> I’m a backend engineer. I sit in the weekly sprint planning meetings where Product Managers (PMs) discuss how to squeeze another 0.4% margin out of "human assets"...
This is what made it feel fake to me. Even the most naive startups don't discuss these kinds of details with the dev team (or sometimes even the senior management) because it's not relevant to getting the work done. This alleged business is likely much larger and naturally siloed. Intent is not a success criteria, and things are always subject to change so why bake it into the code? Sounds like a terrible idea.
What would make way more sense is asking the dev team to expose configuration and stats. Dashboards are not suspicious because they are genuinely useful to the entire business, not just some evil inner group trying to squeeze a few percent.
I have had PMs and POs spend hours with the dev team spilling all the tea because they think it will help the devs better craft their vision. This particular aspect is very plausible to me.
yeah I've worked at a startup where there was one PM that tried really hard to get all the rest of the PMs to stop talking business with the engineers but it just didn't stick. It's too easy to talk about and especially an easy way for newer PMs to bond and gain acceptance with the devs
While management usually tries to hide the evil parts of the business, the nature of eyeing incremental gains is very typical of silicon valley where data cited numbers is the requirement for promotions
It's not even about trying to hide anything! It's not easy to coordinate any business unless there's a single source of truth external to any particular team.
It necessarily has to be need-to-know and decisions have to be based on dry explanations where the intent isn't clear at all unless you're sitting in on many meetings across many teams. This is just how things scale. I question where some people have worked that are commenting.
I've literally never worked anywhere that works like this, and I've worked everything from startups to very large companies. Product always gives both description and intent to software engineering so that engineering can make appropriate choices.
In fact, one of the better ways for an engineer to be labeled as "not independent enough for advancement" is a lack of curiosity about what you're building, because the lack of curiosity limits the engineer to a very narrow scope of work.
If you're the builder working on an evil mastermind's evil lair, you may not be told, specifically, that you're building a piranha pit. But they will have to disclose that it they need a pit, which is also a freshwater aquarium with a means of keeping large carnivorous fish alive. Also that there has to be a hidden trap door big enough for a human to fall through when a button is pushed.
And even if it is given a codename like "the justice room" or something, during the months of design and building no doubt some people will slip up and call it "the piranha pit" in your presence.
> In fact, one of the better ways for an engineer to be labeled as "not independent enough for advancement" is a lack of curiosity about what you're building, because the lack of curiosity limits the engineer to a very narrow scope of work.
I don't think we're talking about the same topic at all. It sounds like OP is so curious that they made the whole thing up, and I think you might be out of touch with businesses that have plenty of tech workers, but aren't a tech company (most businesses around the world).
I think you're starting from the conclusion that the poster made it up and working back from there.
Nothing in that article reads implausible to me, both that they were building things like "desperation score" (probably not called that, probably called something like "commitment" or something) and that any reasonably intelligent and curious engineer would have understood what he was building.
It was removed from all but one, so no mods of any community were able to verify identity (stuck in automod queue for some).