It's not a question of scale, it's a question of management. Companies like Samsung, others and etc are managed by idiots. Pure and simple. Suit wearing, non-technical morons.
Congratulations on your new job, exercise, fresh air and freshly picked berries and vegetables. Sounds pretty decent compared to sitting in front of a screen slaving for knock-off phones with shitty vendored junk.
Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people:
1. aren't managers.
2. aren't able to convince the "idiots".
I'm also curious why smart people become idiots when they're promoted.
Come on. Managing is hard and definitely looks different depending on your position. To make it even more "funny" I can tell you that "employees are idiots" is a frequent manager's rant too.
>> Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots".
I guess you must have worked for completely different companies than I did, because in my experience it's not the smartest people who work their way up into management, just the loudest ones that don't have any specific skill that would make them hard to replace elsewhere.
IMO the smartest people I know at my workplace are the engineers who manage themselves into a position where they can work on interesting projects without getting dicked around by managers distracting from the real work all the time, and make a good living doing it.
"Ability" isn't a uniform stat. There's many factors that comprise our competence. Once of them is technical excellence.
Others include sales, politicking (or "managing up"), managing a team, empathy, oratory, etc.
The best technical minds don't necessarily want to become suits (I'm going to avoid using the term "managers" since engineering managers are very different from "suits" imo). Even if they become one, they may not have the negotiation skills or willingness to smooch that is required for a suit to succeed.
>how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots".
For #2, a good counterexample would be, "the best athletes aren't always the best coaches".
Your point about different skill-sets (as well as the one below about replacing "smart" with "technically competent") is a great one. These are things missing from my post. Regarding
> "the best athletes aren't always the best coaches"
i think that's a very good illustration to whole this discussion. If the most talented athlete benefits from the help of a coach. However the critical part comes when the coach makes a mistake. Should athlete just put whole responsibility on his coach? Just lean back and say "my coach is an idiot and all I can do is to rant about it"? I believe it's a mutual responsibility for both sides to address the issues. If the athlete can't properly express his needs/doubts it's something what he should improve because waiting for the coach to "get smarter" may be a recipe for disaster. Of course the same works the other way too. Now if we replace coach/athlete with manager/employee it's clear where so many problems come from.
I really thought you were my coworker. He has been pushing for me to attack a niche at the company in spare time for months. 'Work on interesting things and move further away from meetings and people in general. You will lock yourself into being "that person."'
I never implied that working on interesting projects means you can't work in teams, and 'getting pushed into a niche' is quite different from getting yourself into a position where you can work on projects you actually like and make progress without having to tip-toe around office politics or waste time sitting in useless meetings or making planning spreadsheets based on when your manager promised a delivery to someone higher up in the food chain, instead of how long it takes to get the job done properly.
I'm not saying you don't need managers, or that no such thing as good managers exist. I'm just stating my observation that more often than not, who gets into management is based on the Peter principle, rather than how 'smart' or capable someone is.
You don't have to be smart to be a manager. I mean in our(developer circles) definition of smart is some one who gets the job done. I mean the real job. Something that is of value. Most people managers don't do that.
In most corporates management really is book keeping. Managing vacations, leaves, holidays. Filling up appraisal sheets, expense documents, coordinating with HR, forwarding Information, arranging meetings and all these kind of assorted chores. This classifies under what you can call as 'running the affairs' as they are.
This has nothing to do building something awesome. That is a different territory. What managers in most companies do ideally is enforce sanity by bringing in mediocrity. Much of their work is in bringing in a process so that their life gets easier. They need numbers, so they have to deal and force people to do things like fill in time sheets, constantly update some system to keep the their managers alerted. You get the point?
Situation only gets worse because, sooner or later all managers realize- they hit a career dead end unless they are politically well connected within an organization to get that next promotion or a travel opportunity. In many ways they are forced to, their position encourages them to. Imagine having no coding skills, no ideas, no ways to show that you got something real done in years. Over time your own value in the market will fall down to point you know you can't really get any real work done any where. This is the story of many middle managers in big corporates.
Most managers are really cost and work accountants.
The Dilbert principle refers to a 1990s satirical observation by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams stating that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to management (generally middle management), in order to limit the amount of damage they are capable of doing.
Another reasonable explanation I've come across is that employees keep getting promoted until they hit a job where they aren't competent. I always attributed that to the Dilbert comics but maybe I was mistaken.
The Peter Principle: The Peter Principle is a proposition that states that the members of an organization where promotion is based on achievement, success, and merit, will eventually be promoted beyond their level of ability. The principle is commonly phrased, "Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence."
In teams of ordinary laborers, managers usually are smarter than the employees. But in teams "rocket scientists", it can easily be a misallocation of resources to employ another rocket scientist as the rocket scientists' manager. The management job may be one of task coordination and solving mundane people issues more suited to a normal college graduate rather than some genius-level person.
This can leave you in the awkward situation where the person in a higher position within the organization is not as intelligent as his employees. But given limited resources, as most companies are subject to, it may be the optimal structure for an organization, despite whatever "Dilbert" moments come out of it.
Your sample is biased. I assume you read most of this rants here (as do I), and this is a place mainly for software engineers and designers, not managers. They complain about their bosses, as do all, and that means you get a lot of complains about stupid managers (because everybody thinks the boss is stupid).
I don't believe for a second that there are no good managers, or that they are not necessary. Apple and Google produce the kind of software that they do because they have good managers (for the most part). The thing is, no one complains about his/her awesome manager. (In an episode of the Debug podcast, Don Melton describes his life as a manager and gives a little more insight about what goes on on a big company).
This is not to say that you couldn't have a system in which the engineers managed themselves, as in Valve.
Having said that, the quality of Samsung's software has not impressed anyone, so I kind of believe that they have a management problem.
Being unable to give a good talk is quite unusual definition of smartness:) But I can see where are you coming from. Indeed that analytical type of smartness which is so useful for engineers often correlates with introversion. Which doesn't help when it comes to dealing with people, promoting self and building your position in the company.
There are many smart people who are good talkers. But I only know them from the Internet.
The top scientists and engineers of our time. The leaders of the biggest companies are often engineers themself.
But they don't make the mass of smart people.
It seems like many managers have a network of mighty people, which just lets them float over the real world. They get fired here and a new job (as good paid manager!!) somewhere else in no time.
No one said it isn't hard to manage or managers in general are idiots.
I was just clarifying that the decline of decent software practices isn't a scale issue, it's management issues.
That tends to be because of non-technical managers/superiors.
I don't think it's a matter of non-technicality. You can find non-technical founders who are doing more or less well (Squidoo, Yammer, Groupon for example) and there's a lot of companies managed by engineers which are falling. I think it's a matter of lacking general management skills as well as number and level of complexity of problems you have to solve when you go up.
You don't need to be a coder to be winning in this game.
But you definitely need be somebody who gets the job done in whatever their area of expertise is. Those are the kind of people you quoted in your example.
There are somethings you can't teach a person. They have to learn by doing or go through the grind.
I think a lot of people are idiots. Managers are just the ones that have the most control over other peoples' lives, so they're the ones people complain about the most.
At my workplace most (not all!) smart people wants to do the real sh*t. ie design, programming etc. They do not want to be a manager because that means there is no time to do what they love, and have to do management instead (meetings, more meetings, budgets, meet other managers (BORING!), attend management gatherings and conference (EVEN MORE BORING) etc).
People who have good managers aren't as loud about it.
I've had 7 managers. 6 of them were good and 2 of those I'd even classify as stellar. Only one was a bad manager. As a result, I simply don't talk about management very much. I suspect that a lot of people are in the same situation.
Every time (~5/month) I hear the "managers are idiots" rant I start to wonder, how is it possible that all the smart people: 1. aren't managers. 2. aren't able to convince the "idiots".
Look, for an analogy, at the theological incompetence seen in many cases of religious colonization ca. 1500-1914. The good priests stayed in the mainland. A lot of idiots were sent to the outposts.
What you have in colonization is the worst people of one society being put over the best of another. That's true even now. Who are the Americans and British who flock to Dubai? People not smart enough to get executive-level positions in their own countries, who want the upper-class lifestyle (that comes from living in a slave state as not-a-slave) but can't get it on their own steam in their own land.
In Managerland/MBAistan, the good ones end up in $5 million per year private equity jobs or running divisions in investment banks. The bad ones get stuck managing nerds (us) and they get really resentful as time goes on. A 40-year-old top-notch programmer is a badass. A 40-year-old Partner at Sequoia is also a badass. A 40-year-old who manages a team of 5 programmers on some project defined by an executive two levels above him (i.e. he has no creative control either) is probably a bitter, terminal middle manager.
The thing is that the best technologists don't want to be managers. They want to be great at their jobs. They don't climb the ranks at all. Managers, on the other hand, always want to climb, and the capable ones do. Top technologists end up answering to people in Managerland who never got out of middle-management and are bitter/resentful.
If we answered to the $5 million per year top-notch businessmen who can actually sell and motivate people, maybe we'd like our jobs better. Or maybe they'd be even bigger assholes; who knows. I think the Colonization Effect (technologists being the colonized people, Managerland being the father country) is worth looking into, though. It might explain why technology management is so terrible. We end up answering to the ones who failed because they don't have any social skills, and who therefore suck at finding a way to motivate us to do the work.
The quality of people who do sales in an investment bank is just much higher-- they can actually convince people to do what they want instead of ordering them around-- than that of the people who manage software engineers in a traditional "tech" company. I've seen both.
To make it even more "funny" I can tell you that "employees are idiots" is a frequent manager's rant too.
The more intelligent managers don't complain that employees are "idiots". It's more that low-level employees don't care enough. They don't have any authority or autonomy so they're not conscientious. The mismatch comes from the fact that the manager obviously believes the beauty contest is worth playing (he played it and won) while his underlings are often disengaged outright.
No I am sure, and they are producing more wealth than I (probably) _EVER_ could. But doesn't mean it's a fun place for a designer and/or software engineer to be.
It means it's great to be on the board, manager or shareholder.
I would have such a serious moral hazard and hypocrisy problem there that I can't imagine being happy as a manager at Samsung. (I used to be an engineer, transitioned to pm, I'll probably be a suit within the next 5 years sadly) I don't think IP theft and blatant product copying is morally correct, and I can't work at a place where I have to support such practices.
So what the previous poster should have said is "managers and my (or our) interests and priorities do not align" rather than being condescending. I couldn't agree more that it's not ideal for a software engineer.
So you're equating "not a fun place for a software engineer" with "managed by idiots"? That's a rather strange attitude, wouldn't you think?
I often see this attitude from engineers, and although I am one as well, I always find it puzzling. There's a lot that can be said about bureaucracies, bad management, and lack of innovation. But the world doesn't revolve around writing cool software, and non-engineers aren't all idiots. It's a bit more complicated than that.
It sounds tough, but at least the thing you do isn't bullshit. I mean. C'mon iOS as an operating system is amazing, working with those engineers would be kick-ass for some people.
No, share holders care about share prices. Which in big part in large companies comes from existing products/services + incremental work. Big leaps come from acquisitions.
You need managers to keep the status quo going. Come in, run affairs as usual and leave.
Android should have a good window manager, not just something like MultiView. MW causes problems with one of my apps and I don't have plan to fix it, my apps target Android, not Android customizations like TouchWiz.
This comes across to me as more of a rant, than a constructive exit description from a company. When hiring new candidates, and doing background checks alarm bells would go off if I saw people whining about their previous jobs in a blog post. Be professional, accept that some jobs are shit, and find a new one. This post will do you no favours in the future.
There has to be some sort of balance between criticism and "maintaining a professional attitude" (whatever that phrase means -- I have never understood it). A lot of times "be professional" is used to silence criticism of truly horrendous software development practices.
Being forced to use a stack of horrible software including IE strikes me as a perfectly valid professional criticism. Possibly, this might be because I worked at another company (also in the mobile space) that had exactly this sort of atmosphere of bureaucracy and using a contrived, corporate software stack for their development teams.
I don't have a company of my own right now, but if I did, I would have no problem hiring someone who ranted about an environment that is toxic to good software development. (I guess I would prefer it if he also gave an instance where he tried to improve that environment and failed, but from experience I know that it often tends to be a futile endeavour.)
So what? It does a good service to future prospective employees by spreading information about what it's like to work there. It's like saying that citizens under oppressive governments should never speak up because doing so can only land them in jail.
This is exactly what I was going to say. Writing a blog post riddled with grammatical errors (and emoticons!) slagging off your former employer is not a good look as far as future employers are concerned.
The grammatical errors could be due to English as a second language. I'm not sure that part of the requirements of working for Samsung in Poland is a flawless grasp of the English language.
Are we honestly that concerned with formality in this industry? I'd be more concerned with the contents and less with how formal they are. And what is wrong with using emoteicons in personal blog posts?
I don't necessarily agree with slagging off your former employer but his criticisms are still valid. The only thing that I didn't like was: "First of all I did this because this job was terrible boring for me (fixing code of other people is not especially exciting)." - That's not perhaps the best thing to write since he was a junior and this will make some people think he is lazy and does not want to take on the less fun jobs that we all have to do from time to time.
And like someone pointed out, English is not his first language. I'm sure you just didn't notice that though. :)
I don't think it will hinder his future employment prospects. He wouldn't be a fit for any company like Samsung, just as they wouldn't be a good employer for him.
It goes both ways. If a person takes a stand like that (basically stating not liking dysopian work environments, bad tools and major bureaucracy), he might make himself not available to such environments, but yet open doors to other ones.
The other thing you forget is that this guy is pretty young and still maturing up. Almost no level headed manager will read too much into it few years down the road.
As a co-worker, I like this type. They are more likely to reject bureaucracies, and seeking efficiency. These types tend to be more motivated on getting things done, and taking joy in their productive work, and not useless work.
Having seen myself how Samsung engineers work (mostly Korean teams), long hours culture, sleeping in their desks (shows you are working hard!), producing buggy code at night, then fixing their own crap in the morning (inefficient tail chasing), I would never work for that company either.
I suppose that I could argue that complaining about an incompetent former employer does literally no good for one's future career prospects. It can only hurt you, and that lack of foresight may be considered "unprofessional" by not considering your own best interests.
(some companies won't care about his rant against Samsung, but some other bigcos will. No company will actually give him bonus points for his public complaints, so overall the blog is purely a net negative for his future career transition prospects)
There is something to be said for opening discussion about coding practices in large companies. His essay was descriptive. Even if it did hurt his own personal career prospects, having it out there helps the community better understand what is expected at certain jobs. If I were a new CS graduate, this sort of information would be immensely helpful in deciding whether Samsung was right for me. I think that, from a global standpoint, his essay was a good thing. I'm not disagreeing with you, of course -- he may have hurt his job prospects for certain companies, but it sounds like he wouldn't be happy working at such companies anyway, so it seems for the best.
He didn't say they're incompetent, to the contrary, just that he didn't like it, and that being directly involved in something that makes more sense to him is more fulfilling to him in the meantime. So yes, he won't be hired by people without reading comprehension who snoop around on blogs, but what makes you think those are particularly productive anyway? And how is this relevant for someone looking to start his own business? And even if that wasn't the case, how are only "bigcos" viable employers, and how can you equate them with "all companies" on top of that?
Bigcos aren't the only ones who would be turned off by this post - I do due diligence daily on new employees at a small dev shop, we work startup hours and get dirty when it comes to the work we do (I do mindless crap daily that feels like I should have an intern that does it for me).
The op's post wreaks of entitlement and puts doubt in my mind that he'd be able to sit for 5 hours and setup staging servers, or batch review and comment code so new employees can follow quickly, or do one of the 100 other small, time-consuming, mundane tasks that we all get stuck doing sometimes at ANY size company level.
Then he wouldn't be a fit for you company, just as you probably wouldn't be a good employer for him.
It goes both ways. If a person takes a stand like that (basically stating not liking dysopian work environments, bad tools and major bureaucracy), he might make himself not available to such environments, but yet open doors to other ones.
The other thing you forget is that this guy is pretty young and still maturing up. Almost no level headed manager will read too much into it few years down the road.
As a co-worker, I like this type. They are more likely to reject bureaucracies, and seeking efficiency. These types tend to be more motivated on getting things done, and taking joy in their productive work, and not useless work.
Having seen myself how Samsung engineers work (mostly Korean teams), long hours culture, sleeping in their desks (shows you are working hard!), producing buggy code at night, then fixing their own crap in the morning (inefficient tail chasing), I would never work for that company either. *
*(Unless they pay me a 7 figure salary, I have a price after all)
I am not sure about that. From the article: "Secondly Samsung as a corporation is a place of absurdity where doing unnecessary things for about 40% of time is a rule"
That's not necessarily true - people like to hire people like themselves, there are a good number of people in the small company world that think similar things about working for a big company but don't say it. If he's otherwise qualified, it's pretty likely that one of them would want to hire him.
It's unprofessional because in the real-world you're OFTEN (of not most of the time) tasked with tasks that you believe are below your skill-set (or non-world changing as the author put it).
The reward for the hard work is usually being elevated to a project you're proud of, or work you enjoy (sometimes this happens, sometimes it doesn't - that's the workforce - if you're in a situation where you don't see upward mobility, you usually switch out from Co. A to Co. B that'll grant you what you're looking for).
We may all feel the way the poster did at one time or another ("eerrrg my job sucks..."), the difference is we don't write negative, public posts against the company that we worked for (especially considering Samsung's probably recruiting, and there's a "talent shortage" in mobile development at-the-moment).
Good luck clearing due diligence for a job at a large reputable company in the future.
Sidebar, it's not a matter of age either, it's professionalism that he should have known - I'm 23, been in the workforce for 5 years, and I wouldn't be caught dead writing a post like this...
It's unprofessional because in the real-world you're OFTEN (of not most of the time) tasked with tasks that you believe are below your skill-set (or non-world changing as the author put it).
The reward for the hard work is usually being elevated to a project you're proud of, or work you enjoy (sometimes this happens, sometimes it doesn't - that's the workforce - if you're in a situation where you don't see upward mobility, you usually switch out from Co. A to Co. B that'll grant you what you're looking for).
Do you realize how disgusting and condescending an arrangement this is? It's "you're a prole, so if you really grovel I'll throw you a bone now and then, if I feel like it; if not, too bad, and that's what you get for being a prole". Fuck that.
By the way, I don't think you're one of the bad guys. I think you're too young to realize that you're defending the bad guys, or at least it comes off that way. At your age, I don't think you've been burned badly enough to know what you're talking about. You may have been laid off, but you haven't had the CEO of a 100-person company spend years stalking you and trying to ruin your reputation. Once you start having experiences like that, you'll know the assholes running this game for what they really are.
the difference is we don't write negative, public posts against the company that we worked for (especially considering Samsung's probably recruiting, and there's a "talent shortage" in mobile development at-the-moment).
Speaking honestly about a negative work experience is a good thing for society, because it allows talented people to allocate their energy to more appreciative companies that will give them better work, rather than wasting their talents on low-level, parochial people-pleasing.
This is like the refusal of some newspapers to print Bush's involvement in the wiretapping scandal of 2004 because it "might affect the election". That's the fucking point! You're supposed to give people information that will help them make better (political and economic) decisions. The prohibition against "bad-mouthing" previous employers by being honest about them is the same thing. It's just fucking oppression and intimidation at this point, not "professionalism". Back when the professions meant something because companies took care to be decent to their people, it was different. But now "bad-mouthing" is almost always second-strike. People don't disparage ex-employers lightly. In all the cases I know about, the ex-employers deserve much worse than they got.
> Do you realize how disgusting and condescending an arrangement this is?
It's a pretty basic workplace dynamic. If you really have to get away from it, you stay out of the workplace.
In freelancing or contract work, you're in the workplace, but are free to turn stuff down and be difficult because there's no long-term investment, you come on board and start contributing immediately. If they treat you poorly, just tell them to take a hike and go find something else.
The real problem is people let themselves be taken advantage of, because they often leave themselves with no options but to take abuse until they crack and do something that gets them fired.
If your immediate supervisor has shown signs of being a sociopathic asshole, you start making connections with other people, spread out your influence on the company. That way when things get real bad you can complain to someone who already knows you. Not make long diatribic rants about how ugly things are. One of these strategies offers options, the other limits them.
And he will come back full circle after he starts his own company and realizes there's a bunch of bullshit and stuff that he needs to swallow. He yarns about how at least in his job at Samsung he had a good income and he understands that everyone, yes absolutely everyone has to start from the bottom and fight their way to the top positions/companies.
Crap, with a foot already in Samsung, he could have stay 2 years and then bargain for either: a) a better position, or b) a position in another company.
I tend to agree with you. Corporations will often test you out in what you consider to be a "crap" job. Why? It's not a test of skill, it's a test of initiative. Without slamming him -- it's his personal choice, after all, and good luck to him -- this is why some people don't advance. They see a position as being "beneath" them when actually they're being watched to see if they can -- on their own -- bring something new to it.
I used to be like that (no really I did): I started programming when I was about 7 years old (LOGO, then Basic, then C). I finished my degree in Software Engineering with the highest grade of all my peers and with honours. About one year before graduation I started working at a software company (doing some rent-a-car systems and tourism web-dev) but inside me thinking I was so-much-better than what I was doing (programming .NET v1). So I took off and went to the UK to do a Master and a PhD.
Fastforward 8 years (4 of Masters/PhD, 4 of a PostDoc), I am 'back' as a 'simple' software engineer in a great company doing what I realized I love: programming software. I have been one year now, learning the company processess and their domain, meeting the people. And after this year, I've got a good career path laid in front of me with the opportunity to sometime become a tech lead.
And this is a great way to lose your best talent. Why work for a place that puts you through bullshit tests when you can work for a company that gives you important work and helps you succeed from day 1?
Personally, I did achieve significant success in a highly bureaucratic environment and got rewarded for it...but then I left anyway to work at a place actually encouraged me to work on problems that mattered, instead of constantly getting in the way when I tried to get anything done. Any sane person would do the same thing.
Corporations will often test you out in what you consider to be a "crap" job. Why? It's not a test of skill, it's a test of initiative. Without slamming him -- it's his personal choice, after all, and good luck to him -- this is why some people don't advance. They see a position as being "beneath" them when actually they're being watched to see if they can -- on their own -- bring something new to it.
It's a total waste of time to play that game. Why? Because not everyone starts on a crap job. When you apply for transfer after 1.5-2 years, you will be competing against people had real work, and you won't be able to get out of your second-class citizen status. You might get a slightly better project, but you'll never get an actually good one.
Were it not for the job-hopper stigma imposed by Boomersaurs holding the reality of the new economy against us (as if we had something to do with it) the most viable thing would be to roll the dice again after 6 months. The only way to get good projects in a company is to start on one (or have a pre-existing personal relationship with the CEO).
The best way to get good projects in a company is to get put on a project that's failing and make it succeed. My first boss at Google did this - he was on a project that was going nowhere, introduced a bunch of modern software-development methods to the team, and got the project unstuck. He's a Principal Engineer now.
This is probably harder than taking a project that doesn't exist and making it exist, but that's why it's also more respected. It shows that no matter where you land, you'll be able to make the best out of it, and that makes you incredibly valuable to...everyone.
get put on a project that's failing and make it succeed. My first boss at Google did this - he was on a project that was going nowhere, introduced a bunch of modern software-development methods to the team, and got the project unstuck.
In order to do that, you need a political protector who can guarantee, in advance, that performance reviews will come out in your favor no matter what happens. There's just too much risk for it to make sense otherwise.
If you have such a protector, then you're an unusually lucky person and most of my advice isn't for you.
You take the risk because you're secure enough in yourself that it doesn't really matter whether you succeed or fail or if you get that promotion anyway. If it doesn't work out - so what? You miss out on that promotion, but you still drew a salary the whole time. That's a lot more than you get if you found a startup and it doesn't work out.
My former boss had no such guarantee when he took the initiative with that project - if it had failed, he would've remained a SWE 3 forever (or, well, at least until he succeeded with some other project). I had no such guarantee when I volunteered for the 2010 search visual redesign - and I didn't get promoted, though I did get my picture in Businessweek and a reputation internally as a person who gets shit done. I also had no such guarantee when I volunteered to help start Google's Authorship program, but I did get promoted for that one, and a nice pick of future assignments. And since then, I've had a major project I initiated (which I'd hoped would be my ticket to staff and senior staff) get canceled and a major open-source 20% project get put in limbo. This blows, but that's life. I was an entrepreneur before Google; some of my projects have been mild successes (enough to get me professional reputation but no money) and many of them got me far less than I got at Google for sinking a year of my time into this failed research project.
What you're asking for is rewards without having to run any risk, which is a generally unattractive quality in a person. There are jobs that give you this bargain, at least until the company goes under - you could be a code-monkey at a Fortune 500, or an accountant, or a unionized laborer. But that wouldn't give you respect, which I think is what you're looking for. People respect folks that are willing to take risks for what they believe in, and accept the consequences when those risks don't pan out.
I disagree and the experience of many others in prominent positions have experience that runs counter to that. From the outside, it's easy to dismiss it as a "game" (which is a bit odd, given the popularity of games in software...). From the inside, find a better way to separate those who can make an actual contribution to those who just do what they're told and need to be told what they should do?
>>>Were it not for the job-hopper stigma
In large companies, perhaps, where your entry depends on a corporate checklist. But in a smaller company where the opinion of those doing the hiring counts for more than procedures, it won't matter if you have the skills they need to fill the job. Let's not forget that Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all behemoths the size of non-digital corporations.
I disagree and the experience of many others in prominent positions have experience that runs counter to that. From the outside, it's easy to dismiss it as a "game" (which is a bit odd, given the popularity of games in software...).
I'm using "game" as a synonym for "gamble", not "engaging, interactive experience".
When you let your boss assign you crap work to support his career goals while you don't learn anything, you're essentially gambling. The idea is that if you let him use your career in the way that a teenager uses a Kleenex, for about 3 years, his sense of indebtedness will inspire him to start giving you real work and this sudden turn to political favor compensate for your wasted time.
What actually happens is that the real work always goes to people with higher-quality work experience than what you got. You're not eligible for the good stuff, because you wasted years of your life on the garbage out of a misguided sense of loyalty (or perhaps financial desperation).
From the inside, find a better way to separate those who can make an actual contribution to those who just do what they're told and need to be told what they should do?
People who try to work directly for the company by solving important problems they weren't told to solve get fired for breaking the #1 Rule of Corporate Survival: Never Outshine Your Master: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMy8Tf-zCag. (Ok, that's actually one of the 48 "laws of power" and I don't agree with the whole body of work, but that one is 100% true.)
I'm doing this right now. Hired on as a "programmer" I haven't written code in the entire time i've been in my current position. I'm doing the crap work, as are all of my coworkers who were also hired as "programmers" in the hopes that in a year or two they'll be able to jump into what they thought they were signing up for.
So now I have a decision, jump ship and hurt my "future" but find a place that gives me real work and get some experience or stick around in my "gamble" and maybe eventually get back to what I was doing as an INTERN in 2 or 3 years.
I'm jumping. not because I hate the company, but because I won't be anywhere further in my career or skillset in those 2 years.
Exactly why I'm leaving my company after ~3 years. There's absolutely no movement but lateral with a laughable pay raise, more responsibility in tasks that are unrelated to my skills and greater micromanaging.
While I've learned a lot here, most of the time I've been stagnating and it's depressing and infuriating.
2 years (or even 1.5, or hell, even 1) at Samsung then moving to Apple would have been a pretty natural choice (The fruit company is definitely always hurting for more software talent)
Can't really think of other handset makers that he might want to go to, but depending on his skillset, some chipmakers would have been a good fit as well.
1. You have no idea what you are talking about or what he was talking about.
2. Your comment is top-voted and that's bad.
Leave alone whining. This guy has not even touched upon what is like working as a software engineer at Samsung. Over the time you learn to despise yourself for just working there and then leave and if you lazied around till late and didn't leave in time then you are stuck and then you despise yourself more.
Two years down the line you look at yourself and then figure you are mechanically doing and following all those work and procedures that you used to hate and then you are scared.
You just name any aspect of a work place or work and a (non HQ - though they are now coming out slowly) Samsung engineer can tell you how horrible that is.
I had been to Korea HQ(Suwon) 5 times and I realized the HQ engineers are same with the only difference that a Samsung job is worshipped in Korea without parallel. If you talk to HQ(Korean) engineers about Samsung's low quality work and lowest quality work life balance - they make it a matter of prestige and patriotism.
What have you been expecting as Junior Developer? Especially in large company, there are lots of smarter people there, you are just starting. Sometimes people need to be a little more humble, than thinking that on start they will be doing new android features right away. I've worked for similar big cos as junior, did not like it also and runned away. But someone has to do the dishes...
I think humility is even more important in a startup than a big co, since being a stubborn arrogant fool doesn't help you respond to reality.
However, the fact that young developers are making such amazing things right now pretty much disproves that "moving up the ladder" is necessary for great software product work in 2013. Times are seriously changing.
I think humility is even more important in a startup than a big co, since being a stubborn arrogant fool doesn't help you respond to reality.
While I'd agree with your logic on its own, the reality of (east coast) startups does not seem to match, at least based on the articles and accounts we most often see here. Humility, a very valuable trait, seems almost totally absent -- unless the bulk of those doing the actual work are so humble as to cower under their viciously self-promoting cofounders. Which I suppose is entirely possible.
I'm sure even Apple has some criticial, internal application in finance or some other part of the corporate structure that they bought from a vendor that uses ActiveX.
Nonetheless, if a firm has committed to Windows (which alone is a problem, but assume they've done that), it is perfectly fine to use ActiveX for systems. IE is simply a runtime, and having to use the IE runtime for some internal systems -- get the hell over it.
As others have said, blog posts like this are never professionally constructive. While some readers might sympathize with the writer, most will wonder if the problem is really with the writer (the old http://www.despair.com/dysfunction.html). There is an unavoidable smell that the writer might be toxic.
Which of course the writer can disregard. I've burned bridges and never had an ounce of concern because I understood that I was burning bridges and embraced that. If the author is doing that knowingly, then brilliant for them.
I interned at a big telcom and worked at a bank. Amount of crappy software that needs to be used is mindboggling. Amount of money that is spent to license that crapware is even more mind boggling.
There is a real market for these beautiful b2c software products that can make their services store data on the bigco's servers (as opposed to their own - security is a concern) and write decent, mostly .NET interface to communicate with the company dabatabases.
There is a real market for these beautiful b2c software products
Careful. "Beautiful" software isn't necessarily a large addressable market in B2C...right now. Not saying you're wrong, but bigco's software packages value security, safety, and supportability over beauty, usability, and time-to-build. It's sad but it's true.
> bigco's software packages value security, safety, and supportability over beauty, usability, and time-to-build.
Why does it have to be either/or? I mean you can have secure/safe and supportable software which is beautiful and usable. It eventually helps in the long-run.
Wow I did not know CR was still around! I used that back when I was doing my BS about 10 years ago. A lot of people used it with Visual Basic.
I remember learning to interface VB with Microsoft's Word libraries in order to create reports in DOC to avoid using Crystal Reports (this mainly just for college projects). I also remember one real-life project (for a restaurant I did during college) where we proposed the client to have DOC reports and he was amazed that it could be done.
OTOH, I ted to think that those things like CR, JIRA, Lotus Notes and others are a necessary evil. The mere fact that they continue existing is because they solve some kind of problem (otherwise people won't use them, right?). I guess the main problem of these platforms is that once they grow so big (trying to accomplish a lot of things) they become difficult to manage or use.
Bureaucracy is everywhere, not only in big companies.
Back when I worked in research, I was in a small (at most 100 people) research institute in Germany; and I was working in a EU project.
Each month, I had to log what I did every hour in 3 different, independent and non-compatible (i.e., it was hard for me to automate the process... and believe me, I tried) places:
1. An excel sheet required by the European Union office in charge of overseeing the project: Log not only the time you spent in the project (doing what for each hour? wp1, wp2, etc.; or admin) but also hours completely unrelated to the project (teaching, other projects, etc).
2. A stupid program called Profiskal. One of those programs made in Java which are made with the feet.
Isn't that backwards? You don't want to work with clearcase, not big companies from what I read. I work at a $very_big_company and use git (and hg/bzr in some cases).
There just happens to be a correlation between those two sometimes.
It's bulky and awful and became a monster of an application that would eat itself. But there were (are) some things that Clearcase does that other version control systems don't do.
I think that http://www.vestasys.org/ works by having your workspace/checkout be a virtual filesystem (which would be how it's able to track build dependencies).
(for example you have to use IE to work because much of their sofware works only as ActiveX controls)
This is a problem endemic to South Korea. They actually passed legislation in the late 90s mandating the use of ActiveX for security. Now that ActiveX is an orphaned technology, that isn't working out so well for them. They are trapped on an old version of IE.
Former colleagues told me that Samsung is also known to put two teams on a task, tell neither that another team is working on said same problem, then whoever succeeds is a rockstar and whoever fails is 'restructured'.
Korean companies aren't the easiest to work for, I should know I also just left a large one, but the Koreans work harder than any other group I know. Just a shame they work harder not smarter because they waste so much time.
I cannot comment on the inner working of Samsung or a similar corporation of that size. But having grown up on a farm I can very much sympathize with the joy and, can we call it freedom, farming has to offer.
I often wonder if we, who code and spend quite a bit of our lifetime in front of computer displays have distanced ourselves from the nature around us a bit too much from time to time.
Warsaw software developers' job market has gotten really interesting since Google opened an engineering center here some umpteen months ago. There is just no reason to stick to crappy jobs at this time.
Edit: OTOH, this is no reason to go with a bang - releasing some pressure is just not worth it.
Warsaw software developers' job market has gotten really interesting since Google opened an engineering center here some umpteen months ago. There is just no reason to stick to crappy jobs at this time.
What makes you think Google is better?
Google pays decently, but the work isn't interesting unless you have social access. Being in an Eastern European satellite office, you're not going to get the machine learning work. You're going to get the stuff that California, Seattle and New York don't want to do.
I'm sure there are Polish companies that offer real work; OP would do better at one of those than in some multinational's branch office. The problem is that most corporations are still pretty colonial and you don't get high-quality work unless you're in the main office.
Statements from friends who work there plus knowledge from seminars they sometimes organize with Warsaw University. Example (Polish language warning :-) ): http://students.mimuw.edu.pl/SR/rok12-13/Google.html
Short translation of the above link: cluster management, availability management, load balancing. OS-level things, definitely not maintenance of a legacy ticketing system for "real" devs in California.
You could be right, but my experience at Google is that even on the projects that seem interesting, the microallocation comes down to rank. For example, on my team of ~15 people there were plenty of individuals doing interesting stuff, but if you were SWE 2-3 you were fucked. Your boss could take advantage of the fact that SWE 3's are pretty much considered to be parasites not worthy of consideration as humans. You'd never get to work on a green field and actually have an opportunity to prove yourself.
The only thing that matters at Google is your rank and your "calibration score". That, and nothing else, determines what projects are available to you. If you're willing to spend 5+ years playing politics and trading favors in order to get promo story you need, then you can get something passably interesting.
Not to contradict your experience, I just find it unlikely to translate to this particular office we're talking about. Who knows, maybe I'll find out first hand.
As I know, (from my own sources inside) Samsung Poland is - as for Corporation - nice place to work. There are many, many worse employers here in Poland. Most big players treat polish workforce as second grade (better than those in 3rd world, worse than in "better world").
It`s funny to hear not that someone who spend 9 months in Korean origin corporation don`t know that in Korea ActiveX is some kind of "standard" for webapps (long and painful story, someone with grater knowledge in this topic should write some word about it - is interesting how they tied themselves in closed and problematic ecosystem)
I have a question as a user to devs: Do you consider fixing code a bad job, as he did? The Net is filled with complaints about things that require fixing in lots of software that's been around a while. Yet it never seems to get done. Is this more because dev hate to fix old code by someone else -- what in the book world would be termed an editor's function -- or is this the nature of the corporate beast, to just keep moving forward?
I am a dev, and I am sure my comment won't be liked here but there it goes:
Nobody likes bug-fixing: not their bugs and of course not other people's bugs. You can see this clearly in open-source software (mainly because the communication channels such as Bugzilla, forums, mailing list are all open).
It is like writing documentation: programmers don't like to do it. However, fixing bugs is worse, because there is really no payoff in doing that: if you create a feature or write a program then you are doing something new... whereas when you fix a bunch of bugs, then it mens at the end you get a piece of software which is working the way it was supposed to work on the first place... so for any external observer (client, manager, user, etc) there was no value added.
Hunting for an elusive hard to fix bug might be very satisfying. You get to know the environment, you might have to construct custom tools to gather data for the debugging purposes and you obviously get the bragging rights if you succeed.
Most bugs are not that challenging though. A textbox is too small to display a value, shoveling of records from point A to point B loses some data fields, this kind of stuff. You basically know right from the start what kind of fix is required and the only challenge is finding the place in the (potentially messy) code where the fix needs to be applied.
What you subsequently described is a copyeditor's function on a book. Maybe such jobs need to be described as such to attract the people who really want to do them?
Why do you assume that because many people does something it's correct to do it? I think you should reformulate your question like "what do you think most successful silicon valley...".
I don't mean that technical skill is everything in a tech company, but it's a very important part of it.
You don't have to describe the new startup, you only have to describe how you organise your life with particular respect to the points you raised in the article.
I'm not very surprised by being forced using IE and all kinds of active X plugins at samsung.
Consider the fact that south korea sold their soul to Microsoft and IE years ago by making it mandatory that all online purcases etc. require ActiveX plugins for IE.
Poor technology choices forced upon the population by governments are inherently bad.
The writing is poor (by native speaker standards; again, I think it's safe to chalk that up to not being a native speaker of English) but he's intelligent and way more honest (corporate jobs truly suck, and idiots are far too often in charge) than 99.99% of white-collar workers have the courage to be.
Congratulations on your new job, exercise, fresh air and freshly picked berries and vegetables. Sounds pretty decent compared to sitting in front of a screen slaving for knock-off phones with shitty vendored junk.
Seeing the company you work for doing commercials like http://thenextweb.com/shareables/2013/04/29/a-terrible-idea-... (even if it was by a third party PR company) is kinda.. weak.