Now with the fear of constant layoffs at Microsoft and Meta too, it's even more critical for individual engineers to optimize their performance review or you might lose your job. Sadly this is hard to line up with putting out a good product.
If you optimize for performance reviews, you'll make a lot of money, yeah. But you'll eventually find yourself overemployed and incapable of keeping up with that gambit anymore. Or, you'll find yourself doing something you never wanted to do. In extreme cases, it's like those people at Palantir in that post last week, realizing they're the bad guys. Usually it's just looking at your calendar on Monday evening, seeing a wall of meetings from 4PM to 9PM, and telling your kid you can't go to the park today.
Meanwhile, the "product people" I know well are all doing really cool stuff during the day, then going home to enjoy their lives. They don't make as much money, but they're happy.
Quote that one Wu-Tang song today, and you'll be quoting that one Talking Heads song in a couple years. I guess.
Those "overemployed" people are your bosses, indeed unable to keep up, steering you into the situation of "those people at Palantir".
When things spiral downward, telling yourself how you're "relatively fine still" with blinders on short-term, "works" just up to hitting solid ground.
I've worked in big tech and had the sort of conversations with my managers where they say: "The work you're doing in X is great. I use it and it really needs work. But it's not a priority, or even 'impactful'. Your work on X is effectively equivalent to doing no work".
Sometimes it isn't even about getting a promotion, sometimes the implication is you should be worried about keeping your job. You can still do X which everyone knows is great and someone should do, but "on your spare time, as an extra" because Y is what your performance review will really revolve around.
The sad part is I can tell they mean it, and do agree someone needs to work on X, but it isn't their decision to make, because they have to show face and explain to their manager why an engineer earning XXX,XXX didn't meaningfully work on Y. Ultimately someone up the chain who you've never talked to is the person who decided X is unimportant; they don't want to kill it they just don't use it, or have a strategic reason to not care about it.
In the politics of upper management perhaps it was something an adversary used to vouch for, and now you have to prove the org can do without it. Or perhaps it's the ace in your pocket, and you wan't it to be lack-luster so when the big boss above you starts talking about retirement, you can show amazing wins in the area and be first in line for succession. Companies are not democracies. For better or for worse big companies are not democracies, they are feuds, so if the kingdom isn't in danger its future comes to depend a lot not on what's the best decision, but how a decision fits the game of thrones.
and probably Once In A Lifetime
Microsoft is literally too big to fail and it's their sole asset at this point. When companies like Github get bought by Microsoft, I just put a clock on the wall in my mind. Just a matter of time before the shit seeps in.
They can't help it. They are organizationally unable to function. It's so much worse than misaligned incentives and redundant management (though those are factors): they seem culturally, institutionally, unable to just... DO ANYTHING. Everything they do is 1 step forward and 4-20 steps back. They are too big and they should be broken up for their own good as well as the good of every user of their software.
Its just unbelievably hard to nail the culture and incentives in large organizations. Some notable exceptions: Sony in its first 3 decades, Toyota in the 70-90s era, Apple after the return of Jobs and till his death, and one could even argue Microsoft in the era of Windows 95 till about Xbox 1. Maybe even Tesla and SpaceX.
Something hard to quantify happens when the culture of product erodes and the culture of politics virally infects a company. I witnessed it at a couple of big companies ... Intel in the late 90s, Google in the 2010-15 era (working as a contractor looking in).
Hats off to people like Jobs and Musk who could grow product culture at scale ... I can't even say I've been successful at fostering this kind of culture in startups under 500 employees.