saying that my brain isn't suited to the type of work. Which like, yeah... I agree. Thats why I take medication.
So you've listed houses, cars, watches, food. All these things indeed serve a purpose as well as allow for creativity and expression.
But the difference is, all those things have sale values that DIFFER based on that creativity and beauty. Code does not. My customer does not care if my backend code is beautiful, and neither does my CEO because it won't make more money.
> Is a dish or menu designed by a chef not art? Is a house designed by an architect not art?
Of course I see the art in those things, and in response i'll pay a lot more for a Frank Lloyd Wright than a mcmansion. But the customer of my B2B CRUD app does not care if my code looks like a FLW or a mcmansion. They care if it works.
>all those things have sale values that DIFFER based on that creativity and beauty. Code does not.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. I certainly prefer to use software that has a nice interface, is fast and responsive and has thoughtful features. I remember the first time my iPhone opened a pop up at just the right time asking if I wanted to share a wifi password with my Mac. Wow! Delightful. And I am willing to pay more money for such things.
>But the customer of my B2B CRUD app does not care if my code looks like a FLW or a mcmansion. They care if it works.
What is "works"? I'm not being disingenuous here. The software development process is often plagued by things like scope creep, unreasonable asks from stakeholders, cutting things for budget or time etc...
"works" is a subjective concept in your hypothetical customer's mind. Likely molded by you or your project manager setting expectations, pushing back on feature requests, etc...
My real point is, it's not just the value of the consumer or "customer". But the artist as well. It's the satisfaction you can get from designing a performant service that handles requirements and has the capacity for future expansion, etc...
Just because some people are philistines doesn't make the creation any less valuable as a piece of art.
I’m sorry but this is complete nonsense; there is no pleasure derived from viewing “beautiful” code from the perspective of the consumer such as in your other examples.
A program is not like a car, a chair, or a house, and if any of this were brought up in a design meeting for code, you’d rightfully be laughed out of the meeting.
But it’s fine to disagree about these things up to the moment where you attempt to slow progress towards delivery for these values. At that point, the point at which functionality is hindered in any way by your artistry, are you now a problem on a development team.
There are plenty of productive ways to deal with problems, but make no mistake, on any competent software team you will be disabused of this “art” notion, not the other way around.
>I’m sorry but this is complete nonsense; there is no pleasure derived from viewing “beautiful” code from the perspective of the consumer such as in your other examples.
You're taking it too literally. "viewing" in the case of software is "using". When I'm using a well designed, performant piece of software I can feel the art in it. When I'm using something thrown together I can feel that too.
"Performant" is not the same as "well designed". What you feel is a pleasant UX, which is art, or closer to it at least, and would fit your analogy drawn against a chair or a car.
However what we're discussing here is how the code and otherwise hidden implementation is designed and built. OP is not a UX designer, OP is a software engineer, and should not waste time building things that are "beautiful" in that capacity.
UX and systems design are almost entirely unrelated, and should not spend time in one another's domain.
Your writing reminds me a lot of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance".
'The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called yourself. The machine that appears to be "out there" and the person that appears to be "in here" are not two separate things. They grow toward Quality or fall away from Quality together.'
> My customer does not care if my backend code is beautiful
Apple can only sustain the high margins they do because you’re wrong. Some people care a great deal. Some of those people have deep pockets. If none of your customers seem to feel that way it’s probably because they are Apple customers.
But you also have companies like Anker and at certain points in their history Sony, Samsung and perhaps LG. They got it. At least for a while.
People here don’t complain about Apple for silly reasons as much as they used to. But I’ve been laughing at people jealously predicting their imminent demise while cashing dividend checks ever since their shares were $40 pre-split (7x and counting IIRC). I’m going to get to retire at least a couple years early just on AAPL, even having done dollar cost averaging.
> B2B crud app
Ah. Businesses have a weird split brain problem and it’s difficult or impossible there. They want custom software for less than or around the price of off the shelf solutions. The OTS ones can be beautiful and occasionally get away with it. If you care about art of even ergonomics you’re gonna have a bad time. I encourage you to seek out a new vertical.
> Apple can only sustain the high margins they do because you’re wrong. Some people care a great deal.
Are you suggesting that some people care a great deal about how pretty Apple's code appears, despite having zero way of knowing anything at all about that as a consumer?
They do start to care when it stops working or it takes forever to change due to it being a mess. This is the natural state most projects end up at unless the devs are putting in a ton of extra effort to keep it clean, organized and maintained. Devs that are thinking about keeping things beautiful, succinct and performant are much more likely to do that.
My Observer bias of late has been about open or nearly open feedback loops. People don’t adjust their strategies when the consequences come due later. I’ve been on a number of projects and seen a few more where management keeps turning screws to get stuff faster and then goes pikachu face when the whole thing grinds to a halt. Few if any of them see themselves as the agents of chaos in this situation. It’s not their fault, it’s someone else’s. And even if you can document it, it doesn’t sink in. Because that was something they did years ago and we don’t think about old things.
No. Not all insiders would necessarily be professionals as covering their tracks post crypto hack. They could just be someone who knew they had access to the keys and said "screw it my life is already horrible lets try this".
Another option is honestly an insider who got screwed (a lot of employees had a TONNE of money on FTX) selling the keys they knew of to someone else.
Or they got screwed and thought about how to screw the higher ups even more. They never need to cash out the money to do this.
Nobody will ever not be suspicious of SBF and his inner circle again after this hack.
If it were just a big collapse and it went like an ordinary bankruptcy with the creditors getting a haircut, he'd just be considered an idiot. Money mysteriously vanished? Now he's malicious as well, and any court is going to ask SBF where it went, and even if he didn't know nobody would believe it.
The latter immediately occured to me. It is a lot easier to claim ignorance if your key gets used by someone else to drain the vault, than it is to drain the vault yourself.
Unintended? My company did two rounds of layoffs already and this was a thing that was known from day 1. Literally the day after the the first rounds one of the questions in the town hall was about "how do we plan to retain the people who are left now that they're getting spammed by linkedin recruiters".
I think these days this is a known and intentional effect from upper management and they absolutely are accounting for another 5-10% of voluntary leavers post layoffs. Its free money from their POV, no severance.
To clarify a bit here, "unintended" meaning the amount of people, not that people left at all. They had to start incentivizing people to stay, they talked about attrition frequently, etc.
I work at a company that did layoffs recently as well, about double this size.
Our managers also had no idea until day of. The entire day was spent watching co workers google calendars and slack accounts. Once they got a meeting booked with HR, their meeting titles all turned into "busy", so we would know who is getting cut and who wasn't. It was a brutal day.
In our case I don't think they were picking people based on performance whatsoever. It seemed to just be about who was paid the best and who in the org structure could have their job removed and someone else take over. Really weird.
Is it "really weird," though? Layoffs, especially when you start talking about entire teams, divisions, products, etc. is about revenue, profitability, and righting the ship (or safeguarding the ship so you don't have to right it 6 months from now). Whether Jim got "exceeds expectations" or "greatly exceeds expectations" is irrelevant when an EVP needs to trim $12M off their budget and Jim's department lost $9M last year.
A common sentiment you see on the internet (especially from younger people who haven't experience a tough labor market) is that only the low performers get laid off. So I can see how they think it's really weird if managers aren't involved.
Low performers always 100% of the time get dropped during layoffs. It's the one window that companies can mostly let go of employees without being sued. (Though, if they lay off too many people in a protected class, still can get sued). What's interesting about a lot of the division or sector-downturn layoffs, that you end up seeing solid performers, and, when you are dropping a good portion of your division - very good performers let go. Most companies try to make a play for keeping their 10x developers - but, I've been in layoffs (Browser Division, Netscape, 1997sh) - where just absolutely everyone was dropped, regardless of performance.
> Low performers always 100% of the time get dropped during layoffs.
This is totally not true. Usually they make jobs redundant not people. If there's a pool of people doing the same job and that headcount is reduced then it will often be the lowest performers that go however some places have done LIFO or cut the most expensive.
However if you're doing layoffs and you reduce your frontend team the it's likely low performers from the backend team get to stick around.
I've been through 18 layoffs since 1996, about 12 of them while in management. I can only speak to the Bay Area - practices may be different outside. You are correct, that lots of times positions/jobs are made "redundant" as part of the layoffs - but speaking as someone who both observed, and participated in the process - those "redundant" positions were quickly backfilled after the layoffs if there was any need.
The one exception might have been when the entire browser division was dropped back in Netscape - everyone was chopped there - but I can't say with certainty whether low-performing Server Division people were impacted (though IT and HR positions were chopped). So - fair, when a division or operating group is cut wholesale, low-performers in other divisions might not be dropped - but knowing the mindset of management - they really like to take advantage of a layoff as a "get out of jail free" card to let someone go. Much less stress, and way, way less paperwork.
When I saw layoffs at a small company (i.e., you could know all the engineers in the company) you could have probably guessed who they would have been by how well they seemed to perform. When I saw it in a big company, not much rhyme or reason tbh.
Which "makes sense" since companies usually try to keep the team deciding who to lay people off very small for fear of leaks. So the n people at a small company making the decisions might know everyone but the same n people at a large company might barely even know the names of all the middle-managers much less all the individual contributors and how well they are each doing within their role.
Everyone is in a protected class because everyone has a nationality, immigration status, ethnicity, sex, sexuality, etc.
The EEOC investigates workplace discrimination, so if you suspect it, it would help to file a complaint with them. They can gather evidence to determine if discrimination took/takes placr and hold the employer accountable.
One of HRs jobs is to track % of people who are > 40. If you are a company of 1000 employees, and you are 25% of each age group 20+,30+,40+,50+ and you do a 100 person layoff, and 100% of them are 40+ - you will be sued and they will almost certainly win.
I was part of lay offs some years ago. Managers didn’t know until the day of, and it wasn’t based on performance. All the performance reviews were already done months before. Some people were even due for promotions.
If layoffs are occurring, companies or managers are going to want to cut poor performers or trouble employees at that time.
So if younger employees are saying it's cutting low performers, and the rest are left as the younger and lower paid workers to pick up the slack, where senior levels are cut indiscriminately or based on salary, because they are higher paid and the goal is to cut expensive workers.
Assuming perfect information, Jim's skill being transferable, and Jim's performance eval being objective, you'd expect that the company would profit from transferring Jim and other top performers to their profitable products, and cutting the worst employees from those projects (after all, even a department making profit is likely to have some employees on the low end of the performance bell curve).
Of course that isn't as easy because of morale, team cohesion, performance evals rarely being comparable across teams, and people being not as fungible as the above suggests. Not to mention all the work this takes, in a time when you probably have other worries. So maybe it's not "really weird", just "not immediately obvious"
I feel like pc86 was just being straightforward about how those decisions are made. They can speak for themselves though.
When I was part of a mass lay-off, it was big enough to trigger CA state law where they had to detail everything. You could clearly see that it was strictly based on who was paid the most (below the managerial level).
>The 'righting' came because of shitty financial decisions made from top-down. The top should be fired first and foremost. The company wouldn't be in the position its in if management were doing their fucking jobs.
Should but rarely, if ever, happens. Some even get a larger bonus when meeting next quarter targets or some other short-term indicator.
> it was strictly based on who was paid the most (below the managerial level)
The "(below the managerial level)" part is the problem and the reason it is outrageous to people invested in a company but not in a position of power (such as the actual developers/engineers, even in a tech-centric company, at least once it has grown to a given size).
A lot of times what you'll see done is structured more as a reorg than just a straight layoff, where if they need to trim $xM from the budget, they'll start shrinking and eliminating teams at the IC level until they reach .7-.8 of that figure, then see how many "extra" managers they have and start trimming there, typically just based on seniority rather than pay. Rinse and repeat until you're at .9-1.1x depending on how many people you think will resign after the layoffs.
Exactly this. I've generally loved the small teams I've been on, and keep in touch with co workers from every company I've worked for and left. But that doesn't mean I held any allegiance to the company that we both worked for. I like people not corporations. Yes it sucks to 'leave' your friends behind at a job, but if they're really your friends you'll still keep in touch.
The band The Glitch Mob maintain an ambient playlist on spotify that I listen to constantly while working. They update it really regularly (4 day since last song added right now).
