I feel like these memes of hating everything other than lone coding is because you keep working for toxic companies.
No, it’s because we are working with humans and their deeply flawed organizations. As much as people hate corporations and love startups, both are always a mess. Every organization I’ve seen from the inside is barely functioning. Cruft, interpersonal conflicts, incompetence, or simply very bad market situations.
Software engineering kind of has to get involved with almost all of that. If you need to get approval from department A and Stacy just keeps changing what she wants, you’ll have to carry that chaos into the development and it will usually percolate through half the engineering department, because hardly any interface is actually a stable attack surface. That means meetings, calls, meetings, reviews, meetings, and fucking Stephen again wants to pitch this weird framework he’s so in love with, meetings, budget calls, because there’s no way, simply changing the field length can take that much work, meetings, …
It’s not about corps vs startups. It’s about having processes, good communication, dialogue, empathy. And it’s also your manager’s job to protect the team from externals that keep interrupting and making adhoc requests. If you don’t feel safe in ignoring calls and replying with “I’m busy now, schedule smth today please”, I consider that a highly toxic workplace.
No, it’s because we are working with humans and their deeply flawed organizations. As much as people hate corporations and love startups, both are always a mess. Every organization I’ve seen from the inside is barely functioning. Cruft, interpersonal conflicts, incompetence, or simply very bad market situations.
Software engineering kind of has to get involved with almost all of that. If you need to get approval from department A and Stacy just keeps changing what she wants, you’ll have to carry that chaos into the development and it will usually percolate through half the engineering department, because hardly any interface is actually a stable attack surface. That means meetings, calls, meetings, reviews, meetings, and fucking Stephen again wants to pitch this weird framework he’s so in love with, meetings, budget calls, because there’s no way, simply changing the field length can take that much work, meetings, …
It’s not about corps vs startups. It’s about having processes, good communication, dialogue, empathy. And it’s also your manager’s job to protect the team from externals that keep interrupting and making adhoc requests. If you don’t feel safe in ignoring calls and replying with “I’m busy now, schedule smth today please”, I consider that a highly toxic workplace.
I guess every job I’ve ever had has been toxic then. Juniors and to some degree mid-levels don’t usually have any say in things like when to meet
from what you describe it does sound like a nightmare, but you’re ignoring or mocking people that tell you that it is not the norm
How am I ignoring or mocking anyone?
I got that impression from your reply “lol that’s funny, you’re funny” to a completely non humorous comment
Then you took it incorrectly, its mocking my employer more than anyone.
got it, apologies
No worries, it happens