The fact that engineers now think that helping others and working with others is negative value, just shows how terrible tech culture has become.
This all comes from management wanting to assign and claim credit. It is this credit system that ensures that people will not cooperate but instead let "others" fail.
> Not all requests for help are predatory. It’s part of your job to help out engineers on your team, and cross-org impact really does involve helping others sometimes, even if you get nothing in return. Predatory behavior is a consistent pattern of drawing on your time for nothing in return.
I don't think it's universal, there are definitely teams and management structures where it's a group effort and people aren't hoarding story points or metrics or whatever.
I could go off on one about how is when the leadership becomes so detached from the with that they need layers of managers to deal with it, leading to horsetrading, artificial metrics and political chicanery. But fundamentally, if an organisation allows such cancer to develop within it, it chose to. Whether by carelessness or on MBA infection, the result is the same.
If you're a salary-chaser who signs up for that kind of company for the pay, you know what you're walking into. You might as well join the army and complain about the food as work for, say, Google in 2025 and complain about management cancer.
"Big" tech is almost tautologically companies that are long-term setting up battlements around their fiefdoms now they've made the land grab. But big tech isn't all tech.
Of course, nothing lasts forever. One company I worked at, where I would have thrown myself into traffic for the team, got acquired and the new owner's MBAs started their process. Cuts, layoffs, new policies, commissars sent in to keep tabs, sales targets airdropped from another continent, endless, endless IT "harmonisation". The usual. So I left them to it. Life is too short to play that game if it isn't your thing.
The post is specifically about “large tech companies”.
But even in smaller companies if your entire job is “to close tickets” and you don’t close your tickets, that’s what you will be judged on. The only way that you can close the amount of tickets you should and help others who are not in the position to help you is by working overtime.
The author is specifically referring to PMs from other teams using back channels instead of going through the proper channels. He isn’t saying don’t help either junior engineers who need hand holding or other team members after they put some effort in their question and have already tried some things.
It’s been almost a decade since my job was mostly “to close tickets” even as an IC and I need to build relationships with other teams to get my job done. But I would be leery of reaching into another team for help and would first ask a team lead or PM could they spare someone.
> Of course, nothing lasts forever. One company I worked at, where I would have thrown myself into traffic for the team, got acquired and the new owner's MBAs started their process
This is inevitable. The second law of dynamics is that “entropy always increases” or things always go to shit over time.
On another note, I’m 50 and spent 25 of my 28 years of working in non Big tech companies except between the ages of 46-49 and have no need to chase max compensation. But if the compensation of BigTech had been available to me when I was younger and unencumbered (instead of older and unencumbered), you best believe I would be “grinding leetcode and getting into a FAANG” (tm r/cscareerquestions) and that’s my recommendation to anyone who is early career.
Again at 50, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than deal with any large company - especially BigTech.
This all comes from management wanting to assign and claim credit. It is this credit system that ensures that people will not cooperate but instead let "others" fail.