Discussion

@grimalkina Pretty much every Perf session at Google. Those who don't wave the flag hard and make everything about being a superhero don't last long.

There was even a slide deck for Europeans to help them write performance review notes like USians so that they'd be able to get promoted. It spent a lot of time talking about the awkwardness of extreme self promotion.

As part of this, a lot of team stuff got worded as if the team was ancillary, at best. As always, it's all in the culture.

@grimalkina Your post reminds me of a talk that Tanya Reilly did on "glue work." This isn't the only way your scenario manifests, but it's certainly a very common one.

https://www.noidea.dog/glue

(There's at least one link to a video of the talk if you don't wanna read the page.)

@grimalkina Persons A, B, and C defined and executed a tool initiative. Project was successful, w/positive impact on the larger org’s processes. Despite a preso to leadership of the project’s development, only A received(s) credit, even with A trying to share. I have seen this dynamic plenty in my workplace, but attributed it to strong guru culture and long tenure of leadership: if they remember you as a star in the past, then anything successful you work on is attributed to your specialness.

@grimalkina "Linus Torvalds created Linux"

You have to get really hand-wavy with both "created" and "Linux" for that to be literally true.

@grimalkina in my first role there was a dev that consistently produced the most unreadable code I've ever seen. A really awesome DBA and a really awesome tester prevented nightmares in prod, to the great annoyance of management.

When we replaced 10k lines of ksh with 126 lines of Perl, I almost got fired for producing such a low amount of volume in weeks of hard work 🤪

Still used in prod 15y later though, which I was told by a third line support whose job we made less stressed 😎

@grimalkina Well judging by the coding interviews, "working fast and alone" is how they expect you to be able to work.

@grimalkina I worked at a company that fired a bunch of recently-hired devs, saw productivity skyrocket, and proudly declared that “we work better with fewer people” etc. In reality, the fired devs had been cleaning up tech debt behind the scenes, so after they were gone tech debt levels skyrocketed and productivity eventually slowed back down to baseline.

@grimalkina previous place I worked was trying to move to a model where 1 dev would take a feature from concept to test to deploy to monitor. with each new feature. and somehow that was going to increase velocity

@grimalkina in my career, I've discovered that I think best as a social activity. Thus, I get accolades for being insightful, asking intelligent questions, and generally appearing as a highly capable engineer. However, the reality is that I'm more of a daydreamer, and I often think of links between concepts others haven't noticed, because I've stopped paying attention. Anecdotal for sure, but my ability is exaggerated by the company of others.

@grimalkina The purported 10x engineer! Not always, some of these are just 1x engineers with odd bags of tricks (so they know how to do a job with 1x work while everyone else only knows how to do it the hard way), but many 10x engineers manage to do 10x themselves because they generate a huge amount of mess and nonsense that turn 9 or 10 other people into 0x engineers because they spend all their time cleaning up after the 10x person.

@grimalkina this isn't a specific story but it really bothers me how being even a little bit quote-unquote well known makes people attribute all sorts of shit to you personally, including things you have literally not even touched, by virtue of being in proximity of it in concept-space

every once in a while i see things people incorrectly attribute to me with 100% confidence on some page and i realize it's been there for a long time and it makes me sad