this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2025
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The fact they had to do this to earn a promotion is an institutional problem. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
Game rules: You want a promotion? Make something cool, improve something while using approaches that will show that you deserve a higher position and, therefore, a bigger salary.
Player: (Lies and creates shit that is even worse than the initial situation.)
Lemmy: Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
You are contradicting yourself. If writing bullshit and making things worse gets you a better career position
Is not the rule of the game. Sell your story to your superiors is the rule of the game, that's the real metric, the the thing that really matters.
Do you want me to present you with a definition of "lie"? I believe you don't understand the phrase "Lies and creates shit".
They built something worse and we're still promoted for it despite it being demonstrably worse. Where's the lie? They described something complex and techy sounding, did it, and got the promotion anyway regardless of the actual results, proving the results didn't matter.
So you want the manager to be cleverer than the engineer in engineering, so the manager would be able to detect a deliberate lie from the engineer?
Yes, but more competent, not cleverer. Some managers aren't fit to be in IT.
You expect a manager to be more competent in engineering than an engineer? You expect the manager to always expect a lie from an engineer and recheck any data received from the engineer?
Well, we have very different ideas about how engineers and managers work.
Technical managers exist. Yes, it's a manager's responsibility to understand the field he's working in. He doesn't need to be a more skilled engineer, but he needs to understand what his/her people are saying.
It isn't enough to detect deliberate lies from an engineer like in this case.
There are ways to know. Did the manager ask for proof of concept? Asked for performance tests of the update and compared it to existing/baseline?
How can I know? Plus engineer could easily lie as he did it right from the start.
Of course don't just ask the engineer. Any piece of code written by the engineer should ultimately be tested by a separate testing team before getting pushed to production. Ideally you have a performance and regression testing team that would help evaluate the changes being introduced and how it compares with the existing.
I'd expect a manager to be able to determine that testing data for the new process is showing it is worse than the previous system it replaced, and NOT promote that person, at the very least ...