Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

Hacker News Discussion ↗

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.