I sympathize with the author and you can see Prime has never worked at a company like the one the author has. I appreciate Primes optimism but its soul crushing to work at a company like what the author desribed. Looking at the other comments it seems like those companies are the norm
This. Most companies are literally bursting with incompetence and are surviving based on some good calls taken a decade or two ago and are currently dying a slow death being sucked dry by corporate leeches.
They are the norm, for sure. It took me 12 whole months, but I finally left, and I'm no longer a slave. Unfortunately it's also entirely sucked the joy of development from me. I coded for years for myself before deciding to say f it and get a job doing it.... and from day 1 my soul began being sucked out of me. People don't care, people have no drive, shit is slow, and stupid, and it's entirely draining. I'm never going back to development, to the extent that I've already bought a new stihl chainsaw and timber framing tools, and I'm starting a business. Programming is a joke. Especially when you realize that 1. most coding isn't even necessary, and 2 the whole point of coding is to make complex things easier for stupid people to do, which means lowering salaries and helping enslave humans. I FUCKING REFUSE TO BE PARTY
As someone who was worked for about a decade in a big american (engineering) company, I can assure you prime that the OP is on point. It is just that your experience a netflix is completely different.
Yeah, I am at a big American tech company that has had a cultural degradation at all levels in the past 3 years. Leadership is exactly this toxic, and operates on the knowledge that things get done. It doesn't matter by who, how well, or how quickly. It matters how it can be spun. Dozens of projects started for promotions that never finish and produce half baked tools and products. Managers and product operations teams all jump on whatever bandwagon that ensures they stay employed (shove chat got in everywhere). The product has become outright hostile to it's users but it doesn't matter. All the technical talent that could leave have long since gone, and now it's just visa slaves or people with less than ideal backgrounds who can't compete in a modern job market
Can confirm. Even in small companies this happens, but prime is kind of right. If I were to set up my own company, I think I would end up tripping up into 90% of the issues described in the article. I think it is somewhat a sign of hubris to not also recognize that a worker only sees the smallest part of the problem and is contact with the issues more closely. Everything in this life is a tradeoff and even finding responsible code monkeys like myself is not an easy job (and even I still trip and drown in my own f-ups at times)
For me this article is not only about the general shittiness of your average dev, but also how bigger companies should not be trusted with their decision making and reasoning in general. The entire part about "there is no budget for that" was exactly about it: don't trust your managers. Don't trust them about the budget, about "company culture", "team spirit", goals, ideas or whatever they gonna tell you. And I am saying that as someone who worked for a company where managers were not only incompetent, resulting with a good chunk of IT department quiting at once, but outright inhuman, firing a dude stranded in an active war zone cause "he was underdelivering" and deducting his last payment cause "he was not able to give back his laptop". The same company that would feed us bullshit about being a family and such.
I was reading a book about corporations and one thing stuck with me. Learned helplessness. You're literally a cell in a body, you don't matter. "Corpo" is latin for body
@@monad_tcp Cells perform work and usually are equally worth, you're not going to stress your 2-3 neurons, your brain performs best because of massive parallelism of millions of your cells functioning together, so they very much ALL matter. Also kind of like how it really matters that all cells reproduce correctly and not become cancer that spreads to other cells, another example. I can't agree with your/the books' analogy, no way you can make that analogy with corpos, because corpos are usually dysfunctional workplaces where most work is just bullshit to keep people busy (and also off the streets/not organized against X pressing societal issue), where profits come from exchanging vasts sums of money between companies on a roll, where things function from inertia of good ideas and financial decisions made years or decades ago, and also where real work is sometimes done by 20% of workers while 80% pretend and/or get promoted as managers where they can do no harm.
Prime currently is the Frog in the Well (he is the Frog, and the Well being Netflix). Maybe if he were to move away from Netflix and move to an Organization that is suffering because of their own Processes, he might visit this article with a different mindset.
I appreciate primes takes but this is one of those ones where there is a MASSIVE disconnect betwern engineers that have worked at FAANG-esque companies and everyone else. Everything the author says pretty much mirrored my experience until i crossed the chasm into better companies.
I don't work at a FAANG company and I agree with Prime. Most of us have project deadlines while architects have time to ~~ justify their job~~ come up with ideas that range from really good to mid. When an idea is clearly mid, they have more time to argue with you then you have time to waste talking to them.
@@vulpixelfulyou seem to completely misunderstand. It's not about FAANG itself, by FAANG-esque I mean good decent companies. What a lot of people high up in tech don't get is that there's a lot, and I mean a LOT of trash dev jobs out there. It's fantastic if you've never experienced it, (seriously, good for you), but until you have experienced at least a few soul-crushing environments where you're severely outnumbered by people who don't have any interest in improving things, and are even ACTIVELY HOSTILE towards any attempt at trying to improve things, (we're talking basic things like even having a ci/cd pipeline, tests, etc), you really won't understand what the author is talking about.
This. And it's not just software. Management by self delusion is a thing. I'd argue that any company where management thinks that things get done in spite of engineering is like this because it selects for technical people that are incompetent/ignorant or competent masochists... Everyone else puts in their year and leaves.
Sorry prime, you're out of touch. Go to a typical corporate gig and what he's saying is obvious. It's by design; almost nobody actually has any amount of autonomy so big brains aren't that useful and engagement plummets. Your ability to schmooze and politic will dictate your success far more than any big-brain tech acumen will. That really sucks for the 'software craftsman' because over selling a jacked up 'solution' at 'the right time' is what wins the day. Places like netflix sucking the cream out of the dev twinkie doesn't help.
I understand some problems prime has with this article ,but on others i think it speaks to volume about places he worked at. Generally i think Prime would be surprised to learn how dysfunctional non big companies can be (where 80% of work is)
I feel like Prime sometimes makes strange takes unlike my current experience, but in this one, it feels like I read a totally different article. All of the stuff about performative management is my exact experience, and even the nonsense about spreadsheets, sadly. Prime read super hard into the 90% of developing are stupid line to the point of misunderstanding everything else. I think the more accurate line, in my experience, is "90% of devs don't care that much about software development, or have learned that it isn't worth caring about in their context," but thats less catchy.
He's definitely too used to working with companies with actual engineering practices. Did he ever work with a normal, average company? Even if they're F500, non tech. Recent listener.
I think that Prime tries really hard to find a way to "take the high road" in his reactions. He wouldn't have the audience that he does if he reflected a realistic level of cynicism. This may be deliberate, or simply the result of what he's been exposed to in his career. He does seem to have been more fortunate than most in this respect, but there's no argument that he's put in the effort to maximize the results he's squeezed out of the opportunities he's had. We are lucky to have him. (back to my vim katas...)
I was in a company like this, so I can 100% sympathize. I was actually a data engineer that also made Power BI dashboards for the company (in fact, for some time, I was the only "data" person there, and I single-handedly created their DW and all of the initial ETL jobs from scratch). Well, there were like 20 different dashboards no one ever used. I was proud of my technical accomplishments, but my work had no impact and this was frustrating. To add to the frustration, management made stupid technical decisions without consulting me or, if they consulted me, my opinion was "noticed" but promptly ignored. And this moronic decisions had very real consequences for me, because I was the one to implement them. Anyways, I decided to switch careers and become a software developer instead, and never again work for a big company, even if I earn less money. At least now people actually notice when production is down...
I feel you. I hired a couple of months ago to help improved the data structure of a company, their reporting was in shambles. I noticed that they indeed had a lot of issues, they didn't collect the data effectively. for the division that I was working didn't made the investment for a proper SQL Server database to built a proper data model, so they are using access (they are trying to get SQL server now), my manager is great, but there's a manager that really believe he knows it all and he always comes with crazy ideas, the team now under my command is able to supply those ideas, but guess what? They normally don't use the dashboards lol, not only that any shortcoming they have from Production it is blamed that's due to the data, but then we deliver what they were missing, and they still fail and again, they somewhat say they need to create 'a kpi' and they need that kpi added to the dashboard to make sure they are successful, but that never happens and the recommendation that I tend to provide to them they tend to over looked them.
That article is a masterpiece! I usually like your measured takes, but here it really shows how out of touch you are regarding the experiences of vast majority of developers. Seems you're really looking at things with rose tinted glasses. not everyone gets to work with awesome smart developers every day. I worked with many 'Dereks' most of us have. I'm happy that you get to work in environment allowing you to be humble and think "maybe it's me whos wrong" but that is a priviliged mindset.
In the past I have been in environments where without a doubt majority of my colleagues were competent, so now I can recognise easily when that's not the case. Ever since, I have been going job to job in search of that old work environment.
I miss that feeling when you work 12h shift and the day just flies by, everyone know what to do things move like clock work, here it's just blame shifting. All the time.
Imagine how spicy this would have been if Prime actually knew what Power BI was... Power BI : ( Power Business Intelligence ), is Microsoft's "no-code"/"low-code" play in the so called "business intelligence" realm. ( I refuse to say "space" ). So, it's basically a drag 'n drop, click 'n drool toolkit for "subject matter experts" to build their own GUI dashboards, drawing on enterprise data, and without help from IT or actual programmers. What could go wrong?
There's a whole rainforest of low-code platforms, like OutSystems, Mendix, PowerApps, etc. I'm not exactly sure why I don't really see more of it on outside circles.
There is a role in companies called Data Analist which uses such software to create reports and that kind of stuff, which is way better than having a programmer being a report generator with different metrics each day "Are you bussy? can you generate me a report of the gender of our clients crossed with their color of their car from the last 10 years please? I need it 2 hours" With data analyst the dude can program a report by just click and drop and if your company is data hungry you can have Data Science experts building and optimizing databases and scripts so the Power BI guys have a better tool to do the job
Too much sugarcoating is bad, too much salt or bitterness is bad. You want takes to be like Chinese or Korean BBQ: roasted, with a bit of spice, and ultimately very tasty. Sometimes you sugarcoat a take and it's got no flavour left. Sometimes you add too much salt and it gives people high blood pressure for no good reason. And sometimes you undercook the take and it just doesn't land or people go along with it and get food poisoning.
Prime, when you experience being the person who never looks down on others, do the right thing, realize that no one else understands how to do it, realize also what doesn’t need done and how no one else realizes that they are doing unnecessary things, then realize that they think you’re stupid for not doing the things they think you should do then also think that what you think can be done is impossible because they assume unnecessary requirements, but then they think they are being polite by not calling you stupid but just “politely” evading this truth while also thinking that you’re politely evading them, you lose the ability to even show them the right way. You can continue to not call them out and continue to think that they are smarter but then there will come a point that they completely blocked you out of their business and workflow thinking that you’re just obstinate or stupid without communicating that to you. Then you realize it’s time to think that you’re smarter because it’s the only way to get something useful done. They’re not just idiots, they’re obstinate idiots who think competent people are in the position they are actually in.
This is explaining so much of my experience, not only in different work environments (not even tech) but also in trivial scenarios like online game clan when trying to convince people to introduce changes that will benefit all and solve problems that everyone is complaining about and quite desperate for solutions. But it all goes exactly like described above.
@@LillyAnarkittyfor some like Bitwarden vs 1Password I wouldn't agree. Bitwarden is just much slower moving and less featureful compared to 1Password unfortunately as much as id love to use it for being open source.
I have worked as a PowerBI developer. It is a low code platform to serve dashboards to users. It's easy to drag and drop stuff, but meeting the user needs is 90% the difficult part of the job. Users sometimes do not want some portions of the dashboard because they want to "customize" (wink wink) it, and automating pipelines kind of kills the flexibility for them that they'd rather go back to Excel. It's very much a management job than an IT job, especially when to develop dashboards one needs to deal with politics, upper management not really caring about their data, IT hating on data professionals, etc.
This is exactly what happens with one of our clients. They have internal developers that implemented some logic, now I am forced to use this when it just feels wrong. When i add something that feels right to me i get a comment "i've never seeing this done before in my life, you have skill issues". Who's right in this case i don't know...
For real... I'm struggling between two people who're like "I've never seen this in my life" and the thing they never seen is the coding style of the other guy. FML
He might be coming off as arrogant but I get where he's coming from to be honest. BigCos do BigCo things. The amount of inept people in a team can be insane. Especially non-software engineering companies.
Hi, Prime! I really enjoyed the video and you raised several really fantastic points. However, I think you did jump to some conclusions and it is very hard to get the full context of the intent of the author without having a real sit down. I was indeed the man who went on sabbatical for year in the article; I did chortle out loud as I do not have a family, nor even a partner so my choice to take a year off to touch grass away from my terminal was (relatively) responsible. Additionally, the author definitely did not do anything nefarious when I left as it was a position in a different team adjacent to my own; the company in question is a strange beast, indeed. I am ecstatic that you can live in blissful ignorance of never having to service a Power BI dashboard plugged into unknown data sources while also debugging machine generated Power-Query SQL because the user doesn't actually understand what they're doing.
There are multiple "Date engineers" which only know to use Power BI with salaries MUCH MUCH bigger than mine in my company and it makes my blood boil. My boss was suprised by me because an oportunity for a Data Driven project came by and i was so into it being "just a dev" that they assigned me a major new project with a new client just because of my "Willingness to improve". Shouldn't this be the normal thing?
Most people are strongly driven by their own emotions and their own sense of self preservation. When you're in an organization that constantly threatens people's egos/survival, you are never going to have data driven processes.
It's because most people don't know wtf they're doing, just chilling and leeching off the work of a few people. Unironically those who actually create something useful deserve all the praise and rewards.
I appreciate your take on Sturgeon's Law being wrong but most programmers really are bad at their jobs. And the biggest reason isn't that they're stupid or bad, it's because the field is extremely new (compared to most fields) and extremely challenging (compared to most fields). If you go back in the history of medicine it's not hard to find a time when most doctors were crap at healing the sick even when then as now they were probably in the top quartile of whatever relevant metric you want to name, and it took a lot of time and effort and standardization to get to a point where that wasn't the case. Programming will get there someday too but it isn't there yet and it will be a long time before most programmers aren't bad at their jobs.
I think it also has to do with him working at Netflix and then having such a strong „only seniors“ hiring approach and much of the culture really being based off of trusting that the others are also really good at their stuff. In your analogy it’s like comparing doctors from a couple hundred years ago, from top universities that are really working on nice stuff with good tools, good colleagues and on the cutting edge of what’s possible at the time with the hundreds and hundreds of snake oil peddlers that went from city to city to sell their objectively subpar products and services to people in need, and being successful at it too, just because there was no one that could critique them and no drive for them to become better (because what’s the people’s alternative? Just do nothing or buy the snake oil). These two points, that tech solutions are not critiqued properly upon delivery, because the clients literally don’t have the capacity to do so. And the fact that theres few other alternatives, fosters companies (literally giant companies of thousands and thousands of people) that just sell bullshit to small and medium sized companies, with bullshit tech, bullshit managers, bullshit teams and bullshit timelines.
Most doctors are still shit. Programmers are soft. Most programmers are shit. Author is a shit programmer. If you are always swimming in shit code, it’s you.
Most _people_ are bad at their jobs. From fast food workers to doctors and lawyers, the average falls below "good", and half of people are worse than that!
I think its harder to ask for help now, tho the tech industry does have a community willing to help others improve. The fear of making a mistake at work and having someone give off "your bad at your job" vibes, would make it harder to approach the very ppl who could help you... Social anxiety and an unwillingness to make mistakes really holds ppl back....
I don't know if Prime is naive, or doesn't experience this at netflix, or simply is pretending as to not insult his colleagues, but the author is definitely on point here. I would venture to say it's even worse than he described it.
The problem in this organizations is that great work is not properly rewarded and laziness is not properly punished. Even the best people that come in this organizations with good intentions and improvement ideas will quickly realize change itself is not as welcomed as they say thought it is. I have worked in this kind of environment and I tell you that even if you want to implement a process or at the very least want to improve one, you will have a lot of passive aggressive backlash before it will ever be used. One example was when I have worked for some industrial machines software and there was some bug in the UI of the machines controllers. I asked the lead Dev why did the bug was not solved and he told me that it was solved before but they received backlash from other employees because their workaround didn't work anymore and not a single manager stepped up to protect the dev team and to tell the others to suck it up and learn how to properly use it. This companies enable mediocrity by the fact that the employees don't really care about their work anymore and can game the system by just appearing busy instead of actually being busy.
Dude, industrial software is whole different can of worms, that is hard for outsiders to grasp. I once found a nasty bug in one of the key software modules. The code was shit anyways so I rewrote it in one day. Went from 1600 loc spaghetti to 600 with clear structure, while the bug was fixed along the way. My boss was mad at me, because I should have only fixed the bug and not change anything. Yeah, you are welcome.
Good call out on the missing context, and the not denigrating 90% of people. When I was very green I had thoughts like "wow look at all this garbage." After enough time passes, you inevitably create garbage of your own. Turns out the "real world" has unfortunate constraints like "time" and "budget", that we all fall victim to. You begin to realize after all this time, "those who came before me made the best choices they could under the constraints they had at the time." One of the reasons I grew to like Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) is because they capture the context in which you made the decision and the justification you had at the time, this makes it really easy to review at a later date and determine things like "oh it's me who is the idiot, not everyone else" and "hey look, we're no longer subject to this context, maybe we can change how this works."
this happend to me on my first job, very stressful job, below avg pay, its so bad that they use gmail instead of git for version control.. the code we write everyday is first compressed to a zip then mailed to self for backup. lol
Every report was created for a reason and with employee churn, it's easier to ask for a new report than to try to figure out what existing reports do. Your job as a developer is to provide a solidly designed data lake. And the business' job is to define the metrics that move the business and give meaningful information about customer actions. If you understand your data, you can gamify your customers from acquisition through sales. You may can probably figure out when reports were last used and prune out reports that haven't been touched in 24 months. Of course, back them up in case someone screams.
God this hits close to home. 😥 Our PM/Boss is the exact same. Valuing the easy-to-see/sell changes way higher, than the stuff in his messy backend, that makes everything tick. Trying to argue your point is pointless. If you say anything not already in his head, he will argue with you for literal hours until you give up or "See it his way". Despite arguing being pointless, there is no planning, only endless arguing. If you, the programmer, don't write anything down, there is nothing. No Storyboards, and no user manual for this messy kraken of an application. Oh and if you "Take to long" be prepared to hear over and over again, how fast and efficient the Colleque is who built him the last cheap thing from the "Ground up". As if building something from scratch is sooooo much harder than having to build on a base of messy data that has been grown over a decade. I Agree with the article. Your job is just that. A Job. Not your friend, not something worth sacrificing an Arm and a Leg for. Just something that helps you to stay alive in this shitty greedy world.
I’m both the guy that built the thing from scratch and the guy that is rewriting it. It is unbelievably HARD to do a refactor/rewrite while maintaining the original even when you’re the undisputed expert in the area/system.
I left a job like this. And about 1 year after I had left it I realised how much of it was my fault. For example management responds way different if you tell them what, why and how. You need to stop asking managers about technical things. They don’t know enough to make the call and naturally they will feel safer about keeping things as they are. You need to tell, and then instead it will ne on them to stop you.
Developers aren't stupid, but I was doing C#, SQL and web dev for a decade before it finally clicked that Uncle Bob's dogma is what's hurting both my own skill development, our productivity and I suspect it's one of the main reasons why most software is sluggish and error-prone. And outside a small crowd of senior experts, I feel very alone with this perspective, yet I wish somebody had helped me realize this years ago. I agree that a smug attitude isn't helping, but there really is an abundance of waste in the software industry. Instead of looking down on it, I am ebullient about the possibilities of the software industry if just 10% of us knew how to utilize 90% of the CPU's powers and wouldn't let bloated OOP abstraction "patterns" get in the way of solving problems.
Dear Primeagen, Says the guy who doesn't even have 1% the skills or talent that article writer possesses. He isn't some nonsensical RUclipsr. He's written apps, most people can even dream about. Understand what he is talking about before disrespecting and making fun of him.
It's somewhere in between. Whenever you get massive success from a big corporation the sychophants will be out in full force. Most people take a job because they have bills to pay, not because they love it. I've been at startups and big corporations. If the big corporations had the level of efficiency of the startups, we'd be living in the Jetsons right now. It's IMPOSSIBLE to manage seven thousand people or whatever. So you have to go on hearsay and rumors. So the people that aren't good at playing the game are maybe partialy right at getting a little pissed.
I've worked in the kind of environment he described, and even then the worst I saw was like 60/40 of "bad" participants and my direct management at all times was quite good and would listen even if they never actually had the power to get anything done. We all just had to sit there while our entire org was dismantled in real time because someone at the C level thought it was a good idea to kill the golden goose for some short term gains.
In all fairness to the user who created the spreadsheet with 400 worksheets - If IT teams gave users proper tools to build their infrastructure around, they might not be using a spreadsheet to begin with. People use spreadsheets and things like VBA largely when they have no other choice. Unfortunately you can't understand this fact if you are a developer who has all the tools at their disposal. It's only something you realise when you're in that business role, and it's your responsibility to perform some task as quickly as possible. Corporate IT often bring in sandboxed tools like Power BI, PowerApps & Power Automate etc. to give users "proper tooling" but ultimately completely miss the point. These trash tools are even pushed onto dev teams too because these apps become part of "IT Strategy". Power Platform tools are not proper in the slightest, and will never replace a programming language even if that language hasn't been updated in 20 years. It is infuriating.
Oh gosh, I can see where this poor guy is coming from. That Power BI thing is like.... look, see managers like things they understand to be used, even if that's the horrible no-code software. If they want a prototype, they want it in a software they understand. Even if it's a no-code software. And they will ask a whole team of software engineer final year interns staring at them silently in horror to make a prototype using that no code software. In the end, you know, in some companies, what degree of expertise doesn't matter if seniority wins out. You have been VERY lucky, Prime.
He is basically not calling everyone stupid, just the "company man". Most of us simply got to do the BS stuff what's asked from us, and we don't talk about Rant club.
I agree with one point the author made in particular. I used to find the way the world works very upsetting until I realised that most people want to just make money and attain status in the easiest way possible. If there are ways to do this without putting in effort, people will find those ways. It is a losing battle that every organisation has to fight until their dying breath because there is no test or structure that can weed out these people. They look and talk just like you and me and they have worked very hard to get where they are without being noticed. Every person needs to put food on the table and feel like they belong but, not everyone can do this without cheating.
This DX thing is weird. I have heard the words "developer experience" put together, but it hasn't hit the types of companies I work for yet in terms of a new religion.
21:12 I seriously think you underestimate how little knowledge a lot of managers have about subjects. I kid you not, there was once a CEO of a car company (can't remember well which one, but I think it was VW) who said that they don't need to know what the company is actually producing to lead it.
I understand and agree with both sides here. I have also experienced much of what was mentioned in the text. However, you can understand what most companies lack and what drives most employees while still keeping yourself humble. Eventually you will go through the experience of being just noise for someone else, who is more intelligent than you at a specific subject, at that specific time. There's no real gain in treating everyone else as substandard, you're just gimping yourself on opportunities to learn and grow professionally.
I think after working with clients and client communications for a long time, going back to a dev team, I try my best to elicit the underlying problems from the devs from their perspective and vernacular. More often than not, when you take the condescending approach, they're less willing to dive deeper into their explanations and under pressure it becomes harder to articulate their problems. If the 10% theoretically did exist like he mentions in the article, it's more ideal for them to have the patience to communicate with the remaining 90% to be on the same level of understanding, rather than expecting the higher ups to just fire off the 90%. I've had many people without the full understanding of the problem and vernacular reveal blind spots in the designs of many systems that ended up making the system better in the end. Without that candid communication, these problems would not have been uncovered and everyone would have either given up using the tools or come up with individual workarounds that only worked for a thin slice of devs.
There is a lot of dead weight at every big corp, even Netflix has laid off thousands of people since 2019, they seem to be doing just fine, and could probably fire many more thousands of people and have no real change in productivity or operations. I don't know if the actual argument is that lots of these people should be fired, but all you have to do is look around at all these big companies firing thousands of people with no seeming changes in their uptime or their product to know that it is undeniably true that most of these companies do not need thousands of people that they've laid off.
0:38 You know, I made one interesting observation over the years: The more bureau based the job (no matter what kind), the more likely the people are suffering from burnout or need therapy. The way the company treats their employees only seems to play a minor role (but not no role) in this. I would actually like this to be investigated more by actual studies (meaning: not some random people doing some work in their free time).
Most people work for money but also most people do not want to do bad things on purpose, but different people have different point of view. The main issue is understanding. Sometime people just don’t have the background experience and knowledge to understand your problem. The best solution you can do is to show them the alternative.
I know where the guy is coming from. At the same time, here is something I saw ... I teach kids to tie knots. (mostly I let the kids teach each other, but I get to teach from time to time also). When I demonstrate the tying of a knot, I then watch them try to follow along. One of the messed up things that happens is that they do the exact opposite of what I am doing.. I have done it many different ways. They instead of moving over the two trees, they move over the one tree... Instead of going through the hole, they will go outside the hole. It is wacked... One might say they are incompetent. The reality is they cannot see what I am doing. Until they do it themselves, they cannot actually see what it is I am doing. It does not matter how smart they are. It does not matter how old they are. The single thing that determines how quickly they pick it up is "HAVE THEY TIED KNOTS BEFORE". And they have to tie knots a lot before they start seeing things. It is not easy to see. This applies to just about everything. People who haven't actually disconnected their front end and back end, don't actually see the disconnect. People who haven't actually wired a house for telephone/internet can't quite see what the wires do... To those who can, good on you. MOST of us don't. Even the smartest of us don't...
I appreciated you reacting to this article because it felt like I was reading my own dysfunctional brain. If things don’t work perfectly try and fix them by some marginal amount. If you can find a better group to work with, do it. There’s no point in getting all bent out of shape about it. Looking for ways to make progress is better than getting all bent out of shape about it.
Hello, author here. The point of the article is actually exactly that. There is a large class of organization that will say they want change (causing you to get bent out of shape about it if you believe them) purely because all organizations must say this. Don't believe them if their actions don't line up with their words and chill out, or find a better place and chill out.
I 100% agree that it's usually the minority who's technically incompetent, yet these people are extremely proficient at winning arguments. These are usually the people who have been in their positions the longest or got their position due to nepotism, so management blindly listens to them and give them approval. Meanwhile the rest of the team is working around the clock, to keep the unmanageable digital mess somewhat functional. These people know a dozen better ways to manage things, yet are always ignored. So they eventually become frustrated and get another job.
One thing I reconciled with and I hate hearing is "how shit this old code is" "what were they thinking" etc etc. Well, while it might be true that it's SHIT and BAD, it might have been go-to, GOOD, or just GOOD ENOUGH for time being and pressures when it was written. You can never fully know and I wouldn't also enjoy people shitting on my code they know no history about. We should be respectful towards what is in front of you regardless because without it you wouldn't be here solving these problems anyway.
To why is this shit like this is more of : We know this is shit and we know it shit for a while now, why is there no plane to clean this shit? will we just keep piling shit up until I get sick of it and quit? so I get replaced with someone who has less experience to feel the same way and add more shit trying to figure out what to do, start puling there own hair out and continue the cycle. At this I don't think I care who will inherit that crap, when it starts to crumble I will be long gone
Idempotent just means that if you run the thing twice you'll get the same result, so it doesn't depend on the initial state. An example is in SQL if you run create table it will error the second time, that's why you always run create or replace table instead. It's simple but prevalent/required in the data world.
Erroring is not a good example of idempotency. An example is HTTP PUT request. Erroring is a different behavior between uses, while PUT behaves the same way every time.
Idempotent just means that if you run the thing twice you'll get the same result, so it doesn't depend on the initial state. An example is in SQL if you run create table it will error the second time, that's why you always run create or replace table instead. It's simple but prevalent/required in the data world.
@@arnontzori The idempotent command is "create or replace table". The sentence about "create table" was just to motivate why idempotency can be a good principle
Plenty of work out there doing interesting things in smaller companies, prolly won’t pay the same but pick your poison and be happy knowing you were fortunate to be able to pick.
This is all due to this still being a very new industry and trying lots of different ways of doing things I bet people don’t know the history of the railroads. Competing standards and plans with 80% of it has been either abandoned or tore up for scrap This is the standard for rapidly changing technologies No one will work in tech when these problems are fixed This is all the results of over investment and use of cheap money
I cant believe that prime actually doesnt realise that alot of developers know nothing except what is nessecary for the position. Maybe netflix filters these types of people out but they definitely still exist!
I resonate with the writer, going through it right now, frustrated, fed-up etc. However where I disagree is on people being inherently stupid. Asking yourself "do you believe everyone is doing there best?", goes a long way to feeling better about most people. 70% are doing there best, the other 30% are LARPing. My percentages change all the time but most people work for someone else out of necessity and don't want to be there.
I think the author looks way too deep into things there are mainly 2 reasons : 1. Never change a working system otherwise you have to fight bugs and production outages constantly 2. There are already systems in place replacing them cost a lot of money and time . This is the reason programmers for old programming languages are still searched. Only big tech rewrites their code base on a wimp. To be clear, this isn't true for start-ups there is the question if you want make money or doing things the right way. Its all about ego there.
I am TRULY shocked by the amount of people in this community who actually subscribe to these ideas. Trying to blame your lack of impact on other people's supposed stupidity is the most defeatist take I've ever seen. If you are so great and smart and hard working, why are you not at a better company, around smarter people, and doing the work that you think matters? Is it REALLY other people's fault or are you just trying to shelter yourself from the fact that you're actually not as good as you think you are?
I haven't ever worked a job like this, because I avoid jobs like this. I take jobs wherein either my department is either fully separate from the corporate structure and we force them to give us more stuff after each release and success or a job wherein I can have barbecues with my CEO and his Dad and generally asking for things to happen is enough to get it to happen. The only reason you end up working in places that are not like that is because you put up with it. And sometimes that is fine, put up with bullshit, and walk away with more treasure than I will probably ever have in my life. But who knows, my life isn't over yet? Maybe just refusing to be a bureaucrat will give me more treasure as the years go by. (Also, yes, I understand that some people really, really need the treasure. They usually have a different source such as a child to maintain or medical bills of a relative to pay. I get that. I wish you all the luck.)
This is real, it is the elo hell of programming jobs. I know it sounds silly if you are privileged enough to work with smart people, but your sample size is too small if you haven't been at more than 3 jobs. Talk with ANYONE that has been at more than 3 programmer jobs please.
It's honestly difficult if not impossible to have the emotional capacity to fully understand something you haven't been through and that's perfectly understandable. That being said maybe cut off on asking people to "start your own business to prove you are better", it's a bit degrading it implies people do not deserve to be alive or have any opinion unless they are the CEO of a multinational corporation.
I honestly think a lot of it is related to the Peter Principle. A very short summary: Just because someones was good at their previous job, enough to earn a promotion, does not make them good at the job they were promoted to. Since they are bad/mediocre at their new position, they are stuck there and will not be promoted. People keep getting promoted to positions that they are bad at, until the whole organization is dysfunctional. That's why it seems like incompetence rises to the top.
Also I agree with you on the issues with the article. I hard a hard time with it too. I'm really tired of engineers talking like this. I was interested in the guy's point and thought that he had some moments of insight but he's just so dismissive and arrogant. He's vastly overestimating that the reason for these problems is that nobody else "gets it" and that people are basically stupid and/or bad at their jobs. I think he'd be surprised how many others get it and either don't know what to do about it or have lots the will --- and he simply doesn't have the social skills to ever discover that fact organically. This is a classic engineer personality trait. Luckily nobody on my team is like this otherwise they'd drive me insane.
14:00 I've had this happen to me where I got "Hey guyzeses I made a cool tool that does a thing! You can haz the tool." suddenly people are requesting feature enhancements to what was supposed to be a simple unitasking tool. Then some one decides the outputs of that tool should be tied into infra for another tool. Suddenly you have lil stupid functionins you wrote glue together into a production tool that needs regular maintenance.
It only takes 1 toxic employee to tear down a workplace. To me, the author is saying that everyone except for himself are toxic employees. And yet it wouldn't surprise me if everyone else all agreed that he was the toxic one. The main thought I had going through my mind during this video was "I'm glad I don't work with this guy".
@5:00 I don't disagree that that is how it comes across or that it is not the healthiest of opinions... but it doesn't mean it is wrong. I think most people, even in skilled fields, don't have good critical thinking skills or at the very least are not skeptical or self reflective at heart and will just go along to get along.
To some extent the "90% rule" is true, that most of the stuff that's being built is just not going to succeed. Most of the ideas are bad. Some of them have inertia and need time to get traction. At the end of the day you never know.
I agree with Prime, here. It's one thing to say that a lot of people in your workplace make bad decisions or decisions out of their lane. It's another thing to attribute that to stupidity. A lot of people just don't know what they don't know and haven't experienced anything different. If you look down on people as you're speaking with them, they _will_ subconsciously pick that up. This can make things a self-fulfilling prophecy for people who are technically skilled but bad communicators.
Thank you for the confirmation (-bias 😂), in not knowing about Power BI, for my emerging hypothesis that the people who can make better tools (devs) tend not to know what the users actually have to do. It also gives some perspective for the Power BI promoters out there, that it isn't important to everyone.
> people who can make better tools (devs) tend not to know what the users actually have to do. Exactly my experience. I'm a dev working in 'user space', and the devs in 'tech space' have little to no idea what users actually do or need. It's only in working in that environment that you really understand what tools users need.
There's a saying in DnD "Make sure you're playing a game you like with people you respect". I have not figured out how to sort for this in my career yet. Yet.
I disagree, fighting against big dysfunctional corporations doesn't make any sense. It's a waste of time and energy and you will probably get fired anyway. Just change your job and move on. I did that and now I'm much less frustrated person. I haven't thought about writing an angry article for a few weeks already.
8:11 Yeah, my personal opinion is not that people are too stupid to figure things out, rather, what I find is that you can be the smartest person around, but if you're years into depression, burnout and sleep deprivation, it doesn't matter. People are too exhausted to think. And some people don't even bother trying, because if they do, they'll be exhausted like us. Honestly, they might be the smarter ones.
I think you are a bit overthinking. It is as simple as motivations and incentives for the 3 categories of workers, managers and corporate suits/shareholders are misaligned and can not be aligned. It is simply capitalism.
there's no proper not improper "alignment" to be had, what matters is redirecting your efforts to supply the most profitable (i.e desired/required) necessities. It's true that there's a lot of economic distortion going on, particularly in industries full of VC and IP law, but that's a matter of economic policy.
Sturgeon's law is interesting. Near as I can tell, the original quote is "And on that hangs Sturgeon’s revelation. It came to him that [science fiction] is indeed ninety-percent crud, but that also - Eureka! - ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things - cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people, and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like." To me, that reads more like "crud or not crud is subjective" than "90% of things are objectively crud"
Hello, love your content, but could you do something about the chat so that it's more readable? semi transparent background, having article on the side, anything like that? In this article, I was interested in "random opinions" and it was incredibly hard to read them.
You probably gotta join twitch so you can watch the chat for real and make more money for Prime because youtubers are the digital equivalent to street performers.
Here's your clue Prime. Derek, the guy who keeps churning out Jira tickets, never stops to consider the outcome. It's painfully obvious to others that the tickets never get worked...but that doesn't stop Derek. Is it unreasonable to suggest that Derek...i don't know... Think about the work he's doing? Maybe consider the idea that tickets that aren't worked are a waste of his time, and everyone else's, in yet another useless meeting? Derek could do a lot of things differently. What he chooses to do instead is just to keep churning out crap. The really sad thing is that Derek is probably doing this at the direction of an overpaid, clueless manager who will promote him for his obedience (that's "being a team player" in corporate-ese, even though he's really the team screwer). Why would anyone think this is ridiculous?
My dad instilled in me "if you're going to complain about something, make sure you have your own solution." I've since amended that to something much less simple: "If you're going to complain about something, have your own solution to ready to offer up. Or communicate that you're voicing the complaint to see if the group can come up with a solution." Plenty of people are good at spotting the problem (i.e. the traffic to work is horrible). Coming up with a viable solution is a lot harder though, otherwise it would have been solved already.
@@njnjhjh8918 I mean, as a huge NotJustBikes fan and other walkable urban planning. I know that's the basic solution. Getting something people will agree to for any given area is a lot more difficult. But yes, the general solution is walkable cities with efficient transportation.
My OCD is killing me... Why do people have such a hard time reading? I can understand that reading out loud in a stream can make you trip over if you're nervous about your reading skills or because you're focused on the entertainment value, or you're tired and this is just a cut from a 5h stream. If you notice you're making too many mistakes I think it's ok to take a breather (3 seconds) and then just move forward. I hope it's something trivial. Mr prime is not the only person I can see struggling through text.
Some people are dislexic, they see words a touch different from others and are not good for reading a lot of text. Prime many times said that he struggles from that. He actually called this as one of the reasons he started his reacts.
The major issue i come across is not the the people are incompetent per se, just that they got thrown into a tier of work where they are WAY out of their weight class. As in, put someone that should be in the application side right into core development. Then you have core developers rushing to undo the damage while at the same time having to implement whatever said person did the right way because the application side is actively using it. Add to it that many times you don't even have anyone doing any sort of architecture to keep the (in)sanity of it all under control, that documentation is either non existent or outdated into uselessness, yadda yadda ydadda...
Power Bee-Eye is how you say it, Prime. LOL. That's hilarious that you don't know that for some reason. It's a microsoft data-visualization tool that every single company that buys into the Microsoft suite (Teams, Azure, Excel, etc) uses. I think it stands for Power Business Intelligence. < 3
This is what I call: "Cynicism". It is unrelenting, and default negatively cloaked as a sort of "faux" wisdom. This is NOT what wisdom is. Actual wisdom sees both advantages and disadvantages, it measures both the Yin and Yang of what it tries assessing. Like Primeagen I say: Go out and create a venture which solves these problems you are surfacing. You cannot or will not do that? Then you are simply piling words together and trying to sound like you are smart, but how smart are you really? Also "cynicism" often leads to largely anti-social tendencies I believe. In my opinion the truly great leaders are just the opposite, they understand the importance of mankind, its tendency to create teams and the abilities of humans when they group together and work well together.
it sounds like he works for a legacy company, which is very different than working for a company that has tech as core business. IT people in legacy companies suffer from this mix of god complex (because nobody can understand or do what they do) and bitterness (because the people that cannot understand what they do are more valued than they are)
I love those useless dashboards nobody looks at and are on 36 inch flat screens hanging in all the offices so nobody can look at them and get LED radiation poisoning (jk) :D. Yeah my last company had those too^^, I always joked it felt like a Tanning Bank since my desk was right next to the thing xD.
I sympathize with the author and you can see Prime has never worked at a company like the one the author has. I appreciate Primes optimism but its soul crushing to work at a company like what the author desribed. Looking at the other comments it seems like those companies are the norm
This. Most companies are literally bursting with incompetence and are surviving based on some good calls taken a decade or two ago and are currently dying a slow death being sucked dry by corporate leeches.
They are the norm, for sure. It took me 12 whole months, but I finally left, and I'm no longer a slave. Unfortunately it's also entirely sucked the joy of development from me. I coded for years for myself before deciding to say f it and get a job doing it.... and from day 1 my soul began being sucked out of me.
People don't care, people have no drive, shit is slow, and stupid, and it's entirely draining.
I'm never going back to development, to the extent that I've already bought a new stihl chainsaw and timber framing tools, and I'm starting a business.
Programming is a joke.
Especially when you realize that 1. most coding isn't even necessary, and 2 the whole point of coding is to make complex things easier for stupid people to do, which means lowering salaries and helping enslave humans.
I FUCKING REFUSE TO BE PARTY
Incompetent middle management is the norm, No one will agree more than middle managers.
100%
@@emyrulz 100% agreed
Prime not knowing what Power BI is, is just precious. I wished I was blessed with such ignorance 😢
Shows how much of a bubble big tech companies create.
His preciousness must be preserved, so that he can keep inspiring the rest of us
As someone who was worked for about a decade in a big american (engineering) company, I can assure you prime that the OP is on point. It is just that your experience a netflix is completely different.
Yeah,
I am at a big American tech company that has had a cultural degradation at all levels in the past 3 years.
Leadership is exactly this toxic, and operates on the knowledge that things get done. It doesn't matter by who, how well, or how quickly. It matters how it can be spun. Dozens of projects started for promotions that never finish and produce half baked tools and products.
Managers and product operations teams all jump on whatever bandwagon that ensures they stay employed (shove chat got in everywhere). The product has become outright hostile to it's users but it doesn't matter. All the technical talent that could leave have long since gone, and now it's just visa slaves or people with less than ideal backgrounds who can't compete in a modern job market
Yes, can confirm
Although there is some brain rot Op is plausible
Yup, agreeing on this absolutely from the engineering perspective as a contractor for a relatively big American corporation.
Can confirm. Even in small companies this happens, but prime is kind of right. If I were to set up my own company, I think I would end up tripping up into 90% of the issues described in the article. I think it is somewhat a sign of hubris to not also recognize that a worker only sees the smallest part of the problem and is contact with the issues more closely. Everything in this life is a tradeoff and even finding responsible code monkeys like myself is not an easy job (and even I still trip and drown in my own f-ups at times)
For me this article is not only about the general shittiness of your average dev, but also how bigger companies should not be trusted with their decision making and reasoning in general. The entire part about "there is no budget for that" was exactly about it: don't trust your managers. Don't trust them about the budget, about "company culture", "team spirit", goals, ideas or whatever they gonna tell you. And I am saying that as someone who worked for a company where managers were not only incompetent, resulting with a good chunk of IT department quiting at once, but outright inhuman, firing a dude stranded in an active war zone cause "he was underdelivering" and deducting his last payment cause "he was not able to give back his laptop". The same company that would feed us bullshit about being a family and such.
I was reading a book about corporations and one thing stuck with me. Learned helplessness. You're literally a cell in a body, you don't matter. "Corpo" is latin for body
It's a family when the people at the top need consideration.
@@monad_tcp Cells perform work and usually are equally worth, you're not going to stress your 2-3 neurons, your brain performs best because of massive parallelism of millions of your cells functioning together, so they very much ALL matter. Also kind of like how it really matters that all cells reproduce correctly and not become cancer that spreads to other cells, another example.
I can't agree with your/the books' analogy, no way you can make that analogy with corpos, because corpos are usually dysfunctional workplaces where most work is just bullshit to keep people busy (and also off the streets/not organized against X pressing societal issue), where profits come from exchanging vasts sums of money between companies on a roll, where things function from inertia of good ideas and financial decisions made years or decades ago, and also where real work is sometimes done by 20% of workers while 80% pretend and/or get promoted as managers where they can do no harm.
In the US, you can't fire a veteran deployed overseas. In fact, there's not much you can get away with doing to a veteran here.
@@T1Oracle A european company and an IT guy from Ukraine. Totally different thing.
Prime currently is the Frog in the Well (he is the Frog, and the Well being Netflix). Maybe if he were to move away from Netflix and move to an Organization that is suffering because of their own Processes, he might visit this article with a different mindset.
I appreciate primes takes but this is one of those ones where there is a MASSIVE disconnect betwern engineers that have worked at FAANG-esque companies and everyone else.
Everything the author says pretty much mirrored my experience until i crossed the chasm into better companies.
100% agree
That's because FAANG sucks up all the actual talent like a vacuum cleaner, leaving the dregs for other companies
I don't work at a FAANG company and I agree with Prime. Most of us have project deadlines while architects have time to ~~ justify their job~~ come up with ideas that range from really good to mid. When an idea is clearly mid, they have more time to argue with you then you have time to waste talking to them.
@@vulpixelfulyou seem to completely misunderstand. It's not about FAANG itself, by FAANG-esque I mean good decent companies.
What a lot of people high up in tech don't get is that there's a lot, and I mean a LOT of trash dev jobs out there. It's fantastic if you've never experienced it, (seriously, good for you), but until you have experienced at least a few soul-crushing environments where you're severely outnumbered by people who don't have any interest in improving things, and are even ACTIVELY HOSTILE towards any attempt at trying to improve things, (we're talking basic things like even having a ci/cd pipeline, tests, etc), you really won't understand what the author is talking about.
This. And it's not just software.
Management by self delusion is a thing. I'd argue that any company where management thinks that things get done in spite of engineering is like this because it selects for technical people that are incompetent/ignorant or competent masochists... Everyone else puts in their year and leaves.
Sorry prime, you're out of touch. Go to a typical corporate gig and what he's saying is obvious. It's by design; almost nobody actually has any amount of autonomy so big brains aren't that useful and engagement plummets. Your ability to schmooze and politic will dictate your success far more than any big-brain tech acumen will. That really sucks for the 'software craftsman' because over selling a jacked up 'solution' at 'the right time' is what wins the day.
Places like netflix sucking the cream out of the dev twinkie doesn't help.
Even Prime's Netflix job came from a certain type of schmoozing, just a different type than most companies need.
Idk how i got to prime but the more i watch the more out of touch with the normal world he seems.
I understand some problems prime has with this article ,but on others i think it speaks to volume about places he worked at. Generally i think Prime would be surprised to learn how dysfunctional non big companies can be (where 80% of work is)
I feel like Prime sometimes makes strange takes unlike my current experience, but in this one, it feels like I read a totally different article. All of the stuff about performative management is my exact experience, and even the nonsense about spreadsheets, sadly. Prime read super hard into the 90% of developing are stupid line to the point of misunderstanding everything else. I think the more accurate line, in my experience, is "90% of devs don't care that much about software development, or have learned that it isn't worth caring about in their context," but thats less catchy.
Netflix probably is dysfunctional let's be honest.
He's definitely too used to working with companies with actual engineering practices. Did he ever work with a normal, average company? Even if they're F500, non tech. Recent listener.
I think that Prime tries really hard to find a way to "take the high road" in his reactions. He wouldn't have the audience that he does if he reflected a realistic level of cynicism. This may be deliberate, or simply the result of what he's been exposed to in his career. He does seem to have been more fortunate than most in this respect, but there's no argument that he's put in the effort to maximize the results he's squeezed out of the opportunities he's had. We are lucky to have him.
(back to my vim katas...)
@@picleus I'd say 45% don't care about best practices or and 45% don't care about business issues.
I was in a company like this, so I can 100% sympathize. I was actually a data engineer that also made Power BI dashboards for the company (in fact, for some time, I was the only "data" person there, and I single-handedly created their DW and all of the initial ETL jobs from scratch). Well, there were like 20 different dashboards no one ever used. I was proud of my technical accomplishments, but my work had no impact and this was frustrating. To add to the frustration, management made stupid technical decisions without consulting me or, if they consulted me, my opinion was "noticed" but promptly ignored. And this moronic decisions had very real consequences for me, because I was the one to implement them. Anyways, I decided to switch careers and become a software developer instead, and never again work for a big company, even if I earn less money. At least now people actually notice when production is down...
I feel you. I hired a couple of months ago to help improved the data structure of a company, their reporting was in shambles. I noticed that they indeed had a lot of issues, they didn't collect the data effectively. for the division that I was working didn't made the investment for a proper SQL Server database to built a proper data model, so they are using access (they are trying to get SQL server now), my manager is great, but there's a manager that really believe he knows it all and he always comes with crazy ideas, the team now under my command is able to supply those ideas, but guess what? They normally don't use the dashboards lol, not only that any shortcoming they have from Production it is blamed that's due to the data, but then we deliver what they were missing, and they still fail and again, they somewhat say they need to create 'a kpi' and they need that kpi added to the dashboard to make sure they are successful, but that never happens and the recommendation that I tend to provide to them they tend to over looked them.
That article is a masterpiece! I usually like your measured takes, but here it really shows how out of touch you are regarding the experiences of vast majority of developers. Seems you're really looking at things with rose tinted glasses. not everyone gets to work with awesome smart developers every day. I worked with many 'Dereks' most of us have. I'm happy that you get to work in environment allowing you to be humble and think "maybe it's me whos wrong" but that is a priviliged mindset.
In the past I have been in environments where without a doubt majority of my colleagues were competent, so now I can recognise easily when that's not the case. Ever since, I have been going job to job in search of that old work environment.
I miss that feeling when you work 12h shift and the day just flies by, everyone know what to do things move like clock work, here it's just blame shifting. All the time.
@@fulconandroadcone9488 Somehow, on those days I didn't really feel tired at the end. I returned happy, cooked a nice meal, or went for a bike ride.
Imagine how spicy this would have been if Prime actually knew what Power BI was...
Power BI : ( Power Business Intelligence ), is Microsoft's "no-code"/"low-code" play in the so called "business intelligence" realm. ( I refuse to say "space" ).
So, it's basically a drag 'n drop, click 'n drool toolkit for "subject matter experts" to build their own GUI dashboards, drawing on enterprise data, and without help from IT or actual programmers.
What could go wrong?
Prime is so disconnected from the average software dev that is not funny anymore 😅
Isn't that Excel?
@@emptystuff1593It's what MS bought and slapped their name on instead of fixing how bad Excel is at this.
There's a whole rainforest of low-code platforms, like OutSystems, Mendix, PowerApps, etc. I'm not exactly sure why I don't really see more of it on outside circles.
There is a role in companies called Data Analist which uses such software to create reports and that kind of stuff, which is way better than having a programmer being a report generator with different metrics each day "Are you bussy? can you generate me a report of the gender of our clients crossed with their color of their car from the last 10 years please? I need it 2 hours" With data analyst the dude can program a report by just click and drop and if your company is data hungry you can have Data Science experts building and optimizing databases and scripts so the Power BI guys have a better tool to do the job
Prime my dude. I love you man.
But you tell people not to sugar coat their takes, but you get SUPER MAD when they do not sugar coat their takes.
Idk, a good number of people are contradictory like that.
Too much sugarcoating is bad, too much salt or bitterness is bad. You want takes to be like Chinese or Korean BBQ: roasted, with a bit of spice, and ultimately very tasty.
Sometimes you sugarcoat a take and it's got no flavour left.
Sometimes you add too much salt and it gives people high blood pressure for no good reason.
And sometimes you undercook the take and it just doesn't land or people go along with it and get food poisoning.
@@ceigey-authat is such a good metaphor, I love it
@ceigey-au lovely
Prime, when you experience being the person who never looks down on others, do the right thing, realize that no one else understands how to do it, realize also what doesn’t need done and how no one else realizes that they are doing unnecessary things, then realize that they think you’re stupid for not doing the things they think you should do then also think that what you think can be done is impossible because they assume unnecessary requirements, but then they think they are being polite by not calling you stupid but just “politely” evading this truth while also thinking that you’re politely evading them, you lose the ability to even show them the right way. You can continue to not call them out and continue to think that they are smarter but then there will come a point that they completely blocked you out of their business and workflow thinking that you’re just obstinate or stupid without communicating that to you. Then you realize it’s time to think that you’re smarter because it’s the only way to get something useful done. They’re not just idiots, they’re obstinate idiots who think competent people are in the position they are actually in.
As a saying in my country goes 'you haven't mined coal'
This is explaining so much of my experience, not only in different work environments (not even tech) but also in trivial scenarios like online game clan when trying to convince people to introduce changes that will benefit all and solve problems that everyone is complaining about and quite desperate for solutions. But it all goes exactly like described above.
this hit me in the feels bigly
Engineers have to understand the fundamental fact that organizations are where good ideas come to die.
you mean like IBM
@@woolfel IBM means International "Business" Machinations.
I agree for all hierarchical organizations, i.e. corporations. Horizontal organizations like open source projects can foster good ideas.
@@LillyAnarkittyfor some like Bitwarden vs 1Password I wouldn't agree. Bitwarden is just much slower moving and less featureful compared to 1Password unfortunately as much as id love to use it for being open source.
@@LillyAnarkitty except for the drama
I have worked as a PowerBI developer. It is a low code platform to serve dashboards to users. It's easy to drag and drop stuff, but meeting the user needs is 90% the difficult part of the job. Users sometimes do not want some portions of the dashboard because they want to "customize" (wink wink) it, and automating pipelines kind of kills the flexibility for them that they'd rather go back to Excel.
It's very much a management job than an IT job, especially when to develop dashboards one needs to deal with politics, upper management not really caring about their data, IT hating on data professionals, etc.
Agreed 👍
This is exactly what happens with one of our clients. They have internal developers that implemented some logic, now I am forced to use this when it just feels wrong. When i add something that feels right to me i get a comment "i've never seeing this done before in my life, you have skill issues". Who's right in this case i don't know...
The one that can reference documentation when they haven't seen something before
For real... I'm struggling between two people who're like "I've never seen this in my life" and the thing they never seen is the coding style of the other guy. FML
He might be coming off as arrogant but I get where he's coming from to be honest. BigCos do BigCo things. The amount of inept people in a team can be insane. Especially non-software engineering companies.
Hi, Prime! I really enjoyed the video and you raised several really fantastic points. However, I think you did jump to some conclusions and it is very hard to get the full context of the intent of the author without having a real sit down.
I was indeed the man who went on sabbatical for year in the article; I did chortle out loud as I do not have a family, nor even a partner so my choice to take a year off to touch grass away from my terminal was (relatively) responsible. Additionally, the author definitely did not do anything nefarious when I left as it was a position in a different team adjacent to my own; the company in question is a strange beast, indeed. I am ecstatic that you can live in blissful ignorance of never having to service a Power BI dashboard plugged into unknown data sources while also debugging machine generated Power-Query SQL because the user doesn't actually understand what they're doing.
So, to sum it up:
Dead weights in a team make useful members miserable. What's new? That's like 9/10 work environments.
Yeah I completely agree don't think this atypical of tech, I have slight suspicion it is worse in tech, but not certain of that.
@@farrongoth6712 This strangely makes me feel better.
Or in other words 90% of people hehehe
@@farrongoth6712 I've worked in a lot of different industries. It's not unique to tech.
IT has the special feature that the deadweights tend to far outnumber the useful members.
There are multiple "Date engineers" which only know to use Power BI with salaries MUCH MUCH bigger than mine in my company and it makes my blood boil. My boss was suprised by me because an oportunity for a Data Driven project came by and i was so into it being "just a dev" that they assigned me a major new project with a new client just because of my "Willingness to improve". Shouldn't this be the normal thing?
Just a dev lol
that made my blood boil @@Downicon3
You got the project, but did you get a raise?
@@BlazingMagpieof course he did not, this is not Wendy's
@@BlazingMagpie i wish
Most people are strongly driven by their own emotions and their own sense of self preservation. When you're in an organization that constantly threatens people's egos/survival, you are never going to have data driven processes.
It's because most people don't know wtf they're doing, just chilling and leeching off the work of a few people.
Unironically those who actually create something useful deserve all the praise and rewards.
I appreciate your take on Sturgeon's Law being wrong but most programmers really are bad at their jobs. And the biggest reason isn't that they're stupid or bad, it's because the field is extremely new (compared to most fields) and extremely challenging (compared to most fields). If you go back in the history of medicine it's not hard to find a time when most doctors were crap at healing the sick even when then as now they were probably in the top quartile of whatever relevant metric you want to name, and it took a lot of time and effort and standardization to get to a point where that wasn't the case. Programming will get there someday too but it isn't there yet and it will be a long time before most programmers aren't bad at their jobs.
I think it also has to do with him working at Netflix and then having such a strong „only seniors“ hiring approach and much of the culture really being based off of trusting that the others are also really good at their stuff. In your analogy it’s like comparing doctors from a couple hundred years ago, from top universities that are really working on nice stuff with good tools, good colleagues and on the cutting edge of what’s possible at the time with the hundreds and hundreds of snake oil peddlers that went from city to city to sell their objectively subpar products and services to people in need, and being successful at it too, just because there was no one that could critique them and no drive for them to become better (because what’s the people’s alternative? Just do nothing or buy the snake oil). These two points, that tech solutions are not critiqued properly upon delivery, because the clients literally don’t have the capacity to do so. And the fact that theres few other alternatives, fosters companies (literally giant companies of thousands and thousands of people) that just sell bullshit to small and medium sized companies, with bullshit tech, bullshit managers, bullshit teams and bullshit timelines.
Most doctors are still shit. Programmers are soft. Most programmers are shit. Author is a shit programmer. If you are always swimming in shit code, it’s you.
Most _people_ are bad at their jobs. From fast food workers to doctors and lawyers, the average falls below "good", and half of people are worse than that!
I think its harder to ask for help now, tho the tech industry does have a community willing to help others improve.
The fear of making a mistake at work and having someone give off "your bad at your job" vibes, would make it harder to approach the very ppl who could help you...
Social anxiety and an unwillingness to make mistakes really holds ppl back....
Unfortunately, doctors are still crap at healing the sick today… our increased life expectancy isn’t thanks to the average doctor.
I don't know if Prime is naive, or doesn't experience this at netflix, or simply is pretending as to not insult his colleagues, but the author is definitely on point here. I would venture to say it's even worse than he described it.
The problem in this organizations is that great work is not properly rewarded and laziness is not properly punished. Even the best people that come in this organizations with good intentions and improvement ideas will quickly realize change itself is not as welcomed as they say thought it is. I have worked in this kind of environment and I tell you that even if you want to implement a process or at the very least want to improve one, you will have a lot of passive aggressive backlash before it will ever be used. One example was when I have worked for some industrial machines software and there was some bug in the UI of the machines controllers. I asked the lead Dev why did the bug was not solved and he told me that it was solved before but they received backlash from other employees because their workaround didn't work anymore and not a single manager stepped up to protect the dev team and to tell the others to suck it up and learn how to properly use it. This companies enable mediocrity by the fact that the employees don't really care about their work anymore and can game the system by just appearing busy instead of actually being busy.
Dude, industrial software is whole different can of worms, that is hard for outsiders to grasp.
I once found a nasty bug in one of the key software modules. The code was shit anyways so I rewrote it in one day. Went from 1600 loc spaghetti to 600 with clear structure, while the bug was fixed along the way. My boss was mad at me, because I should have only fixed the bug and not change anything. Yeah, you are welcome.
Good call out on the missing context, and the not denigrating 90% of people. When I was very green I had thoughts like "wow look at all this garbage." After enough time passes, you inevitably create garbage of your own. Turns out the "real world" has unfortunate constraints like "time" and "budget", that we all fall victim to. You begin to realize after all this time, "those who came before me made the best choices they could under the constraints they had at the time."
One of the reasons I grew to like Architectural Decision Records (ADRs) is because they capture the context in which you made the decision and the justification you had at the time, this makes it really easy to review at a later date and determine things like "oh it's me who is the idiot, not everyone else" and "hey look, we're no longer subject to this context, maybe we can change how this works."
this happend to me on my first job, very stressful job, below avg pay, its so bad that they use gmail instead of git for version control.. the code we write everyday is first compressed to a zip then mailed to self for backup. lol
Wt, this is bad on so many levels.
Every report was created for a reason and with employee churn, it's easier to ask for a new report than to try to figure out what existing reports do. Your job as a developer is to provide a solidly designed data lake. And the business' job is to define the metrics that move the business and give meaningful information about customer actions. If you understand your data, you can gamify your customers from acquisition through sales.
You may can probably figure out when reports were last used and prune out reports that haven't been touched in 24 months. Of course, back them up in case someone screams.
God this hits close to home. 😥
Our PM/Boss is the exact same. Valuing the easy-to-see/sell changes way higher, than the stuff in his messy backend, that makes everything tick.
Trying to argue your point is pointless. If you say anything not already in his head, he will argue with you for literal hours until you give up or "See it his way".
Despite arguing being pointless, there is no planning, only endless arguing. If you, the programmer, don't write anything down, there is nothing.
No Storyboards, and no user manual for this messy kraken of an application.
Oh and if you "Take to long" be prepared to hear over and over again, how fast and efficient the Colleque is who built him the last cheap thing from the "Ground up".
As if building something from scratch is sooooo much harder than having to build on a base of messy data that has been grown over a decade.
I Agree with the article. Your job is just that. A Job.
Not your friend, not something worth sacrificing an Arm and a Leg for. Just something that helps you to stay alive in this shitty greedy world.
I’m both the guy that built the thing from scratch and the guy that is rewriting it. It is unbelievably HARD to do a refactor/rewrite while maintaining the original even when you’re the undisputed expert in the area/system.
I left a job like this. And about 1 year after I had left it I realised how much of it was my fault.
For example management responds way different if you tell them what, why and how. You need to stop asking managers about technical things. They don’t know enough to make the call and naturally they will feel safer about keeping things as they are. You need to tell, and then instead it will ne on them to stop you.
Yep
Developers aren't stupid, but I was doing C#, SQL and web dev for a decade before it finally clicked that Uncle Bob's dogma is what's hurting both my own skill development, our productivity and I suspect it's one of the main reasons why most software is sluggish and error-prone. And outside a small crowd of senior experts, I feel very alone with this perspective, yet I wish somebody had helped me realize this years ago. I agree that a smug attitude isn't helping, but there really is an abundance of waste in the software industry. Instead of looking down on it, I am ebullient about the possibilities of the software industry if just 10% of us knew how to utilize 90% of the CPU's powers and wouldn't let bloated OOP abstraction "patterns" get in the way of solving problems.
Dear Primeagen,
Says the guy who doesn't even have 1% the skills or talent that article writer possesses. He isn't some nonsensical RUclipsr. He's written apps, most people can even dream about. Understand what he is talking about before disrespecting and making fun of him.
Prime is so innocent. He doesn’t even know how to say Power BI correctly. It’s all true. Power BI and Tableau are the worst. Jobs pay well though.
It's somewhere in between. Whenever you get massive success from a big corporation the sychophants will be out in full force. Most people take a job because they have bills to pay, not because they love it. I've been at startups and big corporations. If the big corporations had the level of efficiency of the startups, we'd be living in the Jetsons right now. It's IMPOSSIBLE to manage seven thousand people or whatever. So you have to go on hearsay and rumors. So the people that aren't good at playing the game are maybe partialy right at getting a little pissed.
I've worked in the kind of environment he described, and even then the worst I saw was like 60/40 of "bad" participants and my direct management at all times was quite good and would listen even if they never actually had the power to get anything done.
We all just had to sit there while our entire org was dismantled in real time because someone at the C level thought it was a good idea to kill the golden goose for some short term gains.
Seems like he thought the article was targeted at devs and not people who make charts and get paid like an executive
In all fairness to the user who created the spreadsheet with 400 worksheets - If IT teams gave users proper tools to build their infrastructure around, they might not be using a spreadsheet to begin with. People use spreadsheets and things like VBA largely when they have no other choice.
Unfortunately you can't understand this fact if you are a developer who has all the tools at their disposal. It's only something you realise when you're in that business role, and it's your responsibility to perform some task as quickly as possible.
Corporate IT often bring in sandboxed tools like Power BI, PowerApps & Power Automate etc. to give users "proper tooling" but ultimately completely miss the point. These trash tools are even pushed onto dev teams too because these apps become part of "IT Strategy". Power Platform tools are not proper in the slightest, and will never replace a programming language even if that language hasn't been updated in 20 years. It is infuriating.
Easy to say when IT has already become a subsidiary of finance whether you realize it or not.
@@ScreamingCelt No denial there. Quite often they're in the customer service directorate too. Depends on the business.
@@Sancarn Can you say BPO? I knew you could😎
Oh gosh, I can see where this poor guy is coming from. That Power BI thing is like.... look, see managers like things they understand to be used, even if that's the horrible no-code software. If they want a prototype, they want it in a software they understand. Even if it's a no-code software. And they will ask a whole team of software engineer final year interns staring at them silently in horror to make a prototype using that no code software. In the end, you know, in some companies, what degree of expertise doesn't matter if seniority wins out.
You have been VERY lucky, Prime.
He is basically not calling everyone stupid, just the "company man".
Most of us simply got to do the BS stuff what's asked from us, and we don't talk about Rant club.
I agree with one point the author made in particular. I used to find the way the world works very upsetting until I realised that most people want to just make money and attain status in the easiest way possible. If there are ways to do this without putting in effort, people will find those ways. It is a losing battle that every organisation has to fight until their dying breath because there is no test or structure that can weed out these people. They look and talk just like you and me and they have worked very hard to get where they are without being noticed. Every person needs to put food on the table and feel like they belong but, not everyone can do this without cheating.
This DX thing is weird. I have heard the words "developer experience" put together, but it hasn't hit the types of companies I work for yet in terms of a new religion.
For what I see, when people care about DX is when we stop working just to get things done and as a team they want to improve the code.
21:12 I seriously think you underestimate how little knowledge a lot of managers have about subjects.
I kid you not, there was once a CEO of a car company (can't remember well which one, but I think it was VW) who said that they don't need to know what the company is actually producing to lead it.
I understand and agree with both sides here. I have also experienced much of what was mentioned in the text.
However, you can understand what most companies lack and what drives most employees while still keeping yourself humble. Eventually you will go through the experience of being just noise for someone else, who is more intelligent than you at a specific subject, at that specific time. There's no real gain in treating everyone else as substandard, you're just gimping yourself on opportunities to learn and grow professionally.
I think after working with clients and client communications for a long time, going back to a dev team, I try my best to elicit the underlying problems from the devs from their perspective and vernacular. More often than not, when you take the condescending approach, they're less willing to dive deeper into their explanations and under pressure it becomes harder to articulate their problems. If the 10% theoretically did exist like he mentions in the article, it's more ideal for them to have the patience to communicate with the remaining 90% to be on the same level of understanding, rather than expecting the higher ups to just fire off the 90%. I've had many people without the full understanding of the problem and vernacular reveal blind spots in the designs of many systems that ended up making the system better in the end. Without that candid communication, these problems would not have been uncovered and everyone would have either given up using the tools or come up with individual workarounds that only worked for a thin slice of devs.
There is a lot of dead weight at every big corp, even Netflix has laid off thousands of people since 2019, they seem to be doing just fine, and could probably fire many more thousands of people and have no real change in productivity or operations. I don't know if the actual argument is that lots of these people should be fired, but all you have to do is look around at all these big companies firing thousands of people with no seeming changes in their uptime or their product to know that it is undeniably true that most of these companies do not need thousands of people that they've laid off.
When he said it's all crud, I thought he meant 90% of applications are just CRUD as in Create Read Update Delete. 😂
0:38 You know, I made one interesting observation over the years:
The more bureau based the job (no matter what kind), the more likely the people are suffering from burnout or need therapy.
The way the company treats their employees only seems to play a minor role (but not no role) in this.
I would actually like this to be investigated more by actual studies (meaning: not some random people doing some work in their free time).
Most people work for money but also most people do not want to do bad things on purpose, but different people have different point of view. The main issue is understanding. Sometime people just don’t have the background experience and knowledge to understand your problem. The best solution you can do is to show them the alternative.
I know where the guy is coming from. At the same time, here is something I saw ...
I teach kids to tie knots. (mostly I let the kids teach each other, but I get to teach from time to time also). When I demonstrate the tying of a knot, I then watch them try to follow along. One of the messed up things that happens is that they do the exact opposite of what I am doing.. I have done it many different ways. They instead of moving over the two trees, they move over the one tree... Instead of going through the hole, they will go outside the hole. It is wacked... One might say they are incompetent. The reality is they cannot see what I am doing. Until they do it themselves, they cannot actually see what it is I am doing.
It does not matter how smart they are. It does not matter how old they are. The single thing that determines how quickly they pick it up is "HAVE THEY TIED KNOTS BEFORE".
And they have to tie knots a lot before they start seeing things. It is not easy to see.
This applies to just about everything.
People who haven't actually disconnected their front end and back end, don't actually see the disconnect.
People who haven't actually wired a house for telephone/internet can't quite see what the wires do... To those who can, good on you. MOST of us don't. Even the smartest of us don't...
I appreciated you reacting to this article because it felt like I was reading my own dysfunctional brain. If things don’t work perfectly try and fix them by some marginal amount. If you can find a better group to work with, do it. There’s no point in getting all bent out of shape about it.
Looking for ways to make progress is better than getting all bent out of shape about it.
Hello, author here. The point of the article is actually exactly that. There is a large class of organization that will say they want change (causing you to get bent out of shape about it if you believe them) purely because all organizations must say this. Don't believe them if their actions don't line up with their words and chill out, or find a better place and chill out.
I 100% agree that it's usually the minority who's technically incompetent, yet these people are extremely proficient at winning arguments. These are usually the people who have been in their positions the longest or got their position due to nepotism, so management blindly listens to them and give them approval.
Meanwhile the rest of the team is working around the clock, to keep the unmanageable digital mess somewhat functional. These people know a dozen better ways to manage things, yet are always ignored. So they eventually become frustrated and get another job.
I think this article is the author coping with the fact that he has technical skill but lacks the influence to implement his vision.
One thing I reconciled with and I hate hearing is "how shit this old code is" "what were they thinking" etc etc.
Well, while it might be true that it's SHIT and BAD, it might have been go-to, GOOD, or just GOOD ENOUGH for time being and pressures when it was written. You can never fully know and I wouldn't also enjoy people shitting on my code they know no history about. We should be respectful towards what is in front of you regardless because without it you wouldn't be here solving these problems anyway.
To why is this shit like this is more of : We know this is shit and we know it shit for a while now, why is there no plane to clean this shit? will we just keep piling shit up until I get sick of it and quit? so I get replaced with someone who has less experience to feel the same way and add more shit trying to figure out what to do, start puling there own hair out and continue the cycle.
At this I don't think I care who will inherit that crap, when it starts to crumble I will be long gone
Idempotent just means that if you run the thing twice you'll get the same result, so it doesn't depend on the initial state. An example is in SQL if you run create table it will error the second time, that's why you always run create or replace table instead. It's simple but prevalent/required in the data world.
Erroring is not a good example of idempotency. An example is HTTP PUT request.
Erroring is a different behavior between uses, while PUT behaves the same way every time.
Idempotent just means that if you run the thing twice you'll get the same result, so it doesn't depend on the initial state. An example is in SQL if you run create table it will error the second time, that's why you always run create or replace table instead. It's simple but prevalent/required in the data world.
@@arnontzori The idempotent command is "create or replace table". The sentence about "create table" was just to motivate why idempotency can be a good principle
Plenty of work out there doing interesting things in smaller companies, prolly won’t pay the same but pick your poison and be happy knowing you were fortunate to be able to pick.
This is all due to this still being a very new industry and trying lots of different ways of doing things
I bet people don’t know the history of the railroads. Competing standards and plans with 80% of it has been either abandoned or tore up for scrap
This is the standard for rapidly changing technologies
No one will work in tech when these problems are fixed
This is all the results of over investment and use of cheap money
rewrite the job in rust
I cant believe that prime actually doesnt realise that alot of developers know nothing except what is nessecary for the position.
Maybe netflix filters these types of people out but they definitely still exist!
I resonate with the writer, going through it right now, frustrated, fed-up etc. However where I disagree is on people being inherently stupid. Asking yourself "do you believe everyone is doing there best?", goes a long way to feeling better about most people. 70% are doing there best, the other 30% are LARPing. My percentages change all the time but most people work for someone else out of necessity and don't want to be there.
I actually LOL'ed at the "touch grass"
I think the author looks way too deep into things there are mainly 2 reasons :
1. Never change a working system otherwise you have to fight bugs and production outages constantly
2. There are already systems in place replacing them cost a lot of money and time . This is the reason programmers for old programming languages are still searched. Only big tech rewrites their code base on a wimp.
To be clear, this isn't true for start-ups there is the question if you want make money or doing things the right way. Its all about ego there.
Sometimes systems are so bad that change would reduce your turn over rate at the job because none wants that kind of a job.
I am TRULY shocked by the amount of people in this community who actually subscribe to these ideas.
Trying to blame your lack of impact on other people's supposed stupidity is the most defeatist take I've ever seen.
If you are so great and smart and hard working, why are you not at a better company, around smarter people, and doing the work that you think matters? Is it REALLY other people's fault or are you just trying to shelter yourself from the fact that you're actually not as good as you think you are?
I haven't ever worked a job like this, because I avoid jobs like this. I take jobs wherein either my department is either fully separate from the corporate structure and we force them to give us more stuff after each release and success or a job wherein I can have barbecues with my CEO and his Dad and generally asking for things to happen is enough to get it to happen.
The only reason you end up working in places that are not like that is because you put up with it. And sometimes that is fine, put up with bullshit, and walk away with more treasure than I will probably ever have in my life. But who knows, my life isn't over yet? Maybe just refusing to be a bureaucrat will give me more treasure as the years go by.
(Also, yes, I understand that some people really, really need the treasure. They usually have a different source such as a child to maintain or medical bills of a relative to pay. I get that. I wish you all the luck.)
This is real, it is the elo hell of programming jobs. I know it sounds silly if you are privileged enough to work with smart people, but your sample size is too small if you haven't been at more than 3 jobs. Talk with ANYONE that has been at more than 3 programmer jobs please.
It's honestly difficult if not impossible to have the emotional capacity to fully understand something you haven't been through and that's perfectly understandable. That being said maybe cut off on asking people to "start your own business to prove you are better", it's a bit degrading it implies people do not deserve to be alive or have any opinion unless they are the CEO of a multinational corporation.
I honestly think a lot of it is related to the Peter Principle. A very short summary: Just because someones was good at their previous job, enough to earn a promotion, does not make them good at the job they were promoted to. Since they are bad/mediocre at their new position, they are stuck there and will not be promoted. People keep getting promoted to positions that they are bad at, until the whole organization is dysfunctional. That's why it seems like incompetence rises to the top.
Also I agree with you on the issues with the article. I hard a hard time with it too. I'm really tired of engineers talking like this. I was interested in the guy's point and thought that he had some moments of insight but he's just so dismissive and arrogant. He's vastly overestimating that the reason for these problems is that nobody else "gets it" and that people are basically stupid and/or bad at their jobs. I think he'd be surprised how many others get it and either don't know what to do about it or have lots the will --- and he simply doesn't have the social skills to ever discover that fact organically. This is a classic engineer personality trait. Luckily nobody on my team is like this otherwise they'd drive me insane.
14:00 I've had this happen to me where I got "Hey guyzeses I made a cool tool that does a thing! You can haz the tool." suddenly people are requesting feature enhancements to what was supposed to be a simple unitasking tool. Then some one decides the outputs of that tool should be tied into infra for another tool. Suddenly you have lil stupid functionins you wrote glue together into a production tool that needs regular maintenance.
It only takes 1 toxic employee to tear down a workplace. To me, the author is saying that everyone except for himself are toxic employees. And yet it wouldn't surprise me if everyone else all agreed that he was the toxic one. The main thought I had going through my mind during this video was "I'm glad I don't work with this guy".
@5:00 I don't disagree that that is how it comes across or that it is not the healthiest of opinions... but it doesn't mean it is wrong. I think most people, even in skilled fields, don't have good critical thinking skills or at the very least are not skeptical or self reflective at heart and will just go along to get along.
To some extent the "90% rule" is true, that most of the stuff that's being built is just not going to succeed. Most of the ideas are bad. Some of them have inertia and need time to get traction. At the end of the day you never know.
I agree with Prime, here. It's one thing to say that a lot of people in your workplace make bad decisions or decisions out of their lane. It's another thing to attribute that to stupidity. A lot of people just don't know what they don't know and haven't experienced anything different.
If you look down on people as you're speaking with them, they _will_ subconsciously pick that up. This can make things a self-fulfilling prophecy for people who are technically skilled but bad communicators.
Thank you for the confirmation (-bias 😂), in not knowing about Power BI, for my emerging hypothesis that the people who can make better tools (devs) tend not to know what the users actually have to do. It also gives some perspective for the Power BI promoters out there, that it isn't important to everyone.
> people who can make better tools (devs) tend not to know what the users actually have to do.
Exactly my experience. I'm a dev working in 'user space', and the devs in 'tech space' have little to no idea what users actually do or need. It's only in working in that environment that you really understand what tools users need.
There's a saying in DnD "Make sure you're playing a game you like with people you respect".
I have not figured out how to sort for this in my career yet. Yet.
I disagree, fighting against big dysfunctional corporations doesn't make any sense. It's a waste of time and energy and you will probably get fired anyway. Just change your job and move on. I did that and now I'm much less frustrated person. I haven't thought about writing an angry article for a few weeks already.
8:11 Yeah, my personal opinion is not that people are too stupid to figure things out, rather, what I find is that you can be the smartest person around, but if you're years into depression, burnout and sleep deprivation, it doesn't matter. People are too exhausted to think.
And some people don't even bother trying, because if they do, they'll be exhausted like us. Honestly, they might be the smarter ones.
Uhh, I'm totally on board, with your take. Not that they are incompetent it is that they don't care to listen and be just maybe be wrong for a moment.
I think you are a bit overthinking. It is as simple as motivations and incentives for the 3 categories of workers, managers and corporate suits/shareholders are misaligned and can not be aligned. It is simply capitalism.
there's no proper not improper "alignment" to be had, what matters is redirecting your efforts to supply the most profitable (i.e desired/required) necessities. It's true that there's a lot of economic distortion going on, particularly in industries full of VC and IP law, but that's a matter of economic policy.
2:09 lol power bi.
Sturgeon's law is interesting. Near as I can tell, the original quote is "And on that hangs Sturgeon’s revelation. It came to him that [science fiction] is indeed ninety-percent crud, but that also - Eureka! - ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things - cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people, and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like."
To me, that reads more like "crud or not crud is subjective" than "90% of things are objectively crud"
13:21 "You steal one heart you're not a thief?" I don't understand what the hell he's talking about 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
You know Prime was upset when he forgot to bleep the fucks.
5:12 In my case, I believe that most ppl are stupid, and I'm included in the "most ppl" group.
My take is unwilling to put in meaningful effort.
Same
Hello, love your content, but could you do something about the chat so that it's more readable? semi transparent background, having article on the side, anything like that? In this article, I was interested in "random opinions" and it was incredibly hard to read them.
You probably gotta join twitch so you can watch the chat for real and make more money for Prime because youtubers are the digital equivalent to street performers.
As someone named Derek, I feel personally attacked
Just described Tom and JDSL at 11:00
But Tom's a genious!
He has almost added comment support to jaydeezel@@TheMistr25
Here's your clue Prime.
Derek, the guy who keeps churning out Jira tickets, never stops to consider the outcome.
It's painfully obvious to others that the tickets never get worked...but that doesn't stop Derek.
Is it unreasonable to suggest that Derek...i don't know... Think about the work he's doing? Maybe consider the idea that tickets that aren't worked are a waste of his time, and everyone else's, in yet another useless meeting?
Derek could do a lot of things differently. What he chooses to do instead is just to keep churning out crap.
The really sad thing is that Derek is probably doing this at the direction of an overpaid, clueless manager who will promote him for his obedience (that's "being a team player" in corporate-ese, even though he's really the team screwer).
Why would anyone think this is ridiculous?
My dad instilled in me "if you're going to complain about something, make sure you have your own solution." I've since amended that to something much less simple: "If you're going to complain about something, have your own solution to ready to offer up. Or communicate that you're voicing the complaint to see if the group can come up with a solution."
Plenty of people are good at spotting the problem (i.e. the traffic to work is horrible). Coming up with a viable solution is a lot harder though, otherwise it would have been solved already.
It has been solved. Design the cities for public transportation and living closer to work
@@njnjhjh8918 I mean, as a huge NotJustBikes fan and other walkable urban planning. I know that's the basic solution. Getting something people will agree to for any given area is a lot more difficult. But yes, the general solution is walkable cities with efficient transportation.
Dunning Kruger and ignorance is bliss is what this video reminds me of.
Especially true for non-tech companies.
Currently work in one and I feel like I'm wasting my time.
Maybe we don't like the writer's take but sadly statistics proves him correct.
Two words: Price's law.
I didn't know this one, but I love it!
@@LudicityHackernews and the load put on the 4th quartil grows and grows with the organization size.
Thank you for coming to Primeagen's Ted Talk~ 👏
My OCD is killing me... Why do people have such a hard time reading? I can understand that reading out loud in a stream can make you trip over if you're nervous about your reading skills or because you're focused on the entertainment value, or you're tired and this is just a cut from a 5h stream. If you notice you're making too many mistakes I think it's ok to take a breather (3 seconds) and then just move forward.
I hope it's something trivial. Mr prime is not the only person I can see struggling through text.
Some people are dislexic, they see words a touch different from others and are not good for reading a lot of text. Prime many times said that he struggles from that. He actually called this as one of the reasons he started his reacts.
@@elzabethtatcher9570 that is very informative. Thank you
This whole video and article reminds me the Dilbert TV series and Catbert telling Ashok how cynicism is better than experience.
The major issue i come across is not the the people are incompetent per se, just that they got thrown into a tier of work where they are WAY out of their weight class. As in, put someone that should be in the application side right into core development. Then you have core developers rushing to undo the damage while at the same time having to implement whatever said person did the right way because the application side is actively using it. Add to it that many times you don't even have anyone doing any sort of architecture to keep the (in)sanity of it all under control, that documentation is either non existent or outdated into uselessness, yadda yadda ydadda...
Power Bee-Eye is how you say it, Prime. LOL. That's hilarious that you don't know that for some reason. It's a microsoft data-visualization tool that every single company that buys into the Microsoft suite (Teams, Azure, Excel, etc) uses. I think it stands for Power Business Intelligence. < 3
Auto Play Guy rant was great.
You did your job. We failed you.
This is what I call: "Cynicism". It is unrelenting, and default negatively cloaked as a sort of "faux" wisdom. This is NOT what wisdom is. Actual wisdom sees both advantages and disadvantages, it measures both the Yin and Yang of what it tries assessing. Like Primeagen I say: Go out and create a venture which solves these problems you are surfacing. You cannot or will not do that? Then you are simply piling words together and trying to sound like you are smart, but how smart are you really? Also "cynicism" often leads to largely anti-social tendencies I believe. In my opinion the truly great leaders are just the opposite, they understand the importance of mankind, its tendency to create teams and the abilities of humans when they group together and work well together.
it sounds like he works for a legacy company, which is very different than working for a company that has tech as core business. IT people in legacy companies suffer from this mix of god complex (because nobody can understand or do what they do) and bitterness (because the people that cannot understand what they do are more valued than they are)
I love those useless dashboards nobody looks at and are on 36 inch flat screens hanging in all the offices so nobody can look at them and get LED radiation poisoning (jk) :D. Yeah my last company had those too^^, I always joked it felt like a Tanning Bank since my desk was right next to the thing xD.