I can give you a protip for dealing with this. No guarantees, but often the poker hand that leadership has is an ‘ok’ hand. Maybe two pairs, maybe one pair, sometimes just a high card, sometimes just two face cards. To translate, their hands are often not as good as you think. You may believe they have a three of a kind, or a straight (you will be fired), but the bet you have to make is most likely they got a modest hand.
So what does that mean? Often those modest/weak hands mean the worse that will happen to you is that you will fall out of favor.
If you go into the bet like that, and can live with that, you won’t be scared. If you were matched up against the strongest hand like a royal flush (you will be fired for sure), realize you were up against the strongest possible hand to begin with and weren’t going to come out of that alive.
Usually, if someone has a very very strong hand, they will try to conceal it from you so you don’t even know what you are walking into. It’s the weaker hands that need to convince you that you should be scared and back off from the bet.
The takeaway here is that in each of those situations the pressure is contrived (e.g someone’s got you convinced there’s a ton of pressure, or more scarily, that there’s no pressure, neither of which is ever true).
Constraints is the mother of all creativity. Like Andy Dufresne and the the rock hammer, how about I give you nothing, could you possibly dig your way out?
It’s a suggestion. Generally, code complexity is created by someone that is actually pretty knowledgeable and competent. A straight confrontation won’t easily neutralize such a person in a discussion. They will know how to defend. If they also have peers they are close with, those friends will also negligently condone it with a simple ‘I don’t see anything wrong with that implementation’.
It’s a tough one, so I don’t even know where to begin other than an independent arbiter. Anyhow, I agree with you that it is a delicate matter from an emotional perspective (even though the underlying can be a reasonably objective matter).
Another way to remove finger-pointing is to identify features that should be reasonably easy to implement, but for whatever reason don’t get done in time, or worse, don’t get done well (end results being bad).
If a team was tasked to make a simple landing page for example, and it was oddly hard or time consuming for an average team member, it would be good to dig into why. If the answer is ‘you should see the boilerplate involved, or the deploy process ...’, then you can make a neutral analysis as to the cause.
I wish more managers and business stakeholders investigated this more carefully. Team members of this type add a shadow overhead that impacts velocity dramatically. It’s always visible to average competent devs on the team, but can be invisible to managers who don’t investigate as to why only one person is particularly productive on the team. Most people won’t go to their bosses and say ‘so and so writes overly complicated code that’s making my life a living hell’.
In fact, I think a third-party auditor would be a valuable service for dev teams to utilize at least once a year. Totally neutral party that can come in and say ‘We’re pretty sure the codebase is too complex and we noticed the commits came from so and so’. The business value here is you can root-cause velocity issues that can come from decent people who need to be reigned in (not necessarily fired).
I’m literally prepared to pay to have these people objectively assessed.
Also, most companies like to brand themselves as ‘tech’ to signal that they are growth based. Why is Peloton a tech company? They’re not.
A lot of us have jobs because companies need to fulfill the image. It’s half the reason why so many people are allowed to do full-stack when in reality they would have no business dealing with those parts of the stack in a real operation.
So no, you don’t actually deserve more money because you are working on more things in an inconsequential space (e.g What the entire Peloton engineering team does is probably bullshit. You need maybe a few devs).
There are certainly better examples than Peloton, but that’s what came to mind (a home gym tech (lol) company). Can’t wait until Bowflex starts hiring out web developers.
Someone please translate that to Latin and start plastering that on office walls so people take it more seriously. It’s going to save all of our mental health in the long run.
Is it even self awareness or a lack of editing? Like okay, yours is a game that doesn’t get a lot of traction, but you know what else doesn’t? Board games in general. No one said you have to be entirely selfless, and one’s conviction would appear just as fraudulent if it came in the guise of piety.
Here’s what you could have done: Find five other great board games that everyone else overlooks and explain why they are dope. Put a small blurb about why your game falls in this class, and why you are proud to be in that group.
It checks off all the boxes - misunderstood, ahead of it’s time, probably genius conceptual ideas.
Hate to pile on, but the man’s post reads like an incel post, except incel’s are funny about their entitlement.
Oddly, I never heard of him but find the concept of a geopolitical subversive game extremely interesting (his Balance of Power game). In a sense, our current geopolitics literally has five or six actors operating via undercurrents to destabilize a variety of forces in our world. It’s a poker game, who is doing it and can you stop it from impacting your own country? Okay, so who the hell would be interested in this game (it seems like not many), but I’m interested you little incel, why so entitled?
Narcissism is like getting sprayed by a Skunk (not us, or possibly many of us, but in this case him), where you need many many washes to get rid of the smell. It’s possible, but it takes a lot of time. Talk about the work, force yourself to remove yourself from the equation at all cost, and hide your entitlement, and indulging in woe-is-me.
Small-aside:
If anyone wants to think about just how dangerous and self destructive this type of martyrdom thinking actually is, if you mix this post with any kind of drug or alcohol abuse, you pretty much have jet fuel for self pity and serious long term substance abuse issues. It is way too comfortable of a thing to slip into with the right lubricants on a daily basis.
So what does that mean? Often those modest/weak hands mean the worse that will happen to you is that you will fall out of favor.
If you go into the bet like that, and can live with that, you won’t be scared. If you were matched up against the strongest hand like a royal flush (you will be fired for sure), realize you were up against the strongest possible hand to begin with and weren’t going to come out of that alive.
Usually, if someone has a very very strong hand, they will try to conceal it from you so you don’t even know what you are walking into. It’s the weaker hands that need to convince you that you should be scared and back off from the bet.
The takeaway here is that in each of those situations the pressure is contrived (e.g someone’s got you convinced there’s a ton of pressure, or more scarily, that there’s no pressure, neither of which is ever true).