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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   38745 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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I can't help but think about this post that was linked on the SSC reddit a few days ago: https://matt.sh/panic-at-the-job-market

(long, rambly post that I don't fully agree with but it did say a few interesting things) In particular these two quotes:

Modern tech hiring, due to industry-wide persistent fear mongering about not hiring “secretly incompetent people,” has become a game divorced from meaningfully judging individual experience and impact

...

Such job descriptions also means: your job is physically impossible. You will always feel drained and incompetent because you can’t actually do everything everyday. You will always be behind because each of those bullet points can be multiple days of work per week just on their own (plus, how are you supposed to be productive in 35 different areas requiring months to years of experience if you actually want to be good at each task?). So, from day 1, you will already be about 4 months behind on your expected job responsibilities and you’ll never catch up. It turns into an endless game of managers and executives saying you are “underperforming” because you have 18 primary tasks, each primary task requires 4 to 20 hours of effort, and every manager wants their task done within 4 hours. You are setup to fail. What’s the point?

Maybe a point is some companies just shouldn’t exist if they can’t afford the fully staffed professional teams required to build and maintain their products? The worst secret in tech is amateur developers are happy to act like entry level workers across 20 arbitrary roles for years (in the absence of never having enough time to focus on building up long-term experience or best practices). You can’t get gud if you are always rushed from task to task without any chance of leveling up knowledge and capability through “deep work” as we would historically expect of professionals.

I don't think it's like that at every company, or even the majority. But there are certainly some companies like that. They, in theory, care greatly about their tech workers, because the salaries are high and they have a vague understanding that tech is important. But they don't have a good system for actually hiring good tech workers. And then, once hired, they use them all as generalists, moving quickly from one thing to another, with no chance to actually develop expertise or fix deep underlying issues. And they are never given any kind of decision-making authority in the company, only responsibility to "just fix whatever breaks."

I think that behavior happens the most in companies that are not "tech companies," but still use tech. Banks, airlines, large retailers, that sort of thing. They need tech to function, but it's just a cost center to them- they want to just pay a fixed price per month to "handle tech" and then not think about it ever again. And it seems like those are the ones being bitten in the ass by this thing, because it turns out that running a windows server with third-party antivirus on it with automatic updates is not actually very secure! I wonder if we'll see any restructuring, or if this sort of thing is just going to happen every so often forever, as companies get blindsided by tech issues that they don't understand and never cared to try and understand?

i think the culture of secrecy is the bigger problem. they are paid lot and expected to not blabber to the media if they expect to be employed now or in the future by other companies

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