I think it’s because companies don’t incentivize people listening to each other. Management doesn’t listen to the underlings and the underlings have to compete to get noticed.
I have only a few people with whom I can discuss something in depth without anybody pushing an agenda. With most people it’s just about pushing through what you want to do.
I am just going through a bunch of sessions where a director has engaged consultants to change our stuff to use a new platform. Nobody who works on the system thinks it makes sense but it can’t be stopped because of the director and a few yes men. Nobody listens.
Makes me think of something my dad and I both talked about with our time in the military. He was Army and I was Navy. But when the ability to promote is tied with ranking against your peers, if you really want to game the system, you essentially sabotage your peers. Which is the exact opposite you want in the military or really any organization. You want to foster a, rising tide lifts all boats with getting the work done. But it hard when your performance evaluations are the complete opposite of that, and I have seen people do it.
I got qualified on our equipment quick and was in a position where I was training my peers who I was ranked against. If I were an asshole, I would have trained them poorly and drug it out. I didn't, but someone who is goal oriented to climb through the ranks as fast a possible, it is a logical action that I could have taken.
> If I were an asshole, I would have trained them poorly and drug it out.
That's of course the obvious way this goes wrong. Bad intentions. The much more insidious version is that you could have just been a terrible teachers, maybe you suck at training your peers, and you don't know.
The end result is the same. You look like the only person who gets it amongst the riff-raff, but in this case you don't even have a choice. The system has produced a poor outcome not because anybody abused it, but because it was a bad system.
That reminds me of the Popular Science garage hint from 1963, explaining how to easily dispose of used motor oil: Dig a hole in the ground and fill it with fine gravel. Pour in the oil, and it will be absorbed into the ground before your next oil change.
The Swedish government created this informational video in 1964 on how to properly dispose of your trash when at sea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t03saJVFkv4. Apparently the trick is to make the trash sink rather than float.
"In 2008 we got a correction that cleared the incumbents,"
I thought in 2008 we told the incumbents "you are the most important component of our economy. We will allow everybody to go down the drain but you. That's because you caused the problem, so you are the only ones to guide us out of it"
This is the same as the discussion about using Excel. Excel has its limitations, but it has enabled millions of people to do pretty sophisticated stuff without the help of “professionals”. Most of the stuff us tech people do is also basically some repetitive boilerplate. We just like to make things more complex than they need to be. I am always a little baffled why seemingly every little CRUD site that has at most 100 users needs to be run on Kubernetes with several microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and whatever.
As far as enshittification goes, this was happening long before AI. It probably started with SEO and just kept going from there.
The reality is too, that even if "what is acceptable" has not yet caught up to that guy working at Atlassian, polishing off a new field in Jira, people are using AI + Excel to manage their tasks EXACTLY the way their head works, not the way Jira works.
Yet we fail to see AI as a good thing but just as a jobs destroyer. Are we "better than" the people that used to fill toothpaste tubes manually until a machine was invented to replace them? They were just as mad when they got the pink slip.
I have told people that us techies have proudly killed the jobs of millions of people and we were arrogant about it. Now we are mad that it's our turn. Feels almost like justice :-)
5 days is stupid. I am fully remote and I can see how face time is important. After a few years remote I am definitely feeling a little detached from the company. But 5 days makes no sense. I think 2 or 3 days in the office is perfect. You get the opportunity to talk to people and you have days where you can fully focus.
Most ridiculous is to have to come to the office and then talk to your distributed team members over Teams or Slack. Even more fun is to have them spread around the globe in different time zones .
5 days is just offensive babysitting level amount of butts in seats. People need room to run their lives, meet contractors, sign for a package, etc. 2-3 days in office is the perfect reasonable sweet spot.
Requiring 5 days in office is going to decrease their available talent pool to only get lesser talent who is desperate for any work and can't get any better offers.
I set up some .NET services years ago. Since then it was just adding new stuff. If I was asked how to set up another service, I would have no idea how to do it
I have only a few people with whom I can discuss something in depth without anybody pushing an agenda. With most people it’s just about pushing through what you want to do.
I am just going through a bunch of sessions where a director has engaged consultants to change our stuff to use a new platform. Nobody who works on the system thinks it makes sense but it can’t be stopped because of the director and a few yes men. Nobody listens.
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