> Like the majority of the team is doing useless stuff that management thinks is impressive
This is arrogant thinking typical of developers. Most developers I have talked to (including myself 10 years ago) thinks that they or their friends who agree with them about all sorts of random code quirks are the only one that does work and "carries" the team, and everyone else's work is largely useless. The reality is that a lot of people do a lot of jobs; and they are not perfectly equally distributed, but they are often all necessary and contribute to a large extent.
I recommend a clear, fresh look at the team; or get the opinion of some third party that is not your SWE friend (who is going to be just as sycophantic as the latest LLM, perhaps more). You might find that others at work appreciate them more than your superstar coding. Thinking that their jobs are useless makes you feel good, but may not be the truth.
I feel like you've maybe had the benefit of working in teams where this didn't happen.
I've seen it first hand, people cotton on to EM's latest buzz word, find some space to shove it into and then show it off. EM is blown away despite the result being over engineered or poor fit for the solution.
Last time I saw this was a system decomposed to events when tight orchestration was necessary. 10 months later a single function app was dropped in place to replace it. Dev who did the original work got a promotion for their gift of technical debt.
You've never had a task in a job where it is obvious the task is entirely useless and stupid and a waste of time and exists solely because of process that no one in the chain of being involved has the authority to rip out and replace with something sensible? You guys hiring?
> This is arrogant thinking typical of developers
typical for a lot of knowledge workers. "engineer's disease"
i am good at solving problems in X domain, and believe that carries over to all domains. it's just so simple, they're so dumb, etc.
these guys get to management and then crash out.
Working at FAANG, acutally the stuff I was doing was mostly bollocks. Nothing of real value, apart from a few projects was delivered.
Twitter had laid off like 75%+ of staff and everyone, including on this site, was convinced it would crash and burn, yet it's still working. Explain?
It’s not so much the individual employees fault (or personal failing) that most of them in most large enterprise companies aren’t doing anything meaningful and useful. That’s just how large organizations works, bloat and inefficiency is kind of unavoidable in any type of large organization.
Many are not doing anything obviously meaningful and useful. However that doesn't mean it isn't meaningful or useful, only that you don't know.
When an organization reaches a certain size it starts behaving more like an insect colony than individuals at most levels. There is a lot of exploration that occurs, much of it is unfruitful, yet still enough future resources are discovered for it to continue and expand.
Alternative ways of working
Indeed, and the third party may be someone who thinks the entire SWE department is useless. Most people have an equivalent understanding of what SWEs and high level managers actually do all day.
Meanwhile the people in those departments are working balls to the wall in permanent crisis mode to meet real business needs.
> This is arrogant thinking typical of developers.
Also very typical of hn. Prevailing sense of anyone not physically coding adding no value