Notice that the author didn't write "getting good at delivering value." They wrote "getting good at shipping projects" because
> Shipping is a social construct within a company.
Delivering solid software that helps people get work done is a platonic ideal. Unfortunately there are many companies that value whipping stuff out the door more highly. As corny as this sounds the iron triangle ("good, fast, cheap - pick two") is a thing for a reason. Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving others to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and chaotic on-call isn't something to be rewarded but it's how many companies seem to work.
Thanks for flagging this, this was an epiphany for me today, so for anyone else struck by it I'm linking directly to the article it's from (same author, and linked from the article in the context the parent mentions, just not linked directly in their post above):
"How I ship projects at big tech companies" https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/
Also the HN comments on it from when it was originally posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111031
Sadly you've described precisely the optimal engineering strategy for promotion at my FAANG
And yet those five companies are among the most valuable in the world.
There's a cognitive dissonance that arises when you join a company that is performing extraordinarily well only to perceive dysfunction and incompetence everywhere you look.
It's so hard to reconcile the reality that companies can be embarrassingly wasteful, political, and arbitrary in how they run and yet can still dominate markets and print money hand-over-fist.
Engineers who do this leave nothing but ashes in their wake even if they keep getting promoted for it.
Could we also call this making “improvements” for the sake of making improvements? Because it’s expected (else why are we paying you so much money—sort of thing?)
I guess users can’t know for sure why a change is underway. I suspect some change is tacking away from tech-debt, trends in the workforce, adjustments to the tech stack.
Nevertheless I can’t help but feel baffled by some changes (what’s this SaaS trend making UIs swimming in white space, five rows of visible data when the real estate used to show 2-2.5x more data on screen??)
I suppose that makes AI Taco Bell for companies.
If there's a single hack for your career it is simply telling your manager when things happen. Shipped something? Tell them. Broke something? Tell them. Blocked on something? Keep that quiet. No, wait, tell them! Made a breakthrough on something? Tell them. Hit a milestone? Tell them. Got some bad news? Tell them, as early as you can, so they have time to fix things. And so on, for everything. Clear, open communication about the state of things is critical. Embrace stand-ups. Email people first. Put updates in Slack. Write docs. It doesn't matter how you do it so long as you do it.
If you get a reputation for being someone who communicates when things happen you can practically choose your own career path. Every manager will want you on their team. You can boost your way up the org chart or languish in a role so you have time with your kids, and any competent manager will happily and readily support you to do that.
At every performance review I tell all the people who don't do this that they need to do it more. None of them ever do.
For all I can tell, it's an immutable characteristic that 90% of people will never bring something up unless you ask them.
"When things happen", sounds risky. You don't want to be drip-feeding emails about individual things as they happen. Perhaps this is obvious, but you'd keep your own notes and try to condense into a nice little list for discussion when you next catch-up.
If it's too much your manager can tell you. That's how you get that experience.
I long for a flat org structure.
The only thing I've said here is that you shouldn't be waiting for your manager to ask for updates. If you read that as me suggesting managers should passively sit around doing nothing except receive reports then you didn't think about it for very long.
I've been all the way up to CTO in a mid-size company (650ish people), and I've felt like this in every role I've had at different times. Some places more than others. Where I was CTO wasn't too bad but that came at the cost of me not touching code at the company for several years because, at that level, and in the kind of company it was, you just really can't - not without finding yourself becoming a blocker anyway.
But I've worked in a couple of larger organisations - one of them, probably 90k employees, although it wasn't a tech company - and these issues are rife there as well. To some extent, I think it's just big company behaviour, not specific only to big tech companies.
Some folks want to scale impact. Some want to be bespoke crafters. Both are okay, you just have to accept they are mutually exclusive.
As much as a person may choose to belittle the bureaucracy at companies, it exists for a reason, and often that reason is fairly sensible. It is also simple to avoid bureaucracy if you dislike bureaucracy: just go work at companies where it hasn't had a chance to build up or the company has intentionally kept its bureaucracy in check.
Regarding promotions in bureaucratic companies:
> "You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success"
Whats interesting is that all sorts of companies evaluate performance differently. The better companies will tell you how they are evaluating you - so if you want to get promoted, do the things they say you should do to get promoted. Glue work, crushing jira tickets, making the world a better place... are actually things that a company might positively evaluate you on... or maybe all they care about is shipping and you should just do that. The path to promotion is doing the things that a company is willing to promote you for ("If you want to be loved, be lovable").
For what its worth at Wells Fargo during the account scams your path to promotion was doing illegal stuff. So you know, maybe don't do that stuff and avoid promotion even if you can't leave your job right now.
And truth be told, you don't have to do politics/visibility stuff. It's true that thinking about that all the time probably increases your odds of getting promoted. But also, what if you obsess about optics/your boss's boss's opinions/crunching/visibility etc etc for 3 years and you end up not getting promoted anyways?
I feel like a certain type of content tries to invoke fomo in you in order to get you hooked on their promise of their content. Fundamentally I believe that you'll be happiest in your life if you work at a company that is small, has a good gender balance, has a good balance of personalities (i.e. not all competitive high-functioning spectrumy nerds), and doesn't obsess over hype-cycles.
I spent many years trying to get promoted and if I could do it over I wouldn't have, I'd just let it inevitably happen with years in the industry.
But I'd push back on the idea that all tech companies work this way. Smaller companies and startups can be different. The feedback loops are shorter, you're closer to customers, and it's harder to hide behind the appearance of shipping.
The trick is finding places where the incentives actually align with the work.
1. Do people like working with you 2. What would a competitor pay to hire you
The driving factor in the first is your UI, the second your skills.
But man, big tech is a joyless place to work right now.
I think the author nails a lot about different career paths but left out one, the gambler which I think a lot of people have an aspect of. The gambler is the person that is throwing crazy at every problem and the thing is that sometimes it actually pays off, but like a lotto scratcher the overall payoff is pretty low for most (unless you are this guy [1]. Like I said, most).
I think this is different from their person that 'wants to deliver real value'. This is a person that loves the idea, and that it could be the next big thing. That or I just -really- liked the name 'the gambler' and filled in the rest of the details for the fun of it. Really, who doesn't want to be the gambler? Honestly.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2011/01/cracking-the-scratch-lottery-c...
It amazes me how much low hanging fruit there is to grab to work on. At least things I felt would have had a truly positive impact on the customer and my own organisation.
The only way you get to work on it is if you don't ask for permission, but directly show some progress.
Now I'm switching to a different team within the same organisation that "wants to move like a start up". Let's see how things will move...
> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether.
I've done plenty of really fun, engaging and interesting work in smaller companies. If you're able to be involved in open source work, what you do can still be something that many people appreciate, beyond the customers of your company,
This is perhaps what I find somewhat odd about Sean's writing. It sometimes reads to me like a scathing critique of the dysfunctional bureaucratic dynamics of big tech companies, but that isn't really his conclusion!
Actual theme: LARGE tech companies suck.
Declared subject: you have to know how tech companies work
Actually subject: you have to know how large-and-or-disfunctional-and-or-sales-or-finance-bro-led-companies work.
Tagging @dang re title.
