That's because many of us older developers got into the profession when it didn't pay well, and had negative status associated with it, because we loved doing it.

So yes, there is very little tolerance from us toward those who are in it for money/status/prestige, and not for the love of it.

imo younger engineers are doing this because the culture has driven out and suppressed any instinct to care about anything else. If you show up at a job and try to care you fail, you get frustrated and burned out, all your eagerness is rewarded with nothing. There's a strong pressure, from every direction, not to care about anything other than just completing tasks, executing on OKRs, and collecting your RSUs, since you just get burned if you try; saying anything out loud about how the work is pointless or even nefarious threatens the illusion and the illusion protects the money hose so it's not allowed to be questioned.

> As I've seen it younger engineers simply focus a lot more on money and their career growth versus the product or whatever their own sense of "the right thing is".

I've seen a lot of this in younger engineers, too, but taken to such extremes that it's counterproductive for everyone.

"Resume driven development" is the popular phrase to describe it: People who don't care if their choices are actively hostile to their teammates, the end users, or anyone else as long as they think it will look good on their resume.

This manifests as the developer who pushes microservices and kubernetes on to the small company's simple backend and then leaves for another company, leaving an overcomplicated mess behind.

It's not limited to developers. One of the worst project managers I encountered prided himself on "planning accuracy", his personal metric for on-time delivery of tickets. He's push everyone to ship buggy software to close tickets on time. Even weirder, he'd start blocking people from taking next sprint's tickets from the queue if they finished their work because that would reduce his personal "planning accuracy" stat that he tracked.

We even had a customer support person start gaming their metrics: They wanted to have the highest e-mail rate and fastest response time, so they'd skim e-mails and send off short responses. It made customers angry because it took 10 e-mails to communicate everything, but he thought it looked good on his numbers. (The company tracked customer satisfaction, where he did poorly, but that didn't matter because he wanted those other achievements for his resume)

They have it right. Goals are short term, jobs are ephemeral. Hell, maybe careers are ephemeral now as well.

If the individual's focus is on short term income or career growth, then they align with the company's goals.

Solid engineering practices and product quality don't matter anymore (except in FOSS), and will likely be viewed as antagonistic to the KPIs, OKRs, or whatever metrics measure what is considered success.

Stated as someone who has been in various forms of IT since 1985, and has experienced most of software engineering turned into an MBA value extraction mindset. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em.

I'm very much not an experienced engineer but I lean that way. I think the modern profit-above-all-else attitude of modern engineers comes from the whole "learn to code" movement and promises of a good paying job. These people aren't motivated by their passion for the craft but instead because it was seen as easy money

I'm in the middle and lean loyal, but the younger folks probably got it right. There's no more IBM of the 1960s loyalty to be had from the company's perspective, so why not go out and make what you can while you can. No more pensions, not even a gold watch. Look at how often tech sees layoffs - it's not if there's another, it's when.

If this were good for stock go up 9/10 startups wouldn't fail. While cutting corners can be needed at times doing the wrong thing doesn't. Eventually the wrong thing also pisses off the market and turns your company into a joke with a bad reputation.

Well, it's hard to do anything else when management doesn't let you, and when your entire life is on the line. Nobody's going to risk homelessness (or worse: a lack of health insurance) on principles that are simply not rewarded anymore. There is an entire generation of programmers who wouldn't recognize software quality if it bit them on the Electron app. It's not their fault, but it's the way things are now. Unless and until this relentless obsession with hoarding wealth changes, we will continue to get the software we deserve. Selah.

Agreed. It really all is an obvious consequence of optimizing only the things that can be measured on a two dimensional graph, at the expense of all the things that can't (even though in the long term those complex, multidimensional things like culture and care and integrity do, indeed, "make line go up", though perhaps with a smaller first derivative)

The first really stupid customer I encountered had a bunch of beanie babies in his office.

I used to mutter about him being that race in Star Trek TNG that kidnaps people to make their ships “go”.

But then one day I had an epiphany. I realized his boss knows exactly what he is. He’s a useful idiot with a knack of getting something for nothing out of people. That’s his skill. Not dinner conversation, but cost control. That and the Gervais Principle explain a lot of our head scratching about bad managers. They just know how to nerdsnipe or neg us into doing free work.

Every time I take a computer to the Genius Bar I impersonate that beautiful moron. I’ve paid for one expensive repair that I feel nobody should have to pay for, but also not paid for two repairs that I knew damned well were out of warranty. All told I’ve paid pretty much what a fair universe should have charged me for lifetime maintenance on my hardware.

The thing is if they know you’re in IT they will engage in a coherent argument with you that explains why they are entitled to deny your claim. If you just say, “it won’t connect to the internet” then they do the mental math on what an argument will cost with this grandpa whose kids bought him too much laptop for his own good and decide a waver is just less work.

It is. Our "security manager" has a dashboard that just literally counts the number of "security policies" we've put in place. Anything that isn't a box to tick is completely ignored as irrelevant. So we are essentially counting how many group policies we can implement and just disregarding the effectiveness of them for mitigating relevant threats and ignoring the added complexity and cost it incurs by making everyone's life more difficult. Systems password management/MFA? Who cares, can't make a graph out of it. It's the dumbest shit I've ever had to deal with.

>Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.

I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem in leadership.

I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years, there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've contributed a great deal to engineering strategy, particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.

The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain) don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of a director.

[0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this excellent website: https://staffeng.com

[1]: As in having the power to put plans and/or actions into effect

> But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.

True for a tech company startup, almost absolutely false for a well-established company, especially a non-tech one.

luck is probabilistic after being selected for sucking up.

> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.

To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.

> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.

> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.

The Professional Managerial Class (college -> management being the norm) gained a lot of steam in the '80s and had basically taken over the entire economy by the end of the '90s. My dad's career spanned the pre- and post-transition eras, with the latter coming as a very sudden shift due to a large merger. His description of the difference was... not flattering to the modern notion. Way, way more wasted time. Way more business trips that could have been an email (but how would the managers get to go party away from the family otherwise?). Lots more clueless management who don't understand WTF the business actually does or how any of it works, resulting in braindead leadership.

It is a variation of the principal-agent problem, and recognizing had helped me climb up the ladder in my career.

I wouldn't blame this on MBAs. The fault lays in the culture of the Board Room. There used to be a time that the board cared about the welfare of employees and the good of society as a whole. I know this is hard to believe in contemporary times.

What were the "the US stock market reforms of the 1970s", roughly?

I gave it a pass for those decades being in "recent memory" even if the experience wasn't first hand.

Easy now, I think it's pretty easy to see that he's talking about "three decades" generally, a decade in his own experience and two or more generalized out. You can know about things that you don't directly experience.