Tony.How about honesty?
Cause we can all do better on that. Let's cut the corporate fluff. The tech industry runs on two things: caffeine and lies. And since 2023 on three things, caffeine, lies and LLMs API keys 🙊🤫.
Employers and employees are locked in a perpetual toxic spiral of delusion.
Tech industry is becoming a jungle but you should replace your machete for a proper dictionary in order to make it here.
The kind of dictionary that translates "Innovative" into "We have no idea what we're doing".
The kind of dictionary that translates "impactful" into "You'll maintain the same type of CRUD app you've been dealing with for years until your soul evaporates".
The kind of dictionary that translates "Flexible hours" into "We'll Slack you at midnight".
The kind of dictionary that translates "fast-paced environment" into "We have no fucking idea how to plan ahead our next move".
Ok. You get the point. I was just venting.
You are about to say amen, huh? We are all grown up men here, don't take it on the employers only.
Don't act innocent, you're not.
You are guilty of slapping "blockchain expertise" on your resume after a 30-minute freeCodeCamp tutorial. Sound familiar? I've been that guy too.
You are guilty of nodding gravely when the PM declared: "Our tool, (which competes with a Microsoft product that took them years to build) can be done in a few months, we're a startup!" instead of laughing hysterically on their face.
You are guilty of breaking prod and let the intern (or that clueless new hire) take the blame. Well, I've been that new hire, that's why I know people like you exists.
Let's be real here. You're not fooling anyone. I guess my main point here is that the deception goes both ways. It's not just employers who are at fault, you know exactly what I'm referring to.
When liars hire liars, what can go wrong, right?
I'll tell you: projects fail and burnout skyrockets. All in a very predictable fashion, over and over, company after company.
Projects fail because nobody has practice admitting the inconvenient truths when needed. Say, admitting the deadline was a hallucination. Admitting you broke something before you start investing time to fix it instead of fixing it on silence. Admitting you marked as done a task that fixes the thing today but creates tech debt tomorrow.
Burnout skyrockets as everyone is working on bugs instead of features (arguably devs fault), or working on sprints that were designed for 80 hours work weeks (arguably PO's fault).
The turnover it's a revolving door of devs fleeing to the next company. Hoping this time will be different, hoping they won't need the dictionary I meantioned earlier with them.
Well, at least it used to be like that, with the current job market they will not leave but rather stay at the company and pray for the best.
Lose-Lose
In any case, neither companies or engineers are reaching their full potential under such a dystopic environment. It's a lose-lose situation.
Devs will blame management squeezing engineers till the last drop of sweat. Management will blame devs arguing there's a so called knowledge gap. Both things are half-true and half-wrong in my opinion.
Do I have a solution? Maybe not. But if I can think of something worth trying (from both sides), it's this:
Wait for it...
Drum roll please... 🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁
STOP FUCKING LYING
Stop fucking lying. (Notice the period)
How about that? How about some honesty? How about cutting the bullshit for once? For a greater cause. For a win-win. Wouldn't that be somehow ironic? Finding out that the solution to our hardest technical problems lies in the most basic human value?
Radical, I know right? I might be a genius for suggesting it. But seriously, I am not being ambiguous here:
Employers, how about honesty?
Admit your SaaS codebase is held together by hope, Stack Overflow and God's grace. And that no major changes in the way of working will be welcomed. Specially if they disrupt deadlines. Sounds harsh? It is. But isn't it true?
Admit you accept to perpetuate a certain level of mediocrity in the wake of profit earnings and tighter deadlines. Hey, that's business, right? But don't pretend you are building the next big thing, or that your product is "impactful" in any way. It's not. It's just a little tool to make money, a tool you keep calibrating to make more money, sometimes at the expenses of other stuff. Absolutely not an engineering masterpiece, we are grown ups here.
Admit is not that you lack of suggestions for improvements from your engineers, but rather that you are not willing to pay the price for it. And that's okay too. Just be honest about it.
Your engineers will realize otherwise as soon as they land their new job, they will feel dissapointed, lose motivation and eventually un-engage. The potential intrapreneur you hired will become a mere code monkey, and you will lose the chance to have a real impact on your product. (I know a guy, who knows another guy who knows that guy that lived that...)
You are making your engineers more incompetent
Most importantly, ensure your engineers genuinely have free time beyond the supposedly 40-hour workweek to learn and grow. Many engineers grow the most when unemployed for this very reason, once re-hired, they lose the opportunity to acquire new knowledge.
And no, learning on the job is not the same; it lacks the space for deliberate growth, often forcing compromises in quality due to relentless deadlines. Engineers should at least understand the theory behind "the right way" to build stuff, even if reality later sets in and deadlines prevent perfectionism or full application of that knowledge.
An engineer that only learns on-job is an engineer that will never learn the right way to do things, just the "good-enough/deadline-friendly" way to do things. And overtime, employers will pay the price for perpetuating this cycle of mediocrity, which is the most ironic part of it all. 🙄
Now employees, how about honesty?
Stop pretending you care about the company as if it were yours. You're here for the money; we're all here for it. Most of us are just waiting for that side project to kick-off, monetize enough and leave. Then, only then, we will work late at night until our brains collapse. But we will do so on OUR OWN PROJECT, the one with NO INCOME-CAPS. The one where we get to decide. The one we can fuck up our lives for.
So yeah, you are here for the money, and if you are lucky enough, for the money and the reputation of the company you work for. That doesn't mean you don't wanna do your best while you are there, get that nice portfolio and build on your reputation, but let's not pretend you are an underpaid CEO of the company. You are paying bills, paying bills at your chosen company, but paying bills.
So don't fake it. After all, they supposedly hired a smart dude, they shouldn't be shocked if the smart dude sets smart boundaries and takes smart decisions to take care of their own interests. The opposite of that is stupidity, by definition.
Otherwise you will set unachievable expectations for yourself and your colleagues, you will all then fail to meet those expectations, and employers will be the ones lied to. Even worse, you will open Pandora's box of lies flowing both ways and feed back the vicious circle over and over.
Maybe also, stop pretending you know more than you actually do. 🙊🙊 You're not a senior engineer just because you've simply been working for five years. The HR lady might buy that, but in the tech trenches, the truth is, sometimes five years of experience just means repeating five times the shitty code you produce in a year. If anything, you're accumulating bad habits. Which brings us back to the same truth I mentioned some paragraphs above: "having the chance to learn the right way to build stuff matters" (and if you can also apply that knowledge at your workplace instead of just letting it gather dust consider yourself extra-lucky).
Both of you
Use previous points to set realistic expectations about each other.
Or keep gaslighting each other. What's the worst that could happen? (Looks at the 14th missed release this year)