by stuffn | 2025-11-06 18:29:17+00:00
Seen this time and time again. Motivated engineers will leave, smart engineers will realize nothing actually matters and fall into doing as little as possible to complete a given task knowing it'll be thrown away/deprioritized/etc. Continue to collect a paycheck (and possibly raises and promotions) without truly doing anything meaningful. LLMs have been a boon for this type of engineer who realizes the pointlessness of it all and can see through the reality distortion field your average CTO has.

I've been at companies where we have had to beg for a few hours a QUARTER to do meaningful fixes outside of bandaids. These are pushed off time and time again until suddenly the company is weeks out from a costly SEV0 and then it's an emergency. But, while time is finally given it's only enough to bandaid it for another year. I've been at companies where the pagerduty alarm go off every 15 minutes with actual problems. Despite complaints nothing changes. Instead, management decides we're all incapable and adds more process but still grants no time. There have been numerous times in my career where I effectively have 2-4 bosses, meetings, and status reports and am still expected to somehow deliver something that requires deep thinking. For this fact alone I am thankful for LLMs because I can completely disconnect from my work, check the LLM, and dump whatever garbage it gives out. At the end of the day it's not "me" so who cares.

"Skip level" meetings are worthless. Meeting with your VP/CTO is just going to be a bunch of ceremony around what they want you to do and you telling them what they want to hear. No one wants to hear they're incompetent, and you'd be stupid to tell them so given they sign your check. It turns into a ritual of "yes sir" and nothing gets done.

Then the yearly company feedback comes around and one of two, or both things happen:

1) The questions are catered so that they can be interpreted in a positive light either way. Either you agree with <question> or you don't understand the importance of <question/question-compliment>. You are made to look stupid.

2) They deliberately ignore negative feedback.

The truth is, unless your company is putting the VP/CTO/CEO on the L1 pagerduty cycle and having them woke up at 3am every night nothing will change. There are too many layers of bureaucracy involved as the article points out. That's why the "leadership" is always "surprised" when the company burns down. They simply do not feel anything at all relative to what the people actually building the product feel. They get a wild hair and want a fizz-frobnicator added that will produce net-negative return on investment. You do it, because despite how stupid it is you have to.

As long as they get their 3 martini lunches, bonuses, and mansions, it doesn't really matter. We've all seen and heard enough of their bullshit to know even the the "best" bosses are absolute snakes.

Truth is, no one wants to build things to last anymore. We live in a reality where everything including you, your dishes, and your software are disposable commodities. At least in actual engineering there are some laws available to protect you from having to do things that are deliberately putting people at risk. We have no such protections especially in this economy.