- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- hackernews
“Companies are structurally set up to collude on salaries, but they’re not set up to deliberately make their employees sad - they just don’t have that kind of fine-grained control over the culture!”
This is such an insane take. I’d argue that hiring freezes are more common dictates than corporations following the law.
I don’t think engineers need encouragement to be cynical. More often engineers need to lighten up.
I just want them to stop acting like egotistical know-it-all jerks all the time. They love to speak in black-and-white absolutes and IMO it just shows how much they really don’t know.
I think Dunning-Kruger also applies to smart people… you don’t stop when you are estimating your ability correctly. As you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self estimates.
That’s basically his point
Cynical writing is like most medicines: the dose makes the poison. A healthy amount of cynicism can serve as an inoculation from being overly cynical.
Politics has no place in engineering disciplines. Imagine if we talked about building bridges like this. “Sorry your entire family died when the bridge failed. My boss has an ego and we have to use the shitty bolts he designed. I’m just doing my job”
Granted not all projects carry this degree of risk but we shouldn’t normalize sub standard practice. Long term risk is generated by bad code which can be and often is detrimental to the profitablity of a project. One of your jobs as a software developer is to be able to communicate this effectively with management. There are cost implications to churning out shitty code.
Bad form > poor product > unsatisfied users > loss in sales to competitors
Should we though?



