13 ms·
How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer
- hkon 1y agoWhere is the influence?
- tayo42 1y agoInstead of waiting to be told what to do and being cynical about bad ideas coming up when there's a vacumn and not doing what he wants to do, the author keeps a back log of good and important ideas that he waits to bring up for when someone important says something is priority. He gets what he wants done, compromising on timing.
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- anticristi 1y ago"He gets what he wants done, compromising on timing." is a really good summary!
- vcryan 1y agoPolitics is inescapable. Software engineers can't live outside of them. Whether these are the team politics, org politics, etc. I don't think engineers are universality bad/good at politics. It's just like anything else, takes practice.
- woadwarrior01 1y agoThere's a way out. Build your own company and make it something beneath you.
- antasvara 1y agoIf you have other people working at your company or investors, politics will come into play. It's rare to have a CEO that can decide things 100% by themselves and still retain talented employees. It's also super rare to have investors with zero desire to determine a company's direction.
- j16sdiz 1y agoOn that level, there are other policies. Politics in standards bodies, industrial organisations, regulatory issues, funding and investment, etc
- woadwarrior01 1y agoI’ve been on both sides of the table. To me, all of those are far more palatable than petty company politics (both in BigTech and startups).
- kylecazar 1y agoWhen I've reported to founders they were front and center in the politics (which is probably how it should be). Becoming a career CEO might be a way out, though.
- woadwarrior01 1y agoA fish rots from the head down.
- azemetre 1y agoThere's an even better way out, implement workplace democracy.
- eptcyka 1y agoYeah, and you can also get rid of local politics by moving to the countryside and homesteading. And you can bypass national politics by homesteading on a ship or an island that nobody cares about. And you can just move to a different planet to escape global politics. But any group of people will develop some form of politics, and to do anything meaningful longterm, you need a group of people, not just an individual, why not get better at politics? It is inevitable you will have to take part in them. But of course, I still want my hut in the woods.
- AaronAPU 1y agoI am a solo founder literally to avoid ever having to deal with politics and video calls.
- desireco42 1y agoamen brother :)
- vinnymac 1y agoI used to run my own business when I was a child, and made a lot of money from it. Paid my way through school with my earnings. There was no sales or marketing, and all I did was product and engineering, and at no point was I politicking. So no, it's possible (albeit difficult) to not be part of the meat grinder, I have done it.
- elktown 1y agoSure, to some degree it will always be there. But company size and careerist culture - both local to the company and differences between countries - makes it vastly different in presence.
- bdangubic 1y agopolitics is 100% escapable
- eschneider 1y agoYeah, this approach largely works.
- throwaway984393 1y ago[dead]
- zug_zug 1y agoI think this is largely practical advice if you want to influence a tech company at all costs. That is -- to have multiple projects lined for each executive goal that you can singlehandedly deliver on to thunderous applause. That said, it's often easier said than done. We've all worked at places where projects were canceled 3 months in due to all sorts of reasons (e.g. security breach changes all priorities, nobody cares about your database change now). So I do think there comes a point where an engineer asks themselves -- "How many projects do I have to prepare, how many stakeholders do I have to convince, how many wins do I need before I see tangible benefits commensurate with my investment?" What if I just let the executives set the course and provide my insight if asked, and still get 90% of the pay. Ultimately this is a guide to work successfully within a dysfunctional system, but nonetheless great advice for that.
- SeanAnderson 1y agoMan, I must not have worked at dysfunctional enough companies. I can't relate to the opening remarks in this article at all. I'm used to really open communication from the top down and, even when we build in a direction I disagree with, we've discussed things enough that I'm at least interested in seeing why someone else I consider intelligent sees the world so differently. Perhaps it has to do with only working for companies founded by engineers rather than product/marketing? I'm not really sure.
- mewpmewp2 1y agoWhat size companies have you worked at?
- SeanAnderson 1y agoRelatively small. 50-100 people. I could see it being totally different at larger companies, but gosh it sounds miserable!
- mewpmewp2 1y agoYeah, it's definitely miserable, but unfortunately frequently those larger companies pay a lot more, so there's the trade off. Kind of selling your soul.
- bbminner 1y agoI suppose that's because higher level VPs at large companies have broad goals and even broader notion means. It is not necessarily bad - allows to fiddle with different approaches before locking in on a specific technique. Wasteful? Yes. Efficient at satisfying board mandates informed by real time tectonic shifts in the industry? Also yes.
- apwell23 1y ago> I can't relate to the opening remarks in this article at all. i am guessing you never got promoted at work?
- getnormality 1y agoIt seems like this post can be summarized as follows: 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. 2. If your manager doesn't have something in particular they want you to do, you should figure out what they will want you to do in the future, and make any necessary preparations so that it will be doable when they want it. I'd say it's good advice. The only thing I would add is that managers and leadership are sometimes happy to be given something different than what they asked for, so long as it's still what they wanted at a higher level. This is risky, but success can be a fast track to respect and autonomy.
- Trasmatta 1y agoI would rather not live my life with the sole purpose of people pleasing managers
- huflungdung 1y ago[dead]
- tamimio 1y agoThis is usually in big corps, so if you like working in these hellholes, then proceed with all these shenanigans. I worked there before and it's not really good for engineering, let alone engineers' mindset, because in addition to the actual technical stress, now you have to deal with all this bs from people who do nothing all day but these games. Small companies are the best for me, and I remember one time in a small company they hired a manager from a corp. In a year, he managed to fuck up everything, 4 engineers left including myself, and turned the work culture into rules and policies instead of adults working with each other towards a common goal.
- mewpmewp2 1y agoThe only problem is that big corps can pay so much more...
- Jgrubb 1y ago> The important thing is to have a detailed, effective program of work ready to go for whatever the flavor of the month is. This is basically my theory of how things get done in Washington. There's no grand plan most of the time, just an army of operatives ready with a slide deck to pitch when the conditions for an idea present themselves.
- masfuerte 1y agoNot just a slide deck. The lobbyists have already written the legislation.
- awill88 1y agoBased lol
- moandcompany 1y agoUnderstand what your boss's boss cares about and make sure your work can described in relation to those goals or concerns.
- MarkMarine 1y agoOne of my favorite quotes: “ Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” - Milton Friedman I’ve found writing 1 pagers and technical documents that I can circulate, and then re-reference when there is a crisis is the way to have my ideas floating around at the time. I’ve had some success driving the architecture I want iteratively, slowly progressing towards my goals by building consensus but I’ve also been owned by VPs and directors that are much better at politics than I am. Having the library of 1 pagers, sending them around so they are latently in the air, and waiting for the impetus to execute on that idea has been much more successful.
- elevatortrim 1y agoDo you mean if 1-pagers helped you get recognition and advance your career, or if they helped your ideas come to life?
- MarkMarine 1y agoThey helped my ideas be “lying around” and picked from when the crisis happened. In the source, the author says that when there is a crisis (an outage or similar) management will come to you and ask for help solving the problem and you should already have a solution ready to go. What I’ve found is that you should pre-seed your solutions with 1 pagers. Identify things that need to be improved, changes to solve tomorrow’s problems and just take the extra step of writing a 1 pager about it and circulate it. Then when the problem happens that your solution fixes, your fix is already there ready to be fully fleshed out.
- anon84873628 1y agoAbsolutely! I thought this was inherent in the Staff Engineer position in the first place, so was sort of surprised it needed to be stated in the article.
- posix86 1y agoThe biggest political capital that you can build up is your technical understanding & skills. But they are only useful insofar as you put them into the context of the broader company strategy. Giving appropriate advice, and delivering, in the interest of the company, will give you capital, i.e., people listening to you & relying on you, trusting you, which gives you power to steer. Preparing contingency plans & pitching then, then executing them, is the best way.
- codazoda 1y ago> Preparing contingency plans & pitching then, then executing them, is the best way I’m interested in hearing more about how you execute on this. Where/how do you keep your plans in wait?
- posix86 1y agoDepends on the scope. Simple things might be docstrings or sections in READMEs, bigger things issues/tickets or a page on Notion/Google Docs or whatever you use; overview there or in your head. The crucial mindset imo is that you're trying to do something that's already useful. At the time you write these things, you're probably more familiar with the topic at hand than anyone else in the company; try to leverage that into writing a document that someone else (or yourself in the future) can save time once they actually execute what you write by getting faster to the point where you're at right now. E.g. from the article, rewriting a js package structure in vite; think through implications and potential hurdles you already have a solution for. They're useful in almost all outcomes. If they won't be executed, at least you know why (e.g. too complicated/effortful), and if they're executed, best case you can improve the company's offerings substantially.
- softwaredoug 1y agoIMO the best you can do: - Ship often to prod (don’t do theoretical work). - Ship wins (as defined by generally acceptable metrics.) - Have someone in management or a PM who is good at selling your wins Even here, though, you will run into problems. There is always a new VP or leader looking to make an impact. Because you maintain the current systems your team is engaging in WrongThink and new VP has shiny new RightThink (AI, etc). As soon as your code hits prod you have “legacy” code. New VP can make promises of future, theoretical riches that you can’t compete with, as you maintain the boring, current reality. Reality is not sexy or interesting. You’re in the old guard now. A lot simply boils down to patronage. Making your higher up VP look successful and being in a position to move with them to their new company.
- gjgtcbkj 1y agoThis could not be more true, however the id like to add the patronage goes farther up the chain. They are all just saying want they need to to clear the checks. It an executive has ever actually invented a successful business model I have yet to meet one.
- jakeydus 1y agoOh they have invented a successful business model, it's just that it's successful for those in executive positions. The whole C-suite mentality is as successful for execs as it is cancerous for everyone else.
- Aurornis 1y ago> - Have someone in management or a PM who is good at selling your wins Looking back on my career, one of the single biggest changes I could have made to improve my success was escaping teams with bad PMs as fast as possible. Great PMs improve everything, but they're hard to find. I spent too much time sticking around on teams where bad PMs were driving us in the wrong direction and failing to interface effectively with the rest of the management team. As soon as something changed that removed those PMs from the situation, everything improved.
- 1y ago
- apwell23 1y agoglad to see someone being real and not parroting infuriating "politics is just learning how to interact with other humans narrative" . politics at work isn't any different than any other politics. Its not a spl breed of politics thats more pure and noble. succeeding at workplace politics requires the same skills of identifying who to suck up to, who to eliminate and who can be trampled over to get where you want.
- johnfn 1y agoA lot of the frustration I typically hear in this camp is something like “well I shipped a huge refactor that cleaned up all the code, why does no one appreciate that?” One particular interaction that got me thinking was a few years ago listening to an acquaintance telling me how he spent months meticulously cleaning up the data pipeline and making it perfect, and how no one appreciated this work. Like, as an engineer, I don’t doubt that this work is valuable. But you have to imagine what it must sound like from the perspective of a PM or EM. Itd be like my PM saying “I spent the last month organizing all eng docs to be properly formatted with bullet points.” You’d be like, uhh, okay, but how does that affect the rest of the company? More importantly, how does the PM distinguish engineers who are doing impactful work from the engineers who are doing the “bullet point formatting” work, of which surely some exist? From the perspective of a PM, these types of work can be hard to tell apart. Really what you want to do is articulate what you plan to do, ahead of time, in a way that actually clicks for non-technical people. For instance, I was pushing unit tests and integration tests at my company for years but never found the political will to make them a priority. I tried and tried, but my manager just wouldn’t see it. Eventually, there was a really bad SEV, and I told her that tests would prevent this sort of thing from happening again. At that point the value became obvious. Now we have tests, and more importantly, everyone understands how valuable they are.
- andrew_lettuce 1y agoI think what you're describing is communicating the value in terms that the audience understands and appreciates. This is really a sales skill and most developers have little experience or recognize it as such. A good manager can help here, and I agree that a strongly aligned staff dev and engineering manager can accomplish a lot. That's been my experience and I'm always grateful for devs who work this way too.
- jlund-molfese 1y agoI agree! You have to also remember that, if you're the person pushing for something to be priority, it's your job to make it make sense to whoever is responsible for prioritization. The easiest way to do that is to speak the same language everyone else is. Your product manager probably speaks in dollars (or euros, renminbi, etc). If you provide a good-faith estimate (ballpark ranges are totally fine) that increased test coverage or whatever your technical objective is will cost 200 dev hours, and save 400 dev hours on an annual basis, or reduce the rate of support tickets by 15%, or allow for X future business scenario to be supported or whatever, you'll generally have way better luck. My favorite "trick" is taking tech debt work, and framing it in a way so, not only do I not have to push for it as "tech work", but my PM will actually put it on the roadmap proactively because it just makes sense from a business perspective. It also gets easier over time. You might get some skepticism at first, but if you have a history of delivering accurate estimates and results over months or years, you'll build trust with stakeholders such that what might've taken a round of meetings to convince them before, can now be a 10-minute conversation.
- apwell23 1y ago> The easiest way is to actively work to make a high-profile project successful. This is more or less what you ought to be doing anyway, just as part of your ordinary job this involves you getting a chance to work on it in the first place. why would you in particular be getting to work on those projects? you have to first align yourself with VP and become their bitch. someone who they can trust. you should always follow prison strategy of finding the biggest bully in the yard and becoming their bitch. only then you get to even sniff work thats important. don't even think that you will be given important projects if you show off your technical acumen and skills. that strategy usually backfires and puts a target on your back both from ur peers and superiors who now see you as a threat. just remember ppl who got into managment positions have no technical skills anymore and are highly insecure of that fact. they will murder you if they even have a little bit of inkling that you are someone who is technically proficient that can drive projects with little help.
- yinser 1y agoYou should consider finding a career coach, professional therapist. This level of pessimism can't be healthy.
- apwell23 1y agowhy? i got director level by following those strategies. nor am i depressed. perhaps you are commenting about language in my post?
- latchup 1y agoIs that a moon? No, that's your survivorship bias! Jokes aside, congratulations on slipping and falling up the summit, collecting not a single bruise to your ego or soul along the way. I am genuinely happy for you.
- cindyllm 1y ago[dead]
- josfredo 1y agoIt is interesting to notice that when the goal is considered positive by a large enough percentage, the act is named "influence". Whereas when the goal is considered selfish and against the common good, the act is named "manipulation".
- zwaps 1y agoThere is a career book that makes a lot of good but extreme points. One of them is: technical ability is actively detrimental to your power and career. You have to spend time and energy on actually doing things, and every competent manager will do their best to keep you right where you are, with as little political influence as possible. Conversely, as a manager, so the book says, you want to avoid actually doing anything. You should start initiatives -as many as you can- and deftly use your political capital to either own, disown, or weaponize them. Whether they succeed in creating value is irrelevant, certainly not something you should focus on. People focused on success and value of initiatives are still working hard when you have moved on. These people are hopelessly behind the scheming manager, eating crumbs. And if necessary, you the manager just claim credit retroactively.
- marcinzm 1y agoI slightly disagree. Managers aiming to move up the political chain are very much happy to give political influence to those that will publicly and privately support the manager's own political goals. They want to be pushed up from below and pulled up from above. Managers that are coasting won't because they don't want competition from below. Engineers often can't tell the two apart, and have too much ego to not publicly and privately make their manager look bad.
- procaryote 1y agoI am sure these techniques are effective; but they're disingenious and self serving. If I see a staff engineer consistently trying to latch onto company initiatives and strategy goals to get funding for their pet project, I would like to fire them Why not try to actually solve the issues, and spend the politics budget on making sure people noticed? Even if you failed on the politics thing you've at least done something useful
- anon84873628 1y agoYou're implying that the pet projects don't align to the goals. If the person is actually technically competent and has good ideas, then it won't be much of a stretch to justify why the project is relevant. Unless the new initiative is really a complete 180. High level engineers should be looking ahead and predicting what projects will be needed based on technical weak spots or market trends.
- byte_surgeon 1y agoInteresting article. I think ideas also need to mature in people's minds. That can take a long time. And when the right timing comes, people might come back to your idea.
- teiferer 1y ago> Scheming takes practice and power If that's how your workplace works, then find a new one. Call me naive, but not all companies work like that. (Mine doesn't.)
- byte_surgeon 1y agoInteresting articles. I think ideas also need to mature in peoples minds. That can take a long time. And when the right timing comes, people might come back to your idea. Of course that will not always work.
- fogzen 1y agoAll great advice. But I wish I had spent more time asking myself whether I should spend my life eating crap and kissing someone’s butt in order to further someone else’s ambitions. You can play the game, but ask yourself if that’s the game you want to be playing. I’m wary of people who seem happy to make themselves slaves to money no matter the human cost.
- martin-t 1y agoPeople should collectively own the companies they work for. The people doing actual real work often have a much clearer picture of what's a good or bad idea. Meanwhile management, let alone owners, are looking to either a) maximize short term profits (because they intend to be somewhere else by the time the bad decisions manifest) or b) create infinite growth from finite resources (but they still intend to sell when the peak is reached). Customers, workers, management and owners have wildly different incentives. And only customers and workers have incentives that lead to long term prosperity - building value (indirectly) from natural resources and human time. Management and owners don't build anything, their incentives are redistributing the created value, ideally so as much as possible goes to them.
- braiamp 1y ago> The easiest way is to actively work to make a high-profile project successful Oh, my sweet summer child. Do you really believe that I would be allowed to be able to make a high profile project successful? I literally have been sidelined of many high-profile projects were they failed in the precise way I said it would fail if continuing the path we were on which is caused by actively working to make it successful. Telling your boss they are wrong and why tend to not work when your boss already have an idea on its head about how it will work.
- oh_fiddlesticks 1y ago>The easiest way is to actively work to make a high-profile project successful. Reminded me of Proverbs 22:29 "Have you seen a man skillful at his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before common men."
- poisonborz 1y agoI wish there were more articles on this topic. Politics is always something engineers have to suffer because, not a part of life in a way they could actively utilise, even though they are the core business-forming part of the lower ranking workforce.
- rzz3 1y ago>Powerful stakeholders are typically so stupid and dysfunctional that it’s effectively impossible for you to identify their needs and deliver solutions to them I’m sorry, WHAT? How old is this author? “I fail to communicate effectively with anyone who isn’t an engineer because I lack the required empathy and perspective” is very different from “the average stakeholder is stupid and dysfunctional”. I stopped reading at this point because author is clearly someone who doesn’t take responsibility for their own failures in communication.
- anon84873628 1y agoThe preceding paragraph says software engineers *believe* these things and has a footnote referencing HN discussion. Thus my interpretation is that those points are examples of the extreme, often false stereotypes people believe. They are the mistaken position against which the author is arguing.
- rustystump 1y agoI think this article completely misses a critical point at staff level, being a force multiplier cross functionally. Api is slow, api wasnt being gzipd, good snack, give snack to other eng, find more snack. Oh look product doesnt have metric, get product the metric, now team look good because boss see what team do.
- bdangubic 1y agoI build my entire career doing exactly this and after three decades in the industry, last one as a contractor, this is one of the very core things I do…
- quacked 1y agoAll good advice; I would also advise doing whatever is possible to be considered personally useful by very important executive staff that you like personally, even if it means doing jobs that are trivial but showy for non-technical users (like dashboards). Once they like and trust you, pitch them an actually good idea that they can take credit for at the right time.
- firesteelrain 1y agoMy advice is to spend it where it matters. I took over a data center project. It’s really a software development environment. They implemented istio when nginx would have worked just fine. Only needed ingress controller and nothing crazy for what this is. There is a VM that runs nginx and it is the reverse proxy for Atlassian tools running in VMs. But we have NSX-T which can handle this so no need for a separate nginx reverse proxy. Point is my predecessors made things too complicated by chasing shiny things instead of using what is native in our environment to get the job done and simple maintenance
- riazrizvi 1y ago> It is simply a fact that software engineers are tools in the political game being played at large companies, not players in their own right. I like this truth. Talent is mostly a zero-sum game against your time. You can’t be great at playing politics unless you have the time in your role to focus on that, and software engineers are paid to be code mules.
- imiric 1y agoPolitics in the workplace is exhausting. I refuse to play these games, which is probably to my own detriment. I shouldn't need to promote and sell my ideas to anyone. I'm paid to provide my skills and ideas, and if the people around me don't find them valuable, that's on them. I'd rather move on to places that do value them, than engage in politics. > Some program of work will be funded whether you do this or not. However, if you don’t do this, you have no control over what that program is. Why would I want control over that? I share my technical opinion, and it's up to the team or higher-ups to decide which direction to go in. Besides, who says that my opinion is correct, anyway? It should be held to the same level of scrutiny as anyone else's. This idea that engineers should constantly push for their ideas to be implemented, and to take on projects with the highest visibility, is incredibly toxic. It leads to a culture of obsession over KPIs, OKRs, and other pointless metrics, where people prioritize work that looks good on their record when it's time for a promotion, rather than doing work that has a positive impact on the product, no matter how small. It's all a theater, and I refuse to have any part in it.
- EdwardDiego 1y ago> A slightly harder way (but one that gives you more control) is to make your pet idea available for an existing political campaign. I have become very good at hitching my wagon to passing VP trains, it's sad, but it works.
- AbbeFaria 1y agoI work at MSFT. Everything the author says is 100% true not only at MSFT but probably at every Mag-7 company. It’s also the same reason why MSFT doesn’t have a blockbuster AI product. 1. At work or for personal use, I use GPT-5 or Claude Code. I am forced to use Copilot because that has access to internal company data but it’s nowhere close to GPT-5 or Claude. 2. MSFT open sourced VS code but on its own couldn’t engineer products like Cursor or Windsurf. Lets leave aside the economics of these products for now. The regular down in the trenches engineer like myself is so busy thinking about how I can advance my career by playing political games, currying favour with my manager or manager’s manager that little time gets spent on product building. Good thing MSFT has all the cash in the world to invest in companies like OAI, GitHub etc because the bureaucracy is stifling at MSFT.
- weinzierl 1y agoThis is good advice but it has one flaw that makes it unrealistic for most software engineers. "Scheming takes practice and power, and neither of those things are available to software engineers." Most of us are terrible at scheming not only, not even primarily, because of a lack of practice. It is a lack a of information. All the advice from the article assumes you know what the people above you really want. Reliable information about this is the precondition for blatant scheming as well as the subtle influencing the article promotes, yet is the hardest part to achieve. Make a mistake their and you'll actively hurt your career. Hiding your real motives is a main part of politics and you should expect that anyone above you will do it to some degree. Navigating that well is simply not in the skill set of most technical peope who generally appreciate openness.
- phaser 1y agoUnfortunately and with the pain of my soul, after 10 years working in start ups, I have to admit that yes, the truth is that politics matters and matters much more than good engineering, that is something that I have learned the hard way. And it’s the only reason I’m considering leaving the game completely, as soon as I have enough economic freedom. > Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. I have confirmed that this is true, and a useful mental model to be successful in the world of start-ups, but also describes very well the opportunity seized by certain historic character of 1930s Europe.
- sporkland 1y agoAs someone that has influenced company politics as an independent contributor (non-manager) repeatedly, I find you have to go through a lifecycle: 1. When you first join you need to show you can actually accomplish things, likely through code contributions / launching something. 2. After you do that you start becoming part of conversations and can start influencing directly. The key here is problem identification and bringing useful independent data. Whether we like it or not managers have built in leadership authority, IC's have to establish it by above, so usually the leadership group is dominated by managers, but if you can bring useful technical data / solutions and become a "voice of the people" if you will that lets managers not have to dig in and solve every problem you will start influencing politics. Where I see a lot of folks fall down: 1. Focus on problems that aren't attached to either important issues: tabs vs spaces isn't gonna sink the company. If you start getting triggered about a technical thing and can't explain the impact in terms of availability, cost, productivity you'll quickly get tuned out. That isn't to say the work isn't important, it's just not workable at the political level, you just gotta fix it through influence with other IC's. 2. Inability to explain how the problem is attached to important issues: Similar to above, even if it's a real problem the ability to craft a narrative so the managers and other leaders can connect it up to real value that they'll see. 3. Discomfort with taking risks: No important problem / political problem is without risks / gaps, either in terms of timeline, impact, decision paralysis (as there are truly multiple ways to skin a cat). If you need 100% certainty to kick into gear it'll be hard to influence at the top levels as it often requires taking decisions and the inherent risks involved in signing up for those outcomes.
- veep33 1y agoAppreciate this discussion. I worked 15yrs in large tech companies as a software engineer and felt like a pawn always. Engineers have a hard task - building and maintaining code is a high focus activity, leaving no time for scheming. Meanwhile the non technical people have all the free time and use it wrongly on scheming. With vibe coding, perhaps this dynamic can shift. In the early days of the software industry there weren't these many non technical people running the show. I appreciate the authors workarounds but shouldn't the larger question be whether this is the correct way to run a company?
- valeriaortiz 1y ago[dead]