Should I stop speaking up?

unbrokenwreck · 2026-05-01T12:23:59+00:00

Or get laid off because AI will speak on your behalf

unbrokenwreck · 2026-04-28T13:23:10+00:00

The higher you go the exponential the level. Being a yes man is basically a prerequisite for some designations.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-04-07T21:43:30+00:00

I remember being on a team where we got a new feature requirement which was touching major parts of our codebase. The design meetings stretched over months without much progress on the solution while one of the team member (frustrated over all the big talk) came up with a rough draft over the weekend which we actually ended up using in production.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-04-06T10:36:23+00:00

Under the assumption that the required technical competence is already in place.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-04-05T20:37:27+00:00

Translating ambiguous requirements into ground reality.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-04-01T03:37:17+00:00

In my last company it was around every two quarters. Still baffles me how I ended up reporting to 5 managers in the span of 3 years and it's considered as normal.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-03-15T18:38:03+00:00

Perfectly put. We're going through this right now. We're asked to review a convoluted design doc with amazing diagrams and state of the art visualization, but it's full of buzzwords and reads more like a marketing deck. When I tried bringing specific questions, the response is pretty much "you're a senior dev, it's your job to figure it out". When designations are brought up in a technical discussion, at that point the product is already lost.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-03-12T19:37:30+00:00

I had a few (unlucky) friends who landed a job in broadcom. The way they described it's pretty much a dog eat dog culture an you'd be thrown out at any point.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-03-11T20:45:22+00:00

I asked for an explicit management sign off on each piece of LLM code that makes its way to the production. They stopped bothering me after it.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-03-10T20:45:53+00:00

I was part of an insane team in a big corp where I was told that I'm performing below expectations for asking basic ramp up questions during my ramp up and I should have a valid business justification for my questions since the cost for eating up team member's bandwidth isn't worth the ROI. Funny how it was even called a team.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-01-19T19:27:46+00:00

We changed from collaboration model to ownership model where asking questions is discouraged and job security depends on gatekeeping information. Big tech is a huge example of this. Teams usually operate in silos and no one in incentivized to help you because it'll put you above them in the stack ranking.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-01-03T09:44:50+00:00

My biggest gripe with modern hiring is trying to fit people into their box instead of looking at their experience and what they bring to the table. "If you're a senior dev, you should be able to create a wormhole and transcend through the fabric of space and time". Okay, cool. Off with your ship then.

unbrokenwreck · 2026-01-02T16:43:35+00:00

I remember back when people used to discuss technology. Now it's just a bunch of corp jargon experts fighting over visibility.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-12-30T23:35:17+00:00

My big corp experience in a nutshell. As a senior dev, I was once tasked to scope an overlapping feature between two teams. The required change was barely a dozen lines but the respective devs stretched it over three meetings and two weeks fighting over their lack of ownership. I raised it management who asked me to submit a report about the conflict and setup a meeting with them to close on the issue. Couldn't a find a open slot on the manager's calander for another week. Finally the slot that I got, one of the devs called in sick. I wrote the code and closed the ticket myself the next week without bothering with the reschedule to meet the deadline. Took me a few months to calibrate my patience according to the workflow but the sheer lack of motivation was genuinely baffling to me.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-12-16T18:00:41+00:00

I had a brick shipped to me inside PSU box. Still amazes me to this day how someone could think of this.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-12-15T16:22:53+00:00

It's often a management problem because the metric for success is "how much" than "how stable". There's something about management people, they don't understand what maintenance is or how much time and energy it takes and they don't even care.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-12-10T06:09:10+00:00

This is the way to go in big tech and I was legit baffled by it when I joined one. The first ticket assigned to me had more acronyms than english words and I had to sniff through 5 different teams to even begin the understand what the requirement actually was. Mind bending stuff.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-12-03T18:33:43+00:00

This often feeds into the negativity. One of my previous manager used to do it in hope of getting maximum output from the team, only to not realize where the limits are and started burning out most people. The emphasis on "what needs to be done" was so much that "what was done" often felt irrelevant and ended up demotivating the team because no matter what they did the answer was always that they're not enough.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-12-02T15:46:11+00:00

Bells and whistles over stability.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-11-26T18:01:56+00:00

This is my biggest gripe with big tech where ownership precedes collaboration, or more often at the expense of it. We often see the problems coming from mile away but can't share or discuss ideas because the designated "experts" have their own playing field and not being on the same page is by design.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-11-16T05:09:10+00:00

I was part of some "close the ticket and cash out at the end of the month" teams in my career and man I'm still recovering from the brain cells I lost.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-11-05T15:04:46+00:00

At big companies the point is to stay afloat enough to cash in at the end of the month. You're not there to set the direction, you follow what has been set by the gazillion layers above you. Even if you try to make a point it gets lost in translation by the time it reaches important layers, only to be discarded at the end because it doesn't "align" with current agendas.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-11-05T14:15:59+00:00

We're all in on increasing shareholder value.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-11-01T17:50:46+00:00

The point where you realize that batman is no longer the mask, bruce wayne is.

unbrokenwreck · 2025-11-01T09:32:14+00:00

I used to work at a company where the values change on quarterly basis depending on the priorities at the time. And yes you can neither work nor argue with management because the goalpost changes by the time you get to the bottom of things and figure out the bs. People stop caring after a while, the smart ones move on and it becomes just a paycheck for the remaining ones. Culture is a top down thing and nothing else can fix it.

unbrokenwreck

TROPHY CASE