cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/34411807
While many of them still provide free food and pay well, they have little compunction cutting jobs, ordering mandatory office attendance and clamping down on employee debate. […] “Tech could still be best in terms of free lunch and a high salary,” Ms. Grey said, but “the level of fear has gone way up.”
Along the way, the companies became less tolerant of employee outspokenness. Bosses reasserted themselves after workers protested issues including sexual harassment in the workplace. With the job market flooded with qualified engineers, it became easier to replace those who criticized. “This is a business, and not a place to act in a way that disrupts co-workers or makes them feel unsafe, to attempt to use the company as a personal platform, or to fight over disruptive issues or debate politics,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, said in a blog post last year.
You’ve nailed it. 15 years of experience here.
Scrum messed everything up too - lots of less-technical people needed jobs in software and that’s where they tend to slot in.
We would do better to think one level of hierarchy higher than the context we’re in more of the time. Doesn’t seem to be much appreciation for holism and design patterns (your mileage with the latter can vary of course).
Elegance is down and writing your own shitty code instead of using decent opinionated frameworks is up. Because people hate reading code.
If I’m frustrated I write code outside of work.
I tend to look for roles where there is serious, vertically integrated ownership of the code over time.
Spaghetti (or lasagna) is common and I can deal with it, unless the team worships the “clever” maniac who wrote it.
The one specific thing that will cause me to leave is micromanagement.
Thinking about moving closer to bare metal where there is less room for cruft and genuine tradeoffs have to be considered.