alt Hacker NewsThe personal account makes a lot of sense, although I could easily see why the OP was not successful. Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator.
The second thing is that this series of blog posts (whether true or not, but still believable) provides a good introduction to vibe coders. These are people who have not written a single line of code themselves and have not worked on any system at scale, yet believe that coding is somehow magically "solved" due to LLMs.
Writing the actual code itself (fully or partially) maybe yes. But understanding the complexity of the system and working with organisational structures that support it is a completely different ball game.
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> Even if you are an excellent engineer, making people do things, accept ideas, and in general hear you requires a completely different skill altogether - basically being a good communicator.
I was thinking like this for a while but, now, I think this expectation is majorly false for a senior individual contributor. Especially when someone who can push out a detailed series of blogposts and has tried step-wise escalation.
Communication is a two-way street. Unlike the individual contributors, the management is responsible for listening and responding to risk assesments by the senior members and also ensuring that the technical competence and experienced people are retained in a tech company. If a leader doesn't want to keep an open ear, they do not belong there. If there is a huge attrition of highly senior people from non-finalized projects, you do not belong leadership either. Both cases are mentioned in the article.
Unfortunately our socioeconomic and political culture in the West has increasingly removed responsibilities and liabilities from the leadership of the companies. This causes people with lackluster technical, communication and risk assesment mentality being promoted into leadership positions.
So outside of a couple completely privately owned companies or exceptionally well organized NGOs, it will be increasingly difficult to find good leaders.
OP was not successful because they didn't want to fix the problems he discussed. I have been in the same exact situation, and no level of communication skills would have been successful in changing their minds.
Even before vide coding this problem existed.
The truth is, only small companies build good stuff. Once a company becomes big enough, the main product that it originally started on is the only good thing that is worth buying from them - all new ventures are bound to be shit, because you are never going to convince people to break out of status quo work patterns that work for the rest of the company.
The only exception to this has been Google, which seems to isolate the individual sectors a lot more and let them have more autonomy, with less focus on revenue.
Absolutely textbook "Brilliant Jerk". Dude just whines and whines and whines. If you're so good, why can't you get anybody to work with you?
I disagree.
I've worked on honing my communication skills for 20 years in this industry. Every time I have failed to get the desired result, I have gone back to the drawing board to understand how I can change how I'm communicating to better convey meaning, urgency, and all that.
After all that I've finally had an epiphany. They simply don't care. They don't care about quality, about efficiency, about security. They don't care about their users, their employees, they don't care about the long term health of the company. None of it. Engineers who do care will burn out trying to "do their job" in the face of management that doesn't care.
It's getting worse in the tech industry. We've reached the stage where leaders are in it only for themselves. The company is just the vehicle. Calls for quality fall on deaf ears these days.