Software Engineers Leading Projects: Part One

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• Benefits of engineers leading:
  • Growing skills that are hard to strengthen otherwise - communicating with stakeholders, influencing without authority, empowering other team members, delegating down/sideways/up and mentoring.
• Why do engineers often don’t lead:
  • Need manager support.
  • Managers who don’t want to mentor.
  • Fear of delays - the outcome will make the team look bad. This comes back to whether the manager supports professional growth, wants to mentor engineers on their team.
  • Engineers not wanting to lead. “I’m not paid enough to do more.”
  • Expectations are vague.
• Coordinating large projects can be a full-time job.
• “Why put myself on the critical path of all projects? Would it not be better for everyone if I offered the opportunity for others to lead, support them, and help them build skills that made them better project leads?”
• For engineers preparing to lead:
  • Don’t wait for permission to lead: take the initiative.
  • Volunteer to take on leadership tasks, like facilitating a team meeting, figuring out how to fix tech debt.
  • Gain context about the company, the business, and the engineering work.

The Bullshit-Job Boom

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• Some, he thought, were structurally extraneous: if all lobbyists or corporate lawyers on the planet disappeared en masse, not even their clients would miss them. Others were pointless in opaque ways.
• A bullshit job is not what Graeber calls “a shit job.” Hannibal, and many other of the bullshittiest employees, are well compensated, with expanses of unclaimed time. Yet they’re unhappy. Graeber thinks that a sense of uselessness gnaws at everything that makes them human. This observation leads him to define bullshit work as “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”
• Flunkies: are those paid to hang around and make their superiors feel important: doormen, useless assistants, receptionists with silent phones, and so on.
• Goons: are gratuitous or arms-race muscle; Graeber points to Oxford University’s P.R. staff, whose task appears to be to convince the public that Oxford is a good school.
• “Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. (This is the woman at the airline desk whose duty is to assuage angry passengers when bags don’t arrive.)
• “Box tickers” go through various motions, often using paperwork or serious-looking reports, to suggest that things are happening when things aren’t. (Hannibal is a box ticker.)
• Last are “taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose job is to create and assign more bullshit for others.
• Instead of reaping the rewards of our labor in the mid-century style, we now split them among shareholders and growth for growth’s sake. The spoils of prosperity are fed back into the system to fund new and, perhaps, functionally unnecessary jobs.
• Graeber comes to believe that the governing logic for such expansion isn’t efficiency but something nearer to feudalism: a complex tangle of economics, organizational politics, tithes, and redistributions, which is motivated by the will to competitive status and local power. (Why do people employ doormen? Not because they’re cost-effective.) The difference between true feudalism and whatever is going on now—“managerial feudalism” is Graeber’s uncatchy phrase—is that, under true feudalism, professionals were responsible for their own schedules and methods.
• He also may misidentify the degree to which most people fret about the nature of their productive output; for some, work is the least important and defining of life’s commitments. But his point is that the bullshit economy feeds itself. Workers cram in Netflix binges, online purchases, takeout meals, and yoga classes as rewards for yet another day of the demoralizing bullshit work that sustains such life styles.
• Without such demands on their time, he writes, they could be “rehearsing for plays, playing in a band,” and the like. The binary is misleading—it is possible to hold a mind-numbing job and be the singer in a band—and anybody who has read much student fiction or seen many campus plays will wonder whether the bullshit quotient is much lessened there. Young people may be asked to do inconsequential work as part of an insidious acculturation scheme. Or they may be asked because their higher-order skills are not honed, and there’s benefit—for everyone—in forcing them to attain their lives’ endeavors by intent, not by default.