Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

Posted 5 hours ago by hnthrow10282910
116 points

The large companies I’ve worked at (including FAANG) seemed to thrive on kudos via performative actions. Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive while the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal.

Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team.

Anyone else notice this? Not sure if there’s a word for it, but it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers

Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

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