[reallymental]

I think y'all (i.e. who've contributed anonymously to the article), have taken these words too literally. I think we're finally seeing the culmination of around 15+ years (post '08) of leadership mindset finally reap its rewards.

Over the last decade (last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35, so that's all my personal anecdotal data goes back to), these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.

It's replaced with one phrase, "Profit at any cost". So that means, if you got yours, you're good. If you didn't, see ya! All this is obviously reflected geopolitically (macro-level), so why are we so surprised when it's affecting us at the micro-level?

This is a quote from a really good TV series (called Smiley's people), delivered by George Smiley (Alec Guinness):

`In my time, Peter Guillam, I've seen Whitehall skirts go up and come down again. I've listened to all the excellent argument for doing nothing, and reaped the consequent frightful harvest. I've watched people hop up and down and call it progress. I've seen good men go to the wall and the idiots get promoted with a dazzling regularity. All I'm left with is me and thirty-odd years of cold war without the option.`

So, it's not been out of the norm in our times to watch our own backs. No one is watching ours, the workers, the talent. Moscow rules gentlemen.

[marcinzm]

As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is". That makes the stock go up and everyone is happy more or less. At the same time a lot of experienced engineers get very upset at the suggestion that they should do likewise.

[arevno]

That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.

So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.

[ajkjk]

imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.

[Aurornis]

> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".

I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.

"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.

This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.

It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.

We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)

[kermatt]

They have it right. Goals are short term, jobs are ephemeral. Hell, maybe careers are ephemeral now as well.

If the individual's focus is on short term income or career growth, then they align with the company's goals.

Solid engineering practices and product quality don't matter anymore (except in FOSS), and will likely be viewed as antagonistic to the KPIs, OKRs, or whatever metrics measure what is considered success.

Stated as someone who has been in various forms of IT since 1985, and has experienced most of software engineering turned into an MBA value extraction mindset. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

[mghackerlady]

I'm very much not an experienced engineer but I lean that way. I think the modern profit-above-all-else attitude of modern engineers comes from the whole "learn to code" movement and promises of a good paying job. These people aren't motivated by their passion for the craft but instead because it was seen as easy money

[eddieroger]

I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions, not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs - it's not if there's another, it's when.

[venturecruelty]

Well, it's hard to do anything else when management doesn't let you, and when your entire life is on the line. Nobody's going to risk homelessness (or worse: a lack of health insurance) on principles that are simply not rewarded anymore. There is an entire generation of programmers who wouldn't recognize software quality if it bit them on the Electron app. It's not their fault, but it's the way things are now. Unless and until this relentless obsession with hoarding wealth changes, we will continue to get the software we deserve. Selah.

[getpokedagain]

If this were good for stock go up 9/10 startups wouldn't fail. While cutting corners can be needed at times doing the wrong thing doesn't. Eventually the wrong thing also pisses off the market and turns your company into a joke with a bad reputation.

[the_snooze]

It's toddler-level thinking. Replace the complexity of leadership, humanity, and values with "make line go up," because the latter is way easier to measure, especially when you ignore the costs that aren't yours.

[eric_h]

Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)

[hinkley]

The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office.

I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”.

But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work.

Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware.

The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.

[bongodongobob]

It is. Our "security manager" has a dashboard that just literally counts the number of "security policies" we've put in place. Anything that isn't a box to tick is completely ignored as irrelevant. So we are essentially counting how many group policies we can implement and just disregarding the effectiveness of them for mitigating relevant threats and ignoring the added complexity and cost it incurs by making everyone's life more difficult. Systems password management/MFA? Who cares, can't make a graph out of it. It's the dumbest shit I've ever had to deal with.

[forbiddenvoid]

Just a note, because I think the footer might be confusing: this essay was written by just one person. There are 24 essays each year, each one written by a different anonymous contributor.

[Aurornis]

> these "leaders" have all thrown away the facade of "mentorship", "leadership" and all those heavy words.

I have some counter-anecdotes: Two of my recent jobs had management who were so focused on their soft skills that it was hard to get any work done.

These were people who had read 20 different management books and would quote them in their weekly meetings. They scheduled hour-long 1:1 meetings every week where you had to discuss your family life, weekend plans, evening plans, and hear theirs for a mandatory 20 minutes before being allowed to discuss work. They treated their job as "shielding" the team from the business so much that we would be kept in the dark about the company goals, reliant on a trickle of information and tickets they would give us.

They were so insistent on mentoring us individually that they wouldn't accept the fact that we knew more than they did on programming topics, because they felt the need to occupy the role of mentor. You had to sit and nod while they "mentored" you about things you knew.

The easy dismissal is to say "that's not real leadership" and you'd be right, but in their minds they had invested so heavily in implementing all of the leadership material they could consume from their top-selling books, popular podcasts, and online blogs that they believed they were doing the best thing they could.

The last company I worked for like this collapsed. They ran out of money. They had an abundance of "leadership" and "mentorship" and feel-good vibes, but you can't fund a business on vibes. The attitude was that if you create an "awesome environment" the money would naturally follow. Instead, nothing important got done and the VC money bled out in between team lunches and off-site bonding experiences.

So any extreme is bad.

[eleveriven]

But I don't think the people in the article "took things too literally." What they're reacting to isn't abstract geopolitics or macroeconomic trends, it's the lived experience of working under managers who claim to care while acting in ways that make it obvious they don't

[exasperaited]

Post '08? All of this dates from the US stock market reforms of the 1970s, ultimately, which led to an explosion of IPOs, and fed the explosive growth of management consultancy and MBA culture. "Business" became something one specialised in as a career farming a quasi-commodity.

The culture of the "exit" is the problem; the notion of routine payment with stock options, etc. etc.

Back when I was working in a dot com (well a dot co dot uk) I noticed this; if you ask for a hard salary in lieu of stock options you are treated as if you have a communicable disease. Something I am glad I did, actually, because I saw other people leave with vested options that the company refused to either honour or buy back.

Everything about the subsequent 21st Century IT culture is short-term-ist, naïve, and sick, and it is still taboo to talk about some of the problems.

[slashdave]

I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.

[ambicapter]

What were the "the US stock market reforms of the 1970s", roughly?

[didibus]

> Profit at any cost

Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...

You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.

Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.

Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.

Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.

What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.

What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.

Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.

It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

[no_wizard]

>Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.

I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem in leadership.

I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years, there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've contributed a great deal to engineering strategy, particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.

The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain) don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of a director.

[0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this excellent website: https://staffeng.com

[1]: As in having the power to put plans and/or actions into effect

[Sohcahtoa82]

> But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.

True for a tech company startup, almost absolutely false for a well-established company, especially a non-tech one.

[dominotw]

luck is probabilistic after being selected for sucking up.

[stuffn]

> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.

To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.

> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" 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.

> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.

[pwillia7]

I wonder if this is related to the agency problem[1] and the rise of short-sightedness from the ruling class.

If you're just trying to make as much money as possible this quarter and have no real care about building long-term value, why wouldn't you put agents in that mercilessly generate money at the expense of things like your brand and people?

I also wonder how many of the authors of the piece are at public vs private companies.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...

[phantasmish]

The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.

[alephnerd]

It is a variation of the principal-agent problem, and recognizing had helped me climb up the ladder in my career.

[css_apologist]

> last 3+ decades realistically, I'm around 35

ah yes, the formative years of 5-15 spent in 1-1 with my manager has drastically shaped my life & experience /s

[theideaofcoffee]

Easy now, I think it's pretty easy to see that he's talking about "three decades" generally, a decade in his own experience and two or more generalized out. You can know about things that you don't directly experience.

[jayd16]

I gave it a pass for those decades being in "recent memory" even if the experience wasn't first hand.