arvindamirtaa
Joined 14 years ago
Joined 14 years ago
The "narrative" was right. There are actual outages now unlike earlier. It's not like twitter engineers were holding up the servers to the light for there to be outages the moment they're gone. Systems run on their own just fine, until something does go wrong. And if there's nobody there to fix it, something usually small blows up. Enough of these and users start to notice degraded performance and outages.
So, it's sometimes nice to have periodic validation that you're keeping true to the course / indication that you need to make a few minor adjustments, etc. That's on your side.
From your manager's side, if they find something isn't working, they don't need to wait 3/6 months to bring it up at which point there isn't much you can do to get back the lost productivity.
Everyone who is a manager actively makes independent contributions for a not-insignificant portion of their work-week.
So, when we have 1-on-1s with them, we can actually discuss improvement avenues from the same vantage point. Not some spreadsheet pushing manager who has no clue how to measure engineer-productivity or performance.
When they do code reviews, their comments serve as an important learning opportunity, pointing out good practices/conventions, etc.
And finally, when you disagree, it's backed by the validity of your points as 2 engineers, rather than their authority as a manager vs you, their direct report.
I can't remember the number of times they've shut down someone's production workload without notice or warning, gave them no way to resolve/rectify any supposed infraction, and gave no way to contact them to appeal the decision.
I once had to resort to numbering my points and just referring the boilerplate responses (few and far inbetween as they were) back to the numbers over and over until I finally gave up, moved away and never looked back.
/s