alt Hacker NewsThis isn't a surprise at all. I saw the exact same thing at Meta. The incentives are so strong to improve your individual performance that it's hard to resist, literally hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
Maybe I'm naïve, but it seems like the people who keep their eye on the ball and really try to make a great product are the ones who win out in the long run.
If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today.
Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy.
Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.