Dr. Derek Austin 🥳
1 min readJun 24, 2024

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That's 100% what every company wants all the time for its low-level "worker bee" ("code monkey") employees: replaceable, interchangeable, and scared of losing their jobs.

It's the Gervais Principle:
1) Sociopaths (Founders, the "Geniuses")
2) Clueless (Product and Design, the "Choosers")
3) Losers (Engineers, the "Code Monkeys")

100% of places I've worked (6 different full-time software engineering jobs) have been exactly like that: the "geniuses" are the only people who get to have ideas, and beyond their typically-stupid ideas their only responsibility is to make way more money and set arbitrary deadlines for everyone else.

The "clueless" product and design folks try to execute on those ideas, without ever even knowing that the ideas are stupid, that the executives are setting arbitrary deadlines, or how much work their "amazing" features and UX designs will need.

The "code monkeys" at the bottom live in constant fear of layoffs and being replaced, especially but not only by foreign contractors, and they're seen as completely interchangeable and replaceable.

You might disagree, since some "real engineers" (assumedly like you or me) will have, you know, ideas and a sense of how long things take.

But those opinions are not the least bit welcome "up the chain" so the deadlines remain impossible and arbitrary, while the product remains bloated with way too many features.

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Dr. Derek Austin 🥳
Dr. Derek Austin 🥳

Written by Dr. Derek Austin 🥳

Hi, I'm Doctor Derek! I've been a professional web developer since 2005, and I love writing about programming with JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js & Git.

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