The Optics-Driven Workplace and the Death of Competence
“I’m a Timestamp Man”
Every company has at least one dude (and sometimes a whole gaggle of them) who manages by the clock.
He doesn’t read your code, doesn’t understand your systems, but he knows when you were “last active” on Slack down to the minute. The feedback on this will never come direct, always through snide comments about you not being terminally online. What lurks beneath is technical incompetence. There’s a whole class of leaders who confuse presence for performance and a whole layer of companies that promote them. They’ve built an entire philosophy of leadership on the belief that if they can see you doing something, then something must be getting done.
Meanwhile the innovators, the tinkerers, and the maintenance crew that keep the place standing are never noticed or even chewed out for their idiosyncrasies and “odd schedule”.
Visibility
This started long before 2020.
Employees have been suffering small defeats in their war for work freedom over decades. You used to have your own office, then it was cubicles, then the open office with assigned desks. Now? “Hot desking” to make it clear that not only are you not a member of the executive class, you are not even entitled to personal space when you are working. It’s strange that even in hot desking open offices that the executives still have dedicated offices with doors that close.
What’s at the root of this privacy erosion is distrust. “If I cannot see you suffering, how will I know that you’re working?” The converse for new managers also became prescriptive, “The job of a manager is to watch my employees suffering so that I know they’re working.”
In 2020 we all went remote which would have solved this right?
It made things a lot worse. Swaths of inferiority complex laden middle managers would now have to justify their existence without physically watching their employees work. As with any other insecurity-motivated behavior, their need to know didn’t vanish, it intensified.
The tech was leveraged to feed their insecurity. Strange neuroses about whether or not the Slack dot is green, employee computer-tracking software to make sure the mouse is moving, and even video recording during “work hours” were just some of the ugly things that popped up. Boundaries dissolved. Since employees had the “privilege” of a private workspace again, a privilege only typically afforded to the executive class, they should owe something to make it clear that they are lower status. The fear drove people to book meetings through their lunch, often eating on-camera. The expectation that workers “owe” responsiveness 24/7 became much more of a norm. A lot of hapless employees even took to social media to celebrate this; if they were required to work at 10PM some nights, they must be important, which of course conveys status.
Some companies, managers, and employees were exempt from this. Maybe they were particularly self-aware, already had great remote culture, or just had a few good mentors early on. We’re not talking about some in this article though, we’re talking about most.
Influx
Companies dramatically overhired in 2020-2022. Huge cohorts of new grads wanting to pursue design or mechanical engineering pivoted quickly to software to make respectable money.1 They were impressionable and willing to do whatever it took to have a shot at making enough money to afford a house or other basic financial milestones.
Shitty control structure + impressionable workers with next-to-no bargaining power = total paradigm shift.
Of course these new software professionals optimized for optics because that’s what raises layoff safety would be primarily determined by.
Most of them never saw the old world. They never watched a room full of veterans tear down and rebuild an architecture in an afternoon. They never learned what a real engineering culture even feels like. So when their manager praised them for being “online early” instead of shipping anything meaningful, they absorbed that as gospel. They thought this was the trade. They thought this was the game.
A whole generation came up believing that activity is the output. That responsiveness is the job. That a green light equals contribution. Not their fault. It’s the system they inherited. But the effect was brutal. The performance of work completely replaced the substance of it.
Bye Bye Throughput, Hello Optics!
You can see it in the way people narrate their tasks out loud. You can see it in the calendar Tetris. You can see it in the endless Jira comment threads where no one is saying anything real. You can see it in how quickly people panic if they haven’t typed something into Slack for an hour. Half the working world now has the same nervous tic:
“Let me prove I’m here. Let me prove I’m trying.”
And the thing is, even mediocre leaders ate it up. They prefer this world. It’s legible to them. It’s safe. They can’t evaluate real technical output, but they can evaluate attendance and motion. A timestamp is comforting. A long message thread creates the illusion of collaboration. A hundred meetings look like progress on a roadmap that still isn’t going anywhere.
Meanwhile, the actual builders are suffocating. The quiet seniors, the ones who quit slack for a day and rewrite a service, who silently fix the bug the whole department was panicking about, who spend more time thinking than posting, are drowning under a culture that mistakes noise for signal.
They don’t brag. They don’t perform. They don’t put on the little theatre. They just produce. In an opticsmaxxed world they get the rod.
This is where the gap started to widen. You have one group optimizing for legibility and another optimizing for reality. The more the first group grew, the louder and safer it became. The second group kept carrying the weight in silence, then slowly checked out, moved on, or burned out entirely.
That’s the environment these new engineers grew into:
A culture where the green dot matters more than the green tests.
A culture where the metric is how visible you are, not how deep you can go.
A culture where the least competent people are often the ones most eager to broadcast how hard they’re working.2
And once that dynamic locks in at scale, it’s intractable.
It’s not all doom and gloom. There are still plenty of companies out there that care what you ship, champion creative work, and don’t give a shit if your Slack dot is green (in fact, if it’s green you’re not getting focused work done). But they’re rare!
I’m not being critical here. It’s my opinion that median worker pay across all fields needs to be much higher. Median income in the US is a pittance that puts home ownership and general financial health out of reach for most. It wasn’t a problem that software salaries were so high, they should be higher than median, it’s specialized work. The problem is that median pay was low enough for people to have to learn an entirely new discipline just to achieve financial milestones that were part and parcel of ordinary life for previous generations.
The influx of Amazon culture due to layoffs has made this one the norm.