Accountability is definitely a problem. Now we blame the “process”. The solution to every problem created by the faulty “process” is another bureaucracy, another validation, another tool, or another person in the decision making meeting.
And so, everything from Hollywood blockbusters to software solutions is created by committee. The end products are all box-checking, lowest common denominator throwaway garbage. No risks are taken. And very little value is delivered.
Note that if you ask the CEO if you, the owner of a project can be accountable for it. They might say yes quite happily. But when you ask for the power to be able to enforce it, they will refuse.
You need power to exercice accountability. Otherwise anybody can come shit in your codebase, and you are now accountable for it. Because you do not have the power to refuse the turd.
If only politics was limited to affecting those who opted in. But mostly government shouldn't be the whims of one individual, it should be much more considered than that.
He was elected as president of a constitutional republic. He's acting like an emperor, enacting control through cronyism, threats and targeting of individuals and private companies via executive power. You could counter that he was elected by people who wanted to disrupt the system but that's a massive assumption and even many of his political base seem to be surprised by the extent of his actions. There is constantly political alignment behind his actions, with aligned politicians & media noticeably readjusting their opinions, politics and bills and revising history to align with the latest demagoguery to appear from this one person.
The constitutional republic was designed to protect from one person's whims but that ideal seems to have crumbled when the rest of the republic has been co-opted, controlled or simply ignored. In Europe we always knew that US claims to have the best democratic system were hubristic nonsense, no maybe more in the US realise the fragility of government.
Mid-tier engineers are the most dangerous type of engineer as they've learned enough to make decent abstractions and they tend to run with that over-engineering everything they touch.
IMO it is better said that Go is designed as being a good language for Senior and Junior developers, where mid-tiers will probably hate it.
In the end it was a dumb comment by one of the Go devs which got jumped on by all the Go haters. Contrary to the popular meme, Go's not just for mid-tier programmers - it never was (and to be fair to Rob Pike, they've twisted what he said). But sure, it makes it easier for programmers at all levels to get started, and to get real work done. That includes advanced people as well as the inexperienced.
I think the ultimate goal of making a programming language is to cause the least friction for a programmer trying to get real work done, and in my experience Go's great from that point of view. Language bells and whistles may be exciting, but often don't pay their way in terms of real world productivity, IMHO.
I have never understood why go fans think “make it easier for beginners” is an important feature. I mean, sure, it’s nice to have, but not at the expense of anything else — your career lasts 40 years; why optimize for the first month experience?
Pretty much every reputable computer scientist has been saying for the last 70 years that the most important thing in the entire world is simplicity and ease of understanding.
I like that meme graph with the junior programmer liking the simplicity, then the mid level programmer liking the power, then the senior going back to liking the simplicity.
> I have never understood why go fans think “make it easier for beginners” is an important feature.
Well, in the real world a lot of people have to work on teams where many of their co-workers never grow beyond beginner level. So anything that can be done to reduce the burden of having to deal with them is welcome. Not everyone gets to sit in the Silicon Valley ivory tower beside the greats.
> your career lasts 40 years
40 years is a peculiar number. If it is your passion, you should easily be able to see 60-70 years (assuming you live to an average age), and if you are only in it for the paycheque the comparatively high salary offers you retirement long before 40 years comes around.
In the time you get everyone on the team to agree whether you should use Maven or Gradle, which testing framework to use, or figure out how to autoformat your code, your Go program will be done.
* everyone agrees to use `cargo test` (what even is a “testing framework”)?
* everyone agrees to use `cargo fmt`
What’s the advantage of go here?
By the way, the formatting situation is actually worse in Go because there are both gofmt and gofumpt used in the wild, at least gofmt has different behavior depending on different flags, and there are additional linters people use to e.g. ban long lines that for some reason the formatters don’t cover.
It may have been a dumb comment, but there's some truth to it. Go was to solve a Google problem of devs that needed to write system management programs, not systems themselves. The choices of Python or C/C++ left a large gap that Go filled.
I used Go for most of my own projects and as I got deeper into it began to realize its warts, but the worst was that you can't get performance by "share memory with communicating"--channels are slow. Reading the non-idiomatic stdlib implementation shows the difference of who it's made by vs who it's for (which isn't the authors).
> Go was to solve a Google problem of devs that needed to write system management programs, not systems themselves.
What's the difference? The opposite, so to speak, of system is script, and I don't think system management falls into the scripting category. A system management system is a system too. But that isn't what they were talking about anyway. They were talking in the context of building servers (think like a HTTP server). That was clearly spelt out.
I understand that the Rust crowd has reimagined system to mean something akin to kernel, much like they have reimagined enums to be akin to sum types. Taking established words and coming up with entirely new meanings for them is what they like to do. But that reimagining has no applicability outside of their little community. This is not how the industry in general considers it.
It’s funny you mention that: my on and off years with go have locked a couple (possibly wrong today) ‘rules’ for go; one is that channels are crazy slow, and another is that defer does not always work like you imagine it will.
There was a sort of misunderstood dream in the early days of go that it would make fanning out and using your 24 cores easy as empowered by channels: this is still not easy in go, although it may be easier and less error prone than c.
In the intervening decade, python has made say a parallel for loop immensely easier.
I’m had all three titles at various points in my career but the reality is that my responsibilities and operational altitude varied widely from company to company. I just completed a job search after being laid off and one of the challenges of finding a job in leadership is deciphering what each company actually wants from their managers or directors or VPs.
Some roles are “hands on”. For others that’s a red flag. For some it’s all about managing people and emotional intelligence. For others it’s all about technical acumen and technical direction. Sometimes what they are really looking for is exactly what the last person in the role did. In other cases, they want the opposite of the last person to hold the role.
The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software, in my experience, is that one’s title explains which meetings one is expected to attend.
I've had a similar experience, however I found it tied to the size of the company. If you're a director at a large corporation, you will be very siloed and you most likely won't be doing much coding. If you're a directory at a small company, you're going to be coding, managing coders, and being part of leadership and strategic discussions.
Can confirm. I currently work for an SMB (~150 employees) as a manager. Our VP doesn't write any code but the directors and managers are still IC's on projects.
Right now I really like being an IC in addition to being manager cause I still have that coding itch to scratch, but I just know one day I will eventually graduate to role where I don't write any code. Long term it is the direction I want to go in but it's going to be bittersweet when I finally get to a role with no coding.
Isn’t the most effective way to find out what you’ll be doing is by measuring how many people are going to be under you overall?
A “vp” at a startup with 20 people under them will likely have very different responsibilities than a faang director with 200.
I believe this is why you get asked how many people are under you when interviewing at these roles. The titles - as far as I’ve seen - are mostly meaningless. It’s about the scale of your decisions. I know the article talks about the type of influence/decisions you’ll be making. (Executing others decisions vs making the decisions) But I find it’s rare for these bigger companies to really give a shit about that. They care more about how many people you’ve had under you. It’s rare to see someone be VP at startups with a few people (and that’s their only experience) and then be VP at faang in their next role.
The "number of people you've had under you" does provides insight into what a role entails, but there's still a lot of variance. What does seem to be uniform is that the "number of people you've had under you" determines whether a hiring company will think you’re qualified for a job. Companies simply aren't likely to take a "risk" hiring an outsider that hasn't been in a role with a similar perceived scope of responsibility. And since actual here's-what-you're-doing-day-to-day responsibility can vary so much, the "number of people you've had under you" becomes a proxy for that.
I understand the reasoning for why they put so much weight on the number of reports you’ve been previously responsible for, but it also explains why big companies stagnate. The people change but the thinking and strategy doesn’t.
> The only thing you can really depend on when it comes to leadership titles in software
It's not just leadership titles. Even if they list tech stack, responsibility or any of it it may not eventually be reality. Sometimes it's a wish list, sometimes it's planned and other times they "forgot" to update it.
And it's not necessarily a bad thing. I should think adaptive roles would be a benefit, not a hazard. At my company we simply list "software engineer, all levels" in our postings.
Less than a year ago multiple States attempted to remove Trump from the Presidential ballot. That’s the closer analogue to the shenanigans in Turkey, not the attempted equivalence you’re trying to make.
Refusing to accept that you lost an election and then attempting an insurrection to overthrow the candidate that you lost to isn't quite the same thing.
This is a blatant lie: Trump resisted sending the national guard and the Mayor of DC had to ask Virginia and Maryland for police assistance. Ultimately Pence pushed the Pentagon to respond, and he’s never been forgiven for it.
If you liked the original, you should absolutely watch Age of Resistance. It’s not a masterpiece but it was clearly made by people that care about the original, its legacy, and its lore.
> Their product marketing is a huge mess, they keep changing the names of everything every few months. Nobody knows which Copilot does what anymore. It really feels like they're scrambling to be first to market. It all feels so incredibly rushed.
Product confusion, inconsistent marketing, unnecessary product renames, and rushing half-baked solutions has been the Microsoft way for dozens of products across multiple divisions for years.
Rule #1 for Microsoft product strategy: if you can't yourselves figure out the SKUs and how they bundle together, the odds are good that your customers will overpay. It's worked for almost 50 years and there's no evidence that it will stop working. Azure is killing it and will continue to eat the enterprise even as AWS starts/continues to struggle.
It’s not just about acquiring “basic skills” or “marketable skills”. Shop enables practical, skill-appreciating minds to use geometry, physics, and science in concert to solve problems. You learn about symmetry and measurement, force and torque, and materials and chemistry simultaneously.
Many learn better at a workbench than at a chalkboard. And even those that don’t often appreciate the chalkboard more when they can relate what they’re learning to what they are doing.
> Reflexive "ugh govt" is a result of decades of Reagan-ite propaganda
I (and many others) have worked for, contracted for, interacted with, and/or closely observed government for decades. The only “reflexive” thing here is your argument that people who disagree with the you are the victims of propaganda.
You can certainly quibble with the details on how to deliver government efficiency (and I highly encourage people to sincerely scrutinize any efforts to do so - it should produce better results), but there are good and valid reality-based reasons that the “DOGE” mission has broad support.
There's no denying that there's bloat, but going in with a chainsaw is not a conducive or efficient way to reduce bloat in an organization.
If you want to use the "private sector lense" (which I do not think is valid for a govenenent bureaucracy), there's a reason why when I've participated in M&A events, we would spend a year doing due diligence and understanding the organizational and financial structure before initiating an event.
By haphazardly doing these kinds of initiatives without even understanding regulations and laws means any potential savings will be burnt in litigation and cleaning up messes.
Indeed. The chainsaw approach will only produce an even less effective civil service, and one in constant crisis.
If you want to actually improve governance (and we really should because it is in fact often quite dysfunctional), you don't come in with the notion that it is intrinsically rotten to the core and the very idea of governance is flawed by nature.
You start by motivating people to improve. Which you don't do by accusing them of graft, corruption and incompetence.
Every accusation is a confession. Elon and his band of criminals know that if they were in government they would try to get a make work job and grift, direct money to their own businesses and friends, etc, so they assume that all civil servants are like that
They are also performing for a constituency who like believing that the government is their enemy. It's straight from the authoritarian playbook : claim the government is broken, get into power and break the government, replace it all with your own organization and declare victory.
>If you want to actually improve governance (and we really should because it is in fact often quite dysfunctional), you don't come in with the notion that it is intrinsically rotten to the core and the very idea of governance is flawed by nature.
There are really two type if inefficiencies being conflated here. That of the workers, and that of the organizations.
For the organization, firing does nothing. You have to start by reducing the scope and simplifying the legislation of those organizations. E.g fix the tax code, eliminate the department of education, streamline EPA objectives.
For the worker incentive, this is really a classic public sector union debate, and should be treated as such.
For the first time in a long time the GOP has control over all branches of gov't.
So if there were policy and organizational changes they wanted to make, they now have the power to do it, through passing laws.
But they're not doing that. Which really draws attention to the fact that it's not the manner in which government is being run that is a problem to them. It's government itself.
I agree that the GOP has legislative control. It'll be interesting to see what they do with it in the coming years, if anything. Destroying and undermining departments through the executive is easier than redesigning it through the legislative, and I suspect this is why we are seeing the current actions.
I'm not sure what you mean by the following statement:
>manner in which government is being run that is a problem to them. It's government itself.
Where are you drawing the distinction? I imagine someone could disagree with both what government does and what it is.
How do you "start by motivating people to improve"? Cause all the inefficiency at best, corruption at worst and all in between is there not randomly because it serves the motivation of the people working there.
Reduction of scope is required to decrease cost and waste. Unfortunately, reducing scope and regulation is a legislative problem, not an executive one.
Having an government organization underfunded and understaffed to fulfill its mission leads to more waste, both on the public and private side.
For example, the solution isnt to fire employees, it is to simplify the tax code.
> Reduction of scope is required to decrease cost and waste
That doesn't follow at all. Plenty of cost and waste arises while carrying out things that are solidly within the scope of a federal government in the eyes of belief system but anarchism and other forms of extreme heterodoxy. To "provide for the common defense" is literally in the Constitution, yet the DoD is a black hole of funding, while soldiers eat powdered eggs on base.
And so have I. Government is not bad or inefficient by definition, and your anecdotal experience with government does not change that. To believe that government is automatically bad because it is the government is an article of faith, whether or not every single individual has been influenced by propaganda.
Government is what we make it. A snapshot in time of your own experience does not define government and its capabilities.
You're complaining about bureaucrary, not government. All those "seeing like a state" aspects originated in corporations. (Who stole the ideas from the military.) Because corporations had experience governments needed.
Is bureaucrary inevitable? A side effect of organizational psychology?
I have no clue.
But until someone divines a better way to coordinate humans, we just have to suck it up.
Recall that we are posting in a thread about DOGE cutting one of the more effective and efficient departments in the federal government. Popular support and good reasons for it notwithstanding, it's clear that the actual mission is not being carried out in good faith.
Also, support for the DOGE mission is entirely orthogonal to DOGE's actual goals and what they are doing so far.
Sure, maybe there is broad support for making government more efficient, but that is not in any way what Elon Musk is trying to do. So if there is broad support for DOGE those people are entirely wrong to believe they are aligned with Elon, and entirely wrong about supporting DOGE as the means to achieve their goals.
That being the case, these same people cannot be trusted to understand our government and how it functions and where the inefficiencies are. If you support the DOGE mission you do not actually support making the government more efficient, so alluding to that support is a red herring. Worse than a red herring, it shows that their anti-government views are not based in reality and facts.
I haven’t seen the main impetus for the layoffs brought up yet: the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week, twice. People are acting like DOGE is attacking tech support recklessly with a chainsaw. This appears to be a targeted cut of insubordinate or redundant individuals.
If a random person joined your company’s Slack and said “tell me what you do, or I will fire you,” and your CEO then said to ignore it, which one would you go with?
If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked, I would probably listen to my CEO’s boss. And what a poor CEO for risking his entire workforce and his own position on a political squabble.
I think it's a great moment for the CEO to have a spine and show the stupidity of the board in that moment.
"To the board: if you have this level of distrust for my management, you should fire me immediately. This request is out of line, and shows great disrespect for our employees as well as myself. If you are dissatisfied with the information you receive about the company's operations and performance, you can talk to me and my staff about that. I will not allow you to display such callous disregard for the people under my leadership."
I’m sure this great CEO will continue to be a great leader under other management, then. We’ll see if Cuban actually follows through on his offer or if it’s just political virtue signaling.
> If the board of my company (my CEO’s boss) showed up in Slack and asked ...
You would write "Ask HN: my company has thousands of employees, a board member showed up in Slack and told everyone to write him a weekly summary, or we'll be fired, what to do?" and everybody would be like "WTF that's beyond stupid, name the company, also it's time to polish your resume!" yada yada.
What if the CEO was just put in place by the chairman of the board. As was the case for many of the agencies that told their employees not to respond.
And it’s not the board that send the emails, it’s a committee created by the board.
It’s unclear whether OPM has the authority to order employees to do anything.
The real way to do this. If it was what they actually wanted to happen was for the president to issue an executive order requiring everyone to logon to a secure site and fill out a form. Then give some kind of reasonable deadline that makes allowances for people on PTO or leave.
That’s not how well-functioning organizations operate. Power is delegated, and if it’s publicly undercut, there is a loss of trust in leadership.
If a board wants something done, they can urge the CEO to implement it, but they do not hold unilateral power to dictate internal operations. They can vote to remove the CEO if they feel that they aren’t producing the desired result, but again, this is an indirect action.
Most of the agency heads telling employees not to respond were just installed by the President within the last few weeks.
They answer directly to the President. The email was sent by someone at OPM who also answers directly to the President.
The President has issued no formal orders regarding these emails. He did issue an executive order telling employees to comply with DOGE requests but this email came from OPM not DOGE.
> A judge ruled Thursday that the Office of Personnel Management — the central human resources office for the federal government — broke the law when it ordered other federal agencies to terminate thousands of “probationary” employees.
> “OPM does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe to hire and fire employees within another agency,” the judge said.
A previous memo from the exact same email address as the "5 bullets" email told employees that this email account was being established as a way to communicate with every single federal employee at once, and stated clearly that no one was obligated to reply to any messages from the email account. They can't even figure out what the hell they are doing and be consistent with their own messages.
Once again, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
The request was at best a bad joke, and I think you know that too.
If the real purpose, as Musk later stated, was to see who would respond and who would not, with no consideration of content, why deceive? Be direct: "This is a test of government employee email deliverability and responsiveness. Please reply to this email when you receive it. An empty reply is fine, you do not need to put anything in the email."
If you want to know what people are working on, you work with the management chains because those are the people whose job it is to know what their people are working on. You take your time to dig into the data, talk to people at all levels, understand the structure and the work. This request, in the way and fashion it was made, shows an incredible lack of disrespect, distrust, and disregard for federal employees across the board. If I were a government employee and received that mail, I would be unable to avoid expressing my own disrespect and distrust in my reply.
These emails sets up a self-fulfilling prophecy where government fails to serve the people. Some people leave public service. Others stay but are disillusioned and checked out because they know their actual job performance no longer matters, the whims of a billionaire who voted with his wallet to make himself co-president can destroy their livelihood at any moment. Over time, you have people who are unable to leave and thus will do what they're told out of fear, and unqualified loyalists who just do what they're told.
On every team I’ve worked on there is an expectation of at least weekly updates. Usually a daily or every other daily standup. The request is not unreasonable.
I can never know what I’d do when faced with a position where I believed some of my budget was going to pay dead and inactive employees, and where members of the management chain were insubordinate and unwilling to help identify the issue and even complicit. I’d guess I’d just fire them all. Is that more humane?
> On every team I’ve worked on there is an expectation of at least weekly updates. Usually a daily or every other daily standup. The request is not unreasonable.
At the team level, that is of course quite reasonable.
Doing this from a top-down approach in an organization at any real scale is fucking insane.
Where are you getting the idea that the email is related at all? For government offices were I know workers, firing is based on 100% seniority, completely independent of performance or email responses.
> For government offices were I know workers, firing is based on 100% seniority, completely independent of performance or email responses.
Reductions in force due to mission/budget/etc. changes, etc., which are based on seniority, not firings, which are (where civil service protections apply) exclusively for documented misconduct or incompetence and have due process protections.
It’s true that private industry (at least outside of unionized workplaces) leverage at-will employment to blur the line between mission/budget-based staffing reductions and for-cause firings, but the civil service isn’t at will and the line is a sharp legal distinction.
To be legal, without individual cause, they would have to, but they don't appear to have followed the law for either seniority-based reductions or for-cause firings (and in at least some cases there appear to have been directives given to falsely characterize broad policy-focus based dismissals as for-cause firings.)
"the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week"
This is entirely false. This is so incredibly false that I am actually shocked you were willing to post it. It is hard for me to imagine anything more absurd and untrue someone could have said about this topic. I tremble with fear thinking about what your media diet must look like in order for you to believe this absolute nonsense.
TFA: “After thousands of government layoffs, the Office of Personnel Management on Saturday directed federal workers to email a list of roughly five accomplishments”
I was incorrect, and you are right about the order of events in this case, although I don't believe TFA says these 18F employees didn't reply to the email. I noted in an edit that I accidentally pulled a quote from a different article. I believe the gist of what I and others are saying here is still true.
Some other points:
* The second email came "late Friday" and the layoffs happened hours later at 1 am on Saturday, so it's not reasonable to count the second email as a warning or genuine attempt to find the "good" employees. I'm guessing it was just blasted out and happened to land in their inboxes before the firing notice did.
* Based on https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/01/general-services-ad... it appears the entire 18F unit was cut, so this doesn't seem targeted or predicated on email responses. Also, I'm not a leader, but if 100% of my organization didn't comply with an order, cutting them all is probably a much less effective decision than trying to meet them half-way. I guess if they've truly been doing nothing for years, there would be no loss, but that seems unlikely to be true in most cases including 18F's.
* Your initial comment appeared to be speaking generally on DOGE cuts, so it is fair for us to be responding accordingly. 18F seems to have been pretty small, but part of the reason this story is interesting is everything else DOGE is doing. As we've said, plenty of cuts happened before and independent of any email. Personally I'm doubtful that responding does much, but I'd be interested in any reporting on employee's experiences or what DOGE is saying about responses and how it affects their decisions.
Like I said above, I don't think TFA mentioned 18F's responses and there's not really a good reason to assume that the layoffs were due to no response.
> Those impacted in the wee hours of Saturday morning also received emails late Friday from DOGE with the subject line, “What did you do last week? Part II.”
They were asked first last last week. And then again on Friday.
——
> According to Politico, the emails — prompting employees to list their weekly accomplishments by Monday — were widely distributed across multiple agencies, including the State Department, the IRS, and the NIH.
These quotes support the existence of the emails, which people here aren't disputing. They say nothing about whether the only layoffs were those who didn't respond, which was implied by your original statement that "the people let go were unable or unwilling to send an email listing 5 things they accomplished in the last week."
I don't care where it's from, it is still false. The layoffs were happening long before this email went out, and the vast majority of them had nothing to do with the email. The threat to fire people over the email was toothless and illegal, and as far as we know from public evidence no one has been fired over it. You have no idea what you're talking about
Neither DOGE nor Elon wrote this email. OPM did. Since OPM is now ran by a former Elon employee, they probably sent it at Elon’s request. Maybe the President was informed beforehand maybe not.
It doesn’t matter either way. The President has the authority to order employees to perform certain tasks but he has to do it through proper channels.
OPM doesn’t have the authority to order non-OPM employees to perform specific duties. They never have in the past. And the President has issued no executive orders stating that OPM has this authority now.
And so, everything from Hollywood blockbusters to software solutions is created by committee. The end products are all box-checking, lowest common denominator throwaway garbage. No risks are taken. And very little value is delivered.
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