Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
Many software engineers at large tech firms describe their roles as increasingly “performative,” focused on visibility, meetings, and promotion games rather than shipping meaningful products. Commenters link this to bureaucracy, misaligned incentives, and weak productivity metrics, citing examples from FAANG-style companies, Twitter’s post-layoff stability, and promotion systems that reward narrative over impact. Others argue that coordination work, 1:1s, and organizational “slack” are necessary at scale, suggesting the real issue is not that these roles exist but how effectively they are carried out and aligned with customer value.
Extent of Performative / “Bullshit” Work
- Many commenters say large corporate SWE jobs (including big tech) feel heavily performative or “bullshit,” with lots of compliance, rituals, and work that is never used or later scrapped.
- Others caution this is often engineers’ arrogance: just because you don’t understand or see the impact doesn’t mean the work is useless.
- Some note entire careers built on being brought in to replace months of ineffective “work” that delivered nothing.
Bureaucracy, Incentives, and Organizational “Laws”
- Multiple references to bureaucracy expanding for its own sake (Pournelle, Parkinson, “purpose of a system is what it does,” Price’s law, Pareto, Ringelmann).
- Large orgs naturally accumulate layers of admin, process, and “paper shuffling,” often shifting focus from serving customers to preserving the organization.
- Promotions and performance systems that reward novelty, visibility, and “impact narratives” drive project thrash and performative behavior.
Productivity Distribution & Measurement
- Strong belief that a minority (often ~20% or less) does most of the real work, though numbers are anecdotal.
- LOC, PR counts, and other simplistic metrics are criticized as gameable and misaligned.
- Distinction between:
- Doing technically solid work that never ships or has no users.
- Doing visible “impact” work that’s actually negative or pure tech debt.
Small vs Large Companies / Startups vs FAANG
- Small teams are described as more directly impactful but still subject to variance and founder/VC pathologies.
- Big companies offer stability, benefits, and “slack,” but also bloat, slow delivery, and demoralization for high-agency engineers.
- Some see big firms partly as middle‑class “welfare systems” or “purpose factories” as much as value-creation machines.
Twitter/X Layoffs as Case Study
- Debate over what massive staff cuts revealed:
- One side: proof that thousands were unnecessary to keep the site up.
- Other side: uptime is the wrong metric; revenue, growth, and long-term maintainability suffered, and headcount has been re‑expanded.
1:1s and Meeting Culture
- Deep split on 1:1s:
- Pro: essential for surfacing blockers, morale issues, career talks, and cross-team coordination; especially needed at scale.
- Con: often devolve into status updates, forced chit‑chat, and calendar-filling rituals that delay real communication and feel purely performative.
- Broader skepticism about recurring meetings, standups, and “agile” ceremonies when they become ends in themselves.
Management, Coordination, and “Real Work”
- Some argue engineers underrate coordination, admin, and good PM work that clears politics and process so builders can focus.
- Others say middle management and “org leadership” are where most performative work lives, with politics and narrative-spinning dominating.
- General consensus that as org size grows, coordination and bureaucracy costs rise nonlinearly and are hard to avoid.
Coping Strategies and Career Choices
- Responses include: seeking small teams, staying IC and avoiding ladders, doing startups, or accepting the performative aspects as the “cost” of salary and stability.
- Several note significant psychological toll from doing obviously meaningless work, even when pay is high.