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yup...and this is why I stopped. because of this kind of tone that I found toxic in actual job settings but then again it's points are fairly valid to filter only the strongest programmers.

Tell engineers to come up with their expected salary in a room and they will fight and compete with each other to work for free. The rationale ones, or the 'bad' engineers seemingly walk out because they still have the sanity intact.

Interestingly enough, companies and employers know this about engineers, and would be more than happy to screw you over what you actually deserve. All they have to do is sit aside and watch the professionals sabatoge each other. They are the perfect employee. Fire them once they build the pyramid, and find slaves overseas to maintain it.

This is what I realized at the end of the day. All I care is that I turning ideas into real products that work. If these are product that I can sell on my own, even better. If my skill and experience allows me to do this over and over, then it is good enough of a skill for me. Might not be a 10x engineer but neither do I want to be involved in a gladiator matches anytime we have to build something but end up arguing over irrelevant things, and end up delivering late.




Yes, that is the worst part to me. I worked at a place once, many years ago, where a Lead software engineer came in and started what I could only equate to a turf war. He'd set people up to get them fired, call competent engineers who made a mistake out as being idiots, etc.

One time, he assigned me work - and never mentioned that someone on another team had been assigned the exact same work. He wanted to see me do it faster than the other guy so that he could fire the other guy. So when I completed it, and he used it as ammunition against the other guy (even though the other guy had done a perfectly good job it turned out). I stood there helpless and ashamed that I'd been used as a weapon for someone to tear another good programmer down.

A couple of months later, the company began to lay people off and that lead bolted for the door. I did too, but I was just glad to not have to work in such a hostile environment anymore. So much anxiety.


That is revolting. I hear a lot of nightmare stories like this. Unfortunately, I think as engineers, we are forever doomed to be treated like peasants, unless you know how to play politics, kiss ass, and move up into a manager position.

The concept of manager seems so old fashioned and backwards especially when we are now dealing with a manufacturing industry that produces nothing physical, where the concept of a product is actually just a vote of minds of all the stakeholders, engineers, customers. Having traditional managerial that were suitable for overseeing factories and suppress workers from rioting and maximizing labor output in an information based product is nothing short of censorship.

My idea of a dream team of software engineers is one where we have as little technical and business censorship as possible. It would be sort of like how day trading desks operate but we end up building one product that reflects the demands of the customers, the future market. Instead of having a manager telling you what to do or what to build, you act on information from a customer directly. This might be a tougher hybrid to find but I reckon we'll see more and more entreprengineers as traditional manufacturing corporate structures lose their appeal.

Wishful thinking but I hope some people share the same ideas and values.




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