I happen to manage approx 20 people in a ~500 person org. Everyone gets a chance to decide if they want to focus on becoming a social animal and growing in the org (which results in more meetings, more emails, more chats, etc.) or just concentrate on the technical stuff. The latter is perfectly fine for me as I am aware that these people still produce huge amounts of value to the company. However they are not party to some decision loops and are often on the receiving end of architecture and design decisions. Most of them start to complain about that sooner or later, so I ask them to start participating in more meetings... Once being able to put all that into perspective, most of them don't complain about it anymore.

So long story short - most of the time you can't have it both ways in a large(-ish) organization. You can either be the guy who digs a hole every day and someone tells him where. Or you can be the guy who decides where to dig the holes but only get to dig a more moderate amount of holes yourself.

It's just that it's impossible to scale that approach, so the larger the enterprise gets, the less you'll actually be shipping... As pretty much all of them seem to think it's easy to scale development teams, increasing their headcount and running productivity against a wall.

A small team has barely any space for Juniors however, so I think it's very good that both approaches exist in the wild

But then for the deployment and maintenance, they hired a large army of cheap inexperienced junior developers.

And if they decided to attend these meetings are they still expected to maintain the same "velocity/story points/etc."? Because if so then they will likely have to work outside of "office hours" to actually get the work done. Possibly why they decline and stop complaining... They realize they'll just get handed a bigger bag of BS.

And it's also perfectly OK to find this out about yourself only later in life, when you have gathered some (more) professional experience.

What's not OK imho is labelling other people's version of work as "corporate bs".

If someone feels like a meeting is "corporate bs", that speaks to a failing of those hosting the meeting to properly communicate the intent of the meeting. If you are not able to effectively communicate with the people you work with, perhaps it is you who isn't cut out for corporate life? If you think you can treat a class of kindergarteners like it is a fourth year university course, teaching kindergarten likely isn't for you.

Peter principle applies, I suppose.

It takes effort to mitigate all that and it takes even more effort to try to work around it if it happens a lot. If you are ready and willing to improve the system - welcome to management ;) If this feels like a whole lot of crap to you - better stay away from big companies, do some consulting, find startups with like minded people... Staying on a job, being unmotivated or stressed out is not good for anyone involved.

To your second point.. corporate bs is not necessary and should be called out. Most of it falls into waste. Another large chunk falls into people trying to climb the corporate ladder.

This is the problem. Most managers are not aware of the real ground situation and rely on “visibility” presentations to judge worth.

All AIs that I've seen so far just optimize the reproduction of existing biases and/or serve to obfuscate policy decisions by ensuring that no person is left to blame. Are you stating a dream there, or did I miss a development towards practical AI systems that make decisions more transparent?

You can't just have "transparent objectives" and let AI take the wheel.

(Good comment, though ;)

I am omnivore, having successfully maintained both outdated Eclipse/OSGI-based codebases and large PHP websites, but everyone wants to buy me in entirety.

Being freelancer is more difficult for the not long term, but the best to achieve shorter working hours I would say is, work full time for 9-12 months, then you know how things work and also have some "power" to request part-time.

The problem of course is that after 2-3 years you will most likely change job again, so it does not last too long as long as you want higher salary

Honestly, I'm content with being in middle class but I also think about future opportunities and work towards bigger goals.

It's about 8.7% in North America according and 2.7% in Europe to Credit Suisse[1]. That is not _many_, that is _very few_ in my dictionary.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

The worst part is the high degree of censorship. Everyone is so sensitive now that it's impossible to speak openly

What would you say if you weren't censored?

"I think the demands you are making with regards to how fragile you are emotionally are not reasonable, and if this is how you must be treated in corporate life it is you that needs therapy". In general I think this response is correct and humane (provided you word it properly), because such fragility is not indicative of mental health. It is extremely not compatible with corporate culture to express this, as the prevailing notion is that everyone around such a person needs to conform 100% of the time to what they want.

I’m transhumanist, pro changing your identity, can easily handle gender fluidity, am thrilled that both Haskell and Rust ecosystems are so welcoming of transgender. I used ‘they’ as gender-neutral singular pronoun by default for decades just to not reveal people’s gender arbitrarily. But no language policing, please.

That said, it is a red flag that the company ok with spamming the employees to virtue signal. It is likely that it will be accompanied with other annoyances and has an incompatible culture.

Better to get out before you go crazy or get fired.

Simple expressive language is also taboo. One Italian coworker used a analogy of the product as a beautiful woman in a meeting to get a point across.

Basically all my us colleagues were shocked, because they only use dry corporate speak.

I think it is a big part of imposter syndrome and exhausting to speak and listen to.

I recently worked for an all-remote team where almost everyone is Europe based, and there was no humour at all in their meetings, and very little personal anecdata of any kind. It was very dry and professional, week in week out. I once cracked a light joke (nothing that anyone could find offensive) and it fell very flat. Doing so was obviously out of place. Never made that mistake again.

Not just missing humour, but I couldn't discern any way that people formed work-social connections outside of those meetings, even though most of our interactions were over Discord. It was all about the work, and that was minimal as well. Even on Discord it was interesting to see much of the time, people talked past each other, not appearing to understand each other's point, or just saying what they'd worked on with no replies. Even DMs tended to be dry and would end when the question at hand was answered. My attempts to be friendly and curious led nowhere, metaphorically like the flatness of talking in an anechoic chamber.

I found it quite depressing and difficult, not because I especially needed work friends, but because I couldn't find a way to get to the "informal real talk mode" about work either. It was difficult to forge the kinds of informal links that make work easier and more effective, and I think everyone's work quality suffered for it because everyone was kind of working on little atomised areas. I saw very little evidence that anyone cared about anyone else's wellbeing either.

You thought the Europeans were the dry ones?

Actually yes.

Although the teams I worked with were almost all people in Europe, one was from USA, and another was in Canada (though guessing from their name, perhaps their family came from eastern Europe). Those two were people I enjoyed listening to more, and felt if I reached out it would be feasible to have a bit more depth to the conversation. They managed to sound more interesting and emotionally present than the others, both in writing and verbally, and if I had a choice I'd choose them to work with in future.

It may not be a coincidence that they were among the most technically skilled people as well. I noticed a correlation between high technical skill and pleasant and thoughtful people, though by no means was that universal.

EDIT: After thinking over the above reply, I realised that "dry" isn't the right word for the distinction I'm using. "Humourless" and "entirely work oriented", perhaps. There were some Europeans that weren't dry, they had strongly expressed (but dubious) technical opinions and weren't afraid to say them. But that wasn't humour, and tended to imply someone else was wrong/stupid/incompetent, which imho was unhelpful for fostering prosocial work relationships.

* The vast majority of executives are paranoid, risk averse know nothings. They don’t want to take any business risks lest it harm their comp.

* Because most execs don’t understand their business, their customers, their industry, and they distrust their staff — they can’t formulate clear and concise goals and objectives. This is how orgs end up with that blitzkrieg of murky, pointless, meaningless objectives.

* Quite a lot of people in leadership roles got to where there are by making very morally and ethically questionable decisions. It’s largely due to the stupidity of the investor class that these individuals were never caught. The horrible thing is because these individuals are loaded to the gills with malintent they assume the same of everyone else. They tend to structure their organizations around mistrust.

* This is why management practice, especially in the US, appears to be a bad case of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. All of management’s bureaucratic nonsense and irrational separation of duties creates self-inflicted wounds. management salves wounds (they never get at the root cause). And then management rewards itself with big bonuses for fixing the problems they created.

* The US Federal Government functions way more effectively than most large companies. The reason is that in the govt policies, procedures, and controls are well documented and maintained. In most orgs all three are usually in flux at all times. This makes unity of effort pretty challenging on a good day.

* If orgs cut a lot of their senior leadership they could pay everyone a lot more -and- see a productivity improvement whilst preserving their margin

* Investors think they’re so clever.

And of course one last thing

* most people have no idea what they’re nattering on about

Naturally, it is easier to perform some work if you understand and agree with its intent and the way it's executed, or if it's indeed your own choice what to do and how to go about it. You will never fully experience this as a wage worker taking commands from a manager taking commands from a boss taking commands from another boss taking commands from a board of owners motivated by their own profit, but perhaps work will seem more meaningful in a smaller company where you have more influence on decision making.

Depending on culture you may also be able to take a bit more charge. Demand to know a clear agenda in advance of meetings, decline meetings that don't have an agenda that's relevant to your work and insist that the agenda is followed during meetings. Impart on your manager that your time is being wasted when it is.

To combat this feeling seeping into the other parts of my life, I have started to do some physical work, like cultivating gourmet mushrooms in my backyard. I asked for less hours some years ago, which means less income, but I am happier and I get to do physical work with my hands.

Everyday for me is a mix of Gardening, nature, building 4wds, eletrical devices, welding, really anything i wish. Plus my job which i get payed for. I do what i want, everyday. I never get up unless i want to (i can set my own hours and no one questions it) All my shirts/ties/suites are in the bin, replaced with crocs, tank tops, and tracksuites.

Most people think that customers have no idea, while in most cases if you put the right knowledgable people in front of them they would build amazing features together. I have seen it in an AI startup! Whenever us devs worked with the customers we built amazing data science products. Whenever it was managers, it was all these random non sensical requests and demands.

Someone who can sell a project directly to the customer while also knowing exactly what is possible and in what timeframe without having to consult someone else is worth their weight in gold.

We still have a few too many "hype-men" type salespeople who are in the Always Be Closing mindset without any sense of what's actually deliverable or even sensible.

But you usually have these proxy people, who then have to do countless internal meetings to figure out what to actually do, imposing extra ordinary requirements and work hours and that’s why we have all these posts with people hating meetings, burning out and switching fields. If only the middle management and product was tech educated and oriented..

So if you hook a big client, you can go and order that Tesla :)

The worst part is that perception and behaviors change, since the requesting party thinks "this should be a 2 hour change" and it takes 2+ weeks to due to process-- the fastest way to inhibit changes are making them riskier due to more effort/buy in from disparate parties, so you get more stagnation. Yea, rigid frameworks will help flush out loafers, but couldn't the same be done with a software type solution or even competent management?

I was in a similar position like you a couple of times. Some things I did:

* If less income isn't a problem ask to work less. Why not work 32 hours instead of 40+?

* Find another company. And know that an interview works both ways: the company wants to know you but you can also ask a lot about the company's culture.

* Find a job doing something different but is related to what your experience is.

Indeed very true, I've had managers and CTO's who made a point on shielding the engineering teams from any rando meetings, but other departments in the same company where living an experience similar to OPs with death by video-conference.

Even had a manager who would cap meetings to max 3h per week. This really added pressure for ppl to justify townhall type meetings for passive listeners.

In the end it really depends on who your boss is.

And I, as a team leader/project manager of sorts, just said to my team not to come into meetings that had no pre-defined agenda. I went in and relayed any questions to the team via the company chat if I didn't know the answer outright. Saved the team from hours of useless meetings.

My solution is to try to move "down the stack" and retrain to work with C++ and math-heavy jobs (computer vision, simulation etc.). From what I'm hearing, developers in those area have much less contact with the business side of company.

From what I’ve seen though, those domains don’t particularly have much interest in people without established careers in them already.

If your talented in your field, u dont need a ladder to up your earning potential.

75% efficiency kills you inside? Most companies would kill for 75% efficiency. The hyperbolic horror stories are usually 40-hour weeks for 5 hours of work.

I'm willing to believe that 75% isn't bad business-wise, but 10 h/week are a bit less than a tenth of your waking hours, over one and a half hours per day, several hundreds per year, a few ten thousands over the course of your life.

Imagine what you could do with that time. Imagine you could spend 1½h per day more with your kids, with the people you love, with friends. Or maybe learning new skills, working on personal projects, going hiking, whatever you enjoy.

I believe that it's perfectly understandable to feel (at the very least) a bit bitter about that when you feel like that time is taken away from you for no clear purpose.

I had a boss one time that wanted me to work 50 hours a week. "There's no such thing as a 40 hour a week job anymore" he said. I could get all of my work done in under 20 usually, so doing 40 was bad enough, you want me to put in more time here just so you can prove who's in charge? I didn't work for him very long. There were guys in there that worked for him for years and years, they all looked like husks of men.

If you're not cut out for it don't do it. There are jobs out there that aren't like that, but they're not around every corner. Go try to find one, and don't live a life you don't want because you think you have to.

I don’t know what my next move will be, but I likely won’t last too long here.

I dream of running my own saas where I completely run the show by myself (support, development, marketing) and make decent middle class income from it but I don’t think I’m good enough.

Have you considered hitting the ground running, leveraging synergies and lateral blockchain avenues along the way?

In a proactive manner, preferably, for a full paradigm shift.

Carbon nanotubes.

I make about as much as a Starbucks assistant manager, though, so your mileage may vary. :-D

Without all of them being YOU and acting like YOU think they should act, how else can they get anything done?

Have you considered that everyone else there thinks the same, except about YOU?

All these meetings and unnecessary occurrences are in fact necessary to get the bare minimum in agreement between all these different people who think differently and are trying to get different things done.

How else would it be done?

The work itself isn’t the issue, it’s the fluff around the work. Meetings, agile ceremonies, office politics/playing the game. There was a book on it, Bullshit jobs.

My current situation is I’m in the easiest job I’ve had, fantastic package, working the slowest I’ve ever worked with no manager pressure, no “what you doing, where’s the product”. With that it’s burning me out daily. Agile ceremonies, splitting hairs on non important details bike shedding, not delivering, no product in twelve months, everything needs a meeting, a design doc, and unanimous agreement from the team.

It’s killing me. I want to work hard and I want to build things and see things used. Essentially I’m sat twiddling thumbs knowing I am not working at my best because the culture/process is stopping me from actually doing the real work, the product features that customers pay for.

Even so, all companies have their own flaws. You have to be able to communicate those flaws to leadership and feel comfortable with that process. Sometimes when you do so, change will occur, sometimes it will not. Sometimes you are told why not, sometimes it just seems to get dropped. This isn't ideal but it is the corporate world.

The key is to figure out what flaws you can live with. To find some joy in the good side of the work. Or at the very least, just to accept that this is the price you pay to get the paycheck. If you do not feel that the paycheck makes it worth the trouble, you are in the wrong job.

* What do you do to overcome this feeling? I'm aggressively interviewing aiming to smaller companies. Hope I'll get out and into a healthier env before I get sick.

PS: Most of these companies are a dead empty shell already. It's just that due to inertia it will take years or decades for them to actually die, if we assume they operate in a mildly healthy market -and that's a big IF. There's loads of them out there. Actually the majority is like that. Bands that made a few good albums and are capitalising on past glory.

I switched to working in higher ed at a research institution (making much less, of course). I won't pretend that I'm out there saving lives or anything, and I won't pretend that there's not still a massive amount of BS and red tape, but at the end of the day I do go home and think I might be contributing something actually useful to the researchers and educators who are using my software.

It's important to not define yourself by your work, but it's also important to feel like your work has some meaning. I just couldn't find that at startups (even one I had high hopes for, in the energy sector working on smart grid tech).

It seems you like your work, but not your working environment. Big companies always have this kind bullshit. Small companies however, care about the work and results. You can really make a noticeable difference when you represent 10% of a company.

After 2 years I still don't know what's the functionality of my PO, basically he just pass the task from the top to poorly written tickets that constantly miss information or does not take into account or business logic, this causes a back and forth between me redefining the tickets and having to explain to him, causing him to re-explain those changes up with constant delays and blockers.

My manager is part of another team and barely interacts with my work or me in any meaningful way, we have bi-weekly 1 on 1 that are constantly cancelled for lack of topics.

I’ve been quite vocal to show my happiness and ask them to explain if that meeting ads value anywhere.

One of the things that I dislike in data science specifically is the initial stages where you have to prove that there's a use case, or (in some companies) to convince people that they need your work in some way. It's very frustrating and demotivating and I just don't care enough.

Once you get to the building stage (if that's even part of your job), then it's much more satisfying. That's one of the reasons why I want to switch to software development at some point.

It is an essential requirement of working with other humans that you put up with some of their bullshit. Getting to do work you enjoy and getting paid good money for it is amazing. Every company is there to turn a profit, that will never change. Personally having things to look forward to outside of work and trying to see bullshit from the perspective of the bullshitters helps a lot.

At worst, you will discover that they are an *hole (which you probably thought already), and at best they'll listen, and talk with you and you'll make a small step on fixing your corner of the world.

While it can definitely backfire if your product people never push back and agree to things that are impractical/impossible, ultimately "keeping the customer happy" is how the business stays in business and paying people.

It means that either you’re not high enough in hierarchy to feel the ownership, to get noticeable stocks etc.

You’re just being used as an expensive cog in the wheel.

Or/and you don’t care about the company mission.

Why are you still there I wonder?

In my experience as soon as I achieve my own goals with an employer - I leave the next day.

Go make something for yourself. Or do some consulting work.

Useless/overlong meetings seem to be a consequence of poor middle management and/or just the general structure of large corporations where lines of communication and hierarchies of responsibilities are complex.

What I do personally is to always ask for an agenda before accepting a meeting request. It's not rude to request one and can help focus discussion or see where you can add value.

I've thought about it a lot, I feel like everything the industry touches magically turns to shit.

Maybe I'm being a little negative, I know. But I think about things I really like, things I do for free in my spare time and when I put (imaginatively) on top of that a business layer, a management layer, a stakeholder layer, etc. I can see it being destroyed in front of my eyes (I'm not talking about computer stuff, but cooking, sports, writing...).

It's capitalism my friends. Alternatives?