[HN Gopher] On Becoming a VP of Engineering
___________________________________________________________________
On Becoming a VP of Engineering
Author : endlessloops
Score : 252 points
Date : 2023-07-14 08:39 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.honeycomb.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.honeycomb.io)
| throw1234651234 wrote:
| There is very little public discussion on the topic, because
| these roles are lucked into, at best (outside of founders, as
| people mentioned here already).
|
| Here are the Engineering VPs I have personally met / worked with.
| These are for billion-dollar-revenue companies (Banking and
| Health Care specifically)
|
| 1. 20-something year old Developer (not senior) who followed a
| non-technical CTO to a new company and got the VP title before.
|
| 2. Architect of a small start up that got bought - right time,
| right place.
|
| 3. Scrum master who was a friend of someone at the company who
| has no technical background.
| awill wrote:
| VP of Engineering isn't some standard role you can compare across
| companies. My current company, Directors often have orgs of up to
| 500, and VPs usually have 1k+, sometimes 3-5k.
|
| To pretend that a VP at a startup, with an org of 50 is the same
| as a VP at an FAANG with 1k+ is just silly. I'm not saying one is
| better, but clearly they require very different skills.
|
| In fact, I've seen first hand that people who are given the VP
| role at small companies sometimes don't understand this, and are
| then shocked when they apply to a FAANG and are offered a manager
| or senior manager role.
| icedchai wrote:
| I used to work at a small 40 person company that had a VP and
| director for a department of 2 people (not engineering.)
| Utterly insane. Based on my experience, the VP has the
| experience of an intern at a larger org, but was there early.
| Director is worse. The 2 reports are competent.
| sublimefire wrote:
| This post is basically an example of a survivorship bias and the
| rationalization of it. What is missing is the statistical insight
| into internal moves to the VP positions vs the external ones.
|
| I would say it is extremely hard to get an internal move to a VP
| position, either it is a startup or a big corp. Startups need to
| succeed and big corps require you to put in years and develop
| good political relationships.
|
| The easiest way is to start hitting the top roles early in life
| and do it constantly instead of thinking to start at the bottom.
| If you cannot make it into the top in the existing company then
| build your own. If you start at the bottom then you remain there
| because your skills are not valuable in the top leadership roles.
| MichaelGlass wrote:
| I don't think the article touches on internal vs external
| hiring at all. They tried it but eventually didn't do it. But
| there's no value judgement -- it just seemed like they couldn't
| find a great candidate and then the author was eventually
| promoted.
|
| Fwiw the same thing happened at my last startup. We did a
| search for a VP eventually promoted from within. I hereby
| claim, that statistically speaking, it definitely happens
| sometimes.
|
| I guess the author disagrees with your last statement, > If you
| start at the bottom then you remain there because your skills
| are not valuable in the top leadership roles.
|
| She says that she had the space to think more about strategy
| because the "people at the bottom" were doing an good job of
| keeping the company's infrastructure stable as they scaled.
| Maybe it's less about top and bottom and more about what types
| of problems people are good at solving. My tip: if you like
| planning and management and strategy, you should try to get
| roles, in the top, bottom, and middle using those skillsets.
| Lots of even introductory roles involve "manager", and lots of
| non-management roles are a great career path for many.
| intelVISA wrote:
| Unfortunately true, one should apply this mindset everywhere.
|
| e.g. don't settle for Js roles if you want to excel you have to
| push yourself into competitive spaces and write cursed code in
| OCaml to truly be a Good Programmer
| ben7799 wrote:
| In this blog the new VP of engineering lays out why you should be
| wary of working at Honeycomb.
| lapcat wrote:
| I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more
| intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis,
| is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent
| admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the
| qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they
| need to be in a leadership position.
|
| I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own
| company, and this is true of anyone who started their own
| companies, including the ones that are now BigCos. Founders don't
| need any specific qualifications or characteristics to merit
| their positions. They choose themselves for leadership, and then
| they choose their friends as the first employees. Only much later
| does hiring become formalized. No matter how much you want to
| believe that hierarchy is a "meritocracy", the founding of the
| hierarchy was undoubtedly chaos. Chaos is a ladder. ;-)
|
| I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is
| strange, and I honestly never considered my former bosses to be
| "better" than me. As far as I've seen, corporate ladder climbing
| is essentially political. This post reminds me a lot of the
| endless series of essays about what makes a "senior engineer".
| These are all written by people whose minds have been thoroughly
| corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with an inner need
| to justify it.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| You don't "just" become the CEO of a big company. You become
| the CEO of a small company (typically 1 to 3 people)
|
| Then you make a boatload of money, and the market decides
| whether you get to become the CEO of a big company.
| lapcat wrote:
| Everyone knows this. It's unclear why you felt the need to
| say it.
| [deleted]
| oblio wrote:
| > I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is
| strange
|
| I'll tell why several reasons this happens:
|
| 1. In many cultures this beaten into kids from an early age.
| There is no wide range of free will, just the
| family/tribe/clan/group hierarchy.
|
| 2. Hierarchies are... safe. You're part of a group, you roughly
| know where you stand.
|
| 3. Humans are social and inherently hierarchical :-) We've been
| like this for possibly millions of year, you're working against
| lots of brain machinery trying to fight this. It's probably
| doable but far from easy.
| ddq wrote:
| First two points, yes, though on point three I strongly
| disagree that modern mass hierarchy has existed on an
| evolutionary timescale. Neither Homo sapiens nor our
| ancestors ever had hierarchical groups larger than a village
| until we shifted from hunter-gatherer to agrarian around
| 10,000 years ago. The core concept is "natural" at a
| tangible, real scale where it can be seen as an extension of
| the parent->child form, but nothing in my research has yet
| refuted the idea that we're actually working against our
| brain machinery to scale up hierarchies orders of magnitude
| that defy visualization, though I can see the lizard brain
| appeal of submission to executive individuals. People can
| understand a president, CEO, captain. Parental figures. But a
| parent to thousands or millions, with dozens of steps between
| you and them? Seems like alienation would be a natural
| response.
|
| Of course, this is all appeal to nature, but still an
| interesting perspective to consider.
| lapcat wrote:
| > We've been like this for possibly millions of year, you're
| working against lots of brain machinery trying to fight this.
|
| I think my brain is wired differently. Maybe that was a birth
| defect; it wouldn't be the only one.
|
| > It's probably doable but far from easy.
|
| That's certainly true.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| > I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is
| strange
|
| It is deeply weird: it is perfectly reasonable to lead/be led
| without believing that the leader is somehow better.
|
| > These are all written by people whose minds have been
| thoroughly corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with
| an inner need to justify it.
|
| This sounds very teenage edgelord, but I really think a
| majority of the population acts as if a primary motivator for
| them is outsourcing as much risk/hard things as allowable. To
| do so entails buying into false/constructed realities to
| justify their own passivity.
|
| Thus, job titles attain a status of Real Enough, because
| everyone's play acting that they're real, and that bootstraps
| them into actual reality. Collective result of sunk costs by
| the faithful.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Yes. This hit right in them feels. Our world is a lie and it's
| full of people who believe the opposite and go out of their way
| to prove you wrong
| lordofmoria wrote:
| You're forgetting that companies need both Visionary AND
| Execution focused leaders at the very top.
|
| I'm an execution through and through guy, but I learned early
| on that my co-founder's ideal traits are the opposite of mine,
| and that's what you're seeing here.
|
| What's being described is a classic Visionary - spontaneous,
| jumps around and can be distracting, yes - but crucially, is
| also an amazing innovator and motivator of people.
|
| In a successful startup, you need both Visionaries and
| Execution people.
|
| I recommend Rocket Fuel - https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Fuel-
| Essential-Combination-Bus...
| danielvaughn wrote:
| I was founding engineer ("CTO") of a startup a couple years
| ago, and I completely agree. We had the CEO who had domain
| expertise in our market, but who had never ran a tech company
| and was not technically proficient. I on the other hand was
| technically proficient, but I also never ran a tech company.
|
| This lack of execution expertise doomed us; we really needed
| a strong operations role. We made good progress on the
| product itself, but hit a wall when it came time to ask for
| money from investors.
| icedchai wrote:
| I was in a similar position, working as CTO under a first
| time CEO where we built a small team, product, got some
| limited traction, but follow-on execution completely
| failed. It was incredibly hard. It depresses me to this
| day, thinking about where it all went wrong. I probably
| won't ever do it again.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > What's being described is a classic Visionary -
| spontaneous, jumps around and can be distracting, yes - but
| crucially, is also an amazing innovator and motivator of
| people.
|
| The description reads more like someone who is simply high
| energy and brings a lot of enthusiasm and positivity. I don't
| see much suggestion that the person is necessarily very
| Visionary:
|
| > [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style,
| often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists
|
| There is a lot of value in having leaders who are positive,
| high energy, and can motivate teams. I've come across a few
| leaders who had boundless energy, enthusiasm, and enough
| charisma to lead teams into any effort. However, the ones
| without the right amount of execution ability ultimately just
| led us to slosh around doing a lot of half-useless work in a
| high-energy manner.
|
| These days I'm more cautious when I meet someone with
| abnormally high charisma and energy levels. I probe more for
| knowledge and experience in executing. Many of the highest
| charisma leaders I've come across haven't had the abilities
| to back it up, but they've used their charisma and charm to
| work their way into the right companies and right meeting
| rooms at the right time to become associated with success.
|
| Of the successful startups I've worked at, I can think of
| several people who were charismatic, confident, high-energy,
| but didn't really contribute to execution. Even worse, some
| of them detracted from progress as they used their charisma
| to redirect efforts in self-serving ways, or spent their time
| pushing podcasts, building social media profiles, and
| attending conferences instead of working for the company.
| lapcat wrote:
| > You're forgetting that companies need both Visionary AND
| Execution focused leaders at the very top.
|
| I'm not forgetting. And I'm not claiming that this promotion
| was a mistake. I am raising questions about the narrative
| that the author is telling/selling. Consider how you'll
| likely not see such a long-winded post from company founders
| explaining in detail why they _chose themselves_ for their
| own jobs. They founded a company because they wanted to, and
| they didn 't care whether they had exactly the right
| experience and qualifications.
|
| The narrative is about slowly making your way up the
| corporate ranks, gaining experience, working hard, achieving
| qualifications, and deserving your promotion. The author
| feels that this kind of story is encouraging, uplifting, that
| is shows you too can make it to the top, but I actually think
| it's kind of a disservice, an attitude that can hold people
| back. The company founders suddenly made it to the top at the
| very beginning without any of that, without "deserving"
| anything. If you think you have to "earn" your position,
| you've already bought into the myth of the hierarchy. The
| best reason to be ambitious is the realization that the
| people above you are just as flawed as you are.
|
| If anything, competence is often overlooked in promotions.
| For example, from the article: "I didn't get promoted right
| then (it wasn't the right time) but we also stopped looking
| for an external hire." Why wasn't it the right time?
| ddq wrote:
| Once attuned to unjust or involuntary hierarchies, one
| realizes their ubiquity in modern society. Hierarchy and
| bureaucracy are useful and efficient, but while the
| imagined ideal is a meritocratic Star Trek bridge crew,
| they are commonly economically coercive, Kafkaesque,
| nepotistic, oligarchic power structures that serve those at
| the top rather than serving the systems' purported ends.
|
| At least that's my worldview, which is broadly anarchic. I
| disagree with the notion of people having to - by force or
| coercion - submit to another's power without easy escape. I
| am happy to follow leaders voluntarily for mutual benefit
| as long as I am truly free to reclaim my autonomy at any
| time - the social contract.
|
| But think of the economics snares - particularly tying
| employment to housing and healthcare, and birth citizenship
| being involuntary and difficult/expensive to change. I
| could go further into detail to summarize my beliefs but
| you probably get my general perspective. I'm fortunate
| enough that in theory I could escape most of the
| hierarchies I'm under, but most humans in practice do not
| have that freedom and that saddens me.
| lapcat wrote:
| > the imagined ideal is a meritocratic Star Trek bridge
| crew
|
| Incidentally, this is why The Wrath of Khan was so great,
| because it showed that Kirk was fallible in a number of
| ways. He messed up by leaving Khan on Ceti Alpha V, he
| messed up by ignoring Saavik citing regulations to raise
| shields, he was embarrassed to appear fallible by putting
| on glasses to read, he admitted to cheating on the
| Kobayashi Maru test, and only Spock's sacrifice saved
| them all from destruction.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Most people won't understand what you are saying. They just
| won't. It won't ever compute.
| ddq wrote:
| Part of me feels that pessimism, but another part of me
| believes every rational individual has at least one path
| to a more open mind, whether through music, art, study,
| self-reflection, dialog, mind-altering substances... all
| sorts of sources of inspiration. Most will probably never
| understand, but I won't stop lighting sparks and hoping
| they kindle in the minds of those with whom I choose to
| interact. That's what worked for me, at least.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| On this specific topic it's not pessimism and it has
| little to do with rationality. It's largely just spending
| time in organizations and watching what happens.
| jimbokun wrote:
| What would be your alternative advice?
| lapcat wrote:
| > What would be your alternative advice?
|
| My alternative advice was basically this: "The best
| reason to be ambitious is the realization that the people
| above you are just as flawed as you are."
|
| In other words, don't buy into the myth that your
| position in the social hierarchy is a natural reflection
| of your personal worthiness.
| epups wrote:
| Not sure what point you're trying to make here. You can go
| and start your company any time, sure, but I would much
| rather be a VP in a medium sized startup than a founder.
| And to get to VP, even in a small organisation, you
| certainly need competence.
| lapcat wrote:
| > And to get to VP, even in a small organisation, you
| certainly need competence.
|
| I don't know if I agree with that. Anyway, competence
| comes at various levels.
| brewdad wrote:
| You can get to VP without competence. Staying there
| requires it. You don't necessarily have to be the most
| competent person possible but there is a floor.
| lapcat wrote:
| > You don't necessarily have to be the most competent
| person possible but there is a floor.
|
| Heh, well that's not really saying much.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| Floor = minor negative impact to the business due to your
| (in)competence.
| jselysianeagle wrote:
| So from what I've seen and learned, there's definitely a
| difference between being truly smart/visionary/creative
| etc vs just being "not dumb". And while I suppose the
| latter could also be deemed a kind of competence, I think
| what the others are driving at boils down to this -
| people with connections or just a knack for politics and
| schmoozing can get pretty far ahead and many underlings
| often mistake their rise for some sort of amazing
| technical or creative ability.
| epups wrote:
| If you open a company right now, what would be your
| criteria for promotion?
| Aurornis wrote:
| > And to get to VP, even in a small organisation, you
| certainly need competence.
|
| Being extremely competent is one way to get into these
| positions, but it's hardly the only way.
|
| These positions are often given to people who are viewed
| as the most loyal, most credentialed, most connected, or
| most polished. Competency is often assumed, or even
| wished for, but it may not be the driving force behind
| the decision making.
|
| I've been a at a couple high-growth startups. The number
| of people who get hired or promoted into VP positions for
| no reason other than having the right connections and
| being loyal for empire-building purposes was shocking.
| jselysianeagle wrote:
| > The best reason to be ambitious is the realization that
| the people above you are just as flawed as you are.
|
| Can I steal this? It's so on-point and I've seen it many,
| many times throughout the course of my career. There's been
| a few truly brilliant managers and principal engineers I've
| had the good fortune to work under, but for the vast
| majority of upper level leadership this tracks.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Can I steal this?
|
| Feel free!
| morgante wrote:
| Have you ever started a company?
|
| > The company founders suddenly made it to the top at the
| very beginning without any of that, without "deserving"
| anything.
|
| When they started, they weren't at the "top" of _anything_.
| It 's not like someone just handed them the CEO title of a
| successful firm.
|
| Building a company from scratch is way more work than
| climbing a corporate hierarchy.
| jt2190 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you're taking issue with, as that's his
| point: If the founder did not require someone else's
| "approval" to take the position of CEO, why should, say,
| a developer believe that they need "approval" from their
| organization to think that they're senior-level? It's
| giving the hierarchy above way too much control of your
| career.
| lapcat wrote:
| This reply was better than my reply, thanks.
| morgante wrote:
| You don't need anyone's approval to decide to call
| yourself a "senior" developer (even if nobody else
| agrees).
|
| Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate
| arbiter. If you call yourself a senior developer, but
| can't perform as one, the market will correct your
| misconception--just like it knocks down incorrect
| founders.
|
| OP is the one obsesses with hierarchy.
|
| The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founders
| of successful companies haven't earned their position.
| Charity has absolutely demonstrated a lot of merit to get
| Honeycomb to where it is.
| lapcat wrote:
| > Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate
| arbiter.
|
| > The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the
| founders of successful companies haven't earned their
| position.
|
| "The market is the ultimate arbiter" is the exact
| opposite of the idea that you need the perfect resume and
| experience to get and do the job.
|
| That's what you seem to be misinterpreting about my
| comments. A retroactive assessment of someone's tenure in
| a leadership position is fundamentally different from a
| promotion to a leadership position, where the assessment
| necessarily comes before the tenure.
|
| > Building a company from scratch is way more work than
| climbing a corporate hierarchy.
|
| There's no reason to believe that this is true, other
| than the meritocratic article of faith that the most
| money and power always go to the people who work the
| "hardest", whatever that means. (I think that scrubbing
| toilets is hard work.)
| morgante wrote:
| > There's no reason to believe that this is true, other
| than the meritocratic article of faith that the most
| money and power always go to the people who work the
| "hardest", whatever that means.
|
| And the observations of ~everyone who has done both. I've
| done both and starting a company is _way_ harder.
| lapcat wrote:
| Again, I've started a company, contrary to your previous
| assumption, and I know other people who have started
| companies. You don't speak for everyone or even most
| people.
|
| If climbing the corporate hierarchy is so much easier,
| then how high up the ladder did you get exactly?
| morgante wrote:
| I never said you hadn't started a company. I explicitly
| _asked_ if you had--the opposite of assuming. Nothing in
| my comment assumed you hadn 't.
|
| Since you're unwilling to argue in good faith, we can
| resolve this.
| lapcat wrote:
| > I explicitly asked if you had--the opposite of
| assuming.
|
| It felt like a rhetorical question, because without
| waiting for my answer, you presumed to explain to me,
| "Building a company from scratch is way more work than
| climbing a corporate hierarchy", and then you doubled
| down, presuming to know "the observations of ~everyone".
|
| What exactly was the purpose of your question, and what
| is your response to the answer "Yes"?
| hitekker wrote:
| You didn't read his top-level comment about where he said
| he started a company, so it's actually you who aren't
| arguing in good faith.
| morgante wrote:
| "I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my
| own company" is phrased like a hypothetical, not as a
| past tense action. I'd expect a founder to say they
| _became_ CEO.
| [deleted]
| lapcat wrote:
| > Have you ever started a company?
|
| Yes. Care to take back your comment now?
| nickdothutton wrote:
| I'd second this, if it helps... think of the visionary as the
| "spiritual leader". This framing echoes many political and
| civic movements. The execution specialist is often
| necessarily a very different person to the
| spiritual/visionary leader. In the company I got my start in
| many years ago, it quickly became essential that the founding
| CEO move to spiritual leader, while we found an execution guy
| from outside to make the machine run smoothly. Couldn't have
| done it without both of them.
| jarjoura wrote:
| I guess that's kind of true. However, once a company involves
| funding and builds a board of directors full of industry
| leaders, those same leaders are now on the hook to provide
| company value in the same way as any other company. In fact,
| companies have a legal responsibility to not drive it into the
| ground, or they face potential lawsuits from its investors.
| Investors do not need to be VCs, and could just be the founders
| themselves.
|
| However, I do agree with you on another point. At the companies
| I've worked at, it's the people in the middle of the hierarchy
| who have impressed me the most. The have incredible hyper fast
| minds with intimidating levels of reasoning skills. I've always
| found them to be the true heroes of companies in my mind. They
| aren't usually there at the beginning and either were hired for
| their skills, or quickly rose up from the bottom and earned
| their place.
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| Even though currently less popular, I think Zuckerberg is a
| great example of this. He went from a college kid to a top 20
| CEO with no formal training, except running his company.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Perhaps, but never discount someones background. His parents
| were successful executives and there were plenty of
| opportunities for him to be exposed to executive leadership
| (via Harvard, familial connections etc)
|
| Not like he went from nobody to somebody here, his background
| certainly allowed exposure to things many others would not
| have.
|
| I honestly would put Steve Jobs as the best example you can
| find of someone who went from "nobody" to CEO
| strikelaserclaw wrote:
| I think he would be pretty close to someone who went from
| nobody to a great CEO and founder but i don't think anyone
| in this world truly starts off on equal footing. Steve Jobs
| birth parents were both advanced degree holders, he got
| adopted by a blue collar family who lived in prime real
| estate bay area during the first rise of tech. Ultimately
| it is useless to compare people, we should judge people by
| their output regardless of where they started.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| I'm a huge proponent of origin stories, especially the
| true ones. Musk, Mozart, John Coletrane and Christiano
| Ronaldo, everyone has a story you can learn from.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Jobs' adopt family matters more than his birth parents,
| beyond margin. He grew up middle class (maybe upper
| middle class, honestly) but his parents weren't
| executives or VPs, they had a more typical background and
| he did as well. I think that makes it vastly more
| relatable. I believe strongly this contributed to his
| fanaticism around his ideas and thoughts, as well as why
| he essentially failed as a CEO twice (Apple the first
| time and NeXT computer was heading toward financial
| instability). Contrast this with Zuckerburg, who hit out
| of the park with Facebook.
|
| Zuckerburg by contrast had a bigger ecosystem around him
| to lean into and a lot more exposure to executive types
| and "elites". Facebook didn't happen after a string of
| failures, and I don't believe ever came realistically
| close to failing either.
|
| That's not to say either are talent-less. Zuckerburg was
| a very talented engineer and by all accounts has a good
| business acumen for the markets he's addressing. Steve
| Jobs likewise had a very good litmus test ability and
| really good foresight into technology, design, and user
| experience. I don't want to diminish that. However, not
| accounting for their ecosystem will do little to
| understand how they got to where they are.
| lapcat wrote:
| > he essentially failed as a CEO twice (Apple the first
| time and NeXT computer was heading toward financial
| instability). Contrast this with Zuckerburg, who hit out
| of the park with Facebook.
|
| This is not entirely accurate. Jobs didn't become CEO of
| Apple until 1997, after Apple acquired NeXT. He was not
| CEO of Apple before that. Zuck set up the IPO so that he
| could never lose control of Facebook. Jobs didn't have
| the benefit of that situation, and he did lose control of
| Apple in a power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley,
| which led to his departure from Apple and founding of
| NeXT.
|
| To talk about Apple, we need to talk about Steve Wozniack
| too. Jobs wasn't even an engineer, while Woz was a
| brilliant engineer, and Jobs had the amazing bit of luck
| to be introduced to Woz by a friend while still in high
| school! Of course Jobs was able to see the potential of
| Woz's inventions, but the Apple II computer would not
| have been possible without Woz.
| playingalong wrote:
| He might have received some subset of formal education along
| the way. He could've hired some private tutors, etc.
| starcraft2wol wrote:
| Almost certainly. But it he didn't first become qualified
| as a CEO, and then get the job.
| wpietri wrote:
| Totally agreed with this: "I've always felt that hierarchical,
| subservient thinking is strange"
|
| On the one hand, we are social primates. And primates gonna
| prime. But I personally have very little interest in hierarchy;
| it mainly seems irritating and counterproductive to me.
| Obviously, looking around at the world, I'm a outlier here. But
| perhaps the strangest thing to me is how often neurotypical
| people can't even talk about the power dynamics that they are
| clearly participating in. You see it in big things, of course.
| But also in the small, as when the stated purpose of a meeting
| (e.g., "stand-up meeting") is wildly different than the actual
| purpose (a sit-down meeting where the manager gets to feel
| important and reestablish dominance over those lower down in
| the power hierarchy).
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I think it was Marc Andreessen who said it that you'd rather
| be upfront with hierarchy than to pretend it doesn't exist
| and have it form chaotically and without control.
|
| I remember reading about some flat team structure at Gore
| Inc. in the 90's and it was an epic failure.
|
| Military relies on it more explicitly when you really need to
| get things done. In abstract sense, the military is more
| similar to companies than being different.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, you might enjoy reading "Tyranny of
| Structurelessness". But there are other options besides
| "controlling hierarchy", "secret, denied controlling
| hierarchy", and "chaotic failure".
|
| Just as an example, consider a party. When I host, I am
| very definitely in charge. It's my space, it's my party.
| Friends will often help, serving as an intermediate
| hierarchical layer. But this hierarchy is mostly
| supportive, not controlling. I may slip into control mode
| when, say, I have a bad guest who needs to be ejected. But
| most of the magic happens not because I'm in charge, but
| because I've created a space for more dynamic interactions
| to arise without interference.
| Scubabear68 wrote:
| > I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is
| strange, and I honestly never considered my former bosses to be
| "better" than me.
|
| It is generally always about politics. I have been through many
| re-orgs, various people go up and down in esteem like the tides
| based on whatever the prevailing sentiment is this year.
| Position in the hierarchy reflects that along with personal
| relationships with the right people, and a big dollop of luck.
|
| There is little correlation of ability to your level, of
| course. Success often depends on who is under you, and how you
| can spin their output (good and bad).
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Startups are almost inherently messy, so agreed, I think it
| helps dispel a myth of perfection that some folks have.
|
| Founders have the most context across the engineering, product,
| marketing, sales, customers, partners, team, etc. They do need
| to change gears as the company hits progressive phase changes,
| but someone who has already managed a few transitions and has
| that rare context is a strong candidate for the next.
|
| A big part of the job becomes hiring & delegating... Including
| checklist ppl. Ex: Why you see technical CEOs with COO/CRO/COS
| that can help manage the business ops sides that are very
| checklist driven.
| brightball wrote:
| > They choose themselves for leadership, and then they choose
| their friends as the first employees.
|
| Could probably change that to "choose people they trust as
| first employees"
| epups wrote:
| Do you promote people at your company based on the same
| principles you declare as universal? Or do you at least try to
| promote the more efficient/useful people?
| brandall10 wrote:
| This is all true until a board w/ a enough voting power to
| impact C level hiring/firing decisions is installed.
| eru wrote:
| > I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own
| company, and this is true of anyone who started their own
| companies, including the ones that are now BigCos. Founders
| don't need any specific qualifications or characteristics to
| merit their positions.
|
| If you are involved in starting a company, you _get_ the
| position of CEO, CTO, etc essentially arbitrarily.
|
| That's initially.
|
| After a while you merit your position by not running the
| company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.
|
| Often, that's a much more honest and brutal way of measuring
| merit, than any evaluation.
|
| Big companies need the evaluation, because eg Google is not
| going to go bankrupt, if they have one lazy and incompetent VP.
|
| Compare https://gwern.net/backstop
| mrits wrote:
| You could run your company into the ground but constantly
| getting bailed out by investors with sunken theory syndrome.
| marcinzm wrote:
| >After a while you merit your position by not running the
| company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.
|
| That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm
| dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long
| as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence
| in leadership or they hired the right employees that
| incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't
| mean they're competent.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Hiring the right people _is_ competence when it comes to
| corporate leadership. That 's pretty much the only lever
| they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but
| for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off
| on things that get bubbled up.
|
| I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride
| themselves on being able to understand complex things, and
| see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. It's
| also not helped by the fact that management skill has a low
| floor, since it's so hard to assess, thus everyone has had
| bad managers and they really make your life miserable. But
| at the upper end of management skill with large org sizes,
| the problem of debugging orgs and understanding the outputs
| of systems of people is way harder than software due to the
| human element. Even just getting accurate information and
| assessments is non-trivial given the underlying incentives
| and politics. In this type of environment, competence looks
| completely different from how a craftsperson thinks about
| it.
| rgifford wrote:
| You're missing what the previous commenter said.
|
| There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed
| simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky
| early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space,
| or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in
| spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless.
|
| Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills.
| Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's "figured
| out slot machines." My response: "Dude, that's awesome!"
| I'm not about to burst his bubble on the random,
| ambivalent jitter of the universe. We all need our
| delusions, who am I to take his?
| borski wrote:
| There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to
| randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success
| modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but
| luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great
| example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention
| strategy and wasn't managed well enough to adapt. Startup
| success requires skill and countless hours of hard work,
| period, and the leaders who are successful rarely look
| the same. It also requires some luck, but you need both.
|
| I also used to deride soft skills. I learned, over time,
| that they're extremely valuable, and deriding them
| doesn't take away their power.
|
| I think nearly every engineer would be well served by
| attending a _good_ conflict resolution and "how to
| influence people" course. My 21-year-old self would smack
| me for saying that, but I've learned things since then.
| rgifford wrote:
| I agree: Conflict resolution, public speaking,
| salesmanship -- they're all valuable. They make for
| better people in this world.
|
| When it comes to how these traits translate to the
| success of leaders or companies? I have no idea. I'd
| guess causation there is noisy. I bet leaders get a lot
| of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious
| games for social capital, managing risk in decision
| making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully
| crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against
| their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a
| compensation structure that has senior leadership making
| 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.
|
| In a modern secularized world corporate leaders of large
| companies seem to take on the role of psuedo-religious
| figureheads that grant absolution and purpose in the face
| of the unknown and rob workers blind in return. Like, why
| in the hell do we need company values? Never understood
| why workers collectively put up with that patronizing,
| condescending nonsense. But I guess they're there for
| some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and
| will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours
| per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife
| and kids though, don't you?
|
| It's all just soft skills though -- that's the
| differentiator, the secret sauce, what makes great
| leaders. So soft. So skilled. /s
| borski wrote:
| > I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like
| playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing
| risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting
| blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate
| people against their own self-interest -- especially in
| favor of a compensation structure that has senior
| leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.
|
| That would be a bad bet. There are a few leaders that are
| like this and build short-term successful companies, and
| there are fewer yet that are like this and are able to
| build long-term successful ones. There will always be
| sociopaths who are master manipulators, but it isn't
| limited to leadership. I know plenty of engineers who get
| hired at multiple roles illegally and outsource their
| jobs to fiverr, and if they get caught they simply quit
| before or after a PIP and get a new gig.
|
| The vast majority of leaders really do care, and these
| stories and assumptions do those leaders a disservice,
| because good leadership/management takes real effort,
| time, and hard work. Manipulation quickly loses you the
| trust of your team and causes them to leave, hurting your
| cause.
|
| > Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never
| understood why workers collectively put up with that
| patronizing, condescending nonsense.
|
| Retention. If you can find a set of people who share a
| common set of values, they are easier to retain because
| everyone is aligned on where we need to get and how we
| want to get there.
|
| Alignment is extremely important for success. A founder
| can force alignment for a while, but the whole company is
| far better off if alignment occurs due to intrinsic
| belief systems.
|
| > But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that
| doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity
| to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the
| privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though,
| don't you?
|
| That's not the point of having values. When we came up
| with them for Tinfoil, they came _from the team_ and we
| debated and reviewed them annually, and changed them as
| needed.
|
| The point was to make sure we are on the same page when
| it comes to hiring, and it also helped in two other ways:
|
| 1) Making hiring more objective. No more "I didn't think
| she fit our culture" nonsense. Now you had to point to
| _specific examples_ which were antithetical to our
| values. If we didn't get to see a certain one, it told us
| what to ask next.
|
| 2) Making it easier for peers to managers to call out
| problems. If someone was out of line, or suggesting
| something that flew in the face of a value we'd agreed
| upon, anyone was enabled to politely point out that was
| against our values. The rule in how to respond to that
| was a polite thank you for pointing it out, and we never
| really ran into issues with it.
|
| What I found fascinating was that by _having_ this set of
| values, engineers and others were actually _more_ likely
| to point out a manager's or exec's issue, and did so.
| When they did, they were almost always right, and things
| got adjusted.
|
| But what I found exceptionally surprising was how much it
| helped engineers talk to _each other_ in the office. When
| you have a common set of beliefs and things you want to
| do to embody, it's much easier to maintain alignment.
|
| Also, we were upfront about these before the offer;
| nobody had to join, and all of our values were
| argumentative. That is, they were active opinions that
| could trivially be disagreed with and cogent arguments
| could be made against them. That was ok! This was what
| _we_ wanted to do.
|
| An example of a bad value: innovation. Literally nobody
| wants to not be innovative. Terrible value, gets nothing
| across.
|
| An example of a good value: use the right tool for the
| job. We strongly believed in being polyglots and using
| the right tool for the job, rather than building with
| what we already knew (unless that was the right tool).
| Plenty of companies make the argument that we are all
| Python because then we all speak the same language and
| things are faster to build. That's a legitimate argument,
| neither is right or wrong; but we picked the former. If
| you preferred the latter, there are plenty of places to
| work that fit better!
| rgifford wrote:
| > That would be a bad bet.
|
| It's a terrible bet. But it's the direction American
| corporate leadership has overwhelmingly been heading for
| the past couple decades [1] [2].
|
| I get the sense you've had the good fortune to run and
| work in smaller startups in The Bay Area that have been
| unprecedentedly democratic in the scheme of human
| enterprise. I'm guessing you've also had the good fortune
| to do that during a 3 decade span of falling interest
| rates that drove money into VC and startups in a
| similarly unprecedented fashion. Everyone plays nice when
| they're eating good.
|
| I studied social sciences / economics and it gave me a
| lot of perspective when I went to SF for tech work. The
| history of American labor is one of asymmetrical power
| and blood. This isn't a notion we've disabused ourselves
| of and grown beyond. Between the early 1800s and early
| 1900s the US saw decades of terrorism against workers by
| corporate leaders. Look into Labor Wars [3], The Pullman
| Strike [4], The Battle of Blair Mountain [5], The
| Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire [6]. After labor laws
| cemented and wars settled, corporate leaders moved
| towards globalization to start the process all over again
| in other countries and hollowed out middle America to do
| so.
|
| Historically, the defining traits of American corporate
| leadership are amorality and self-pursuit. Startups have
| this silly habit of sitting around to LARP as altruists
| that might, maybe stumble into billions of dollars. Like
| if they talk about company values, silly truisms, and
| team building enough it changes gravity. Who is getting
| paid what? That's all that matters. If you're making a
| half a percent over four years as the 5th hire at a
| startup, you're getting screwed unless your founder is
| the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. I think
| workers and the general public are waking up to this and
| getting tired of lip service and signaling from half
| altruist cut throats.
|
| I'm saying 'you' but I'm using it generally, more as in
| the pronoun 'one.' I'm glad you exist and I appreciate
| you sharing your experience! All the best.
|
| 1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-
| worker-com...
|
| 2. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/14zg
| fv3/oc...
|
| 3. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/t
| hemine...
|
| 4. https://jacobin.com/2022/07/great-upheaval-railroad-
| strike-1...
|
| 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
|
| 6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Fact
| ory_fi...
| borski wrote:
| > If you're an altruist, prove it. Make less than 200k a
| year, including stock grants (with appreciation factored
| in).
|
| I did, with the exception of when the sale happened. For
| the first three years, I paid myself $30k. For the next
| two, $50k. For the next one, $70k. For the next one,
| $90k. Only in the last two years did I pay myself $160k.
|
| When we sold, I gave up over half my RSUs and distributed
| them across the engineering team. I tried to give them
| all up (because I was well covered by the cash portion of
| the sale) but the acquirer wouldn't let me, since they
| wanted me to be incentivized to stay.
|
| My cofounder gave up none of hers, despite being equal
| partners with me.
|
| I suspect most of my team would work for me again,
| whereas the same is definitely not true of my cofounder.
|
| Being cutthroat works short-term, and you may win big.
| But you get one shot at that, usually, with only a few
| "star-studded" exceptions (Adam Neumann, for example).
|
| Being "altruistic" (which is not the word I'd use; I'd
| use "a decent human being who understands how negotiation
| works and what a BATNA is") works long-term.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| >>We all need our delusions
|
| Not to be an a-hole but says who and why? I think I
| prefer utter honesty, but ironically I may just be
| deluding myself.
| borski wrote:
| My god, I could not have put this better myself. Thanks.
| jarjoura wrote:
| You sir sound like someone who is in that upper
| management realm. People ARE hard.
|
| Something that has kind of annoyed me with upper
| management folks. At the companies I've worked for in the
| bay area, they all copy each other with the same
| management theories. They love to re-org and reshuffle to
| tree-shake out the fluff. They also love to drive towards
| exceedingly unrealistic goals because they expect
| pushback and want negotiating room. Now the latest craze
| seems to be that layoffs are good, even though I haven't
| heard one positive thing from anyone.
|
| So I'm not sure these upper management folks, with their
| org debugging skills are actually doing things other than
| obfuscating the actual output of their orgs. If everyone
| is always moving around and assigned new goals, all it
| does is keep their org goal post actually undefined.
|
| On the ground, sure, I did what was expected, or more,
| and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me.
| However, I'm always curious to understand why upper
| management folks are obsessed with keeping things
| chaotic. There has to be other strategies out there, or
| at least in our experiment driven culture, room to test
| out new ideas.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > Hiring the right people is competence
|
| It can be, or it can just be luck, which is the point of
| the comment you're responding to.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Sure, but it's always both in large scale human endeavor.
| We're not talking about virtuosic performance that is
| more or less the direct result of talent + obsessive
| practice. That's why I'm equally uninterested in those
| who claim it's all luck as those who worship and hang on
| every word of prominent tech billionaires. I'm more
| interested in applying human agency than trying to come
| up with a theory for success--the latter is inevitably
| biased navel-gazing.
| zer8k wrote:
| > After a while you merit your position by not running the
| company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.
|
| Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat
| stable company. C-levels get a lot of undeserved respect
| when in fact usually they're protected by a very
| (understandably) conservative board. The board will choose
| inaction over action in almost every case unless the
| failure is so bad it's public. CEO types are not as
| fungible.
|
| The actual people who succeed by not running the company in
| the ground are the engineers who by-and-large are fungible
| "human capital" paid as little as the company can possibly
| get away with in the current market. This is the only
| industry where CEOs are held with reasonably high esteem.
| Perhaps it's because engineers think they will become one
| one day. Or maybe it's because tech CEOs are ascribed some
| sort of god-engineer status when the reality is most of
| them couldn't even pass their own 18 phase 5 day interview
| + colonoscopy their engineers do.
| ska wrote:
| > The actual people who succeed by not running the
| company in the ground are the engineers
|
| This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a
| tech based business, having competent engineering is
| table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.
| zer8k wrote:
| If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find
| another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a
| slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves
| on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company
| catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case
| study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor
| level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying.
| Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped
| into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.
|
| I am an engineer. Some of what I say is hubris about it.
| But I think its neither controversial nor false that
| engineers hold all of the power in a tech company. The
| skill gap is not a bijection. You can teach most
| engineers to sell, lead, and plan. You cannot teach most
| executives to write even half competent software. Outside
| of the scrappiest start ups VPs of engineering I have
| reported to generally have been out of engineering for a
| long time. It's strange to ascribe such a title to
| someone so out of touch with their field.
| djcapelis wrote:
| > If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find
| another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a
| slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves
| on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company
| catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case
| study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor
| level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying.
| Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped
| into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.
|
| I'm not sure Twitter is a good case study of CEOs being
| interchangable.
|
| > If 80% of the engineering team walks your company
| catches fire and burns to the ground
|
| Why was that again? That 80% of the engineering team,
| uhm, "walked"?
| JamesBarney wrote:
| I've much rather bet on a company with a great CEO and
| mediocre developers than one with a mediocre CEO and
| great developers. If you're building the wrong product it
| doesn't matter if Carmack or Linus is writing the code
| the company will fail. And judging from the code and
| technical competence I've seen, it's isn't uncommon for a
| company to succeed with mediocre devs
|
| > You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.
|
| Have you run a large company? I've run a small one so was
| forced to learn all of these skills, and let me tell you,
| it was hard, I found it much harder than learning how to
| code.
| icedchai wrote:
| Exactly this. I worked at a small startup where we had
| great engineering talent. It was hard to find in this
| area. We got a product built, shipped, running with beta
| B2B customers... then it fell flat on its face.
|
| After the initial release, there was little to no
| marketing, poor go-to-market strategy, and slow sales.
| This was all the CEO's realm. Sales and marketing is
| hard.
| ska wrote:
| Some of it is hubris, some just naivety.
|
| It's very true that in a e.g. a "pure" software tech
| company, software engineers have much more power than
| they do in say an oil exploration company. This isn't
| surprising, it's the basics of being a profit center or a
| cost center. In this case engineering definitely has a
| "crash the company" lever; But this doesn't make the
| company succeed. In order to do that you need to
| understand the markets, customers, financing, etc.
| parameters, not just the tech. Knowing what to build, and
| what not to build, (and when) is usually more important
| than the tech, honestly. Hell, a huge swath of the "tech"
| sector isn't about doing much interesting on the tech
| side. Which isn't to say you can get away with crap work,
| just that it's mostly straightforward and you have to
| care.
| nickserv wrote:
| I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has
| shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not
| necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because
| they don't *want* to.
|
| Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales
| isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the
| documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you
| the company will fail, even if it has the best
| engineering team.
|
| And of course good executives are also incredibly
| important, how many companies have been run into the
| ground because of bad management?
|
| So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to
| be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long
| term success.
|
| Oh and for what it's worth my CEO writes code ;-)
| drewcoo wrote:
| > most engineers are terrible at selling
|
| Selling often involves . . . not lying exactly, but
| "creative truthing." Engineers tend to dislike that. And
| not just software engineers.
| JamesBarney wrote:
| > tech company engineering has to be good
|
| As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a
| requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is
| the engineering good at every successful tech company
| I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I
| don't think the answer to this is "yes".
| nickserv wrote:
| I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For
| me it's more about medium and long term success, not
| growing quickly and selling out a couple years later.
|
| Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the
| right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this
| approach last more than a few years.
|
| Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy
| to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will
| have to be done later. But I would consider that to be
| good engineering.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes
| radically as company size grows.
|
| For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and
| get changes into production for consumers to see is
| everything.
|
| With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware
| and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and
| outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.
| borski wrote:
| > You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.
|
| No, you can't. Source: I've tried.
|
| Some? Sure, you can teach some of them. Hell, some become
| _exceptional_ at it. Most could not care less about it,
| though, and are thus terrible at answering customer
| questions, doing sales, understanding how to optimize a
| funnel, negotiating a sales contract, or anything else.
|
| Even doing demos is a _taught_ effort, whereas some folks
| naturally give great demos.
|
| It's okay for there to be room for multiple important
| skillsets in a company. It's not a zero-sum game.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Also, one of the key responsibilities of the CEO is to
| identify, recruit, and hire high performing engineers.
|
| Jobs' great talent was identifying Woz and his potential.
| And then many more after him.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The original thesis of YCombinator was that it's easier
| to teach people with strong technical skills how to
| business than to teach business people how to code.
|
| So if you really think CEO is an easy job requiring
| little in the way of specialized skills, start a company,
| name yourself CEO, and make a fortune. What's stopping
| you?
| koheripbal wrote:
| Most startups fail.
|
| You need to be good to succeed.
| marcinzm wrote:
| I've been mostly in startups for the last 10+ years.
| Until recently the main thing you needed to be good at is
| getting more VC money. That is correlated to certain
| measures of success but having a ton of free money means
| you can patch a lot of failures over that would bankrupt
| most companies. Then either sell or IPO before the house
| of cards came down. It's been interesting watching over
| the last year as that strategy started to no longer work.
| indymike wrote:
| > Until recently the main thing you needed to be good at
| is getting more VC money
|
| It's always better to be getting money by selling to
| customers. It's amazing how well that works and how much
| less capital you need to grow.
| marcinzm wrote:
| If your goal is to make a lot of money (not just some
| money) then using VC money to get there is a very
| reasonable play. Just siphoning some money from later
| rounds could give you tens of millions. You don't even
| need to succeed after that as a business. The goal for
| many founders isn't to run a long term business but to
| make money.
| indymike wrote:
| > You don't even need to succeed after that as a
| business. The goal for many founders isn't to run a long
| term business but to make money.
|
| Getting a big exit is my goal as a founder. Investor
| capital is spent to get to that exit. People who have the
| goal of making money off investors make self-enriching,
| bad for the company decisions.
| wpietri wrote:
| On the one hand, I'm grateful that era is finally coming
| to an end. Things were so much saner after the dot-com
| bubble popped.
|
| On the other, I really worry that we now have a
| generation of entrepreneurs and employees who have only
| ever known a bubble environment. Many will have a hard
| time adapting to the actual reality of running
| functioning businesses.
| brigadier132 wrote:
| This really depends on a definition of success that
| includes creating massive money burning firepits. Now to
| be fair some of the chief firepit architects got very
| rich doing so.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| That is only something like 1% of businesses: money-
| burning VC-funded companies who have to advertise enough
| to get more VC money or die.
| marcinzm wrote:
| But the vast majority of companies referred to as
| "startups" versus "small businesses" fall into that
| category. We can discuss the other case but the person I
| replied to explicitly said "startups."
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC
| funded. My point is it's an amazing marketing win by
| financiers. And here we are now, with what the weird
| minority do sounding like the expectation for startup
| business practices vs what most actually do.
| pc86 wrote:
| "Startup" by definition is companies that need large-
| scale growth to succeed. Uber, DoorDash, those kinds of
| businesses are start-ups. It doesn't need to be VC
| investment necessarily, but it needs a lot of capital to
| get going and there's a certain amount of network
| effects. That's not marketing, that's what the word
| means.
|
| > _Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC
| funded._
|
| Then they're probably not startups, but just tech
| businesses. Nothing wrong with that - they're objectively
| better in my opinion - but let's not call them something
| they're not just because we like the word or we want the
| cachet of being associated with something we're not.
| wpietri wrote:
| I would draw the line slightly differently. Bootstrapped
| startups are still startups. So for me the definition is
| more "company exploring a novel technology, product, or
| business model". Most new businesses are doing something
| that's well understood. Opening a new restaurant or
| corner store is hard, but it doesn't have the same need
| to figure out something fundamentally new.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Yep.
|
| Numbers-wise, I'd think VC-funded startups merit the
| distinction. They're (a) relying on financiers to make
| their strategy work (b) there's significant positive &
| negative impacts of that decision vs everyone else (c)
| they're the minority.
|
| Startups using non-VC revenue are the majority and also
| doing all sorts of great work in invention+innovation in
| tech, business model, doing with scalable ideas, etc. VC
| $ buys things like press relationships and "X raised Y"
| headlines, but thankfully the days of breathless capital
| raise news on tech crunch are much more zzz now.
| rfrey wrote:
| > "Startup" by definition is companies that need large-
| scale growth to succeed
|
| By _your_ definition. And maybe a bunch of people who
| read the PG essay that narrowed the word that way. But
| not by the definition of 99.9% of economic participants.
|
| Investopedia's definition, for example, bears no
| relationship to the PG definition. Neither does
| Webster's, dictionary.com's, or any entrepreneurship
| textbook you might find. Even Steve Blank doesn't define
| it that way.
| ysavir wrote:
| You need to be good _enough_ to succeed. People needn 't
| go beyond that to maintain a status quo.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > to maintain a status quo
|
| Startups are explicitly disrupting the status quo. Yeah,
| one needs to be good enough to do that but it's nothing
| to downplay. That is _hard_ in a world of established
| actors.
| 411111111111111 wrote:
| Leadership matters, Apples history is a prime example of
| this as shown by first faltering without Steve Jobs and
| then becoming the most profitable company after he
| rejoined.
|
| Nonetheless, you're still attributing way too much to the
| ability of the leadership. After all, that story is so
| remarkable precisely because it's pretty much the only
| well known example of this.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Even Steve failed with Next, and had to sell it to Apple.
| arethuza wrote:
| I like the description someone made on HN that "NeXT
| acquired Apple for minus 400 million".
| bamfly wrote:
| DoubleClick got an even better deal, acquiring Google for
| -$3.1 billion ('08 dollars)
| maxk42 wrote:
| On the contrary: I've seen more companies succeed
| _despite_ their management than _because_ of it.
| smallerfish wrote:
| > You need to be good to succeed.
|
| You need to be good, somewhat lucky, and have
| product/market fit to succeed.
| simonswords82 wrote:
| Being good creates the luck. I'm not saying it does not
| happen the other way around but it's fantastically rare
| to just "luck out" your way in to success.
|
| Product/market fit doesn't fall out of the sky either.
| It's created by being good.
| [deleted]
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Most companies are not startups. There are plenty of
| bumbling people running million dollar (and thats it
| forever..) businesses. And they are the boss.
| barbariangrunge wrote:
| Almost all new businesses fail. Calling every one of those
| failed founders, Eg, of coffee shops, or software
| companies, or board game stores, a dumpster fire--is an
| asshole move
| marcinzm wrote:
| If A then B does not mean if B then A.
| parentheses wrote:
| This is true about a lot of positions. Once secured, as
| long as nothing goes terribly wrong, nothing changes.
| sib wrote:
| If you're a founder of a venture-funded company _, then you
| either merit your position by continuing to do well or the
| VCs will remove you, before you run the company into the
| ground.
|
| _ Assuming you did not have enough negotiating leverage upon
| fundraising to put yourself into a non-removable position, a
| la Zuckerberg.
| mejutoco wrote:
| I like this take. I would only change "by making it succeed"
| with "by not running out of money", which in my mind have
| slightly different connotations.
| joriskok1 wrote:
| If you look at "by making it succeed" and then you want to
| define what success is, then you could end up with "by not
| running out of money" again.
| md_ wrote:
| Half agree.
|
| Successful founders get to remain CEO (or CTO, or whatever).
| Unsuccessful ones don't: their investors push them out, or the
| company tanks.
|
| Along the way to obtaining any position, there's a lot of
| partially correlated signals you have to send, and they're
| different between different paths. To become CEO at an
| established company, you might have to show prior experience,
| know how to wear a suit and tie, etc.
|
| To become CEO of your own startup, you have to show investors
| or customers something else, but I'm not sure those signals are
| less bullshit: you might find that wearing shorts or playing
| League of Legends during investor calls somehow convinces
| people you're a super genius.
|
| Basically, there's _always_ an element of bullshit, because we
| 're humans, and our judgment is tempered with all sorts of
| irrational biases.
|
| I don't think that means that an essay on "what it takes to do
| $job" is inherently bad, though.
| [deleted]
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > As far as I've seen, corporate ladder climbing is essentially
| political.
|
| At a minimum, it's a kind of specialization that measures a
| different kind of qualification then expected from ICs.
| opportune wrote:
| Really disagree with this - a lot of process-oriented
| checklist-following managers are actually terrible leaders. You
| don't need to be particularly skilled to do that. As a CEO you
| can bring a lot more to the table than that, and delegate it if
| you need to - it's not an uncommon skill - to focus on adding
| value by setting direction, fighting fires, focusing on
| whatever is currently the most important problem or project.
|
| Obviously you can start your own company to reset the hierarchy
| according to your wishes. That doesn't mean this CEO is
| unqualified though.
| lapcat wrote:
| > That doesn't mean this CEO is unqualified though.
|
| I didn't say they were unqualified. I said, "the founder
| doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the
| underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position."
| kasey_junk wrote:
| First, I didn't read that at all as a remark about someone's
| qualifications. It seems a straightforward and friendly
| admission of where 2 different styles exist. Acknowledging
| those style differences is a _good_ and healthy thing and not a
| tacit appeal to hierarchy.
|
| Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit
| reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling,
| bosses, and equate the founding of the company with founding of
| a hierarchy. If you, who claim to be skeptical of the
| hierarchy, can't stop doing that how can you expect those
| around you who are trying to model their behavior off of you?
|
| In knowledge industries managers aren't leaders, they are
| support staff. The best software managers and executives know
| this and do everything in their power to make it easy for the
| actual leaders and experts, the IC doing the work (yes
| including that intern you just hired) to get on with it.
|
| But one of the support functions of the executive team is to
| set that expectation by example.
| switch007 wrote:
| > In knowledge industries managers aren't leaders, they are
| support staff. The best software managers and executives know
| this and do everything in their power to make it easy for the
| actual leaders and experts, the IC doing the work (yes
| including that intern you just hired) to get on with it
|
| That's just lip service.
|
| Who goes to the annual offsite, the quarterly planning,
| manages or sets the budget, decides on initiatives. Not the
| ICs
|
| Why in companies that espouse this servant leadership
| nonsense does it take 3 months to get approval for a new
| monitor?
|
| This whole "servant leadership" crap is just PR. Every year
| there is a new orange coloured book about Leadership and some
| new cult-like idea filters down the layers.
|
| But companies are the same hierarchy they have been for
| hundreds of years.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Completely agree and in my specific company they have this
| concept of "Highest Performers" who get to go to an annual
| offsite/party for a week. Guess who only gets picked?
| Directors and VPs. It's almost satirical how unaware
| leadership is or the optics they emit.
| ryandrake wrote:
| You and I might have worked at the same company. They'd
| call it the Top-100 Summit or whatever, where the "best
| innovators" would gather to decide the direction of the
| product lines. Who were these "top" innovators? You
| already said it: Directors and VPs. Comical.
| ddq wrote:
| > Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit
| reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling,
| bosses, and equate the founding of the company with founding
| of a hierarchy. If you, who claim to be skeptical of the
| hierarchy, can't stop doing that how can you expect those
| around you who are trying to model their behavior off of you?
|
| This is a venture capitalist-minded audience, so "when in
| Rome". Text often lacks important tone so try reading the
| comment aloud and add an air of disgust when you encounter a
| word that you interpret as loaded with implication.
|
| That critique doesn't really hold up or add value to the
| discussion. Its thesis resembles "yet you participate in
| society, curious" and bad-faith tone policing, but that's
| just my interpretation. Could just be miscommunication or a
| differing moral framework.
| lapcat wrote:
| > First, I didn't read that at all as a remark about
| someone's qualifications.
|
| It wasn't. That's why I said, "It looks like an almost
| inadvertent admission." The rest of the blog post, though, is
| explaining in detail why the author qualified for their
| promotion.
|
| > Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit
| reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling,
| bosses, and equate the founding of the company with founding
| of a hierarchy. If you, who claim to be skeptical of the
| hierarchy, can't stop doing that how can you expect those
| around you who are trying to model their behavior off of you?
|
| I don't understand this comment. Of course I used terms to
| _describe_ hierarchies. How can one talk about about thing,
| even critically, without using terms to describe it?
|
| > In knowledge industries managers aren't leaders, they are
| support staff. The best software managers and executives know
| this and do everything in their power to make it easy for the
| actual leaders and experts, the IC doing the work (yes
| including that intern you just hired) to get on with it.
|
| "Support staff" who by strange coincidence get paid a lot
| more money than the people they supposedly "support" and also
| have the power to hire and fire them. Hmm...
| hitekker wrote:
| Some people are afraid to question authority. You have to
| sugercoat the message a few times before they can stomach
| the complexities of social hierarchies.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| > "Support staff" who by strange coincidence get paid a lot
| more money than the people they supposedly "support" and
| also have the power to hire and fire them. Hmm...
|
| One wonders why hierarchical thinking endures. Hmmm...
| m_rpn wrote:
| In modern, tech-enabled knowledge industries managers aren't
| leaders, they are just a waste of money that could instead go
| to the people actually getting things done.
| icedchai wrote:
| This isn't 100% true. Some _are_ good leaders and protect
| their team from BS and distractions, letting them focus on
| getting things done instead.
| the_sleaze9 wrote:
| I disagree with this. People add burden, that burden
| increases exponentially (to a point), and that burden is
| taken on by managers.
|
| Some management is better than others, of course. But they
| ARE necessary.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| Yep, I completely agree. A huge amount of people have been
| brainwashed into the American corporate chain of command and
| there is so much assumption that because people have X title,
| they're actually qualified for that title. Title inflation is
| everywhere and anecdotally, titles are just used as vehicles
| for pay increases and tenure recognition, not meritorious.
|
| edit: didn't mean to say this is an American-specific thing :)
| oblio wrote:
| > A huge amount of people have been brainwashed into the
| American corporate chain of command
|
| LOL. This is not American specific in any way, lest you think
| the US invented the military, too :-p
| chadash wrote:
| You say this is an American thing. Is there a country you are
| thinking of that has this less engrained? My experience
| working with foreign cultures is often that organizations are
| _more_ hierarchical, not less.
| piva00 wrote:
| Probably it's all very hierarchical but it definitely
| differs in level and degree between cultures.
|
| Anecdotal examples:
|
| - Brazil (~10 years experience): very, very hierarchical,
| your manager/boss is up on the totem pole, societal status,
| etc. In non-tech environments you can expect to be berated,
| chastised, and generally abused as an underling. There are
| good bosses, of course, but using a dumb generalisation the
| culture is "I'm better than you because I'm higher in the
| hierarchy". In the end underlings will be bad mouthing the
| boss at any opportunity behind the boss's back but will pay
| lip service in front of them, politically-heavy work
| environments.
|
| - USA (limited experience ~1-2 years), very hierarchical,
| politically-heavy, bosses can demand stuff from you and
| it's expected to bow down to their whims.
|
| - Sweden (~10 years experience): not so hierarchical,
| consensus-based approach for decisions, a manager is a
| different position (more laterally viewed than upwards),
| challenging bosses decisions/opinions in a respectful way
| is encouraged, someone higher in the hierarchy forcing
| underlings to their will is very badly viewed (and usually
| a "failure of leadership" because you couldn't convince
| people on your vision).
| Swizec wrote:
| > - USA /../ > - Sweden /../
|
| In my observation, USA is a lot more like your
| description of Sweden. I think this came with the
| popularity of servant leadership[1]. Even the military
| (in some branches?) is aiming for sharing goals instead
| of orders and promoting self-organizing teams because
| hierarchies don't scale. At least according to books like
| It's Your Ship and Extreme Ownership.
|
| The realization in management science of the past ~20
| years has been that people only do things when they
| understand the goal and agree with the plan. They also
| need leeway to change the plan if it isn't working.
|
| This future is of course not equally distributed.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership
| kodah wrote:
| > Even the military (in some branches?) is aiming for
| sharing goals instead of orders and promoting self-
| organizing teams because hierarchies don't scale.
|
| This is incorrect. We consolidate most of our decision
| making at the small team leader level. Title and role,
| because of that, are explicitly not intwined. Lance
| Corporals can lead Sergeants if they possess the
| experience to do so. This is more common in the infantry.
| Small team leader have _always_ practiced servant
| leadership; the idea that you eat last, take first watch,
| are the first in and last out on patrols is as old as
| time herself.
| 9659 wrote:
| US Military absolutely teaches "servant leadership".
|
| And "Do what I say leadership" at other times.
| bamfly wrote:
| My outsider perspective is that the military trains its
| members in leadership skills[1] at practically every
| level, because modern great-power approaches to warfare
| rely on heavy devolution of decision-making and
| leadership such that leadership is a regular component of
| the job at all but (perhaps) the _very_ lowest ranks, and
| because almost anyone _might_ end up needing to act as a
| leader, situationally, even if they ordinarily don 't do
| much of that.
|
| (though, of course, an order's still an order--but, even
| there, their training in proper order-crafting focuses
| heavily on not making orders any more restrictive than
| necessary, so those receiving them have as much
| flexibility as possible to achieve the objective as they
| see fit--what you want, not how to do it, that kind of
| thing)
|
| [1] Hey, look, _training_ people, what a crazy idea, eh,
| corporate America? And not just with snake-oil bullshit
| seminars or online "courses" (videos with quizzes anyone
| with two functioning brain cells could have aced without
| watching the videos) or other box-checking crap that
| passes for training in the corporate world-- _actual_
| training.
| indymike wrote:
| > These are all written by people whose minds have been
| thoroughly corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with
| an inner need to justify it.
|
| This is really the truth, especially in giant corporations.
| It's really fun when you are part of a startup and sell to a
| big company and they realize that not one member of the startup
| would have been hired by HR, and suddenly, the team members
| from the startup getting the promotions over the HR approved,
| pedigreed bigco employees.
| snickmy wrote:
| I'm reading this through the lens of the fact that a VP at
| honeycomb is probably comparable with a senior manager at a big
| tech company.
| ShivTheShiv wrote:
| This person is learning how to be an effective manager of
| managers. It's the equivalent of a director at a big company.
| dbish wrote:
| Manager of managers is "senior manager" at places like amazon
| and meta, not even director (source: was one at both these
| places, though at meta the official title was just
| engineering manager, you were labeled as a level as M2).
| tflinton wrote:
| In my experience ICs make product, managers make people,
| directors make process and VPs make policy. Everyone over that is
| an approval step in budget requests.
| strgcmc wrote:
| I like this framing a lot, but it seems to conspicuously miss
| who makes "strategy"? Assuming policy != strategy
|
| Unless you're making a subtle joke that, nobody makes
| strategy... Which if so, then kudos for a nice joke
| tablloyd wrote:
| I wish Honeycomb employees would spend some time on improving
| their product in a tangible way instead of writing blog posts.
| I've had the missfortune of using Honeycomb at work and for any
| systems that interact with more than a couple of services it's
| simply unusable. I don't get why there's all the hype around the
| company?
| Solvency wrote:
| This is really self-fellating...and to post it on your own
| employer's site is brazen to me.
| jerrygenser wrote:
| These corporate blogs are almost 100% purpose for prospective
| employees. This is a way for prospective employees to become
| sold the corporate culture is rainbow and unicorns.
|
| It's standard corporate PR.
| opportune wrote:
| I could be wrong but I think corporate blogs are also
| motivated by improving SEO/pagerank. That doesn't mean the
| content lacks value though.
| sharts wrote:
| _yawn_
| weego wrote:
| It's definitely up there with the classic "Why I left (FAANG)"
| self-serving visibility posting.
| user_named wrote:
| Maybe she's getting ready to leave
| intelVISA wrote:
| best time to leave FAANG was always yesterday
| user_named wrote:
| "everyone in this company is very smart, especially my boss,
| and I'm also very smart"
| okokwhatever wrote:
| mostly
| zer8k wrote:
| > Nonetheless, I think we were all glad we went through this
| process. Above a certain level, leadership promotions have to be
| about what the company needs, not the individual, and it was
| valuable to imagine together what a great VP of Engineering for
| Honeycomb might look like.
|
| Of course the author talks about it like he was plucked from the
| heavens to get the position. I would too.
|
| The reality is none of the "what I did" section actually matters.
| This person was half decent at their job for long enough, and
| played the political jockeying game well enough, to get the
| position. Every corner office position is earned through politics
| not talent in your field. Most companies have something like a
| distinguished engineer position for the top 0.05% IC.
| packetslave wrote:
| Interesting that you (and others in this thread) automatically
| assume the author is a "he"
| zer8k wrote:
| Of course this is likely an oversight of fast typing that is
| getting me downvoted.
| jwmoz wrote:
| I don't really understand the point of this post.
| will_gottschalk wrote:
| A quote really jumped out at me:
|
| > VPs of Engineering from frontend backgrounds are relatively
| rare, and it's partly because the most pressing technical
| challenges a startup faces are often around scaling, reliability,
| and backend architecture. If we had been dealing with nonstop
| incidents, constant struggles with scaling, and major
| architectural challenges with our query and storage engine,
| someone with deeper backend and operational experience likely
| would have been chosen for the job, not me. Because of Ben, Ian,
| and other incredibly talented ICs on our team, and some of the
| solid design decisions the founding team made that bought us a
| lot of technical runway, these concerns were not top of mind for
| our leaders. Goals like executing well against our product
| strategy and leveling up our user experience were instead the
| concerns of the day, and there I could be more helpful.
|
| I've worked at companies in the past where frontend is looked
| down upon because all of our leaders are backend/infra people.
| What I've noticed is that the code quality from those backend
| devs is quite awful. I wonder if there exists an inverse
| relationship between leadership representation and engineering
| talent?
| harrygeez wrote:
| > What I've noticed is that the code quality from those backend
| devs is quite awful
|
| Without knowing which metrics you use to measure the code
| quality, my hunch says you are focusing on the wrong thing. I
| am a frontend engineer turned tech lead. I think we developers
| choose our focuses based on our personal inclinations and what
| we value, and usually what I would notice is people who choose
| frontend work have different inclinations from backend
| developers.
|
| What is awful code? Is it not formatted consistently or
| prettily? The variables are not named descriptively? The code
| is not split or structured nicely? I find that frontend
| developers tend to judge code on superficial values.
|
| In an organization especially an engineering focused one,
| people get acknowledgements by solving problems. Very often,
| teams can function well enough without their main frontend guy
| but would struggle without one let alone a few strong infra or
| backend engineer. That's just the reality.
| wgottschalk wrote:
| There's a few things that stood out to me from that codebase:
|
| 1. No unit tests. Integration tests broken weekly when
| external data source would change.
|
| 2. Hand rolled ORM resulting in inconsistent separation of
| concerns. Some controllers would use the ORM classes
| directly. Some would add layers of indirection. Some would
| make database calls directly in the indirection layers.
|
| 3. Database data model would "compress" dimensions to be
| clever. ex: the id field is a concatenation of a user
| supplied string + timestamp + some hard coded string prefix.
| In addition, there's multiple columns which represent similar
| concepts like "tenant", "customer", "team".
|
| 4. Several ongoing migrations created necessary but hard to
| understand backwards compatibility logic. Code breaks in
| strange ways when trying to add features because you have to
| remember there's 2^n different code paths.
|
| 5. No async code. Everything was a blocking call to the
| database resulting in unnecessarily slow api responses.
|
| 6. No indexes in the database to improve db perf
|
| The managers didn't see this stuff. They just know features
| can take a while to get out the door so they respond by
| asking for more head count. Leadership sees that more backend
| devs are needed and hire more backend focused managers to try
| and manage the fact that there are scaling and perf issues.
| ukFxqnLa2sBSBf6 wrote:
| Isn't it good for tests to fail when things change? Are you
| saying that the data source is not abstracted properly like
| with a repository pattern?
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Does not seem like typical mistakes backend developers
| would make. Perhaps it is rather, that they moved on into
| leadership, since they found that to be their more
| effective roles, rather than their output as backend
| developers? Kind of like admitting, that perhaps it was not
| meant for them? With these kinds of practices, I could
| imagine that.
| DrammBA wrote:
| I'm a 5 yoe frontend developer and I agree completely with
| you, backend/infra can be so much more complex than frontend.
| In my current company I participate on many hiring interviews
| for our team, and the backend interviews are incredibly
| savage compared to what's being discussed on a regular
| frontend interview. Even if I tried I can't bring the
| frontend interviews to that level of intensity because
| frontend simply doesn't have enough depth. It's a miracle I
| get paid a similar salary to them.
| wpietri wrote:
| > I've worked at companies in the past where frontend is looked
| down upon because all of our leaders are backend/infra people.
|
| I think there's a lot going on here, but one of them is
| definitely gender. Front-end development is often feminine-
| coded and seen as lesser. E.g.:
|
| https://thoughtbot.com/blog/tailwind-and-the-femininity-of-c...
|
| I also think in tech-land we tend to associate leadership with
| male-coded traits. So it's not shocking at all to me that
| leadership and front-end backgrounds are often seen as somehow
| incompatible.
|
| And I think that same sort of gender dynamic is relevant to the
| code, too. For me, part of what makes for good code is that
| it's good for others, good for collaboration. But if you're
| going to be a macho big-swinging-dick alpha nerd tech bro, then
| that can involve performing genius via solo cowboy coding.
| There the goal isn't to work closely with a team to make
| something together, it's to be a visibly amazing IC with upper
| management written all over him.
| bamfly wrote:
| At smaller companies, at least, my observation has been that
| frontend (in fact, _design_ , even if unable to write code)
| seemed to have a big leg-up on positive visibility among
| important stakeholders, clients, owners, and managers, and to
| have an easier time moving up the promotion ladder than
| backend.
|
| A demo of improved API response times, even if accompanied by
| pretty graphs (extra work purely for self-promotional
| purposes) just doesn't get the ooohs and aaaahs and "can we
| see that again?"s and "can you forward me these slides?" that
| a design mock-up of a prettier button can. And when back-end
| supports feature development, it's still the front-end that
| people are looking at when it's demo'd. Basically the only
| thing that gets a big reaction from non-tech-folks from the
| backend is when you manage to make a large opex number a
| _lot_ smaller, and even then, no guarantee.
|
| Requires backend-experienced folks in the right places to
| counterbalance this, and a lot more effort on the part of
| backend folks to make their naturally-hard-to-"read" and
| relatively-boring (to look at, anyway) work flashier and more
| prominent.
| jtmarmon wrote:
| This article is hilariously bad. The argument goes:
|
| I like CSS more than Tailwind -> Why don't people like CSS
| more? -> Maybe because 'CSS, which makes things look
| 'pretty', is considered feminine'
|
| You're entitled to like CSS more, and I could even agree
| making things look pretty is feminine coded, but it obviously
| doesn't explain people's preference for Tailwind because
| Tailwind also exists to make things look pretty.
|
| ---
|
| I've worked with plenty of female engineering leaders, and
| most of them have a backend background.
|
| The reason for this imbalance has nothing to do with gender,
| but entirely to do with criticality. Given that frontends
| tend to read/write from the backend, the domain model is
| usually owned by the backend in most apps, meaning that
| capability design and expansion is gated by the backend.
|
| Not to mention that screwing up your backend architecture is
| in 95% of cases a much much deeper problem than screwing up
| your frontend. A data migration is basically always harder
| than redesigning the UI for some app.
| lnenad wrote:
| So based on an opinion of one person or a very small number
| of them you write
|
| > but one of them is definitely gender
|
| Why is it so easy to blame something on sexism?
|
| > macho big-swinging-dick alpha nerd tech bro, then that can
| involve performing genius via solo cowboy coding
|
| This is such a small number of people that act like this and
| write shitty code because of it that it's not worth
| mentioning.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > What I've noticed is that the code quality from those backend
| devs is quite awful.
|
| In my experience, people that look at areas they don't know and
| think "I don't know of any problems there, it should be easy"
| have a very high likelihood of being bad at the things they
| know too.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| > While Charity has deep experience in the domains of
| infrastructure & operations, databases, and backend engineering,
| I come originally from design, frontend, and product engineering,
| and I take a particular joy in collaborating with product
| management and ux design.
|
| I had trouble figuring what they actually did, and what they
| currently do in their VP role. There's a lot of lip service, but
| it's not entirely clear what the person now spends most of their
| days doing.
|
| Even the quote "coming from design, frontend and product
| engineering" doesn't tell me much (I'm also exactly that; I work
| on projects from doing sketches to Figma layouts to building
| front-end/mid-end in Sveltekit, build APIs in FastAPI, etc. etc.)
| -- what did they excel at to get the VP job, and what do they
| miss the most about being in the trenches to... doing what they
| do now?
|
| There's a ton of words on here but I don't really know what it
| says.
| mariusmg wrote:
| >There's a ton of words on here but I don't really know what it
| says
|
| Welcome to management.
| afro88 wrote:
| I had a similar impression. I also thought as you move into
| executive leadership things get much more strategic and you're
| rarely the one executing. But they list out lots of tactical
| experience and qualities that they say make them a good VP.
| itsagavin wrote:
| Its just HR PR forced on the poor dude. I'm a tech adjacent
| poor but I've seen many been forced to write something and it's
| always kind of like this. A bunch of people in the company will
| write a piece or two like this so something recent comes up in
| searches during campus recruiting. It serves two purposes, just
| the right amount of ass kissing and gassing up potential
| recruits.
| cyen wrote:
| On Becoming a VP of Engineering, Part 2: Doing the Job
| https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/becoming-vp-of-engineering-pt2
| vasco wrote:
| There's a few steps removed from the trenches to VPE. Check out
| "The Manager's Path" book for an overview of the different
| expectations of a current day smaller-than FAANG-like companies
| and the path of an engineer going up through management.
| gampleman wrote:
| > If I went looking for another startup to join at some point in
| the future, I would specifically look for an exec team or
| founding team that could cite examples of building up high
| performers for internal promotions -- and swiftly recognizing and
| rewarding those already having impact outside of their role-
| defined scope.
|
| Yeah in my experience this seems very rare. The default in most
| start ups I've seen is that when a new level in the hierarchy
| becomes necessary and/or available (i.e. the existing person
| leaves) is to hire externally.
|
| I guess the rationale is that if everyone is doing some necessary
| job and they are good at it, it's better not to mess with it. But
| needless to say, I find this very demotivating. Much more so than
| if I am passed for the promotion but a colleague gets it, because
| I know that if there is a culture of promotion and progression, I
| might have a fair chance next time. But if its always external
| hires, then my whole career at this company is in the same
| position I started with.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Something I've seen countless times is the initial employees
| complaining that the company "is not what it used to be" when
| it grows to a certain level and, in my experience, they refuse
| to adapt and leave or are fired.
| OJFord wrote:
| Was the company/leadership simultaneously talking about how
| it intended to grow but retain its 'culture' or whatever
| though?
| gtirloni wrote:
| Why you ask? I'm not saying the employees were wrong to
| think/do whatever they thought/did.
| OJFord wrote:
| I thought you were implying it's a failing of grouchy
| employees ('refuse to adapt') - I just think that might
| be sometimes hypocritical as companies love to talk about
| their culture etc., if you change what that is (and
| previously talked about it) then you should expect some
| negative reaction to it, and if you don't (or talk about
| how you're keeping it the same) then it seems unfair to
| criticise someone saying it's changed or not liking that.
|
| (Personally I think I'd rather companies uncultured/not
| talking about it, but if they do it should make sense and
| be consistent with actions.)
| gtirloni wrote:
| Sorry, I should have been clearer.
|
| I was replying to the point where OP says companies end
| up hiring externally when they grow and need new
| layers/functions.
|
| Most of the time (in my experience), it's not that
| employees want to take those new jobs but upper
| management fails to promote them and more that the
| company is becoming something they don't like (which
| makes sense, otherwise they wouldn't have joined a
| startup if they prefer big corps)... and they don't want
| to adapt.
|
| It's all perfectly fine, IMHO. People move on. Companies
| move on. Some people will adapt (because they like the
| new reality, or they need to like it, or..) and others
| won't. And by adapting I'm not saying become "better" but
| different only.
|
| I think the worst case is when both parties don't realize
| it and don't take action. Then you get upper management
| hiring externally, saying the employees that helped the
| company grow are bad employees, etc. And the initial
| employees saying upper management is clueless, sold out,
| lost their way, betrayed the culture, etc.
| throwawaythekey wrote:
| I've become that person. In small teams a lot of magic
| happens and the feeling is somewhat addictive. I don't think
| it's wrong to long for times when the company had more
| output, at a higher quality, while using fewer resources. The
| past will never repeat itself but it seems meek to not
| attempt to preserve the good parts.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The default in most start ups I've seen is that when a new
| level in the hierarchy becomes necessary and/or available (i.e.
| the existing person leaves) is to hire externally.
|
| Count me among the people burned by this.
|
| I joined a startup with promises of being promoted when the
| department grew. I was required to hit certain performance
| metrics, which I exceeded. Then it came time to hire and
| suddenly the position was only open to people with oddly
| specific qualifications I didn't have (example: required an MBA
| or experience at company greater than # in size, where the #
| was chosen to be just barely more than the biggest company I
| had worked for)
| kshacker wrote:
| So what did you do?
| dasil003 wrote:
| Startups scale faster than management skill sets. Being able to
| manage a team of 10 doesn't translate to managing an of org of
| 100, let alone 1000. I'm not saying that's what's going on in
| your case, but it's a legit reason in some cases: avoiding the
| Peter Principle.
| bradlys wrote:
| In my experience, this "avoiding the Peter Principle" is rare
| for people who are founders/friends-of-founders.
|
| I think that's where the complaint comes from. It's mainly
| that a lot of competent people get skipped because founders
| and friends of the founders keep just hiring their external
| favorites rather than promoting and rewarding people who are
| getting the company to where it is.
| dasil003 wrote:
| What's your sample size? I mean sure, nepotism happens,
| this isn't a surprise. But for competent founders, the
| ability to successfully execute the role at hand is the
| primary consideration. To be coldly rational about it:
| whether someone was a high performer at the previous stage
| or if they were a close personal friend are both irrelevant
| data points. The only thing that matters is can they be
| effective in the next stage. Obviously this is a judgement
| call, and founders can get it wrong (they're only human
| after all), but the Peter Principle is a real thing and it
| can be deadly when someone is promoted beyond their
| capabilities during hypergrowth. This can be a very tough
| pill to swallow for someone who got the company where it
| is, but it doesn't make it less true.
| rgavuliak wrote:
| I work for a larger start up (or a scale up) that is doing
| decently. Majority of the top leadership was promoted from
| within sometimes all the way from IC to VP and I think it
| shows. The org would definitely benefit from someone that would
| have seen that level across multiple orgs.
| vrc wrote:
| It's usually not the founders strong suit to grow talent, so
| they farm that out to other companies and hire the growers.
| That's been my experience. Where it misses is that most other
| companies or managers can't actually nurture talent.
| marcinzm wrote:
| In my experience promoting too much from within just means all
| the flaws the founders had will never get better since the
| people who put up with them (or don't see them) got promoted.
| And if you're one of the few external hires who has the
| experience to see them you're probably in for a bad time.
| a_imho wrote:
| It is not just startups, no wonder the age old wisdom is
| always-be-leaving if you want to get a raise/promotion.
|
| I think the rational is more like paying as little as possible
| for keeping smart people around who could outperform their
| title. Switching jobs has a very real cost for employees,
| especially in harder economic times. Some will leave
| nonetheless, some will quite quit but some will stick around
| just fine.
| newsdataio wrote:
| [flagged]
| colpabar wrote:
| consent accident
| snowstormsun wrote:
| The cookie banner on this website is not gdpr conform.
| darkwater wrote:
| I'm in the UE and I get an extra cookie banner (with a design
| not matching the website's) on top of the "standard" one. This
| extra banner has a "Reject all cookie" clearly visible and
| clickable.
| manfre wrote:
| It showed me the reject all on top of the accept all.
| Clicking reject all left me looking at the accept all banner.
| Only options were "accept all" or bounce.
|
| This doesn't speak highly of their frontend team with the "I
| am very smart" undertone other comments mentioned.
| snowstormsun wrote:
| Yeah I think it was similar for me.
| k__ wrote:
| I didn't get a cookie banner, because my browser blocks all
| of them.
| wiradikusuma wrote:
| I'm a CTO of a venture-backed startup. My observations:
|
| - _Most_ people in high positions are smart. I put cunning in the
| same category :) But there are many _equally_ smart people who
| are not in high positions, because..
|
| - They don't have the chance (either by design or by choice).
|
| - You can have a better chance by starting your own business.
| Nobody starts a business with the intention of getting a VP job
| in another company, but it's a good fallback.
|
| - Or know the right people (networking). But this usually go in
| hand with the previous point.
|
| - Or work at some prestigious company (e.g. Google), and then
| move to a smaller pond to become a bigger fish.
|
| - Or be known by your boss and their boss. So that when your
| direct boss resigns, they know who to appoint next :)
| lapcat wrote:
| > - Most people in high positions are smart. I put cunning in
| the same category :) But there are many equally smart people
| who are not in high positions, because..
|
| > - They don't have the chance (either by design or by choice).
|
| This is an important insight.
| Aurornis wrote:
| These are all great points.
|
| One thing I've learned is that when you see companies promoting
| and hiring executives for a lot of reasons other than merit,
| it's time to start looking for a new job.
|
| I didn't realize during the interview, but my last company's VP
| and higher positions were almost exclusively held by people who
| had connections to the CEO, regardless of their qualifications.
|
| There were a handful of people who were promoted out of merit,
| or logically as part of acquisitions. They were steadily
| replaced and or demoted to make room for more of the C-level
| executives' friends and even family members over time.
|
| One C-level executive I enjoyed working with was demoted to a
| VP title and the CEO's long time friend took his C-level
| position. The demoted C-level executive had years of experience
| at some of the biggest names in the industry. He had also
| uprooted his family and moved across the country for this
| position. His replacement had no experience in the industry.
| The VP was asked to stay around and "allowed" to keep his stock
| options to help the CEO's old friend learn the position and
| take over.
|
| Opened my eyes to the realities of nepotism and loyalty in some
| companies.
| jononomo wrote:
| Fortune favors the bold.
| say_it_as_it_is wrote:
| This post wreaks of low self esteem. The author feels the need to
| prove that they are worthy of a great and powerful management
| position by sharing how much surface knowledge they possess about
| so many things. Usually, these posts are shared on LinkedIn as
| people desperately try to market themselves.
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