> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really micromanages me.
Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to - with no details - or put “bench” - again with no details.
Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer review system.
In my experience, having to track my hours absolutely destroys my performance. Thinking about how I need to pay attention to how long I spend on everything is a constant distraction in the back of my head while I try to do anything useful, and then I spend the rest of the day procrastinating having to fill out the paperwork. I know I'm not the only one because the entire dev staff was ready to mutiny the last time I was at a company that tried to get devs to start tracking their hours.
Exactly. For consulting company, you have to track how much time you spent on a project. I am allocated for a project for 100% for a week, sure we are going to bill for that week. But we don’t get paid until the project requirements are met. The client isn’t going to audit every hour. They are going to sign off based on results.
I’ll keep Jira updated at the end of the day because the PMO organization needs that for tracking and even we need that for coordination. But I am going to put in 40 hours at the end of the week.
No I’m not going to track hours I spent on internal meetings, conducting interviews and the other internal minutiae that takes up my day.
The company only makes money when I’m billing a client - that’s what I’m tracking - my results. Is the company making money on me and am I getting positive feedback from sales, my teammates and the customer.
Nope. As far as the client is concerned, payment is delayed until the requirements are met that were laid out in the statement of work. They could care less how many hours were put in.
I personally have put in extra hours to complete a project for a client that I did the proposal for as the SME in the technology because I underestimated. I’m a salaried employee for my consulting company and didn’t get paid extra.
Our consultants in Brazil and Mexico though while they also don’t have to track their hours for our benefit. They have to get approved to work over 8 hours a day because of labor laws in those countries. I can imagine that if they might do more granular tracking so they can justify the need to work (and get paid) for more hours.
As a team lead, I’m just going to track Jira stories being done on time if I need to be on the approval chain.
I have heard about projects at my current company where we have to give the client free work because the requirements weren’t met within the time allotted. I’m sure there were internal retrospectives where we had to go through our Jira board and see why stories were mis estimated or whether sales underestimated.
But even that falls on the implementation side because one of the staff consultants or engineering manager has to sign off on an SoW before it goes to the client.
Even during the retrospective, no one is trawling through Salesforce for details. We are looking at Jira.
I’m not saying we don’t track work output. I am saying we aren’t tracking granularly in our time tracking system that is only for billing clients. No one is expecting us to track every hour.
Usually that only works in Time-and-Material projects, and where management does a hard line with the original SOW, and the final delivery actually matches the original SOW.
When they don't, there are those hardliners that want a justification what they were paying for.
This is true. The three consulting companies/departments I have worked for have had T&M projects that are SOW based and staff augmentation projects.
I said in another reply (don’t remember whether it was to you or not) that I avoid staff augmentation projects for a lot of reasons.
But if you are in consulting and doing SoW based work, it’s a dereliction of duty by your tech lead not to insist on signed change order if the requirements veer materially from the SOW. It puts your company at risk of not being paid and/or having to do free work.
In my experience "just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to" matches folks expectations.
However.
If you're ever on a project that doesn't turn out so well, it may suddenly become critical to account for all work done during every billed hour in detail.
I would advise all consultants to track their time diligently and completely.
That’s part of the project management tracking but that’s not strictly hours.
Those traceability artifacts are in order
1. the signed statement of work - this is the contract that is legally binding.
2. The project kick off meeting where we agree on the mechanics of the project and a high level understanding of the expectations
3. Recorded, transcribed and these days using Gong to summarize the meetings, deep dive discovery sessions.
4. A video recorded approvals of the design proposals as I am walking through it.
5. A shared Jira backlog that I create and walk through them with it throughout the project
6. A shared decision log recording what decisions were made and who on the client side made them.
7. A handoff - also video recorded where the client says they are good going forward.
I lead 2-7 or do it all myself depending on the size of the project.
At no point am I going to say or expect anyone on my project to say they spent 4 hours on Tuesday writing Terraform.
But then again, my number one rule about consulting that I refuse to break is that I don’t do staff augmentation. I want to work on a contract with requirements and a “definition of done”. I control the execution of the project and the “how” within limits.
I want to be judged on outcomes not how many jira tickets I closed.
When I was at AWS I worked with a client that directly hired a former laid off ProServe L6 consultant. He was very much forced into staff augmentation where he did have to track everything he did by the hour.
You could tell he thought that was the fifth level of hell going from strategy consulting to staff augmentation. It paid decently. But he was definitely looking and I recommended him as a staff consultant at my current company (full time direct hire)
FWIW: I specialize in cloud + app dev - “application modernization”
In my experience, that’s only if you are doing a staff augmentation type consulting. I absolutely refuse to be on a project where the client controls the project and the company I’m working for isn’t just giving high level businsss requirements status updates.
I will not touch a staff augmentation project - ever.
I only work on projects that for all intents and purposes are fixed fee projects where we sign a contract promising that we will deliver x for $y.
In some level of granularity, we track what stories are complete in Jira and alarm bells go off if the burn down isn’t trending correctly. But we aren’t logging every hour we spent in Salesforce.
This was true when I was working in the consulting department at AWS (ProServe) and is true now at a 3rd party AWS partner.
Lucky you, I have done that regardless of the project type, when the client wasn't happy with the x for $y delivery, and delays payments until having their beloved Excel sheets.
I have also had to provide technical support in escalation meetings, predating delivery of said sheets.
Because customers tend to want to map why the Ferrari they asked for is a Fiat with bandages, given the fixed price budget, and thus want to map each requirement to the work time spent on it, and expensed budget.
Then comes all the argumentation why all those hours were required for each item, due to project delivery challenges on either sides, decisions that would require even more work, needless efforts spent in stuff we shouldn't have done as part of fixed price, and so forth.
You did see the part about the four year stint at BigTech in between? Unless you think the second largest employee in the US is a “small little company”.
I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference between how he didn’t really seem to need to prove his “impact”?
Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)
> In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers.
> I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don’t need your VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to need your tools.
> When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP, “We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without Perfetto”, that statement carries immense weight. It travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.
Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of visibility.
The question I’m trying to answer is why are keeping metrics important at all?
From my experience working on and being the third highest contributor to what was a very popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche, we kept metrics because we had to justify why it should it exist and why should we keep getting resources for it. This is the same reason that the Google Staff engineer that was in the linked article did it for his project.
The next reason is that to get promoted and to have something to put on your promo doc, you need to show “impact”.
But when you are at a staff level and no longer chasing promotions, it becomes perfunctory. You do it just because you are suppose to and do the bare minimum to check it off the list and stay in compliance. But everyone if any importance knows you.
That’s true at BigTech to my 1000+ company. No one from the C suite is wondering who employees #13545 is or what I have accomplished whether or not I go into details.
However I do make sure I get peer feedback from everyone that I work with officially or if I go the extra mile for them. I asked my manager do I need to record my goals for the year. He kind of shrugged and asked me was I trying to get promoted to a director or something (a manager role would be a horizontal move). I said “no”. he said not really.
I keep a personal career document just in case I need to prepare to interview because I stay ready to interview - I have for almost 20 years. I have been working for 30.
Then back to my minor criticism. It’s not like at a staff level once you have accomplished a lot and built up a network, you are going to be blindly submitting your resume to a job you found on Indeed. At that point your resume is just something to put in the ATS as part of the hiring process. But no one in the hiring prices is going to look at it. They are already targeting you to work there.
I had a director who was a former coworker at a well known non tech company basically offer to create a job just for me because he needed someone who he could trust. I’m not special, I just have a decent network and made a positive impression on a few people
Exactly this. I’m still friends with my former manager at AWS who is now an L7 “very important person” over a service there and another former coworker who is a tech lead over another service. He’s an L6. I can guarantee you neither of them are being micromanaged and have mostly autonomy. I’m sure they have to deal with OP1 goals (? It’s been awhile I think that’s the term).
Hell I was a lowly L5 consultant who they only entrusted to small projects and slices over larger projects (fair I only had 2 years of AWS experience at the time) and no one micromanaged me as long as I was doing my job. I flew out to customers sites by myself to lead work and my manager rarely knew what I was doing. I would go weeks without talking to him.
Contrary to the usual opinion on HN, this provides a good reason to do an MBA!
You should learn enough economics that if you are even a bit insightful you will avoid Econ 101 thinking, you will learn about things like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and a lot of other things relevant to management.
My MBA program mentioned in passing intrinsic / extrinsic motivation in the Ethics class - which in my program did not even have a final exam :).
Most of the time was spent on cost cutting, customer vs producer surplus, profit margins, efficient markets theory, lots marketing, lots of "the purpose of a commercial enterprise is to make money for its owner" said in different ways, and maybe some operations analysis.
Damned is this industry, when even _you_ say you have to show that "remoteness works".
I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
I have more respect for him because he chose to do this. It’s probably clear that he doesn’t have to, at all. But he’s choosing not to rely on his (somewhat) tech celebrity status and deliver on measurable outcomes.
Not that I've ever been especially religious about it but it's probably a good thing to keep track of activities, especially those that directly affect customers. It's pretty easy/low-effort and is useful to be able to pull out.
Do you have a particularly easy way to track or are you kind of doing the same thing as consultant and logging your dailies? Always drove me a bit crazy having to do that admin piece every day.
If only I had known that in the past, I even once received the completely wrong advice to "not stand out, since your work will speak for itself and you will get recognition".
(Fancy US tech companies like to be very selective, have a competitive mindset, hire "the best" according to their filters, and then want people to show how amazing they are, uu, so much impact, woah... and in effect people need to constantly manage upwards.
While in many other companies, or "orgs", having a good team cohesion is more important. To blend in a bit, get accepted even if it means foregoing some ambition.)
Having good team cohesion is all well and good. But when it’s time to get promoted, what are you going to say “I pulled well defined Jira tickets off the board”?
When you get ready to interview for your n+1 job, and you spent months grinding leetCode and practicing reversing a btree on the white board, get to the behavioral interview and I ask “what accomplishment are you most proud of?”, what are you going to say “I worked with my team and we together closed 20 story points a week”?
I have given the thumbs down to a lot of candidates this year alone who couldn’t discuss something that they took ownership of or where they stood out.
Exactly, I can’t imagine that a “senior” developer needs to track everything that carefully. Hell I work at a consulting company full time as a staff consultant where we do have to record hours and I don’t go into any detail whether I’m on or off a project.
It’s more that it takes so long to get anything done, the effort and results need to be recorded because it most often won’t be obvious from the impact. It’s hard to make a splash on a production system maintained by 30 other people, but you can usually make things better, but it won’t always be obvious.
I guess they don’t know how or don’t bother to evaluate people on what they actually contribute? Just number of meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
Meetings by themselves are worthless. Similar to how having an idea for something isn't intrinsically valuable. I argue, meetings can't be actual contributions because the real state, the code/hardware/etc, of your project hasn't change. The result of the meeting, what people actually do afterwards due to what was discussed, is all that matters. In which case, it isn't the meeting that was the contribution, it was the artifacts that were created afterwards (documents, jira project tasks, code, etc) that are the contribution.
When we view meetings as actual contribution, we're really just valuing people doing effectively nothing. For example, anyone who's job is just to take meetings, and nothing else, is worthless IMO. You need to tangibly create something afterwards. This is a problem with big tech (which the company I work for is one of), it rewards people shuffling papers around, especially senior+ engineers, instead of valuing real work they should be doing.
Senior+ engineers have also deluded themselves into thinking that they shouldn't be coding, and rather their real work is creating endless amount of superfluous documents and creating as many cross team meetings as possible, rather than doing the hard work of creating an actual product.
Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B. Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit really mean?
Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare *that*.
200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.
People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.
> People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you.
Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it. Not without flaws, of course, but preferable to chasing a made-up metric. It's arguably the entire point of a manager, to know what their employees are doing at a high level. We managed to do this for hundreds of years without needing shiny dashboards and counting every meeting attended.
Metrics have their place as well, of course, but they should be one data point, and should not be chased after so religiously that recording the metrics becomes significant work on its own.
>Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it
"My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?"
"My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
"My manager keeps hiring only people of their race and playing favorites with them, what do I do?"
"Coworker X gave me a bad review because I wouldn't go on a date with them"
Even in the best case it biases heavily towards the people most enthusiastic about selling an image of themselves rather than those who are necessarily contributing.
Relying on someone's perception/vouching for you rather than performance metrics can be an absolute disaster - for the people involved and for the company if it turns into a lawsuit.
> My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
There may be legitimate cases but if someone runs into these issues often, may be its just excuses for bad performance. If the issue is genuine, find out what your specific organization can do about the situation and resolve it within that framework or find a better manager.
No amount of metrics are gonna help if you are going against a hostile manager, team or leadership.
These are all pretty extreme cases that apply if your managers/coworkers are horrible people. Most people are thankfully, as a rule, pretty normal.
Obviously discrimination exists, which is why metrics should still be used (as data points) and why larger companies need an oversight process.
Turning ourselves into automatons, promoting and praising people exclusively based on some arbitrary set of numbers, just to try and make it fairer, won't lead to a happier or genuinely fairer workplace. At the end of the day, most jobs relevant to HN are complicated and explicitly involve a lot of human interaction. You need humans to judge performance in human-interaction jobs.
If there's one person in a team discriminating unfairly, that should be pretty obvious if they're the only one objecting while everyone else thinks an employee is doing a fine job.
If the entire team is discriminatory, then as the sibling comment said, metrics aren't really going to save you either, they will find a way to push their will through. And that is probably a horrible place to work that won't be made more palatable by being promoted.
Again, I'm not saying these aren't real issues, but relying solely on metrics is not the solution. You need both qualitative and quantitative data for a healthy environment and to make good decisions. Just because some humans are bad people doesn't mean the solution is to become inhuman altogether.
"everybody else" doesn't scale. If you have 10 people, that's 90 reviews to be written. No one's going to go into much detail, and in general you get a culture of only saying nice things so that others only say nice things about them.
Seems like a skill issue, my friend, not sure what to say.
Again, we managed to do this for literal centuries without needing to turn workplaces into metrics-obsessed assembly lines. A manager should know what's going on in their team and should know who's doing well. It's kind of the whole point of being a manager.
For most of human history we didn't have organizations of hundreds, much less tens of thousands. When we did they were rife with nepotism, classism, brownnosing, racism, and more. We aim to do better these days, which is a hard problem.
Most of human history, sure, but I'm talking about the last few centuries. We've had plenty of organizations of that size; corporations, governments, militaries.
But why on Earth is the total size of the organization relevant? That's the whole point of a hierarchical design, one manager just needs to know the people or abstracted teams that sit below them. Even in a "modern" org there's nobody sitting looking at a spreadsheet of 200k employees going "gee how will I figure out who to promote, better sort descending by lines of code written".
And yes, we've been talking in circles at this point. I agree a fully vibes based "promote who you feel like" approach has all those flaws, which is why I'm saying you need both quantitative and qualitative data. But in general qualitative should hold slightly more weight in complex, non-linear, interaction-heavy jobs like engineering, because it's hard if not impossible to find fair metrics for literally everything an employee possibly does.
Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them.
"What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.
"What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful griping.
Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them.
"All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.
My whole point here is that "doing whatever bullshit makes you feel good" is not necessarily the better option. Either you can prove that it's worth something, in which case you will not have to ask "What's your proposal?" because people won't complain about it, or you're just doing something for the sake of doing something, and your only recourse when people show you that it's bullshit is to get defensive.
> If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave.
And if you don't identify good performers properly and don't reward them, they will leave as well.
A pragmatic approach is to reward your team, as a team. If you go with "we fire the lowest 10% every year because there have to be low performers", you're creating an adversarial situation. Wanna know what happens if you're my manager in an adversarial context? Easy: I will be an adversary. How constructive is that? Not my problem, I did not make the rules.
> One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare that.
Try to assign money/revenue/PR to that and you'll have decent proxy for impact.
Again: what money is attributable to each feature? Are subscriptions up 2% because of the new payment flow or because it's tax refund season? Are they down because of the new UI or because of tariffs? It's not realistic to tell them apart most of the time.
Keeping track of actual value would require actually rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really care about how often you're on time or your meeting attendance record.
Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism.
Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?
Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!
I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
Agreed. There's the additional point that I think many people don't appreciate, which is that those managers and many people lower down in the org chart merely exist because somebody else needs to be responsible for a system or a liability regardless of whether they do anything measurably profitable, and aren't necessarily incentivized to do anything more productively; they're just there to take care of it or be blamed if it's not, and have a low ceiling for what that job can possibly be worth with no measurable way to argue for more, and so in the case of managers, try to invent clout-generators at any cost and with no connection to how the assignees might accomplish it.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
Suppose you have a thousand engineers and those thousand engineers generate ten billion dollars in annual profit. How much do they each get paid? They amount they're worth? Nope, the amount they'll accept.
If you live in the US and you have the wherewithal to be an engineer then you could also have been a doctor or a lawyer or some other high paying occupation. And many of those can't be fully remote because they have to see domestic patients or interact in person with local courts or clients. Which means that if you want someone in the US to be your engineer, you need to pay them an amount that makes them want to do that instead of choosing one of those other occupations. Whereas the one in Taiwan doesn't have the option to become a doctor in San Francisco and is therefore willing to accept less money.
So why don't companies just hire exclusively the people in Taiwan? There are all the usual reasons (time zones, language barriers, etc.), but a big one is that they need a thousand engineers. So they and their competitors hire every qualified engineer in Taiwan until Taiwanese engineers reach full employment, at which point the companies still don't have all the engineers they want. And when the average engineer is making the company ten million dollars, paying San Francisco salaries is better than not having enough talent.
So then why doesn't every smart person in Taiwan become an engineer? Because the companies hiring engineers there are only paying Taiwanese wages, and then they're not any better off to do that than to become a doctor or a lawyer in Taiwan. And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers, and then you would only get a modest increase in the number of engineers for a significant increase in compensation. Which is still what happens, but only slowly over time, until the wages in Taiwan ultimately increase enough to no longer be a competitive advantage. And companies don't want to make that happen faster because then they'd have to pay higher salaries in Taiwan.
Not everyone who can be an engineer can also become a doctor or a lawyer. Different requirements and tolls on your mind and work style that aren't interchangeable for everyone.
There are two reasons that doesn't matter. The first is that it's untrue more often than not; plenty of people could do both. And the second is that "doctors and lawyers" are just arbitrary stand ins for high paying domestic jobs. They could also become physicists, commercial airline pilots, Wall St. quants, actuaries, etc.
Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in the world for white collar professions, what other new information do you have that we don't already know?
There is a significant correlation between higher scores on one and higher scores on the other.
> Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
The barrier to either of those professions is getting good grades and then scoring well enough on a standardized test, and the entire premise is that the professions pay well which is how people pay back the loans.
On your original post, you said they pay lower in other places because they can, which I agree with, of course companies will pay as little as they can, because margin on labor is the key profit margin that enables capitalism to function. But I disagree that this is due to efficient markets. Instead I believe it's because corporations can be sociopathic, whereas humans are humans, and come with feelings and flaws. A corporation can for example leverage the human desire for being a part of something larger, or local culture social pressure, to extract more hours of work out of someone than they're contractually obligated to give (see for example Japan or Taiwan working culture). Corporations are immune to these sorts of things so it's a one way, non-market-based street of exploitative behavior. Furthermore of course is the fact that corporations weild far more capital and thus power than individual workers, and will often collude with governments to prevent worker collective bargaining.
Furthermore, I believe your idea applies too much autonomy and collaboration between corporations. Example:
> . And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers
This seems to suggest that companies are colluding to prevent macroeconomic effects such as wage inflation. It's post ipso facto explanation, kind of like when make presumptions with evolutionary sociology: "ADHD people served an important role as guarding early human settlements. Their heightened deep focus and obsession with finding details in noise made them ideal to scan the horizon at night." Assuming evolution is an intelligent designer that made different sorts of humans for serving distinct purposes, rather than the reality that we have different sorts of humans because of entropy, and humans happen to be sentient and can leverage these sorts of diverse manifestations to their advantage sometimes - or perhaps, our society just was built in a way that reflects the reality of different sorts of people existing, either way, thus you have people misattributing purpose to chance.
I feel the same when I hear people make market-based justifications for some economic reality like geographic labor cost diversion. My confusion isn't around why it happens, it's why laborers tolerate it. The Invisible Hand of The Market isn't setting labor rates because it needs to maintain cross-role equilibrium between well defined roles, labor rates are simply, as low as a company can get away with.
Markets aren't efficient. A doctor in Taiwan must study for ten years longer than an engineer, in the USA the same is true but also the doctor must take on potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. In medical school a student must sacrifice both their mental health and social life and dedicate themselves entirely to completing the curriculum. If they fail they're saddled with debt they have no hope of paying (in the USA, Taiwan not so much), and even still, many fail. Then there's residency. Then in the USA you get a relatively high paid job, but also depending on your role, one of the highest stress, highest legal-exposure, highest-stakes jobs on the market. In Taiwan, same, except, the pay isn't even that good! And in the USA, because of the debt and the timeline before productivity, you'd be far better off simply immediately becoming a software engineer out of college and leveraging compound interest to come out at worst at retirement the same place the doctor does. In Taiwan, in the end the engineer will always come out ahead, and have a social life to boot.
In an efficient market, nobody would ever become a doctor. It's not like people determine whether to go through the hell of medical school based on whether they'd make more as an engineer, monitoring shifting salaries year on year as they come up through highschool.
The vast majority of people aren't making their career choice based on compensation. Compensation plays a role, but the vast majority are making choices based on interest, local availability, local culture, their personal experience (people who were strongly affected by a good teacher or therapist are more likely to become a teacher or therapist), and of course their personal capabilities. This is the sort of thing that's irrelevant to a corporation, and an efficient market hypothesis can't account for.
The market is skewed to protect profits since the market, analyzed in aggregate, represents the will of corporations to extract profit against the sloppiness of humans who are motivated by things other than money, and are also sometimes stupid and irrational, and often at a severe information disadvantage. Furthermore sometimes stupid people run corporations so the corps will behave irrationally rather than sociopathically profit driven like they're supposed to.
Rates are lower in Taiwan because it was basically a third world country living under military dictatorship 40 years ago where a ruling class was an invading military force that took land by force and then stumbled upon incredible profits by turning Taiwan into the chip manufacturing hub for the world. The amount of wealth flowing into Taiwan is astonishing but it's mostly captured by a small subset of chip industry founders, mostly all older than 50, and most of whom have some familial connection to the KMT that let them get government protection as well as having the capital to set up things like foundries. The little these companies pay out to their workers is recaptured by the same class, who own something like 80% of the land in Taiwan, in the form of rent or selling property at outrageously inflated rates.
So, wealth has clumped, and so has power, and so when google sets up an office in Taipei, they find out that engineers there get paid 30k to do a job an sf engineer would do for 120k, so they pay 30k. Or maybe 35 to get the really really good ones. Hell that might be why Google showed up at all.
One final aspect: Google can take advantage of geographic arbitrage, but an individual taiwanese engineer can't, because things like borders, visas, cost of moving, mental toll of leaving behind home, and familial responsibilities don't exist for Google, but they do for the Taiwanese engineer.
> Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the sight of corpses or diseases.
Which only applies to a minority of people, and even that minority of people could still become an orthodontist. Likewise, if your SAT scores are 800 math and 450 verbal then that's quite uncommon and you probably shouldn't try to be a lawyer but you could still be a quant, and if you have certain medical conditions then you can't be a commercial airline pilot but you could still be a dermatologist.
It doesn't matter if every individual engineer has every individual option available to them when the overwhelming majority of engineers have a significant variety of alternatives.
> There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.
There is way more to performing in <anything> than <any individual thing>. But we use these things as proxies because they're designed and intended to be proxies and they're the thing for which data is available if data is the thing you want to inspect.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan, because of time zones.
I know some of them do this, but ours doesn't. There is a once yearly self-review, and as far as I can tell it has literally no impact on your actual performance review and compensation, which are basically entirely up to your manager's observations of you.
So it is important to keep your manager informally up to date on what you're doing, at least during the weeks they're thinking about performance.
If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
Intel's management did not appreciate (as likely did not understand) tech skills/talent lately, which likely contributed to them squandering their lead.
I mean maybe. We often have weekly customer meetings. One of my programs has 2 customers, we meet with both weekly. So do I put idk 200+ customer meetings? That seems like a weird metric because it's like "compiled code 400 times." I've seen resumes that have the same vibe. We did not hire them. Sometimes it's very telling what people think are accomplishments.
While I have a personal career document and have had one for years where I have all of my major accomplishments in STAR format. This seems a bit much.
When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had.
But I would never write it up on a public blog post like this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could get another job, I’m sure that he has a network where a few messages would lead him to one.
Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50 after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at least a lateral move within two weeks.
I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based on my network.
The fact that they were busy keeping count during those 110 occasions and for every other activity clearly tells that they nothing better to do. You have to be loud about such numbers when you have very little meaningful work to show for.
A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.
In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.
Clicking through his links to various posts about e.g. stack pointers or flame graphs, my takeaway is he's an outlier in productivity, and got a lot done in 3.5 years at a monstrously large organization.
I'm pretty envious of his capabilities, in 3.5 years I can ship a couple webapps, I would never personally get JVM compilation flags added.
You are tired, but you still read, still commented (or worse, commented but didn’t read).
I always give people benefits of the doubt. He posted it on his personal blog, going back so many years. Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
the fact that he posted in his personal blog doesn't change the fact that for many of us this is corporate BS and should not be in the top of HN first page. If you disagree, upvote comments you like, don't try to be a moderator.
> Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
That is exactly what many of us prefer to see, actually. The hacker part of hackernews, remember?
For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".
Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
> if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that the organisation is actively working against what he sees as his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he struts out.
I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn’t have the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more negative message than he actually said.
Agreed. He also mentioned these years being “some of the toughest at intel”. To me it read as 1) Amazing that he managed to get anything done at all with this kind of turmoil and 2) A not so subtle hint that things aren’t all good at Intel.
> The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers.
It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.
Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance
> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.
This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.
If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.
With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.
In terms of their compensation though, it functionally doesn't really matter, and that's somewhat true for being a professional as well, it's usually only important how many people think you're good enough. A job is often as or more political as it is technical
Flamegraph is literally just a perl script that visualizes the stack traces collected by perf/dtrace (kernel). It's a good tool though but it doesn't need to be oversold for its capabilities, the hard work is done by the kernel. And honestly, many times it is not that useful at all and can be quite misleading, and not because of the bug in the tool but because how CPUs are inherently designed to work.
What concept in particular? There is nothing novel about that tool, it visualizes the stats collected by perf, and as I said it's not even that useful in root cause analysis in performance regressions, which is like the main point it is marketed for.
If you've been there 16 years, I'm sure you employer feels your impact has been worth the investment. Are you really saying that you don't feel you have made the impact you would have liked to make? Do you feel under-utilized?
That's interesting; I feel like like it's the opposite: What used to be great work is basically unfathomable today and what used to be regular productivity is seen as almost superhuman. People get almost nothing done nowadays and I've never felt like expectations were ever really at the level they ought to be at, especially with how much money people are getting.
> My next few years at Intel would have focused on execution of those 33 recommendations [for a “company-wide strategy to win back the cloud”], which Intel can continue to do in my absence.
The idea that people are going to execute your arduous, detailed plan for world domination while you’re off doing something else seems a bit… unrealistic, to say the least.
You’re dead on. This kind of knee-deep gluey “advice” is the cult of personality that intel now thinks is effective planning. The head’s-down hard work of the 80’s and 90’s vanished when the media turned Grove into a reluctant folk hero and the bubble burst. I was there for 21 years, this guy is symptom of a much larger problem that is self-sustaining. Too many people trying to hide, do the bare minimum, and collect a fat paycheck, while people like this wave around grand plans that will never be touched. Yep I’m a cynic, two decades there fried my compassion circuits.
He doesn’t mention it in this post, but in another post he talked about the toll of needing to frequently attend meetings in the middle of the night in his time zone.
Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
This was the takeaway I had taking to a colleague about his time at Intel - they're a genuinely global company with engineering teams in practically all time zones who are still expected to collaborate with each other. No matter what time of day the meeting was scheduled for, it was the middle of the night for somebody, and no, just working on written docs async for everything didn't cut it, and they couldn't just fly people out all the time. So that's apparently just part of what it means to take a job at Intel these days.
Brendan Gregg deserves respect. Intel? Their reputation had been in the gutter for a few years now. The classic way to offend a nerd is to have a leading market position, tons of cash and resources, then squander it on politics and bullshit.
Masterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my next gig ends. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a great example of highlighting the value they added.
If my back of the envelope math is right, in the last 6 months he’s been attending more meetings at possibly odd hours; he lives in Australia and Intel is based in the USA.
Two different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110 customer meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings during odd hours does not.
Yeah, different numbers, 110 customer meetings, the other post tracked 1-6am meetings. I'm glad I tracked 1-6am meetings since I've shared that number when people think that remote workers aren't making an effort.
Those 1-6am meetings are crazy. I’ve been fully remote for over 16 years now and my only 1-6am meetings are incident response, if I’m on call.
And I’m a nobody; that you have to do that makes it feel even crazier to me.
I admit I was a bit more flexible with that in the past, but once I had a heart attack at 40 it dawned on me any company would just replace me and keep on going while my family was going to have a much tougher time (and no help from whatever company would be employing me at the time).
On modern AWS instance types so much is offloaded to dedicated hardware that the only shared (noisy) components between VMs is memory bandwidth and higher levels of CPU cache (and I think graviton doesn't even share CPU cache now)
I would suspect your performance difference is mostly likely showing that on metal you are sharing the same software wider so not polluting caches as much as a vm neighbour running unrelated software.
The virtual instance is the exact same size as the metal one, which covers an entire physical machine - I guess this is pure overhead rather than noisy neighbors.
That's a surprisingly large overhead. I've not measured that large an impact on AMD, particularly for compute heavy.
Did you profile at all? And have you observed if it's not compute-bound? If it's memory or IO bound it can be due to other virtualization overheads, such as memory encryption.
Calling them AI flamegraphs is really naming them after the workload they are likely to be used on. If you want to make workloads more efficient it’s useful to know where they are spending their time.
Flamegraphs are great, GPU flamegraphs are an obvious good idea. But his choice to work on "AI" instead of general GPU compute, and advertise this "AI" work at the very top of the list of things he's done of note, tells me what I need to know.
Yes that's a great stat. It's amazing how slowly large companies can die. Intel has serious problems in all those segments. Maybe they can recover but I'm pretty pessimistic about their chances.
This is true economically but in reality if you have much larger cost savings than that for sale then these companies mostly say "we would be happy to buy that for $0 while we pay you a million a year to move to the united states"
His bio says he was an Intel Fellow, which is like a VP-level individual role, and yes that's what I expected too… but apparently not? These are kinda low.
Id expect his comp even before Intel to be way above that (he came from Netflix), perhaps levels info is not entirely correct for Intel or doesn’t apply to exceptional hires, fellow level compensation at FAANG seems to be more accurate there though
I really have no idea how IBM is still in business, or the other big toxic techs like Oracle and Salesforce. Just goes to show I don’t know as much about the industry as I think.
Oracle basically runs HR and finance services for like every large company in Europe. They also run a scary amount of healthcare stuff and other government tech type stuff.
It sucks but I see why they do it. If you don't have the technical/managerial talent to handle procurement then it's the safest bet.
They bought Red Hat, which has OpenShift and all their other "DIY Cloud" bits. This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.
To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.
The American hyper scalers are not necessarily the place to be. Modern can mean Non-hyper scalar as well. Can this sentiment just die please? Great that its working out for you and you replaced good sysadmins with aws admins, but it should not be the default strategy perse.
Why does this read like a personal attack? Do you have anything in my comment to refute?
I didn't even use the word "modern."
I actually agree the traditional cloud providers have lots of issues and aren't always the right choice, but the fact remains that offerings from Red Hat and the like are far more popular with older larger corporations than startups or "household name" tech companies like X, Netflix, etc.
I don't. What I'm saying is that the vast majority of companies are, and many of these business using IBM/RedHat/etc. products would follow the tide if not for other things in their way. I've seen it first hand where a fortune 500 kept their large IBM and SAP footprint (because the cost to migrate to something else was huge) and used AWS EKS for all the new apps.
Personally I think at their scale, self hosting and creating more interoperability between the stacks would have been a better investment but I was not CTO or an SVP so I didn't get to make those decisions.
IBM still sells mainframes and similar. And has a giant consulting and service business.
Their purchse of RedHat flows into consulting. Their purchase of Softlayer (rebranded into IBM Cloud) is more IBM owned, customer operated computing, a business IBM has been in since forever.
They are a gov chosen winner, so it is a safe bet they will exist for as long as they are a useful political puppet. Why or how would they become more competitive?
Yeah, behind datasette it looks like there's C64 C parked, and above is a laser 300 (which makes sense if guy is australian) and we can also see 1541-ii behind that, on the top.
Right, laser 300 was called the VZ300 here. I'm out of desk space so I had to put the VZ300 on a stand above my C64C. Maybe AI can finally help me code some C64 and VZ games. :-)
If only! It's kind of a blessing and a curse for us who still code for c64 (demo scene). It looks like llm may help you, but it's usually gibberish 6502 asm. I've seen similar with z80 but on spectrum.
yeah that certainly does happen. Especially if you give it the context of the machine since 6502 itself and opcodes do you no good unless you know the memory layout/ map which is in a sense what machine you're on. NES and C64 are 6502, heck even SNES is but 6502 opcodes are nothing since action is in memory you're interacting with.
When you provide context and the memory map, it does help explaining what algos you're looking at and what's going on. I've had a bit more luck with gemini rather than claude on this vs in general claude codes better. ChatGPT is for the most part lost in hallucinations.
I mean I understand if someone like Keller writes such posts but some dude claiming to have hosted conference events and some kind of process flame graph which could have been done by anyone…
Maybe you should read something about him before you call him that. I recommend the "Contributions"-section on his Wikipedia-article. And if it is of any relevance to your work: his "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" is a comprehensive and excellent guide.
> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
I like to measure things. In real life and on computers. But I also have a couple of work reasons for it:
As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
As a senior employee. This is just the opposite of what I would expect.
(I’m not the author of this)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146451
As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really micromanages me.
Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to - with no details - or put “bench” - again with no details.
Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer review system.
In my experience, having to track my hours absolutely destroys my performance. Thinking about how I need to pay attention to how long I spend on everything is a constant distraction in the back of my head while I try to do anything useful, and then I spend the rest of the day procrastinating having to fill out the paperwork. I know I'm not the only one because the entire dev staff was ready to mutiny the last time I was at a company that tried to get devs to start tracking their hours.
Exactly. For consulting company, you have to track how much time you spent on a project. I am allocated for a project for 100% for a week, sure we are going to bill for that week. But we don’t get paid until the project requirements are met. The client isn’t going to audit every hour. They are going to sign off based on results.
I’ll keep Jira updated at the end of the day because the PMO organization needs that for tracking and even we need that for coordination. But I am going to put in 40 hours at the end of the week.
No I’m not going to track hours I spent on internal meetings, conducting interviews and the other internal minutiae that takes up my day.
The company only makes money when I’m billing a client - that’s what I’m tracking - my results. Is the company making money on me and am I getting positive feedback from sales, my teammates and the customer.
They surely audit in hours, especially when delivery doesn't meet expectations, and payments get delayed until proven what work was done.
Nope. As far as the client is concerned, payment is delayed until the requirements are met that were laid out in the statement of work. They could care less how many hours were put in.
I personally have put in extra hours to complete a project for a client that I did the proposal for as the SME in the technology because I underestimated. I’m a salaried employee for my consulting company and didn’t get paid extra.
Our consultants in Brazil and Mexico though while they also don’t have to track their hours for our benefit. They have to get approved to work over 8 hours a day because of labor laws in those countries. I can imagine that if they might do more granular tracking so they can justify the need to work (and get paid) for more hours.
As a team lead, I’m just going to track Jira stories being done on time if I need to be on the approval chain.
I have heard about projects at my current company where we have to give the client free work because the requirements weren’t met within the time allotted. I’m sure there were internal retrospectives where we had to go through our Jira board and see why stories were mis estimated or whether sales underestimated.
But even that falls on the implementation side because one of the staff consultants or engineering manager has to sign off on an SoW before it goes to the client.
Even during the retrospective, no one is trawling through Salesforce for details. We are looking at Jira.
I’m not saying we don’t track work output. I am saying we aren’t tracking granularly in our time tracking system that is only for billing clients. No one is expecting us to track every hour.
Usually that only works in Time-and-Material projects, and where management does a hard line with the original SOW, and the final delivery actually matches the original SOW.
When they don't, there are those hardliners that want a justification what they were paying for.
This is true. The three consulting companies/departments I have worked for have had T&M projects that are SOW based and staff augmentation projects.
I said in another reply (don’t remember whether it was to you or not) that I avoid staff augmentation projects for a lot of reasons.
But if you are in consulting and doing SoW based work, it’s a dereliction of duty by your tech lead not to insist on signed change order if the requirements veer materially from the SOW. It puts your company at risk of not being paid and/or having to do free work.
I always made sure to include "Time spent on time tracking" when I had to do it.
In my experience "just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to" matches folks expectations.
However.
If you're ever on a project that doesn't turn out so well, it may suddenly become critical to account for all work done during every billed hour in detail.
I would advise all consultants to track their time diligently and completely.
That’s part of the project management tracking but that’s not strictly hours.
Those traceability artifacts are in order
1. the signed statement of work - this is the contract that is legally binding.
2. The project kick off meeting where we agree on the mechanics of the project and a high level understanding of the expectations
3. Recorded, transcribed and these days using Gong to summarize the meetings, deep dive discovery sessions.
4. A video recorded approvals of the design proposals as I am walking through it.
5. A shared Jira backlog that I create and walk through them with it throughout the project
6. A shared decision log recording what decisions were made and who on the client side made them.
7. A handoff - also video recorded where the client says they are good going forward.
I lead 2-7 or do it all myself depending on the size of the project.
At no point am I going to say or expect anyone on my project to say they spent 4 hours on Tuesday writing Terraform.
But then again, my number one rule about consulting that I refuse to break is that I don’t do staff augmentation. I want to work on a contract with requirements and a “definition of done”. I control the execution of the project and the “how” within limits.
I want to be judged on outcomes not how many jira tickets I closed.
When I was at AWS I worked with a client that directly hired a former laid off ProServe L6 consultant. He was very much forced into staff augmentation where he did have to track everything he did by the hour.
You could tell he thought that was the fifth level of hell going from strategy consulting to staff augmentation. It paid decently. But he was definitely looking and I recommended him as a staff consultant at my current company (full time direct hire)
FWIW: I specialize in cloud + app dev - “application modernization”
Escalation meetings when you are asked to prove where all the money went in those 40 hours each project week, with endless rows in Excel sheets.
In my experience, that’s only if you are doing a staff augmentation type consulting. I absolutely refuse to be on a project where the client controls the project and the company I’m working for isn’t just giving high level businsss requirements status updates.
I will not touch a staff augmentation project - ever.
I only work on projects that for all intents and purposes are fixed fee projects where we sign a contract promising that we will deliver x for $y.
In some level of granularity, we track what stories are complete in Jira and alarm bells go off if the burn down isn’t trending correctly. But we aren’t logging every hour we spent in Salesforce.
This was true when I was working in the consulting department at AWS (ProServe) and is true now at a 3rd party AWS partner.
Lucky you, I have done that regardless of the project type, when the client wasn't happy with the x for $y delivery, and delays payments until having their beloved Excel sheets.
I have also had to provide technical support in escalation meetings, predating delivery of said sheets.
How would the spreadsheets of hours worked help if the contract was based on “did you meet the deliverables according to the contract”?
Wouldn’t it be a checklist of - these are the 5 requirements and they were/were not met?
Wouldn’t the spreadsheet be a list of requirements and not hours?
Because customers tend to want to map why the Ferrari they asked for is a Fiat with bandages, given the fixed price budget, and thus want to map each requirement to the work time spent on it, and expensed budget.
Then comes all the argumentation why all those hours were required for each item, due to project delivery challenges on either sides, decisions that would require even more work, needless efforts spent in stuff we shouldn't have done as part of fixed price, and so forth.
Note how the author doesn't work for tiny little companies like you.
You did see the part about the four year stint at BigTech in between? Unless you think the second largest employee in the US is a “small little company”.
I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference between how he didn’t really seem to need to prove his “impact”?
Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)
I think you're misreading that article.
> In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers.
> I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don’t need your VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to need your tools.
> When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP, “We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without Perfetto”, that statement carries immense weight. It travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.
Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of visibility.
The question I’m trying to answer is why are keeping metrics important at all?
From my experience working on and being the third highest contributor to what was a very popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche, we kept metrics because we had to justify why it should it exist and why should we keep getting resources for it. This is the same reason that the Google Staff engineer that was in the linked article did it for his project.
The next reason is that to get promoted and to have something to put on your promo doc, you need to show “impact”.
But when you are at a staff level and no longer chasing promotions, it becomes perfunctory. You do it just because you are suppose to and do the bare minimum to check it off the list and stay in compliance. But everyone if any importance knows you.
That’s true at BigTech to my 1000+ company. No one from the C suite is wondering who employees #13545 is or what I have accomplished whether or not I go into details.
However I do make sure I get peer feedback from everyone that I work with officially or if I go the extra mile for them. I asked my manager do I need to record my goals for the year. He kind of shrugged and asked me was I trying to get promoted to a director or something (a manager role would be a horizontal move). I said “no”. he said not really.
I keep a personal career document just in case I need to prepare to interview because I stay ready to interview - I have for almost 20 years. I have been working for 30.
Then back to my minor criticism. It’s not like at a staff level once you have accomplished a lot and built up a network, you are going to be blindly submitting your resume to a job you found on Indeed. At that point your resume is just something to put in the ATS as part of the hiring process. But no one in the hiring prices is going to look at it. They are already targeting you to work there.
I had a director who was a former coworker at a well known non tech company basically offer to create a job just for me because he needed someone who he could trust. I’m not special, I just have a decent network and made a positive impression on a few people
As a principal at big tech I has essentially full autonomy to do what I thought was highest value with very little need to report anything.
Exactly this. I’m still friends with my former manager at AWS who is now an L7 “very important person” over a service there and another former coworker who is a tech lead over another service. He’s an L6. I can guarantee you neither of them are being micromanaged and have mostly autonomy. I’m sure they have to deal with OP1 goals (? It’s been awhile I think that’s the term).
Hell I was a lowly L5 consultant who they only entrusted to small projects and slices over larger projects (fair I only had 2 years of AWS experience at the time) and no one micromanaged me as long as I was doing my job. I flew out to customers sites by myself to lead work and my manager rarely knew what I was doing. I would go weeks without talking to him.
Yeah, it's how everywhere is measured. But I like to remember Joel Spolsky's takes on measuring everything, including his famous book and blog:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-manag...
Contrary to the usual opinion on HN, this provides a good reason to do an MBA!
You should learn enough economics that if you are even a bit insightful you will avoid Econ 101 thinking, you will learn about things like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and a lot of other things relevant to management.
My MBA program mentioned in passing intrinsic / extrinsic motivation in the Ethics class - which in my program did not even have a final exam :).
Most of the time was spent on cost cutting, customer vs producer surplus, profit margins, efficient markets theory, lots marketing, lots of "the purpose of a commercial enterprise is to make money for its owner" said in different ways, and maybe some operations analysis.
This is great, thank you for sharing
Damned is this industry, when even _you_ say you have to show that "remoteness works".
I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
I have more respect for him because he chose to do this. It’s probably clear that he doesn’t have to, at all. But he’s choosing not to rely on his (somewhat) tech celebrity status and deliver on measurable outcomes.
Not that I've ever been especially religious about it but it's probably a good thing to keep track of activities, especially those that directly affect customers. It's pretty easy/low-effort and is useful to be able to pull out.
We like that you like to measure things. That's why I bought your book.
> I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
Did keeping track and reporting that number help prove this?
It doesn't need to prove that. It needs to produce plausible data that appeases either your direct or +1 manager.
Do you have a particularly easy way to track or are you kind of doing the same thing as consultant and logging your dailies? Always drove me a bit crazy having to do that admin piece every day.
If only I had known that in the past, I even once received the completely wrong advice to "not stand out, since your work will speak for itself and you will get recognition".
It depends on the company culture.
(Fancy US tech companies like to be very selective, have a competitive mindset, hire "the best" according to their filters, and then want people to show how amazing they are, uu, so much impact, woah... and in effect people need to constantly manage upwards.
While in many other companies, or "orgs", having a good team cohesion is more important. To blend in a bit, get accepted even if it means foregoing some ambition.)
That said it's always good to have receipts.
Having good team cohesion is all well and good. But when it’s time to get promoted, what are you going to say “I pulled well defined Jira tickets off the board”?
When you get ready to interview for your n+1 job, and you spent months grinding leetCode and practicing reversing a btree on the white board, get to the behavioral interview and I ask “what accomplishment are you most proud of?”, what are you going to say “I worked with my team and we together closed 20 story points a week”?
I have given the thumbs down to a lot of candidates this year alone who couldn’t discuss something that they took ownership of or where they stood out.
measuring number of meetings seems deflection of actual output!
It's your personal blog though. But again nothing wrong with turning that into a form of LinkedIn post
>As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works.
You were delegated a manager's job?
>As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
Normally, this is stored in the time tracker, not in your memory.
In corps tracking hours is only for the grunts...
Exactly, I can’t imagine that a “senior” developer needs to track everything that carefully. Hell I work at a consulting company full time as a staff consultant where we do have to record hours and I don’t go into any detail whether I’m on or off a project.
At big tech you have to quantify your value like this regularly, so yeah everyone keeps track of the minutiae.
Hehe, no wonder big tech doesn't get anything done.
It’s more that it takes so long to get anything done, the effort and results need to be recorded because it most often won’t be obvious from the impact. It’s hard to make a splash on a production system maintained by 30 other people, but you can usually make things better, but it won’t always be obvious.
It's the overhead cost caused by trust breakdown. (tbf sometimes the timesheets are there for legal/tax reasons)
whats ur point, there's countless of examples to counter your statement
from Windows, Linux, Chromium, VS Code, programming langugages, tools like k8s, AI to revenue! :D
I guess they don’t know how or don’t bother to evaluate people on what they actually contribute? Just number of meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
Those meetings were the authors actual contributions. Any really senior person isn't going to be coding.
Meetings by themselves are worthless. Similar to how having an idea for something isn't intrinsically valuable. I argue, meetings can't be actual contributions because the real state, the code/hardware/etc, of your project hasn't change. The result of the meeting, what people actually do afterwards due to what was discussed, is all that matters. In which case, it isn't the meeting that was the contribution, it was the artifacts that were created afterwards (documents, jira project tasks, code, etc) that are the contribution.
When we view meetings as actual contribution, we're really just valuing people doing effectively nothing. For example, anyone who's job is just to take meetings, and nothing else, is worthless IMO. You need to tangibly create something afterwards. This is a problem with big tech (which the company I work for is one of), it rewards people shuffling papers around, especially senior+ engineers, instead of valuing real work they should be doing.
Senior+ engineers have also deluded themselves into thinking that they shouldn't be coding, and rather their real work is creating endless amount of superfluous documents and creating as many cross team meetings as possible, rather than doing the hard work of creating an actual product.
What does "actually contributed" mean?
Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B. Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit really mean?
Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare *that*.
Still it is a faulty metric.
200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.
Then what's your proposal?
People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.
> People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you.
Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it. Not without flaws, of course, but preferable to chasing a made-up metric. It's arguably the entire point of a manager, to know what their employees are doing at a high level. We managed to do this for hundreds of years without needing shiny dashboards and counting every meeting attended.
Metrics have their place as well, of course, but they should be one data point, and should not be chased after so religiously that recording the metrics becomes significant work on its own.
>Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it
"My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?"
"My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
"My manager keeps hiring only people of their race and playing favorites with them, what do I do?"
"Coworker X gave me a bad review because I wouldn't go on a date with them"
Even in the best case it biases heavily towards the people most enthusiastic about selling an image of themselves rather than those who are necessarily contributing.
Relying on someone's perception/vouching for you rather than performance metrics can be an absolute disaster - for the people involved and for the company if it turns into a lawsuit.
> My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?
> My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
There may be legitimate cases but if someone runs into these issues often, may be its just excuses for bad performance. If the issue is genuine, find out what your specific organization can do about the situation and resolve it within that framework or find a better manager.
No amount of metrics are gonna help if you are going against a hostile manager, team or leadership.
These are all pretty extreme cases that apply if your managers/coworkers are horrible people. Most people are thankfully, as a rule, pretty normal.
Obviously discrimination exists, which is why metrics should still be used (as data points) and why larger companies need an oversight process.
Turning ourselves into automatons, promoting and praising people exclusively based on some arbitrary set of numbers, just to try and make it fairer, won't lead to a happier or genuinely fairer workplace. At the end of the day, most jobs relevant to HN are complicated and explicitly involve a lot of human interaction. You need humans to judge performance in human-interaction jobs.
"most people" doesn't scale to hundreds of thousands of employees. It's not particularly reliable in groups of dozens.
If there's one person in a team discriminating unfairly, that should be pretty obvious if they're the only one objecting while everyone else thinks an employee is doing a fine job.
If the entire team is discriminatory, then as the sibling comment said, metrics aren't really going to save you either, they will find a way to push their will through. And that is probably a horrible place to work that won't be made more palatable by being promoted.
Again, I'm not saying these aren't real issues, but relying solely on metrics is not the solution. You need both qualitative and quantitative data for a healthy environment and to make good decisions. Just because some humans are bad people doesn't mean the solution is to become inhuman altogether.
"everybody else" doesn't scale. If you have 10 people, that's 90 reviews to be written. No one's going to go into much detail, and in general you get a culture of only saying nice things so that others only say nice things about them.
Seems like a skill issue, my friend, not sure what to say.
Again, we managed to do this for literal centuries without needing to turn workplaces into metrics-obsessed assembly lines. A manager should know what's going on in their team and should know who's doing well. It's kind of the whole point of being a manager.
For most of human history we didn't have organizations of hundreds, much less tens of thousands. When we did they were rife with nepotism, classism, brownnosing, racism, and more. We aim to do better these days, which is a hard problem.
Most of human history, sure, but I'm talking about the last few centuries. We've had plenty of organizations of that size; corporations, governments, militaries.
But why on Earth is the total size of the organization relevant? That's the whole point of a hierarchical design, one manager just needs to know the people or abstracted teams that sit below them. Even in a "modern" org there's nobody sitting looking at a spreadsheet of 200k employees going "gee how will I figure out who to promote, better sort descending by lines of code written".
And yes, we've been talking in circles at this point. I agree a fully vibes based "promote who you feel like" approach has all those flaws, which is why I'm saying you need both quantitative and qualitative data. But in general qualitative should hold slightly more weight in complex, non-linear, interaction-heavy jobs like engineering, because it's hard if not impossible to find fair metrics for literally everything an employee possibly does.
> Then what's your proposal?
Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them.
"What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.
"What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful griping.
Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them.
"All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.
> if you don't have a better option
My whole point here is that "doing whatever bullshit makes you feel good" is not necessarily the better option. Either you can prove that it's worth something, in which case you will not have to ask "What's your proposal?" because people won't complain about it, or you're just doing something for the sake of doing something, and your only recourse when people show you that it's bullshit is to get defensive.
> If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave.
And if you don't identify good performers properly and don't reward them, they will leave as well.
A pragmatic approach is to reward your team, as a team. If you go with "we fire the lowest 10% every year because there have to be low performers", you're creating an adversarial situation. Wanna know what happens if you're my manager in an adversarial context? Easy: I will be an adversary. How constructive is that? Not my problem, I did not make the rules.
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>Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.
In general you pick companies, products, teams, initiatives, tasks that you're interested about, so it's not like it is purely dependent on luck
If you have skills and see opportunity then going for that may result in nice outcomes :)
> One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare that.
Try to assign money/revenue/PR to that and you'll have decent proxy for impact.
Again: what money is attributable to each feature? Are subscriptions up 2% because of the new payment flow or because it's tax refund season? Are they down because of the new UI or because of tariffs? It's not realistic to tell them apart most of the time.
If you show X users old payment flow and X users new payment flow, then you can definitely try to draw reasonable conclusions
Managers can be lazy just like anyone.
Keeping track of actual value would require actually rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really care about how often you're on time or your meeting attendance record.
Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism.
Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?
Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!
I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
Agreed. There's the additional point that I think many people don't appreciate, which is that those managers and many people lower down in the org chart merely exist because somebody else needs to be responsible for a system or a liability regardless of whether they do anything measurably profitable, and aren't necessarily incentivized to do anything more productively; they're just there to take care of it or be blamed if it's not, and have a low ceiling for what that job can possibly be worth with no measurable way to argue for more, and so in the case of managers, try to invent clout-generators at any cost and with no connection to how the assignees might accomplish it.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
Suppose you have a thousand engineers and those thousand engineers generate ten billion dollars in annual profit. How much do they each get paid? They amount they're worth? Nope, the amount they'll accept.
If you live in the US and you have the wherewithal to be an engineer then you could also have been a doctor or a lawyer or some other high paying occupation. And many of those can't be fully remote because they have to see domestic patients or interact in person with local courts or clients. Which means that if you want someone in the US to be your engineer, you need to pay them an amount that makes them want to do that instead of choosing one of those other occupations. Whereas the one in Taiwan doesn't have the option to become a doctor in San Francisco and is therefore willing to accept less money.
So why don't companies just hire exclusively the people in Taiwan? There are all the usual reasons (time zones, language barriers, etc.), but a big one is that they need a thousand engineers. So they and their competitors hire every qualified engineer in Taiwan until Taiwanese engineers reach full employment, at which point the companies still don't have all the engineers they want. And when the average engineer is making the company ten million dollars, paying San Francisco salaries is better than not having enough talent.
So then why doesn't every smart person in Taiwan become an engineer? Because the companies hiring engineers there are only paying Taiwanese wages, and then they're not any better off to do that than to become a doctor or a lawyer in Taiwan. And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers, and then you would only get a modest increase in the number of engineers for a significant increase in compensation. Which is still what happens, but only slowly over time, until the wages in Taiwan ultimately increase enough to no longer be a competitive advantage. And companies don't want to make that happen faster because then they'd have to pay higher salaries in Taiwan.
Not everyone who can be an engineer can also become a doctor or a lawyer. Different requirements and tolls on your mind and work style that aren't interchangeable for everyone.
There are two reasons that doesn't matter. The first is that it's untrue more often than not; plenty of people could do both. And the second is that "doctors and lawyers" are just arbitrary stand ins for high paying domestic jobs. They could also become physicists, commercial airline pilots, Wall St. quants, actuaries, etc.
>plenty of people could do both
Citation heavily needed.
Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in the world for white collar professions, what other new information do you have that we don't already know?
> Citation heavily needed.
Have a look at the scatter plot for math and verbal SAT scores:
https://www.statcrunch.com/reports/view?reportid=21828&tab=p...
There is a significant correlation between higher scores on one and higher scores on the other.
> Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
The barrier to either of those professions is getting good grades and then scoring well enough on a standardized test, and the entire premise is that the professions pay well which is how people pay back the loans.
I can become a SW engineer without a degree of any kind, it's only helpful, but becoming a doctor requires everything you mentioned
Which is why many medical specialties pay more on average than engineers get. See also efficient market hypothesis.
> See also efficient market hypothesis.
On your original post, you said they pay lower in other places because they can, which I agree with, of course companies will pay as little as they can, because margin on labor is the key profit margin that enables capitalism to function. But I disagree that this is due to efficient markets. Instead I believe it's because corporations can be sociopathic, whereas humans are humans, and come with feelings and flaws. A corporation can for example leverage the human desire for being a part of something larger, or local culture social pressure, to extract more hours of work out of someone than they're contractually obligated to give (see for example Japan or Taiwan working culture). Corporations are immune to these sorts of things so it's a one way, non-market-based street of exploitative behavior. Furthermore of course is the fact that corporations weild far more capital and thus power than individual workers, and will often collude with governments to prevent worker collective bargaining.
Furthermore, I believe your idea applies too much autonomy and collaboration between corporations. Example:
> . And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers
This seems to suggest that companies are colluding to prevent macroeconomic effects such as wage inflation. It's post ipso facto explanation, kind of like when make presumptions with evolutionary sociology: "ADHD people served an important role as guarding early human settlements. Their heightened deep focus and obsession with finding details in noise made them ideal to scan the horizon at night." Assuming evolution is an intelligent designer that made different sorts of humans for serving distinct purposes, rather than the reality that we have different sorts of humans because of entropy, and humans happen to be sentient and can leverage these sorts of diverse manifestations to their advantage sometimes - or perhaps, our society just was built in a way that reflects the reality of different sorts of people existing, either way, thus you have people misattributing purpose to chance.
I feel the same when I hear people make market-based justifications for some economic reality like geographic labor cost diversion. My confusion isn't around why it happens, it's why laborers tolerate it. The Invisible Hand of The Market isn't setting labor rates because it needs to maintain cross-role equilibrium between well defined roles, labor rates are simply, as low as a company can get away with.
Markets aren't efficient. A doctor in Taiwan must study for ten years longer than an engineer, in the USA the same is true but also the doctor must take on potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. In medical school a student must sacrifice both their mental health and social life and dedicate themselves entirely to completing the curriculum. If they fail they're saddled with debt they have no hope of paying (in the USA, Taiwan not so much), and even still, many fail. Then there's residency. Then in the USA you get a relatively high paid job, but also depending on your role, one of the highest stress, highest legal-exposure, highest-stakes jobs on the market. In Taiwan, same, except, the pay isn't even that good! And in the USA, because of the debt and the timeline before productivity, you'd be far better off simply immediately becoming a software engineer out of college and leveraging compound interest to come out at worst at retirement the same place the doctor does. In Taiwan, in the end the engineer will always come out ahead, and have a social life to boot.
In an efficient market, nobody would ever become a doctor. It's not like people determine whether to go through the hell of medical school based on whether they'd make more as an engineer, monitoring shifting salaries year on year as they come up through highschool.
The vast majority of people aren't making their career choice based on compensation. Compensation plays a role, but the vast majority are making choices based on interest, local availability, local culture, their personal experience (people who were strongly affected by a good teacher or therapist are more likely to become a teacher or therapist), and of course their personal capabilities. This is the sort of thing that's irrelevant to a corporation, and an efficient market hypothesis can't account for.
The market is skewed to protect profits since the market, analyzed in aggregate, represents the will of corporations to extract profit against the sloppiness of humans who are motivated by things other than money, and are also sometimes stupid and irrational, and often at a severe information disadvantage. Furthermore sometimes stupid people run corporations so the corps will behave irrationally rather than sociopathically profit driven like they're supposed to.
Rates are lower in Taiwan because it was basically a third world country living under military dictatorship 40 years ago where a ruling class was an invading military force that took land by force and then stumbled upon incredible profits by turning Taiwan into the chip manufacturing hub for the world. The amount of wealth flowing into Taiwan is astonishing but it's mostly captured by a small subset of chip industry founders, mostly all older than 50, and most of whom have some familial connection to the KMT that let them get government protection as well as having the capital to set up things like foundries. The little these companies pay out to their workers is recaptured by the same class, who own something like 80% of the land in Taiwan, in the form of rent or selling property at outrageously inflated rates.
So, wealth has clumped, and so has power, and so when google sets up an office in Taipei, they find out that engineers there get paid 30k to do a job an sf engineer would do for 120k, so they pay 30k. Or maybe 35 to get the really really good ones. Hell that might be why Google showed up at all.
One final aspect: Google can take advantage of geographic arbitrage, but an individual taiwanese engineer can't, because things like borders, visas, cost of moving, mental toll of leaving behind home, and familial responsibilities don't exist for Google, but they do for the Taiwanese engineer.
Bookmarking this comment. You absolutely cooked with this one.
>There is a significant correlation between higher scores on one and higher scores on the other.
That really doesn't mean SW engineers could be good lawyers or doctors. It's a very superficial evidence.
Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the sight of corpses or diseases.
There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.
> Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the sight of corpses or diseases.
Which only applies to a minority of people, and even that minority of people could still become an orthodontist. Likewise, if your SAT scores are 800 math and 450 verbal then that's quite uncommon and you probably shouldn't try to be a lawyer but you could still be a quant, and if you have certain medical conditions then you can't be a commercial airline pilot but you could still be a dermatologist.
It doesn't matter if every individual engineer has every individual option available to them when the overwhelming majority of engineers have a significant variety of alternatives.
> There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.
There is way more to performing in <anything> than <any individual thing>. But we use these things as proxies because they're designed and intended to be proxies and they're the thing for which data is available if data is the thing you want to inspect.
>which data is available
Except the data doesn't prove that. You chose to interpreted it that way.
How much you are paid is based on your power over the organization, which is why useless senior executives are paid far more than everyone else.
Why would you say useless? They hopefully make a couple of good decisions. Three good decisions a day [1], maybe?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfY3uRCvEMo
You are wrong. The price of luxuries and everything is different around the world. Plus purchase power diffrnce
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan, because of time zones.
I’ve been working in FAANG for some years in a senior position. Never had to track or speak to things like this lol.
I know some of them do this, but ours doesn't. There is a once yearly self-review, and as far as I can tell it has literally no impact on your actual performance review and compensation, which are basically entirely up to your manager's observations of you.
So it is important to keep your manager informally up to date on what you're doing, at least during the weeks they're thinking about performance.
No I don’t.
If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
I'm surprised someone with his reputation would need to do this.
Intel's management did not appreciate (as likely did not understand) tech skills/talent lately, which likely contributed to them squandering their lead.
Use gcalcli to search for meetings with customer invited. That's it! Also, for an engineer that isn't in sales, 110 customer meetings is A LOT.
... is it? I had 14 meetings with externals this week only lol
A lot of people consider score keeping like this to be more important than the job itself.
I can't even say that they are wrong.
Of course, always take notes, they will help when doing escalations, or justify oneself in review meetings.
I mean maybe. We often have weekly customer meetings. One of my programs has 2 customers, we meet with both weekly. So do I put idk 200+ customer meetings? That seems like a weird metric because it's like "compiled code 400 times." I've seen resumes that have the same vibe. We did not hire them. Sometimes it's very telling what people think are accomplishments.
Isn't that show-off? I mean you have achieved is good but feels like bragging about it ! Just a thought
While I have a personal career document and have had one for years where I have all of my major accomplishments in STAR format. This seems a bit much.
When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had.
But I would never write it up on a public blog post like this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could get another job, I’m sure that he has a network where a few messages would lead him to one.
Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50 after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at least a lateral move within two weeks.
I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based on my network.
Parse your calendar export (.ics) file and count events of a certain name and voila?
All startups in due course turn into Byzantine labyrinths of bureaucracy. Only the record keepers survive.
"Count your meetings"
Wouldn't hurt to try!
The fact that they were busy keeping count during those 110 occasions and for every other activity clearly tells that they nothing better to do. You have to be loud about such numbers when you have very little meaningful work to show for.
A "goodbye" post after only 3.5 years. Hard to relate.
In my world it's hard to imagine an impact after that short of a time. And in fact, reading the list of accomplishments ("interviewed by the Wall Street Journal") makes it clear it's a good PR piece.
I'm perfectly willing to believe he's fabulous, but this didn't move the needle for me.
Clicking through his links to various posts about e.g. stack pointers or flame graphs, my takeaway is he's an outlier in productivity, and got a lot done in 3.5 years at a monstrously large organization.
I'm pretty envious of his capabilities, in 3.5 years I can ship a couple webapps, I would never personally get JVM compilation flags added.
Brendan Gregg is somewhat of a systems engineering legend and contributed more to the field than most people could dream of.
Is his post self promotion? Yeah, probably.
Does it matter and do the top 3 comments on HN be salty about that? Probably not that useful.
[flagged]
You are tired, but you still read, still commented (or worse, commented but didn’t read).
I always give people benefits of the doubt. He posted it on his personal blog, going back so many years. Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
the fact that he posted in his personal blog doesn't change the fact that for many of us this is corporate BS and should not be in the top of HN first page. If you disagree, upvote comments you like, don't try to be a moderator.
> Most of his content are technical in nature, the kind of things that would never be on the front page of HN.
That is exactly what many of us prefer to see, actually. The hacker part of hackernews, remember?
Conversely, I made HotSpot commits as an intern, but I never shipped a web app.
If you're talking about the HotSpot VM then that is a work of art. You learn a lot studying its codebase.
Yes, you can learn "they should have added value types to this language".
It didn't move the needle for you.
For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".
Yeah, I understand the responses, but this guy legit has a great track record.
And if you read between the lines (especially the last few), it seems like he had problems pushing certain initiatives of his forward within Intel.
Certainly if you take it in combination with his earlier "Intel is listening" blog post: https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-22/intel-is-listen...
Dude shipped flamegraphs (which he also created in 2011) for cloud GPU loads and persuaded internal stakeholders to release the code as open source.
The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
> if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.
The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that the organisation is actively working against what he sees as his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he struts out.
I felt like he avoided saying anything negative about Intel just in case it would be taken that way. Intel doesn’t have the best reputation so we are all interpolating a much more negative message than he actually said.
Agreed. He also mentioned these years being “some of the toughest at intel”. To me it read as 1) Amazing that he managed to get anything done at all with this kind of turmoil and 2) A not so subtle hint that things aren’t all good at Intel.
> The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers.
It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.
I can’t tell if he is just good at self promotion or he is just good. But that’s always the case at bigcorp.
Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably. His books seem substantial though, I don't know many people who've read or written 800 pages on system performance
> Good at self-promotion == just good in most cases for most practical purposes whether it's factual or not, arguably.
This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.
If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.
With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.
In terms of their compensation though, it functionally doesn't really matter, and that's somewhat true for being a professional as well, it's usually only important how many people think you're good enough. A job is often as or more political as it is technical
Flamegraph is literally just a perl script that visualizes the stack traces collected by perf/dtrace (kernel). It's a good tool though but it doesn't need to be oversold for its capabilities, the hard work is done by the kernel. And honestly, many times it is not that useful at all and can be quite misleading, and not because of the bug in the tool but because how CPUs are inherently designed to work.
Everything is just a script with some visualization once you come up with the concept.
What concept in particular? There is nothing novel about that tool, it visualizes the stats collected by perf, and as I said it's not even that useful in root cause analysis in performance regressions, which is like the main point it is marketed for.
ive been at my company 16 years and still haven't had an impact, so... yeah.
that is some brutal self-honesty right there
Especially since they mention being a surgeon in some other comments.
um, no i didn't
I know, just roll with it.
If you've been there 16 years, I'm sure you employer feels your impact has been worth the investment. Are you really saying that you don't feel you have made the impact you would have liked to make? Do you feel under-utilized?
You can work your entire career and have "no impact" depending on how you define it.
A factory worker may be one of the best assembling doodads, but have no real impact on the job over their career, for example.
That is because these days what used to be high impact is now table stakes.
That's interesting; I feel like like it's the opposite: What used to be great work is basically unfathomable today and what used to be regular productivity is seen as almost superhuman. People get almost nothing done nowadays and I've never felt like expectations were ever really at the level they ought to be at, especially with how much money people are getting.
Some people are more productive. Others less so.
There is a tension between the two groups.
Some workers think meetings are great. Others hate them.
People should try to remember that people post this on their blogs, the way it gets in HN is not always their own doing.
He's arguably the most famous performance engineer. I've followed his work for 15 years.
Screaming at Disk drives has been my go-to party trick to break ice the last decade.
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> My next few years at Intel would have focused on execution of those 33 recommendations [for a “company-wide strategy to win back the cloud”], which Intel can continue to do in my absence.
The idea that people are going to execute your arduous, detailed plan for world domination while you’re off doing something else seems a bit… unrealistic, to say the least.
If it works, he gets credit. If it fails or never happens, someone else gets the blame. pretty classic.
Yea I found that weird. Who is going to execute your gradiose plan once you leave? Why would anyone else care so much as to see this through?
Seems a bit arrogant and short sighted. He would be the only one that cares about this in the end.
You’re dead on. This kind of knee-deep gluey “advice” is the cult of personality that intel now thinks is effective planning. The head’s-down hard work of the 80’s and 90’s vanished when the media turned Grove into a reluctant folk hero and the bubble burst. I was there for 21 years, this guy is symptom of a much larger problem that is self-sustaining. Too many people trying to hide, do the bare minimum, and collect a fat paycheck, while people like this wave around grand plans that will never be touched. Yep I’m a cynic, two decades there fried my compassion circuits.
He doesn’t mention it in this post, but in another post he talked about the toll of needing to frequently attend meetings in the middle of the night in his time zone.
Whatever his reasons for leaving, I hope that he finds a better balance in his new role.
This was the takeaway I had taking to a colleague about his time at Intel - they're a genuinely global company with engineering teams in practically all time zones who are still expected to collaborate with each other. No matter what time of day the meeting was scheduled for, it was the middle of the night for somebody, and no, just working on written docs async for everything didn't cut it, and they couldn't just fly people out all the time. So that's apparently just part of what it means to take a job at Intel these days.
I see some mean comments. I suppose maybe people doesn't know Brendan Gregg's work, this guy reserve some respect.
What's going on with these comments? So much ridiculous and unwarranted bashing. Is someone feeding the trolls? Is 4chan down? Yikes.
Brendan Gregg deserves respect. Intel? Their reputation had been in the gutter for a few years now. The classic way to offend a nerd is to have a leading market position, tons of cash and resources, then squander it on politics and bullshit.
Wow is it me or is the self promotion strong in this one.
Does he need it though? His name is literally a brand in many tech circles and very good brand at that
Always valuable to announce your availability and celebrate recent successes.
And how did I contradict that? My point was that he is not looking for vanity
You: does he need it? He’s famous!
Me: it’s always valuable!
That’s it.
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That is a regular self-review. Companies make their employees do that.
In this case Intel needs him more than the other way around, as far as I know. I do know people keep asking me if they can see flamegraphs of things.
Masterclass in turning a goodbye email into a hire me after my next gig ends. I’m not being sarcastic, this is a great example of highlighting the value they added.
Intel losing great people at high speed. Not the first, not the last.
If my back of the envelope math is right, in the last 6 months he’s been attending more meetings at possibly odd hours; he lives in Australia and Intel is based in the USA.
See https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-05-22/3-years-of-extr...
77 meetings then, but 110 meetings in his resignation blog post…
Two different numbers, no? The resignation posts specifies 110 customer meetings, the blog post you linked to about meetings during odd hours does not.
Yeah, different numbers, 110 customer meetings, the other post tracked 1-6am meetings. I'm glad I tracked 1-6am meetings since I've shared that number when people think that remote workers aren't making an effort.
Those 1-6am meetings are crazy. I’ve been fully remote for over 16 years now and my only 1-6am meetings are incident response, if I’m on call.
And I’m a nobody; that you have to do that makes it feel even crazier to me.
I admit I was a bit more flexible with that in the past, but once I had a heart attack at 40 it dawned on me any company would just replace me and keep on going while my family was going to have a much tougher time (and no help from whatever company would be employing me at the time).
Out of curiosity, do you still hold the same views as you did in the past?https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2023-03-25/is-silicon-va...
I think this is a good opportunity to guerilla-ask a question about cloud performance:
We've been running some compute heavy workloads on AWS, with some running on metal instances, and some running on virtualized instances of equal size.
Both were intel 192 core machines.
Virtualized instances tended to perform 20-25% worse in terms of CPU throughput, which is quite significant, and more than I'd have assumed.
Where does the performance go? Is this an AWS thing, does the performance get lost in the software stack, or is it a CPU-level issue?
I haven't tried with other vendors tbh, but would it be possible to mitigate this by switching to another architecture/vendor like AMD or Graviton?
On modern AWS instance types so much is offloaded to dedicated hardware that the only shared (noisy) components between VMs is memory bandwidth and higher levels of CPU cache (and I think graviton doesn't even share CPU cache now)
I would suspect your performance difference is mostly likely showing that on metal you are sharing the same software wider so not polluting caches as much as a vm neighbour running unrelated software.
The virtual instance is the exact same size as the metal one, which covers an entire physical machine - I guess this is pure overhead rather than noisy neighbors.
That's a surprisingly large overhead. I've not measured that large an impact on AMD, particularly for compute heavy.
Did you profile at all? And have you observed if it's not compute-bound? If it's memory or IO bound it can be due to other virtualization overheads, such as memory encryption.
I will try to profile, but how do you suggest going about it, what to measure? Maybe running some synthethics stressing CPU or memory?
The workload is pure memory/CPU, with very little IO so it's 100% compute bound, with much more emphasis on CPU.
There's a lot of I/O hidden in CPU-bound loads related to fetching, prefetching, caching, etc.
The guys post were commenting on has alot of info on this topic lol
Try the relatively new top-down microarchitectural analysis in perf:
https://perfwiki.github.io/main/top-down-analysis/
Could you share parts of /proc/cupinfo?
Hats off to Brendan!
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Leading the article with AI stuff is certainly a choice. If that's what they've ben spending their time on lately, maybe this is good for Intel.
Calling them AI flamegraphs is really naming them after the workload they are likely to be used on. If you want to make workloads more efficient it’s useful to know where they are spending their time.
Flamegraphs are great, GPU flamegraphs are an obvious good idea. But his choice to work on "AI" instead of general GPU compute, and advertise this "AI" work at the very top of the list of things he's done of note, tells me what I need to know.
A periodic reminder Intel is still in business.
You want something fun? Intel still has more than 50% market share in all segments (data center, desktops, laptops).
Yes that's a great stat. It's amazing how slowly large companies can die. Intel has serious problems in all those segments. Maybe they can recover but I'm pretty pessimistic about their chances.
What's with the retro gear on the desk?
Do you use it much and what for?
In particular Commodore tape player.
Terrible news from Intel, this guy seems like the best performance engineer on the planet
Where do you think he's going next? OpenAI? Google? Just saving 1% on inference could probably justify his salary 100fold
This is true economically but in reality if you have much larger cost savings than that for sale then these companies mostly say "we would be happy to buy that for $0 while we pay you a million a year to move to the united states"
Not being sarcastic here, a million a year is not a target compensation for engineer like him, 5-7 is probably where it starts and goes to the stars
His bio says he was an Intel Fellow, which is like a VP-level individual role, and yes that's what I expected too… but apparently not? These are kinda low.
https://www.levels.fyi/companies/intel/salaries/software-eng...
Id expect his comp even before Intel to be way above that (he came from Netflix), perhaps levels info is not entirely correct for Intel or doesn’t apply to exceptional hires, fellow level compensation at FAANG seems to be more accurate there though
Definitely feels like someplace with GPUs that will let him work remotely.
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I'm guessing he'll land at one of the big frontier model companies. I'm surprised he stayed at Intel as long as he did, they are dying fast.
And it seems there's only one of them that's gonna have any new hardware that needs GPU flamegraphs to optimise...
AMD, Apple, or NVIDIA?
Or Amazon, Google, Cerberus?
Do _any_ of those six companies have any guarantee of silicon wafer supply over the next 18-24 months?
I’m wonder how much longer Intel will be around. It seems to be dying a slow death like Kodak or IBM at this point.
"death" can be pretty slow - IBM has $60B in revenue and 270K employees.
When Shakespeare wrote "cowards die many times before their deaths", he had Intel in mind.
Username checks out
I really have no idea how IBM is still in business, or the other big toxic techs like Oracle and Salesforce. Just goes to show I don’t know as much about the industry as I think.
Oracle basically runs HR and finance services for like every large company in Europe. They also run a scary amount of healthcare stuff and other government tech type stuff.
It sucks but I see why they do it. If you don't have the technical/managerial talent to handle procurement then it's the safest bet.
They bought Red Hat, which has OpenShift and all their other "DIY Cloud" bits. This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.
To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.
The American hyper scalers are not necessarily the place to be. Modern can mean Non-hyper scalar as well. Can this sentiment just die please? Great that its working out for you and you replaced good sysadmins with aws admins, but it should not be the default strategy perse.
Why does this read like a personal attack? Do you have anything in my comment to refute?
I didn't even use the word "modern."
I actually agree the traditional cloud providers have lots of issues and aren't always the right choice, but the fact remains that offerings from Red Hat and the like are far more popular with older larger corporations than startups or "household name" tech companies like X, Netflix, etc.
When you read your sentence:
> This stuff is popular in government or old businesses that may have been slow to (or unable to for regulatory reasons) jump to AWS/GCP etc.
I think it's fair to say that you think migrating to the hyperscalars is a thing a company should do. That's what my previous post was addressing
I don't. What I'm saying is that the vast majority of companies are, and many of these business using IBM/RedHat/etc. products would follow the tide if not for other things in their way. I've seen it first hand where a fortune 500 kept their large IBM and SAP footprint (because the cost to migrate to something else was huge) and used AWS EKS for all the new apps.
Personally I think at their scale, self hosting and creating more interoperability between the stacks would have been a better investment but I was not CTO or an SVP so I didn't get to make those decisions.
they’ve been partnering with nvidia to build large ML training clusters iirc last time i was in their building at a meetup a few weeks ago
IBM still sells mainframes and similar. And has a giant consulting and service business.
Their purchse of RedHat flows into consulting. Their purchase of Softlayer (rebranded into IBM Cloud) is more IBM owned, customer operated computing, a business IBM has been in since forever.
And their financial/stock performance has been pretty good the past couple of years.
> I’m wonder how much longer Intel will be around.
The government took an ownership stake in the company. Nvidia invested a few billion in the company. It's not going anywhere.
Intel is going nowhere.
They are a gov chosen winner, so it is a safe bet they will exist for as long as they are a useful political puppet. Why or how would they become more competitive?
Lindy[1] will make sure it stays around for a while.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Although you're correct that it would be too soon to prophesize their death, I want to clarify that Lindy ensures correlation, not causation.
Intel still sells a ton of silicon.
Glad this made HN. Just wanted to thank you for writing, and I've ordered one of your books.
Congratulations. A fulfilling life.
Leaving intel? That’s one case where an employee won’t get chastised for
So...oai or google?
Yahoo. They're due for a comeback
Hey, maybe he has morals.
Extra slash in the url
You made me look 'blog//2025-12-05/leaving-intel.html'
In the photo of him on his last day [0], there's a cassette deck on his desk.
That could be something mundane, but I'd like to believe something crazy happens if you yell at it [1]...
[0] https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/images/2025/brendanoffice2...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
> cassette deck on his desk
Greybeard reporting for duty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
Looks like the C64 is behind it (underneath a..?) and there’s a small corner of 5.25” diskette station further back.
Probably not his daily drivers.. :)
Yeah, behind datasette it looks like there's C64 C parked, and above is a laser 300 (which makes sense if guy is australian) and we can also see 1541-ii behind that, on the top.
Right, laser 300 was called the VZ300 here. I'm out of desk space so I had to put the VZ300 on a stand above my C64C. Maybe AI can finally help me code some C64 and VZ games. :-)
If only! It's kind of a blessing and a curse for us who still code for c64 (demo scene). It looks like llm may help you, but it's usually gibberish 6502 asm. I've seen similar with z80 but on spectrum.
I think generating assembly with an LLM would be like copying from a magazine back then: nothing learned.
But I wonder, do LLMs help explain chunks of 6502 assembly code, in your experience? Say, if one was learning.
yeah that certainly does happen. Especially if you give it the context of the machine since 6502 itself and opcodes do you no good unless you know the memory layout/ map which is in a sense what machine you're on. NES and C64 are 6502, heck even SNES is but 6502 opcodes are nothing since action is in memory you're interacting with.
When you provide context and the memory map, it does help explaining what algos you're looking at and what's going on. I've had a bit more luck with gemini rather than claude on this vs in general claude codes better. ChatGPT is for the most part lost in hallucinations.
A.B.K. Always Be Knolling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-CTkbHnpNQ
I mean I understand if someone like Keller writes such posts but some dude claiming to have hosted conference events and some kind of process flame graph which could have been done by anyone…
> some dude
Maybe you should read something about him before you call him that. I recommend the "Contributions"-section on his Wikipedia-article. And if it is of any relevance to your work: his "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" is a comprehensive and excellent guide.
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hey, he's not boring. he shouted at a bunch of JBODs!
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Read this blog post from the same author https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2025-11-22/intel-is-listen.... I'm surprised that this narcissist Fellow wasn't shown the door by the company for 3.5 years.
Good luck to whichever team he now joins and get ready to be shoved with his accomplishments reports.