I found myself nodding along to some parts of this (hiring practices, company types) but I found the endless complaining about bad engineering practices frustrating to read. Running a company requires making tradeoffs. Everyone always thinks their pet interest/area is not getting enough attention. Of course the cloud architecture guy is foaming at the mouth to tell you your cloud architecture is terrible and needs to be fixed. I bet the marketing guys are foaming at the mouth to tell you your ad spend is suboptimal and also needs to be fixed this instant. But if the shitty architecture ran for 7 years, was it really that shitty? Am I supposed to be totally dumbfounded at someone copy and pasting a repo 12 times for 12 customers, as if that's the most insane thing in the world. It sounds like it WORKED dude! Yeah it sucks to clean up the mess once it becomes unmanageable, but that's literally why you were hired!
The bottom line is if you are so damn smart and think everyone else is making bad tradeoffs, why don't you prove it and start your own company? Or consulting business? Or anything?
If you're not actively doing that, then I would say you are implicitly accepting your status as "a thing to be traded off against" and should just shut the fuck up. The value of a professional is being able to help with these tradeoffs, communicate clearly what .5X resources will get you versus X resources. You can't be upset that you're only getting .5X (or .1X) resources. You can only use your judgement to execute, and predict/communicate outcomes from that decision. If someone decides not to take your advice, that's their prerogative, they're in charge! If you don't like it, go be in charge somewhere else.
Alternatively, you can take the stance of total responsibility. If you give good advice, and your leadership didn't take it, who's fault is that? Really? Isn't it your job to make sure that people do the right things when it comes to your area of expertise? Did you sell your advice well enough?
> Yeah it sucks to clean up the mess once it becomes unmanageable, but that's literally why you were hired!
I think that applies to every job. Yeah it sucks that people can't seem to hit the urinal, but yeah, that's why the cleaning person has a job. Staying in tech though, I wonder what the author would do of the cloud architecture was perfect upon joining. Nothing? Be useless?
The bottom line is if you are so damn smart and think everyone else is making bad tradeoffs, why don't you prove it and start your own company? Or consulting business? Or anything?
If you're not actively doing that, then I would say you are implicitly accepting your status as "a thing to be traded off against" and should just shut the fuck up. The value of a professional is being able to help with these tradeoffs, communicate clearly what .5X resources will get you versus X resources. You can't be upset that you're only getting .5X (or .1X) resources. You can only use your judgement to execute, and predict/communicate outcomes from that decision. If someone decides not to take your advice, that's their prerogative, they're in charge! If you don't like it, go be in charge somewhere else.
Alternatively, you can take the stance of total responsibility. If you give good advice, and your leadership didn't take it, who's fault is that? Really? Isn't it your job to make sure that people do the right things when it comes to your area of expertise? Did you sell your advice well enough?