Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
The large companies I’ve worked at (including FAANG) seemed to thrive on kudos via performative actions. Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive while the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal. Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team. Anyone else notice this? Not sure if there’s a word for it, but it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers 0 comments on Hacker News.
The large companies I’ve worked at (including FAANG) seemed to thrive on kudos via performative actions. Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive while the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal. Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team. Anyone else notice this? Not sure if there’s a word for it, but it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers
The large companies I’ve worked at (including FAANG) seemed to thrive on kudos via performative actions. Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive while the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal. Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team. Anyone else notice this? Not sure if there’s a word for it, but it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers 0 comments on Hacker News.
The large companies I’ve worked at (including FAANG) seemed to thrive on kudos via performative actions. Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive while the couple all stars get the team closer to the goal. Meanwhile, a lot of managers calendars are purely just 1:1s with devs on the team which clearly has very little value add to the team. Anyone else notice this? Not sure if there’s a word for it, but it’s somewhat demoralising working with a bunch of corporate office workers cosplaying as engineers
Hacker News story: Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?
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Reviewed by Tha Kur
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June 10, 2026
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