Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

With the recent flurry of US federal firings, many people are pointing and laughing at the Trump-voting federal employees who are just now finding out that they’ve voted for themselves to be let go. How could you have this poor a mental model of what your job even is? Well. In my opinion, many software engineers are operating under a mental model that’s just as bad, and are often doing the equivalent of voting for the person promising to fire them. I won’t quote the tweets, but I regularly see stories like “I convinced my idiot bosses to finally let me do only tech debt work, and would you believe they fired me after a few months?” Or “I’ve been busting my ass on this underfunded project and I still got a bad performance review”. Or “it’s so unfair that I haven’t been promoted - look at all this amazing accessibility/standards/open-source work I’ve been doing!” The basic structure goes like this: A bright-eyed engineer joins a tech company, excited to go and make the world a better p ... Read full article.