by cletus | 2026-01-05 21:23:35+00:00
So there's some survivor bias here but it's generally not bad advice. You should be focusing on outcomes like improving SLAs, top line metrics and so on. You should be solving user and business problems. That's all good advice. But still this article presumes a lot.

In my experience, managers will naturally partition their reports into three buckets: their stars, their problems and their worker bees. The worker bees tend to be ignored. They're doing fine. They're getting on with whatever they've been told to do or possibly what they've found to do. They're not going to create any problems. The problems are the underperformers. These are people who create problems and/or are at risk of getting a subpar performance rating.

Now there are lots of reasons that someone can be a problem. I tend to believe that any problem just hasn't found the right fit yet and, until proven otherwise, problems are a failure in management. That tends to be a minority view in practice. It's more common to simply throw people in the deep end and sink or swim because that takes much less overhead. You will see this as teams who have a lot of churn but only in part of the team. In particularly toxic environments, savvy managers will game the system by having a sacrificial anode position. They hire someone to take the bad rating they have to give to protect the rest of the team.

And then there are the stars. These are the people you expect to grow and be promoted. More often than not however they are chosen rather than demonstrating their potential. I've seen someone shine when their director is actively trying to sabotage them but that's rare.

Your stars will get the better projects. Your problems will get the worse ones. If a given project is a success or not will largely come down to perception not reality.

The point I'm getting to is that despite all the process put around this at large companies like performance ratings, feedback, calibration, promo committees, etc the majority of all this is vibes based.

So back to the "take my job" advice. If someone is viewed as a star, that's great advice. For anyone else, you might get negative feedback about not doing your actual job, not being a team player and so on. I've seen it happen a million times.

And here's the dirty little secret of it all: this is where the racism, sexism and ableism sneaks in. It's usually not that direct but Stanford grads (as just one example) will tend to vibe with other Stanford grads. They have common experience, probably common professors and so on. Same for MIT. Or CMU. Or UW. Or Waterloo. And so on.

So all of the biases that go into the selection process for those institutions will bleed into the tech space.

And this kind of environment is much worse for anyone on the spectrum because allistic people will be inclined to dislike from the start for no reason and that's going to hurt how they're viewed (ie as a star, a worker bee or a problem) and their performance ratings.

Because all of this is ultimately just a popularity contest with very few exceptions. I've seen multiple people finagle their way to Senior STaff SWE on just vibes.

And all of this gets worse since the tech sector has joined Corporate America in being in permanet layoff mode. The Welchian "up or out" philosophy has taken hold in Big Tech where there are quotas of 5-10% of the workforce have to get subpar ratings every year and that tends to kill their careers at that company. This turns the entire workplace even more into an exercise in social engineering.