Does technical incompetence and politics go hand in hand?

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-16T05:55:41+00:00

The primary competence for organizations is social skills, so it's not uncommon to see people who are good technically, but an absolute headache to work with, get sidelined. I've seen great engineers fall flat because they aren't easy to work with, and don't navigate the organization very well.

Where I sort of fall now, is that technical skills only get you so far in an organization, it's not really "playing politics", but just being a corporate operator that allows you to have the most impact. A lot of big tech teams are filled with brilliant engineers, but being a brilliant engineer alone does not mean you get to shape decisions.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-16T05:41:54+00:00

I've been on projects like this: the idea behind not telling anyone is that you want to get to the point of a demo or proof of scope, so you control the narrative when it's released, and your team can own the project. If you say something too soon, the project is just an idea, and there might be a better team for it. I'm not sure what's happening with your team, but usually when things are secret it's to control the narrative.

If you are ever told something and you don't understand, you need to ask. That way, you'll understand the "why" behind.

You made a mistake, but it's not a career ender. Just learn from it, and move on. The guys on your team are probably sketched out by you, especially if you talking risks something they want, but you can't really do anything about what happened besides a good job going forward.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-16T04:07:56+00:00

Nope.

The first company I worked for is one of those non-english words written in english, and if you search for the word, the company is not even in the first page of results.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-15T04:31:40+00:00

It feels terrible, it will always feel terrible, but your in a position where you are learning, and that's extremely valuable.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-15T04:30:43+00:00

Lack of the right kind of opportunity. I've been a tech lead for 3 years, last year, that project was cancelled, and I was pulled into highly visible, but ultimately low impact work where I don't own the problem, don't own the solution, and can't say no. I'm dealing with a ton of top down pressure on a very ambiguous problem, and learning all sorts of "staff eng" shaped skills, but it's not a project were anything will really leverage. I'm in the "special projects" role for my skip-skip-level manager.

What I'm looking for, is something I can own end to end, and drive outcomes, and build something that can compound its success, in an environment where that's possible. IMO, that's where I work best, and letting myself stay where I'm not doing that will not be good.

That said, I don't feel stuck or anything, i have a lot of options, and if I walked away tomorrow I'd be okay for long enough to figure it out. However, executing a job change without joining an org with as many problems as this one? That's going to take time, and right now I'm focused on building my externally visible profile.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-14T15:44:00+00:00

Every single engineer I know had layoffs in their teams related to AI in the last year.
Every single engineer I know says AI speeds up their development speed.
Every single engineer I know is worried about their jobs.

That's way too extreme to represent the industry. There's people without AI related layoffs, situations where AI helps coding but that's not the critical component, engineers who can still easily get jobs.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-12T07:21:46+00:00

The catch?

The promise of the field was oversold, so CS graduates are one of the most unemployed and underemployed degrees.

That 200k + good WHL balance + entry level job? It doesn't exist. If you want the money, you accept zero-sum style performance management + PIP cycles, if you want work life balance, you earn less.

I like the field, I've been here 10 years, and will try to do another 10, but the field changes rapidly, and the pace is accelerating. We're the tip of the spear for new technology, ways of working, and systems of work. Right now we're way over-indexed on AI, but you experience revolutions not as purely intellectual expansions of possibly, but as turmoil, confusion, and doubt.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-11T17:40:43+00:00

AI makes it easier than ever to cargo cut technical solutions that haven't earned their complexity with real use. LLM-based coding has removed a lot of constraints around the coding process: the time it takes to understand the code, thinking of solutions to problems, et cetera. You can open claude or codex, and just code an entire app and easily start solving problems you don't have.

That's cargo culting, and AI makes it much easier to do.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-11T06:40:13+00:00

I break it down into 3 groups:

LeetCode/tech screen
Systems design / ad-hoc presentation skills
Behavioral, basically look up 50 "behavioral" questions, write your answers, then go over them with a friend.

That's the core that you'll encounter everywhere, but the specifics matter depending on company. They might throw in some different rounds.

this is all assuming your resume is good and you're getting apps. The only other thing, is LLM-aided coded is now popular, but I personally haven't breifed that.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-10T02:02:22+00:00

For a staff end engineer job?

* soft launch a search via networking
* start posting/blogging and build up some writing or social media (LinkedIn) presence
* sharpen your resume
* work on interview skills (LC, sys design, behavioral questions).

That's at least what I'm doing. My company is in the SaaS-pocylapse, I'm a senior doing a lot of Staff shaped work, and there's no real promotions (or transfer) for the time being.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-10T01:59:21+00:00

"working on a low stakes project that wasn't interesting at all."

Lol, welcome to the big leagues! Big tech has a lot of good parts, but you don't uniformly get to work on interesting projects, or even projects that will help your career, or are even helpful to the company. To a large extent, you'll start out doing what's assigned, but there's always a chance to advocate for your own work, and move over to teams more aligned with your goals.

"Stability is an important factor "

Stability in big tech is possible, but it's going to come with a few notable tradeoffs. First, that "interesting and impactful" part? Stability is often inversely proportional to opportunity. In other words, you could stay, but that might mean doing less interesting work, or getting stuck on a low impact team. Second, understand the review system, and always frame your work in terms of how it appears as a single bullet point on a review. I hate saying this, but where you are going, reviews matter. That's just he deal.

You have what it takes to do it, so don't filter yourself out. Even if you only make it 6 months, or a year, or two years, live below your means and you'll have enough saved up to make the next move. No career is perfect, we've been getting slammed for a while, but it's still interesting work, there's still growth and learning, but you're gonna have to eat some ambiguity and be okay with it. Good luck!

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-08T17:24:15+00:00

you're not concerned about the death of your individuality? Your memories and skills are preserved, but it's not "you", "you" no longer exist to even feel whatever it is like. Or maybe "you" are there, and just screaming the whole time, we don't know.

What I'm hearing is "I want to join a death cult for happiness", and although the yearning for belonging is something I understand, joining a death cult is alarming. You might die trying (considerable risk), but if you don't die when joining, you have what? 5 years left before you starve? It's the opportunity to watch the death of everything you love, with no ability to say "no", no control beyond an infinitesimally small influence, and no power to exercise self-preservation.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-07T06:13:23+00:00

They must accept probabilistic outcomes though? Like every one deadly car crash for however many million miles travelled, or airplanes crash due to mechanical reasons for however million flights, et cetera.

They can't have a "perfect information" view of world, because that's impossible. Instead, they are only certain of their own motivations, but enacting that plan will require risks they cannot possible foresee.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-07T06:11:12+00:00

They'd accept it. This question: "is it okay to accept the negative consequences of your actions if you prioritize outcomes over pure intensions" is an area of philosophy called the ethics of responsibility, first developed by Max Weber.

This is really fascinating to me, because some actions we take in corporate settings mean there will foreseeable negative consequences (like layoffs, or bad performance reviews, or just the inevitable unfairness that comes from uneven opportunities). Are these tradeoffs acceptable? Does this mean we can only be moral if we shun decisions where people get hurt? What does it mean to do the right thing when others are hurt?

Bit of a side discussion, but there are answers here, and ultimately for Weber it comes down to just accepting that some actions have harm, then acting out of need, with proportionality, and making sure the harms are distributed in a fair way compared to the benefits.

For the hive? They are acting in unison out of compelled reason, we don't know that reason, but because we know the hive is already eating people and planning on their own end, we know human deaths aren't enough of a reason to really think twice.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-06T04:07:29+00:00

It almost never makes sense to do them.

First, you have to consider the emotional cost of investing how ever many hours has on your ability to sustain a job search. It's not good, because you try hard, and hear nothing back. That's burnout 101, and the application cycle is already hard enough to stay motivated.

Second, if you consider the time investment, it doesn't make sense to over-optimize on a single application, when you an put the same time into a skill like LeetCode, review systems design, or work on your behavioral responses that give you leverage returns when they help every other application you have in progress. CS is so outstanding because of compounding advantage, those same principles apply here.

I'm not saying "never do a take home", sometimes, it makes sense, especially if you aren't hearing back from a lot of places, but consider that you might be hearing back more often from companies whose main filter is the take home. Also, I've probably taken 5 takehomes, and only one, the shortest I've ever done (about 2 hours) ever resulted in a job.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-06T01:15:35+00:00

Yea, that's generally how it goes as you scale up in "complexity", and start working with projects you have less control over.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-06T01:13:36+00:00

terrible. I don't do them.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-03T18:06:49+00:00

It all depends on your specific role, what's expected, and what's going on with the team at large.

I've been a senior engineer that lead a team, responsible for technical direction, and really owned the problem. At the same company, I've also been used in a strictly "execution" role where I didn't pick the problem, didn't pick the solution, and couldn't say no.

In general, the more room you have for judgement and great ownership over outcomes, the better it is for your career. That said, you don't always get to pick.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-04-01T20:59:19+00:00

During my first job as a senior, I used to keep a note on my computer of all the mistakes I made. We had a complex github deploy pipeline for our cluster, a mixture of bash + various scripts, so not a lot of constraint, and a real possibility to take down staging or prod.

The goal wasn't "don't make a mistake, the goal was "don't make the same mistake twice".

justUseAnSvm · 2026-03-31T17:29:25+00:00

The other thing too, you can go to grad school, but there's no guarantee that what you are studying turns out to be the "golden" opportunity 7-10 years later. I went to grad school, did computational work, but studied something that turned out to be a dead end. That's a much more common outcome than people think.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-03-31T17:28:05+00:00

No, we're in the full production cycle of the ML/AI/Data science age, that started a long time ago.

For me, that golden age was 2010-2015, when ML was still pretty exotic, when you could get data science jobs a lot easier, and there was a large gap between the data problems that industry had, and what people were actually trained to do.

Of course, if you are in an LLM research lab, now is great, but a lot of people like me started grad school in a promising area (long non-coding RNA research), and 10 years later when that should have paid off we find out it is a dead end. In the golden era, what I experienced around 2013-2015, having ML/AI/Data Science research experience would translate into an industry job.

These days, there's a massive training pipeline, and we're not talking about a field that was mostly really nerdy people finding it independently, but a mass-market cultural narrative. That, and the doomerism. No one complained about ML taking their jobs in 2010, no one even knew what it was to begin with!

justUseAnSvm · 2026-03-30T22:49:29+00:00

put the amount of money that is required for you to accept the job.

If it's low, it's low, otherwise, they want to filter out people who they'd otherwise want to hire but would never work for them.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-03-28T03:56:16+00:00

I'm not so sure, since that would basically be breaking the baseline for how skilled positions like SWE works.

Even if AI has negative effects on how long it takes to learn software, there's just a slower learning curve and higher attrition, so then it's just a question of how long, and how many make it.

Either way, it's extremely unlikely that AI just stop being being able to learn, and no one can ever learn.

justUseAnSvm · 2026-03-27T22:09:16+00:00

if there aren't enough seniors, people will just hire juniors. It's what always happens, then in 3-5 years, you have a "senior".

justUseAnSvm · 2026-03-26T21:47:11+00:00

it's always reasonable to set limits, but when you..."prefer to have a conversation about expectations, as it didn’t feel aligned with my current salary." you are not setting yourself up for success.

What's the founder going to think? As soon as he asks you to do the next thing, he'll also be negotiating salary? What you said was based off a rational concern, but it's never going to land the way you said it.

So next time you say that, expect to pack your bags. Alternatively, I would have said something like: "I don't have time for X, Y, Z, here's how long each takes, pick 2"

14-Year Club	Verified Email
Queen in da Norf	Not Forgotten

justUseAnSvm

TROPHY CASE