alt Hacker NewsSpotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.
I am very unsurprised by this outcome.
People wonder why good software becomes bad, and it’s because the people who were good at engineering are often outmaneuvered by corporate-politics savvy people in a growing company. One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.
A couple years ago, an engineer I know who has always been a very poor performer and lacks initiative, but is friendly and non-confrontational, was hired by GitHub. It would not have been hard for GitHub to find a much better engineer, but this person would be an easy person to keep under a manager on a team who wouldn’t leave or make waves. That can be more important to some managers than skills.
Replies
> One of the best political moves in a company is to have a lot of people under you.
This is why I’m sceptical of “AI will kill corporate jobs”. A big company has no profit sharing for successful departments. Everyone is trying to get budget to hire because it makes them feel important.
Sometimes I wonder what the tech ecosystem would look like without the ZIRP era.
I look back over 15 years and with the exception of increased smart phone usage, everything else still looks mostly familiar. Maybe a bit more slick, but also slower and buggier despite having much better hardware.
There hasn't been a qualitative leap in software (as was in the 90s). Just larger SaaS companies. Without ZIRP would it have been any different?
I have the impression that for hiring this is fundamentally the most important aspect: Finding a prospect that is just skilled enough for the position without being a risk to the person who is hiring them.
When it comes to number of engineers, always keep in mind that it costs more engineers to maintain (and understand) software than the initial development push.
15 years of extremely well paid engineers and yet we still cannot delete a track from Recently Listened. ಠ _ ಠ
The mythical man-month ;)
Any book recommendations, that is not satire, about navigating the political landscape?
Spotify had a good app when it came out, p2p and UDP custom networking...
>Spotify has progressively gotten much worse over the last 15 years, all while the size of their engineering team has ballooned.
Spotify or Shopify?