Ask HN: Are most corporate software jobs performative? The answers got specific, and bleak

The question that hit a nerve

The Ask HN was simple: are most corporate software engineering jobs, "including FAANG," fundamentally performative — activity that signals work without producing it? It drew hundreds of replies, and the good ones came with evidence.

The receipts

The single most concrete answer was a horror story about inherited code. A long-tenured commenter had to finish a laid-off colleague's project:

"It was a java app with servlets and JSP… He had just copy and pasted the html into his JSP so it had the sample data and messages. Everything submitted and went to the next page, but nothing was posted or saved. He did this like 20 times… Maybe six months of 'work' was like nothing done."

That's the thesis in one anecdote: months of apparent output, zero function, undetected until someone had to touch it.

Why the incentives produce it

The diagnosis the thread kept circling was measurement. A commenter working in ML infrastructure named the mechanism:

"A lot of companies try really hard to be data oriented and try to find objective metrics for impact… Like LOC count, PR count, time in meetings or time spent at the office. Enough of this and people will learn to play the game over doing the right thing."

Two references became the thread's shorthand. A commenter reached for David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs: A Theory; another quoted Civilization — "The bureaucracy is expanding to fill the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" — and added that it "burned me right out," pushing him to a ten-person team doing "meaningful work."

The escape hatch isn't clean

The reply that kept the thread from easy answers complicated the small-company dream. A systems engineer with 25 years in warned the grass has its own weeds:

"The small-company-doing-meaningful-work is also hard to find… Startups also often have their own perverse incentives built around the vagaries of venture investments or the whims and personalities of the founders."

And a sharp inversion: maybe the problem isn't corporate bloat but the absence of clear targets anywhere. A commenter pointed out that even open-source maintainers "say one thing and it is always another" about what gets a PR merged. "Performative" might just be what any human hierarchy with incentives looks like.

Where the thread landed

The deepest cut came from the scale of the resources that fail to fix this. A commenter noted FAANG has engineers with 30 years' experience and billions in cash, "to fix this problem if it was something that could be fixed with human resources and money. And still… there's a lot of this." The implication is bleak and probably right: performance isn't a bug that money removes. It's what large organizations metabolize when they try to measure work they can't directly see — and the only escape anyone described was getting small enough that the work is, once again, visible.