Ask HN: Are most corporate SWE jobs performative?

A spicy Hacker News thread erupted after one software worker asked the question haunting cubicles everywhere: are big-company coding jobs basically performance art? The original post came in hot, claiming that at giant firms — yes, even the glamorous FAANG crowd — a lot of people seem to spend their days doing things that look impressive to management while only a few real standouts actually push the work forward. That instantly lit up the comments with a mix of existential dread, office war stories, and a lot of "yep, same here."

The strongest reaction was brutally cynical. One commenter deadpanned, "Work is performance art," while others pulled out bigger theories, from David Graeber’s famous Bullshit Jobs to the so-called Iron Law of Bureaucracy — basically, the idea that organizations eventually become more focused on protecting themselves than doing useful work. Another crowd favorite argued that once companies start measuring everything — lines of code, number of pull requests, time in meetings — workers naturally learn to game the scoreboard instead of doing what actually helps.

But the thread wasn’t a total anti-manager riot. A few pushed back, saying 1:1 meetings can be genuinely useful and that invisible "admin" work keeps teams functional, even if it doesn’t look glamorous. That sparked the real drama: is corporate life fake busywork, or are angry engineers just underrating all the maintenance that keeps the machine alive? Either way, the mood was clear: the comments were one part therapy session, one part roast, and very ready to call office theater exactly what it looks like.