I switched to a large company from a series of startups (including my own), it is definitely a big change, and "efficiency" is not the thing anymore.

Now I can spend days fighting with some gnarly IT security problem to load an internal Python package cross-org with a Managed Identity token issued to Build Pipeline that is scoped to a Service Principal with a wrong checkbox, or something equally cryptic and useless. Nothing of it would be even remotely possible in a startup. Is it "performative"?.. I think not. Is it efficient or necessary? Probably not, but who knows. Chesterton's Fence and all that.

The Iron Law or Bureaucracy:

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration. Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc. The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. (Quoted from Wikipedia)

If you think 1:1s don’t add value, your slice of the reality of what even modestly sized teams need to operate smoothly is so far from my experience I don’t think we’re likely to bridge the divide.

But to make a good faith effort: what is the job you think line managers are supposed to be doing, if not listening to devs, going to meetings you would prefer not to sit through, and writing up carefully documented feedback for the under-performers you seem convinced surround you at every turn?

This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent.

I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.

If there are no layoffs in their future, they must be creating value you can’t yet see.

Get closer to the work they do and maybe you’ll see it.

Also: the “waste” might be dwarfed by scale. For example Twitter famously had Linux kernel devs on the payroll. Why would a tweet company need kernel developers? Simple. At that scale a salary was nothing next to the gains if some primitive they needed could be built, or some bug or perf problem could be promptly fixed. An engineer could contribute many times what they cost the company, so although it’s far from Twitter’s core business it’s still ROI positive.

There’s also the matter of organizational “slack”. Have a look at this sound advice: https://www.seangoedecke.com/doing-nothing-at-work/?ref=dail...

Beware when making assumptions from afar. Get closer and really try to understand. Things work the way they do for good reasons.

And then, someone needs to build cafeteria menus. And the tool to manage health care enrollment. And badging. And ultimately, you have a product that could probably be operated by a lean team of 100 people, but you have 5,000 employees to take care of all the auxiliary functions, from legal compliance to providing benefits. You need slack in that org structure too, because you don't want everything to grind to a halt when one important person leaves or takes a week off.

I don't understand why you find this objectionable. Would Google or Facebook be more fun if you were on a very small team with zero slack and constant grind, and there was no one to call if the printer is broken? Yes, it's a jobs program funded by the revenue from core services, but it ultimately makes life better for everyone?

Ultimately the "last 80%" of boring business logic actually needs to get built and the day to day operations have to happen. It can't be all AI prototypes and vibe coded demos.

We went through a round of layoffs and I had to “finish” another programmer’s work. It was a java app with servlets and JSP and a bunch of web forms submitting back to a database. He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved.

He did this like 20 times for all his modules. Maybe six months of “work” was like nothing done.

I like to work on small teams that collaborate enough so if someone isn’t doing anything then we know. And I don’t think anyone’s work in my immediate vicinity is performative.

That being said, it’s hard to know people’s process and what is productive to them. If you take a small sample you might not understand. And what you think is performative may be essential. This seems common when I was younger when I thought “I don’t understand it, therefore it’s not important.”

I’m currently thinking through a tough program and browsing HN at 10am and it’s an essential part of my workflow.

There's definitely a ton of cruft that accumulates, and a lot of "work" being done that accomplishes little, just to satisfy a corporate bureaucracy.

But there is a reality where "good performance" is not just about the work you do, but also about your ability to get things done practically, e.g. not just your ability to write a specific microservice, but to make a compelling case for that architecture over another, and to get it reviewed and merged.

That's not to excuse wasting everyone's time on sycophantic vanity projects that don't help the business.

But I do think there's a tendency (especially on HN and Developer Twitter) to only respect complicated engineering work (e.g. optimizing Kubernetes deployments). To be fair, I'd love to almost never deal with company politics and performative work and am lucky to be at a company where effectively zero of that exists.

But as orgs grow, so does the share of work that's more political.

This dynamic seems almost inevitable as a company grows. It's not necessarily bad, as long as the people doing the work are recognized and compensated.

YMMV though - if you know people who managed to stay at a FAANG for a significant time without producing anything of value, more power to them.

And all things that scale have this property. We spend a large percentage (almost half) of our human body on the sum of blood vessels, interstitial fluid, and other such stuff that is entirely internal waste/nutrient scaffold while the “organs and limbs that actually do the stuff” are the other half. A fifth of San Francisco is roads- just sits there not doing stuff most of the time. Some half of the brain is not “thinking stuff” but networking. A fifth of a datacenter is just networking.

Similarly a large amount of organizations is often dedicated to the motion of information flow and so on. “I take the specs from the customers and give them to the engineers. I’m a people person.”

Depending on the manager and on the team, 1:1s with people can be very valuable for all involved.

So in that case yes, with a two-tier employment system it enabled FTEs to be de factor retired while contractors carried their palanquin up the income ladder.

1. The level of "this is an arrangement of labor/capital in order to produce money"

and

2. This is an enterprise where thousands of people spend 1/3 of their time and takes up a huge mental space, so they arrange it in a way that affirms their internal sense of purpose

Organizations, especially large corporations which have passed a few "too big to fail barriers" gradually become a "purpose factory" where their product partially becomes imbuing their higher level employees a sense of importance and justification for spending years there.

Most solutions to understand what's going on, in detail, are naturally going to be quite time consuming.

I eventually worked out that the bureaucratic red tape was a hurdle rather than a deliverable and everyone else on the floor was dodging it. I'm still not sure why they hired me then put me on a team with no work in the funnel and a scope too narrow to make my own work, though I was grateful for the ridiculous pay.

I've found this to be true in almost everything in life, including work and business.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%27s_law

Instead of being demoralized, shouldn't you be happy that you have a nice financial buffer, smart coworkers, and the choice to either effect change internally or compartmentalize work and create a more meaningful life outside of it? I'm not saying you should keep working there, but if you want to play hardball you can always step up or out.

Plenty of people have realized that and played the visibility/politics game. Especially in the last decade where tech has tried to be more inclusive and less about hard metrics. Now the narrative is the key component of your performance review. It's vibes all the way essentially

Then you introduce a layer of line managers that are blurring the signal even more, to the point where the narrative about someone is way more powerful than facts. Their whole job is to play politics and pushing a narrative to other managers/ICs during 1:1s.

This is most big companies. As they grow in size, staff functions get compartmentalized. As their main product matures, the need to develop new things slows down, and daily life becomes more about knob-turning and optimizing what you have to extract more revenue. This means that, for example, the developers, PMs, designers eventually run out of things to do, so whatever they still got ends up growing in size and eventually taking most of their time, be that mentoring, committee work, random initiatives here and there etc.

Source: was dev turned PM in a previous life, managed to flee to greener pastures.

Corporations are not alone in this, of course. When I was in university, in the late 2000s, we had 2 administrative staff for every professor (up from a 1-to-1 ratio in the 90s). You can draw your own conclusions about whether that was a net benefit to educational outcomes.

"The Ringelmann effect is the tendency for individual members of a group to become increasingly less productive as the size of their group increases."

There is evidence of this in simple tug of war games.

But I think there is also truth in realizing work is mostly performative: the pareto principle seems to apply. 20% of the workforce sustains the other 80%. That's purely anecdotal, I doubt the numbers align that way. But it does always seem there are a few all-stars carrying others.

That said the unevenness of contribution isn't strictly a large company phenomena. Small companies have the same uneven distribution. I've worked at two startups with about 4 people total and people were not equally productive.

That said, this is not necessarily the goal and productivity is also very hard to measure. It's doubly hard to measure across different types of work. One person can code up a greenfield back-end for something in 3 days while another can spend a week fixing some elusive infrastructure problem.

Not everyone is as good at everything. So we do have engineers who truly are much better than average. And in large companies most are average. But that is just one factor here.

1:1's can add value or they can not add value. Large companies can't just be flat so someone needs to manage people. A good manager adds value, a bad manager might subtract value, but that's orthogonal.

Is it demoralizing to work for a big and inefficient company? Sure. Is it more demoralizing for people who are motivated to get things done and are good at it? I think so. Go start your own company?

The only parts of these companies that actually do real work at any acceptable rate are skunkworks, and they are created precisely because the rest of the company's structure doesn't actually function for getting anything done.

Why is the meaning of your own life derived from your perception of the lives of others? Or rather, why is it that when you judge others’ lives as inauthentic you find your own to be so too?

Most of what you call performative is likely real, but even if it were purely performative, it would surface people who were not on board and possibly unreliable.

Similarly, a 1:1 with no apparent content could serve its purpose of looking you in the eye to see if you're of sound mind.

I think your concern is better framed as whether people are pulling their weight. The solution for that is to make them deliver something hard on their own every so often, and cycling people through teams to avoid free riders.

The stock price went down 20% during the time I was there, and I could see why - it took months to ship a tiny button.

I work with a lot of ex-FAANG now and they haven't had much of a chance to do impactful things. I've heard a lot of "I was responsible for the reporting function on this dashboard that's 10 clicks deep on Google Play"

I do think Layoffs, while obviously very sad for those involved, were needed.

Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing.

Replaced with a new set of problems of course. Like no money. And if the startup is successful it will eventually morph into a big fat corporate culture. The circle of life.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/paul-buchheit-interview-transc...

Consider yourself lucky. This part is missing in some places.

there is always an aspect of every job that is performative - even small companies. I like to call this perception management. a lot of any job is effectively communicating what you're doing. a lot of effective communication is also not just saying what you're doing, but also how you deliver the information. people are more likely to listen when you communicate things in a more positive tone, make the information concise in a bottom-line up-front style, use a deeper voice (told to me by my wife and women colleagues), and pace the information in a way that lets people ask follow up questions iff needed. no one should _have_ to do all this, but it does change people's perception of how competent you are. I've seen both sides of this coin - amazing engineers that get no promo because they can't communicate, and mediocre engineers that get promoted quickly due to their ability to communicate. I'd almost even argue that this is how should be - as you climb the corporate ladder, communication becomes a lot more important than technical skills and ability

to your point about 1:1s: if you're not getting anything out of your 1:1s, that's a skill issue and is on you IMHO. even when I had bad managers, I was able to effectively communicate my needs, goals, updates, thoughts, as well as give feedback back; in doing so, I've been able to turn horrible manager-team dynamics into a positive experiences. and I'd always argue it came down to the fact that the people perceive you directly correlates with how serious they'll take your word

at the same time, I can empathize with the idea that some middle managers are just bodies that get in the way - everyone's had their fair share of that. but if you're actually good at your job and communicating , you should almost always be able to get around them when it's really necessary

EDIT: and this is coming from a person who is and will always want to stay as an IC engineer

For example, generally you'll be fired if you're not on time, regardless of whether "on time" is meaningful or connected to any real constraint. If there isn't a hard deadline, someone will pick an arbitrary one and decide that's what they need to be mad about that week. It could be that you just weren't on Slack at the moment they said "hey".

If it's not immediate, they'll note it down and weaponize it later. There's seemingly always someone like this in charge and there are only limited, temporary, or lucky ways around it.

If it's not specifically time, it's some other aspect of visibility that's never sufficient. Controlling people and organizations are built on an insidious lack of trust and the pursuit of measurability. This is why, imho, it's rarely worth doing more than the bare minimum, because you need 100x positive extra credits to compensate for even one petty mistake. Not being available in the middle of the night to fix a bug in the system gets you a negative mark in a performance review, while staying late to fix the bug gets you 0.01 positive marks.

"The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy."

This burned me right out, and I don't plan on ever working for any Silicon Valley company again. I'm now happily employed in a small (10 person eng team) company where we are all doing meaningful work.

What would make them less vulnerable to this?

everything else is downstream of that

Your management team is literally telling you what they value, by rewarding it. You might wonder why they value vibes over results. Look way way up the org tree. How is your CEO compensated? Mostly in stock? Who are they trying to impress? Shareholders? Are those shareholders concerned about delivering for customers, or short-term gains? Is the short-term price based on long-term customer value, or what's in the business news this week? What is productive again?

The lack of humility among tech folk is astounding. Why dont you ask yourself why the 10x'ers/doers/high-impact people aren't setting up their 3-trillion dollar company if they are so darn effective by themselves? Perhaps becaus they'll need the "bureaucracy" to interface woth the rest of the world to get things like "money" and "contracts" and deal with the legal system...as well as ensuring their work is aligned and cohesive.

So sad that with the right incentive structure his work would be of immense value to society, instead of his current Wall-E prologue side quest.

At a place like that - results mean nothing, the only result is what your boss's boss's boss is getting yelled at for, and it trickles down from there. The company is likely slowly killing itself yahoo-style if it doesn't have a corner on some prestigious market, or just flailing but number go up if it does (meta), meanwhile all the products that come out of it are absolutely garbage (messenger, yahoo mail) than even a single startup engineer could improve in 1 month yet somehow the politics that be prevent it from happening at big co.

</rant>

IMO it's the death-knell for quality products (though the company may linger on for decades [microsoft]) if it's hard enough to switch to a viable competitor.

When I joined big tech, I understood that most of work is going around and “proposing” solutions or “solving inter team blockers”. People who did the actual job, got very little recognition. People who did peacocking were promoted.

At that time I realized how fucked up corporate is.

It's become so bad that people don't realize what's not performative.

Also, just because I make things look easy or do things quickly, doesn't mean I didn't do anything at all.

I much prefer the label "coder" than software engineer because of this. It signals that the label isn't doing the heavy lifting.

Trying to be a rockstar every day is the fastest way to burning out and making bad decisions. It ensures that you will be left holding the bag. How is that not more performative, if it's in the name?

Startup life has it's own problems. Primarily that the company may cease to exist at any time. it's not for everyone, but I adapted after my first big layoff.

Most SWEs are a mix of Duct tapers and Box tickers, and their managers are Taskmasters.

But I will say this: at a certain point in a large company once the revenue-machine is discovered and deployed, what you want to be building is systems that let you ship and build reliably on top of that foundation without destroying it.

Google in its best phase -- which was already in decline when I joined in 2011 -- did have a slow and cautious development cycle where multiple levels of review covered everything. OWNERS, "readability", very uptight code review. And in order to survive in this environment you had to have a pile of code reviews all running concurrently because making progress on any single one could take days and days to get through review.

But that was kind of the point because pushing the wrong thing and breaking the money printing machine is far worse than moving slow.

But IMHO this didn't scale past 30k, 40k engineers. And inside Google, the culture shifted from one that was SWE/SRE driven to one that was PM driven. And the perf/promo culture for them had really perverse incentives.

Also I have a theory about Google in particular -- its founders and all its initial strong hires all came from academia not industry. And so its internal culture became biased towards a "publish or perish" structure, and "perf" performance reviews honestly looked more like a thesis defense committee for someone's masters/PHD than anything I'd encountered in the software industry before.

The TL;DR about promotions seems to be that:

1. There are guidelines on what you need to do to reach each level

2. Your direct supervisor will work with you on how they can game the system to get you the promotion

For example, they might propose a re-org that will take a product or feature (and therefore some direct reports) from another team and put them on your team so that you have enough direct reports to qualify for getting the promotion you want. They pitch that re-org to other people to get buy-in, either by being straight ("I want this so that my direct report can get promoted") or by justifying it business-wise ("bringing this feature over to our team will reduce overhead by allowing these two groups to communicate more directly"). In some cases, you just bring them over for six months until the promotion goes through and then you give them back; in others, you just cannibalize that team for good.

In other words, it's a zero-sum game where you're taking away the ability for other teams to accomplish their goals so that someone can reach an arbitrary milestone for promotion that their team's current situation doesn't allow for.

I was talking to a CEO of a small/mid-sized startup recently who was interviewing for an exec position and someone from Facebook was intervewing; CEO asked directly "why are you applying for this position? We can't pay anything remotely close to what you're getting at Facebook, surely you know that". His reply was that working at Facebook was so toxic, so stressful, that he just couldn't do it anymore. He was willing to cut his pay by 50-75% just to not have to deal with the constant toxic back-and-forth necessary to get anything done there (and/or to keep your job in the first place).

People ask why I don't go apply for Google or Facebook or Amazon; part of it is that I don't know that my experience would get me in the door, to be honest, but part of it is also that working at those places sounds so stressful and toxic that the pay isn't worth it, at least not at my age.

But if you paid them hourly, they'd starve or fuck off to another job during a lull, and then where would you be when you needed them again 3 or 4 months later? Similarly, salaries don't really work any better either, because there's this psychological expectation that there will be regular duties to perform for that weekly paycheck. Psychological expectations for all parties involved. These systems have evolved and adapted to cater to those psychological needs. They keep the extra engineers on hand, cosplaying, in case there is work for them, so that they could in theory start working immediately (the hiring cycle is brutal, but the learning curve to make them useful is worse).

Even those involved aren't typically aware that this is what's going on, if they became aware of it they'd be forced by convention to try to come up with a new system that was more efficient in one way or another, but that's impossible on practical grounds (disincentivizes key personnel such that businesses which attempt it tend to fail). When this does happen, quite often there are lots of comical stories that come out of it (for instance, believing that because these people tend to do little in the way of constant work that they can be replaced by people who are wholly unqualified, because unqualified people can screw off just as easily as the qualified).

All of “adult” life is performative . Life is a game, a performance, a little play you put on for the benefit of all.

Consider this: if management thinks something is impressive, well that makes it impressive. Managers, by definition, manage people, and having 1:1 meetings helps with that. Are you supposing managers also make the same exact effort and contribution as ICs? Would they still be managers?

Do you have an engineering license? Are you personally liable for the code you write? No? Guess who else is “cosplaying as engineers”?

are there performative jobs|tasks|employees|cultures? yes.

are most of the things that engineers think are performative and useless actually so? nope.

some examples:

* managers managing upward - feels useless - is actually the most impactful bang-for-buck for managers to give their teams space to operate without micromanaging

* sales and marketing. The best software in the world won't get known, bought, or used, without good sales/marketing. There is no meritocracy on quality. Almost no business succeeds through technical credibility alone.

* 1on1s. They may not add any value to you, but 1) you'd miss them when they're gone, 2) i don't know how else you expect managers to stay on top of employee concerns - just know "inately"? 3) they may matter A LOT for your teammates, and them being happy means your team will be happy

There are other things like that.

The compensation can be high, but the psychological cost is real. Over time, that tradeoff isn’t always worth it: someone might earn more in the short term, yet pay for it with chronic stress, declining mental health, and even a shorter lifespan compared to a lower-paid role that’s more meaningful and less draining.