Comment by AviationAtom

I think it's harder to quantify realistic work outputs in some settings, especially if work outputs have been skewed in recent years by people cooking the clock. In others I think they have observed a drop in work output. With the formerly very loose labor market I don't think there was much they could do about it before, but now they see RTO as an option to rein it in. I think if both sides of the equation more consistently approached things in a reasonable manner then both sides would be better off.

I don't know what you think "management" does, but it's not just being a panopticon on making sure every individual employee is performing to their expectations.

In the same environment that is affecting SDEs right now, managers are more and more being asked to do more individual contributor actions, while increasing their span of control.

They have their own work to do, primarily in how they report progress and vision UPWARDS. Most IC's don't realize but depending on their skip level, managing "upwards" may be requiring more than half of a manager's time.

So sure, they know if the overall team work gets done. And they absolutely know their top and bottom performers. But in the middle? Lots of room for variability. Is someone good even if they're not coding becaue they seem to be unblocking others? Is someone good if they're not talking to anyone but cranking out tons of code? This is where most performance management time ends up going to.

And in no point in today's culture, does it account for the possibility of catching people that are moonlighting or coasting.

When you hire managers, some percentage of them won't be solid. And even the best managers have to balance giving someone a chance vs spotting abuse.

In these bigger companies it is very time consuming and difficult to fire someone. In some it is nearly impossible for a manager, and they can't replace the headcount until they do.

There's a real tradeoff between employment stability and managerial oversight in companies at scale.

Not if they can just force enough people to RTO and the ones who won't leave. If we don't organize against this, and negotiate as individuals with our individual managers, we can only sit back and observe this happen to us and our peers.

That's why we have to have spyware on everyone's computers! How else could we possibly measure productivity?

Interestingly to me, there’s still many who believe tech is some sort of utopia of meritocracy where everything is logical and sound, because (relatively) high labor rates.

It’s always been a factor of ROI for the roles vs competitive labor market rates. Tech tends to operate closer to business leadership than many industries so many get this idea of being modern clerics or something and being part of the nobility class in organizations when again, really we’re often some of the most despised in the labor force as a necessary evil that must be paid (relatively) high where at every turn cost optimization experiments are attempted at our expense.

Business leadership doesn’t like you, they like that the things you can do can be wielded to scale their and the organizations wealth higher than most roles, because tech scales. That’s about it, IMHO at least.

> Reagan "welfare queen" story about someone showing up in Cadillac to use their food stamps. Did it happen, probably.

Real person, but absolutely not representative. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor

Reagan was taking it mostly from a single case, about which he then made up a bunch of shit, because reality wasn’t bad enough for him:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Taylor

He also liked to imply that people living large on welfare & benefits fraud (which, already not really a great description of what was going on even in this exemplar case) was widespread and not, you know, a thing he knew about from a single case because the woman was caught and charged with crimes. What an asshole (Reagan, I mean—well, her too, I suppose).

Basically this lady was committing fraud in just about every possible way she had access to, and welfare was just one of them. She then, maybe, kept doing it after release from prison, if you read between the lines a little (though mostly estate and insurance fraud, not welfare, if she was still committing fraud)

>I don't see why they can't do that.

Because they report to the person who says they can't.

I don’t care how long anyone works. If you work 5000 hours but don’t produce anything useful, you’re no good to me.

I know exactly who gets work done. I can easily check the git repos and I’m at the standups. Some people are straight up negative value but cannot be fired. It’s impossible to fire anyone.

I know someone who worked at Google and Dropbox both at the same time. He was an intermediate level developer. But he managed to do both pretty much without stress.

Absolutely, it's a silly argument. I knew plenty of people who slaked off in-person, most managers aren't literally standing behind you watching your screen. It's IMO a bad metric anyway, I'll read Reddit, HN, watch Youtube, etc. when I'm "supposed" to be working because I need to take a break, and I get more than enough done and work enough hours that it doesn't impact my work.

The things you can't hide are having no meaningful update for stand-up every day, not completing any cards, not participate in conversations/planning, etc. If's that not catching up to them then that's on management for not paying attention.

It’s not justice towards the employer, but justice towards your peers, both those who you work with directly, as well as those who are negatively impacted because you took a job that could have been someone else’s.

If you want to have multiple jobs at the same time, there is a vehicle available for that, it’s called “consulting”.

I don’t think anyone should have loyalty towards their employer - you should be free to jump ship to a better gig whenever you want, in the same way they are free (in the US) to let you go at their convenience. But taking multiple full time jobs is wrong, imo.