> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
As a senior employee first at a startup from 2018-2020 and then as a staff engineer at a consulting company for the last year (with a 4 year at BigTech detour between), no one really micromanages me.
Even at the consulting company, when I am on a project, I just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to - with no details - or put “bench” - again with no details.
Why would my company care? The customer is happy, the project is managed through Jira (where I as the lead create the tasks) and my company gets paid when the project is done.
I am sure I ask for feedback after every project in our peer review system.
In my experience, having to track my hours absolutely destroys my performance. Thinking about how I need to pay attention to how long I spend on everything is a constant distraction in the back of my head while I try to do anything useful, and then I spend the rest of the day procrastinating having to fill out the paperwork. I know I'm not the only one because the entire dev staff was ready to mutiny the last time I was at a company that tried to get devs to start tracking their hours.
Exactly. For consulting company, you have to track how much time you spent on a project. I am allocated for a project for 100% for a week, sure we are going to bill for that week. But we don’t get paid until the project requirements are met. The client isn’t going to audit every hour. They are going to sign off based on results.
I’ll keep Jira updated at the end of the day because the PMO organization needs that for tracking and even we need that for coordination. But I am going to put in 40 hours at the end of the week.
No I’m not going to track hours I spent on internal meetings, conducting interviews and the other internal minutiae that takes up my day.
The company only makes money when I’m billing a client - that’s what I’m tracking - my results. Is the company making money on me and am I getting positive feedback from sales, my teammates and the customer.
In my experience "just put 40 hours in Salesforce with the project I’m assigned to" matches folks expectations.
However.
If you're ever on a project that doesn't turn out so well, it may suddenly become critical to account for all work done during every billed hour in detail.
I would advise all consultants to track their time diligently and completely.
That’s part of the project management tracking but that’s not strictly hours.
Those traceability artifacts are in order
1. the signed statement of work - this is the contract that is legally binding.
2. The project kick off meeting where we agree on the mechanics of the project and a high level understanding of the expectations
3. Recorded, transcribed and these days using Gong to summarize the meetings, deep dive discovery sessions.
4. A video recorded approvals of the design proposals as I am walking through it.
5. A shared Jira backlog that I create and walk through them with it throughout the project
6. A shared decision log recording what decisions were made and who on the client side made them.
7. A handoff - also video recorded where the client says they are good going forward.
I lead 2-7 or do it all myself depending on the size of the project.
At no point am I going to say or expect anyone on my project to say they spent 4 hours on Tuesday writing Terraform.
But then again, my number one rule about consulting that I refuse to break is that I don’t do staff augmentation. I want to work on a contract with requirements and a “definition of done”. I control the execution of the project and the “how” within limits.
I want to be judged on outcomes not how many jira tickets I closed.
When I was at AWS I worked with a client that directly hired a former laid off ProServe L6 consultant. He was very much forced into staff augmentation where he did have to track everything he did by the hour.
You could tell he thought that was the fifth level of hell going from strategy consulting to staff augmentation. It paid decently. But he was definitely looking and I recommended him as a staff consultant at my current company (full time direct hire)
FWIW: I specialize in cloud + app dev - “application modernization”
You did see the part about the four year stint at BigTech in between? Unless you think the second largest employee in the US is a “small little company”.
I also added an HN submission that made the front page a couple of days ago by a staff engineer at Google, did you notice the difference between how he didn’t really seem to need to prove his “impact”?
Finally, this isn’t r/cscareerquestions where you have a bunch of 22 year olds needing to prove themselves by mentioning “they work for a FAANG” (been there done that. Got the t-shirt. Didn’t like it)
> In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers.
> I call this the Shadow Hierarchy. You don’t need your VP to understand the intricacies of your code. You need the Staff+ Engineers in other critical organizations to need your tools.
> When a Senior Staff Engineer in Pixel tells their VP, “We literally cannot debug the next Pixel phone without Perfetto”, that statement carries immense weight. It travels up their reporting chain, crosses over at the Director/VP level, and comes back down to your manager.
Visibility is important, it's just not the same kind of visibility.
The question I’m trying to answer is why are keeping metrics important at all?
From my experience working on and being the third highest contributor to what was a very popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche, we kept metrics because we had to justify why it should it exist and why should we keep getting resources for it. This is the same reason that the Google Staff engineer that was in the linked article did it for his project.
The next reason is that to get promoted and to have something to put on your promo doc, you need to show “impact”.
But when you are at a staff level and no longer chasing promotions, it becomes perfunctory. You do it just because you are suppose to and do the bare minimum to check it off the list and stay in compliance. But everyone if any importance knows you.
That’s true at BigTech to my 1000+ company. No one from the C suite is wondering who employees #13545 is or what I have accomplished whether or not I go into details.
However I do make sure I get peer feedback from everyone that I work with officially or if I go the extra mile for them. I asked my manager do I need to record my goals for the year. He kind of shrugged and asked me was I trying to get promoted to a director or something (a manager role would be a horizontal move). I said “no”. he said not really.
I keep a personal career document just in case I need to prepare to interview because I stay ready to interview - I have for almost 20 years. I have been working for 30.
Then back to my minor criticism. It’s not like at a staff level once you have accomplished a lot and built up a network, you are going to be blindly submitting your resume to a job you found on Indeed. At that point your resume is just something to put in the ATS as part of the hiring process. But no one in the hiring prices is going to look at it. They are already targeting you to work there.
I had a director who was a former coworker at a well known non tech company basically offer to create a job just for me because he needed someone who he could trust. I’m not special, I just have a decent network and made a positive impression on a few people
Exactly this. I’m still friends with my former manager at AWS who is now an L7 “very important person” over a service there and another former coworker who is a tech lead over another service. He’s an L6. I can guarantee you neither of them are being micromanaged and have mostly autonomy. I’m sure they have to deal with OP1 goals (? It’s been awhile I think that’s the term).
Hell I was a lowly L5 consultant who they only entrusted to small projects and slices over larger projects (fair I only had 2 years of AWS experience at the time) and no one micromanaged me as long as I was doing my job. I flew out to customers sites by myself to lead work and my manager rarely knew what I was doing. I would go weeks without talking to him.
Contrary to the usual opinion on HN, this provides a good reason to do an MBA!
You should learn enough economics that if you are even a bit insightful you will avoid Econ 101 thinking, you will learn about things like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and a lot of other things relevant to management.
Damned is this industry, when even _you_ say you have to show that "remoteness works".
I also measure meetings (counts, lengths, and mostly meeting minutes/outine jotted down by myself) and keep track of other metrics, exactly for this reason. However, I also don't happen to have written best selling books and stuff, so I really must do this, and you really shouldn't have to :-)
I have more respect for him because he chose to do this. It’s probably clear that he doesn’t have to, at all. But he’s choosing not to rely on his (somewhat) tech celebrity status and deliver on measurable outcomes.
Not that I've ever been especially religious about it but it's probably a good thing to keep track of activities, especially those that directly affect customers. It's pretty easy/low-effort and is useful to be able to pull out.
Do you have a particularly easy way to track or are you kind of doing the same thing as consultant and logging your dailies? Always drove me a bit crazy having to do that admin piece every day.
If only I had known that in the past, I even once received the completely wrong advice to "not stand out, since your work will speak for itself and you will get recognition".
(Fancy US tech companies like to be very selective, have a competitive mindset, hire "the best" according to their filters, and then want people to show how amazing they are, uu, so much impact, woah... and in effect people need to constantly manage upwards.
While in many other companies, or "orgs", having a good team cohesion is more important. To blend in a bit, get accepted even if it means foregoing some ambition.)
Having good team cohesion is all well and good. But when it’s time to get promoted, what are you going to say “I pulled well defined Jira tickets off the board”?
When you get ready to interview for your n+1 job, and you spent months grinding leetCode and practicing reversing a btree on the white board, get to the behavioral interview and I ask “what accomplishment are you most proud of?”, what are you going to say “I worked with my team and we together closed 20 story points a week”?
I have given the thumbs down to a lot of candidates this year alone who couldn’t discuss something that they took ownership of or where they stood out.
Exactly, I can’t imagine that a “senior” developer needs to track everything that carefully. Hell I work at a consulting company full time as a staff consultant where we do have to record hours and I don’t go into any detail whether I’m on or off a project.
It’s more that it takes so long to get anything done, the effort and results need to be recorded because it most often won’t be obvious from the impact. It’s hard to make a splash on a production system maintained by 30 other people, but you can usually make things better, but it won’t always be obvious.
I guess they don’t know how or don’t bother to evaluate people on what they actually contribute? Just number of meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
Meetings by themselves are worthless. Similar to how having an idea for something isn't intrinsically valuable. I argue, meetings can't be actual contributions because the real state, the code/hardware/etc, of your project hasn't change. The result of the meeting, what people actually do afterwards due to what was discussed, is all that matters. In which case, it isn't the meeting that was the contribution, it was the artifacts that were created afterwards (documents, jira project tasks, code, etc) that are the contribution.
When we view meetings as actual contribution, we're really just valuing people doing effectively nothing. For example, anyone who's job is just to take meetings, and nothing else, is worthless IMO. You need to tangibly create something afterwards. This is a problem with big tech (which the company I work for is one of), it rewards people shuffling papers around, especially senior+ engineers, instead of valuing real work they should be doing.
Senior+ engineers have also deluded themselves into thinking that they shouldn't be coding, and rather their real work is creating endless amount of superfluous documents and creating as many cross team meetings as possible, rather than doing the hard work of creating an actual product.
Joe implemented feature A. Sandra implemented feature B. Raj implemented C. All launched in July. Since then metric X is up 20%. Who gets credit, and what does that credit really mean?
Now say all 3 did that in 3 different products. One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare *that*.
200% improvement may just be the result of feature A and 40% may just be the max performance gain from feature B. Comparing developers over the effectiveness of features they implement is mostly rating the PMs or the leadership they work with. Its a dice roll and its a measure of one's luck to be at the right place & right time to work on the right task.
People complain about using metrics. People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you. Performance reviews are an unsolved hard problem.
> People complain about rating performance based on what your manager or coworkers say about you.
Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it. Not without flaws, of course, but preferable to chasing a made-up metric. It's arguably the entire point of a manager, to know what their employees are doing at a high level. We managed to do this for hundreds of years without needing shiny dashboards and counting every meeting attended.
Metrics have their place as well, of course, but they should be one data point, and should not be chased after so religiously that recording the metrics becomes significant work on its own.
>Do they? This definitely seems better to me, and I don't think I've really heard complaints about it
"My manager hates me, how do I get promoted?"
"My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
"My manager keeps hiring only people of their race and playing favorites with them, what do I do?"
"Coworker X gave me a bad review because I wouldn't go on a date with them"
Even in the best case it biases heavily towards the people most enthusiastic about selling an image of themselves rather than those who are necessarily contributing.
Relying on someone's perception/vouching for you rather than performance metrics can be an absolute disaster - for the people involved and for the company if it turns into a lawsuit.
> My manager looks down on me because I'm a member of a different caste, what do I do?"
There may be legitimate cases but if someone runs into these issues often, may be its just excuses for bad performance. If the issue is genuine, find out what your specific organization can do about the situation and resolve it within that framework or find a better manager.
No amount of metrics are gonna help if you are going against a hostile manager, team or leadership.
Not the OP, but my proposal is to acknowledge that unsolved hard problems are... unsolved. Instead of inventing bullshit and pretending it's constructive. Some people make a career out of that bullshitting, others complain about it because it actually has a negative impact on them.
"What's your proposal", in my experience, is often used as a defense against someone calling bullshit. My proposal when I'm calling bullshit is that the bullshitter start being professional, but it's not exactly something I can say.
"What's your proposal" is a response to unhelpful griping.
Performance management does have to happen. If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave. Losing them is expensive. Hiring is expensive. To reward your high performers you need to be able to identify them.
"All of these options are bad" isn't useful if you don't have a better option.
> One produced a 200% improvement in an internal product, one a 40% improvement in a product with thousands of users, one a 1% improvement in a product with a billion users? Compare that.
Try to assign money/revenue/PR to that and you'll have decent proxy for impact.
Again: what money is attributable to each feature? Are subscriptions up 2% because of the new payment flow or because it's tax refund season? Are they down because of the new UI or because of tariffs? It's not realistic to tell them apart most of the time.
Keeping track of actual value would require actually rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really care about how often you're on time or your meeting attendance record.
Rewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism.
Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos?
Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does!
I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
Agreed. There's the additional point that I think many people don't appreciate, which is that those managers and many people lower down in the org chart merely exist because somebody else needs to be responsible for a system or a liability regardless of whether they do anything measurably profitable, and aren't necessarily incentivized to do anything more productively; they're just there to take care of it or be blamed if it's not, and have a low ceiling for what that job can possibly be worth with no measurable way to argue for more, and so in the case of managers, try to invent clout-generators at any cost and with no connection to how the assignees might accomplish it.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
Suppose you have a thousand engineers and those thousand engineers generate ten billion dollars in annual profit. How much do they each get paid? They amount they're worth? Nope, the amount they'll accept.
If you live in the US and you have the wherewithal to be an engineer then you could also have been a doctor or a lawyer or some other high paying occupation. And many of those can't be fully remote because they have to see domestic patients or interact in person with local courts or clients. Which means that if you want someone in the US to be your engineer, you need to pay them an amount that makes them want to do that instead of choosing one of those other occupations. Whereas the one in Taiwan doesn't have the option to become a doctor in San Francisco and is therefore willing to accept less money.
So why don't companies just hire exclusively the people in Taiwan? There are all the usual reasons (time zones, language barriers, etc.), but a big one is that they need a thousand engineers. So they and their competitors hire every qualified engineer in Taiwan until Taiwanese engineers reach full employment, at which point the companies still don't have all the engineers they want. And when the average engineer is making the company ten million dollars, paying San Francisco salaries is better than not having enough talent.
So then why doesn't every smart person in Taiwan become an engineer? Because the companies hiring engineers there are only paying Taiwanese wages, and then they're not any better off to do that than to become a doctor or a lawyer in Taiwan. And if they would pay higher wages there, the local economy would have to start paying local doctors and engineers more to keep them all from becoming engineers, and then you would only get a modest increase in the number of engineers for a significant increase in compensation. Which is still what happens, but only slowly over time, until the wages in Taiwan ultimately increase enough to no longer be a competitive advantage. And companies don't want to make that happen faster because then they'd have to pay higher salaries in Taiwan.
Not everyone who can be an engineer can also become a doctor or a lawyer. Different requirements and tolls on your mind and work style that aren't interchangeable for everyone.
There are two reasons that doesn't matter. The first is that it's untrue more often than not; plenty of people could do both. And the second is that "doctors and lawyers" are just arbitrary stand ins for high paying domestic jobs. They could also become physicists, commercial airline pilots, Wall St. quants, actuaries, etc.
Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
And yes of course, Americans have the highest salaries in the world for white collar professions, what other new information do you have that we don't already know?
There is a significant correlation between higher scores on one and higher scores on the other.
> Because here in the real world the barrier to entry in SW engineering jobs is significantly lower than the law bar or med school. Not to mention cheaper.
The barrier to either of those professions is getting good grades and then scoring well enough on a standardized test, and the entire premise is that the professions pay well which is how people pay back the loans.
> An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work.
An underappreciated difference is that it's hard to schedule meetings between people in SF and Taiwan, because of time zones.
I know some of them do this, but ours doesn't. There is a once yearly self-review, and as far as I can tell it has literally no impact on your actual performance review and compensation, which are basically entirely up to your manager's observations of you.
So it is important to keep your manager informally up to date on what you're doing, at least during the weeks they're thinking about performance.
If you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
Intel's management did not appreciate (as likely did not understand) tech skills/talent lately, which likely contributed to them squandering their lead.
While I have a personal career document and have had one for years where I have all of my major accomplishments in STAR format. This seems a bit much.
When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had.
But I would never write it up on a public blog post like this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could get another job, I’m sure that he has a network where a few messages would lead him to one.
Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50 after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at least a lateral move within two weeks.
I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based on my network.
I mean maybe. We often have weekly customer meetings. One of my programs has 2 customers, we meet with both weekly. So do I put idk 200+ customer meetings? That seems like a weird metric because it's like "compiled code 400 times." I've seen resumes that have the same vibe. We did not hire them. Sometimes it's very telling what people think are accomplishments.
The fact that they were busy keeping count during those 110 occasions and for every other activity clearly tells that they nothing better to do. You have to be loud about such numbers when you have very little meaningful work to show for.
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.