I'm pretty envious of his capabilities, in 3.5 years I can ship a couple webapps, I would never personally get JVM compilation flags added.

For other people, they're going to be thinking "some other company is going to get one of the most effective and impactful performance engineers on the planet".

The "interviewed by the WSJ" line is for managers. Reading between the lines, I'd say he did really well and, if he didn't do better, it's because the organisation didn't let him.

And if you read between the lines (especially the last few), it seems like he had problems pushing certain initiatives of his forward within Intel.

It’s a green flag for hiring managers for sure. Even a lot of valued employees wouldn’t be allowed to represent a big company to the WSJ for various reasons, even with a PR person sitting next to them.

Is his post self promotion? Yeah, probably.

Does it matter and do the top 3 comments on HN be salty about that? Probably not that useful.

The last few sentences to me read like he knows for sure that the organisation is actively working against what he sees as his important goals. Carefully worded (and likely personal lawyer approved) to avoid burning the bridges as he mic-drops and deftly avoids having the door hit him in the arse as he struts out.

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.

A factory worker may be one of the best assembling doodads, but have no real impact on the job over their career, for example.

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 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’m not the author of this)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46146451

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.

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*.

from Windows, Linux, Chromium, VS Code, programming langugages, tools like k8s, AI to revenue! :D

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.

Maybe you should read something about him before you call him that. I recommend the "Contributions"-section on his Wikipedia-article. And if it is of any relevance to your work: his "Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud" is a comprehensive and excellent guide.

You were delegated a manager's job?

>As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.

Normally, this is stored in the time tracker, not in your memory.

It sucks but I see why they do it. If you don't have the technical/managerial talent to handle procurement then it's the safest bet.

And I’m a nobody; that you have to do that makes it feel even crazier to me.

I admit I was a bit more flexible with that in the past, but once I had a heart attack at 40 it dawned on me any company would just replace me and keep on going while my family was going to have a much tougher time (and no help from whatever company would be employing me at the time).

Me: it’s always valuable!

That’s it.

They are a gov chosen winner, so it is a safe bet they will exist for as long as they are a useful political puppet. Why or how would they become more competitive?

To say nothing of the banks and others still using the IBM big iron.

(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.)

That said it's always good to have receipts.

I would suspect your performance difference is mostly likely showing that on metal you are sharing the same software wider so not polluting caches as much as a vm neighbour running unrelated software.

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.

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.

Their purchse of RedHat flows into consulting. Their purchase of Softlayer (rebranded into IBM Cloud) is more IBM owned, customer operated computing, a business IBM has been in since forever.

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.

https://perfwiki.github.io/main/top-down-analysis/

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.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/intel/salaries/software-eng...

Try to assign money/revenue/PR to that and you'll have decent proxy for impact.

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.

Did you profile at all? And have you observed if it's not compute-bound? If it's memory or IO bound it can be due to other virtualization overheads, such as memory encryption.

This does not seem true to me. Most popular programming YouTubers are demonstrably great at self-promotion but tend to be mediocre or bad programmers who know very little, even about the topics they talk about.

If anything we have plenty of examples of where being good at self-promotion correlates inversely with actual skill and knowledge.

With that said, I wouldn't classify Brendan Gregg as being good at self-promotion.

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.

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”

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)

I didn't even use the word "modern."

I actually agree the traditional cloud providers have lots of issues and aren't always the right choice, but the fact remains that offerings from Red Hat and the like are far more popular with older larger corporations than startups or "household name" tech companies like X, Netflix, etc.

There is a tension between the two groups.

Some workers think meetings are great. Others hate them.

In general you pick companies, products, teams, initiatives, tasks that you're interested about, so it's not like it is purely dependent on luck

If you have skills and see opportunity then going for that may result in nice outcomes :)

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.

The workload is pure memory/CPU, with very little IO so it's 100% compute bound, with much more emphasis on CPU.

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.

Citation heavily needed.

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?

> 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.

But I wonder, do LLMs help explain chunks of 6502 assembly code, in your experience? Say, if one was learning.

Have a look at the scatter plot for math and verbal SAT scores:

https://www.statcrunch.com/reports/view?reportid=21828&tab=p...

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.

That really doesn't mean SW engineers could be good lawyers or doctors. It's a very superficial evidence.

Your high sat scores won't prevent you from puking at the sight of corpses or diseases.

There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.

Which only applies to a minority of people, and even that minority of people could still become an orthodontist. Likewise, if your SAT scores are 800 math and 450 verbal then that's quite uncommon and you probably shouldn't try to be a lawyer but you could still be a quant, and if you have certain medical conditions then you can't be a commercial airline pilot but you could still be a dermatologist.

It doesn't matter if every individual engineer has every individual option available to them when the overwhelming majority of engineers have a significant variety of alternatives.

> There's way more to performing in medicine that sat scores.

There is way more to performing in <anything> than <any individual thing>. But we use these things as proxies because they're designed and intended to be proxies and they're the thing for which data is available if data is the thing you want to inspect.

On your original post, you said they pay lower in other places because they can, which I agree with, of course companies will pay as little as they can, because margin on labor is the key profit margin that enables capitalism to function. But I disagree that this is due to efficient markets. Instead I believe it's because corporations can be sociopathic, whereas humans are humans, and come with feelings and flaws. A corporation can for example leverage the human desire for being a part of something larger, or local culture social pressure, to extract more hours of work out of someone than they're contractually obligated to give (see for example Japan or Taiwan working culture). Corporations are immune to these sorts of things so it's a one way, non-market-based street of exploitative behavior. Furthermore of course is the fact that corporations weild far more capital and thus power than individual workers, and will often collude with governments to prevent worker collective bargaining.

Furthermore, I believe your idea applies too much autonomy and collaboration between corporations. Example:

> . 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

This seems to suggest that companies are colluding to prevent macroeconomic effects such as wage inflation. It's post ipso facto explanation, kind of like when make presumptions with evolutionary sociology: "ADHD people served an important role as guarding early human settlements. Their heightened deep focus and obsession with finding details in noise made them ideal to scan the horizon at night." Assuming evolution is an intelligent designer that made different sorts of humans for serving distinct purposes, rather than the reality that we have different sorts of humans because of entropy, and humans happen to be sentient and can leverage these sorts of diverse manifestations to their advantage sometimes - or perhaps, our society just was built in a way that reflects the reality of different sorts of people existing, either way, thus you have people misattributing purpose to chance.

I feel the same when I hear people make market-based justifications for some economic reality like geographic labor cost diversion. My confusion isn't around why it happens, it's why laborers tolerate it. The Invisible Hand of The Market isn't setting labor rates because it needs to maintain cross-role equilibrium between well defined roles, labor rates are simply, as low as a company can get away with.

Markets aren't efficient. A doctor in Taiwan must study for ten years longer than an engineer, in the USA the same is true but also the doctor must take on potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars of student debt. In medical school a student must sacrifice both their mental health and social life and dedicate themselves entirely to completing the curriculum. If they fail they're saddled with debt they have no hope of paying (in the USA, Taiwan not so much), and even still, many fail. Then there's residency. Then in the USA you get a relatively high paid job, but also depending on your role, one of the highest stress, highest legal-exposure, highest-stakes jobs on the market. In Taiwan, same, except, the pay isn't even that good! And in the USA, because of the debt and the timeline before productivity, you'd be far better off simply immediately becoming a software engineer out of college and leveraging compound interest to come out at worst at retirement the same place the doctor does. In Taiwan, in the end the engineer will always come out ahead, and have a social life to boot.

In an efficient market, nobody would ever become a doctor. It's not like people determine whether to go through the hell of medical school based on whether they'd make more as an engineer, monitoring shifting salaries year on year as they come up through highschool.

The vast majority of people aren't making their career choice based on compensation. Compensation plays a role, but the vast majority are making choices based on interest, local availability, local culture, their personal experience (people who were strongly affected by a good teacher or therapist are more likely to become a teacher or therapist), and of course their personal capabilities. This is the sort of thing that's irrelevant to a corporation, and an efficient market hypothesis can't account for.

The market is skewed to protect profits since the market, analyzed in aggregate, represents the will of corporations to extract profit against the sloppiness of humans who are motivated by things other than money, and are also sometimes stupid and irrational, and often at a severe information disadvantage. Furthermore sometimes stupid people run corporations so the corps will behave irrationally rather than sociopathically profit driven like they're supposed to.

Rates are lower in Taiwan because it was basically a third world country living under military dictatorship 40 years ago where a ruling class was an invading military force that took land by force and then stumbled upon incredible profits by turning Taiwan into the chip manufacturing hub for the world. The amount of wealth flowing into Taiwan is astonishing but it's mostly captured by a small subset of chip industry founders, mostly all older than 50, and most of whom have some familial connection to the KMT that let them get government protection as well as having the capital to set up things like foundries. The little these companies pay out to their workers is recaptured by the same class, who own something like 80% of the land in Taiwan, in the form of rent or selling property at outrageously inflated rates.

So, wealth has clumped, and so has power, and so when google sets up an office in Taipei, they find out that engineers there get paid 30k to do a job an sf engineer would do for 120k, so they pay 30k. Or maybe 35 to get the really really good ones. Hell that might be why Google showed up at all.

One final aspect: Google can take advantage of geographic arbitrage, but an individual taiwanese engineer can't, because things like borders, visas, cost of moving, mental toll of leaving behind home, and familial responsibilities don't exist for Google, but they do for the Taiwanese engineer.

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

When you provide context and the memory map, it does help explaining what algos you're looking at and what's going on. I've had a bit more luck with gemini rather than claude on this vs in general claude codes better. ChatGPT is for the most part lost in hallucinations.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Obviously discrimination exists, which is why metrics should still be used (as data points) and why larger companies need an oversight process.

Turning ourselves into automatons, promoting and praising people exclusively based on some arbitrary set of numbers, just to try and make it fairer, won't lead to a happier or genuinely fairer workplace. At the end of the day, most jobs relevant to HN are complicated and explicitly involve a lot of human interaction. You need humans to judge performance in human-interaction jobs.

> 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.

My whole point here is that "doing whatever bullshit makes you feel good" is not necessarily the better option. Either you can prove that it's worth something, in which case you will not have to ask "What's your proposal?" because people won't complain about it, or you're just doing something for the sake of doing something, and your only recourse when people show you that it's bullshit is to get defensive.

> If you aren't rewarding good performers with money and growth most of them will leave.

And if you don't identify good performers properly and don't reward them, they will leave as well.

A pragmatic approach is to reward your team, as a team. If you go with "we fire the lowest 10% every year because there have to be low performers", you're creating an adversarial situation. Wanna know what happens if you're my manager in an adversarial context? Easy: I will be an adversary. How constructive is that? Not my problem, I did not make the rules.