I've come to believe that the software industry is the least meritocratic industry in the history of mankind. I've also experienced similar situations as the author. It's all 100% about company selection. You've got to choose the right company. The rest does not matter AT ALL.

The most I ever got paid working for a company was for a basic project where everyone was moving super slow and people felt comfortable enough to watch YouTube videos in front of their boss and one guy came into work one day wearing his pajamas.

The least I got paid (inflation-adjusted) was a consultancy which had an extremely over-engineered software stack and daily deadlines... Every morning standup started with "What did you get DONE yesterday? What are you going to get DONE today?" If you couldn't point to a specific feature which was FULLY DONE end-to-end, there would be a long awkward pause or the boss would make a negative remark. Their definition of DONE was 100% polished, no iteration; had to be perfect the first time; the boss would sit with you through a very tense one-on-one meeting and go through the detailed requirements for each task word-by-word. The company environment was set up to make it difficult for you to ask question; like the author of this article described so this made it difficult to meet all requirements exactly on the first attempt, let alone given the short deadlines.

I struggled to make sense of the full horror of this industry until Christmas this year; I was at my parent's house and was using their microwave (a popular brand) and it was the most awful UX I had ever seen on a microwave. I literally could not imagine a worse UX if I tried. You couldn't just pin-in the seconds/minutes and press start, you could't extend the start time mid-way through the process and it was hard to start as you had to push a bunch of specific intermediate buttons whose labels made no sense and it would start a fan which kept running even after the microwave was done; I had to pull the plug to get it to shut up... Anyway, this made me think "Wow, my industry sucks... This is the worst software and UX I've ever seen and yet people are still buying this machine! The guy who designed the UX for this thing probably got a promotion too and now giving orders to others about how to do good UX..." This isn't just an outlier 'microwave industry' thing though; this dynamic is present everywhere in the whole tech industry; this was just a particularly striking example.

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tonyedgecombe 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

>It's all 100% about company selection.

I found the more I got paid the better I was treated. I had one client I was doing work for under my previous employment. When I left I charged triple what my previous employer had been charging. Not only did they not bat an eyelid about the price but they started treating me better as well.

The worst customers were those working on slim margins, for a while I was doing a lot of work for component distributors. They were terrible to work for.

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kranner 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's possible the guy in paragraph 4 who designed the UX didn't get a promotion and did their work in the same kind of environment you describe in paragraph 3.

(Also maybe the fan was wired to a thermostat?)

	▲	socketcluster 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		I was just speculating in this case but my understanding of this industry is that if the product earns money then everyone gets promotions and bonuses. It's not about individual ability. My point is that there is no correlation between the financial success of the product and the skill of the UX designer or developer; yet financial success is the main metric which is used to determine rank and pay for these specific roles. I'm happy for sales-people that their pay fully correlates with their performance but as a software developer, it really sucks. My pay correlates much more with the performance of my colleagues in sales than with my own performance. If I'm unlucky, the correlation may in fact be inverted. I've seen this over and over. I worked in blockchain space; the developers before me wrote TERRIBLE code, the thing was literal spaghetti code, full of vulnerabilities and it's a miracle it didn't get hacked. But the timing was right and many of those early developers earned big money as crypto prices soared in the early days... The people who joined only a few months later and pulled off a heroic redesign/refactoring effort and did an amazing job in record time got peanuts because the hype was dying down. So the fact that they improved the product 100x didn't matter at all. It's like there was 0 recognition. Bad luck compounds. I could write an entire book about this effect... But that book probably wouldn't sell; ironically, a victim of the same effect it would be describing. People only care about success stories. With good luck; not only do you get to be successful but you get to sell books about it which makes you even more successful. Good luck compounds too.