[HN Gopher] Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from
Author : mooreds
Score : 275 points
Date : 2025-04-06 18:25 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seangoedecke.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seangoedecke.com)
| bruce511 wrote:
| I work on a product that has been built over 25 years. Lots of
| the work I did years ago is to ensure the product longevity.
|
| Lots of the work I do now is to ensure it lasts another 25 years.
| Thats good, but its only the start of "my work".
|
| It's up to me to "sell" that benefit to upper management. There's
| no point in assuming they'll figure it out by accident. Part of
| my job is enumerating the value I add.
|
| By all means work on technical debt. But be sure to make a
| compelling case as to how the eradication of that debt will
| impact the project over the next decade. Try and throw in
| _immediate_ results as well (faster, more reliable, reduced
| support) but more importantly translate that into terms that
| measure the improvement in cold hard cash.
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| How do you put numbers in there usually? I'm facing an issue at
| work where an important factor should be done to correct a
| serious design mistake, but it doesn't get in the way of any
| feature. It's probably the cause of a lot of loss of
| development time over the lifetime of the project, but I don
| physically know how much of a boost will it give to
| development.
|
| I know it will, but I wouldn't feel comfortable without
| quantifying.
|
| I have some rough idea for approaches to this, but would
| appreciate some external input as well
| 6510 wrote:
| I only do small solo projects but the value from maintainable
| code depends on how often it needs to be updated.
|
| If management comes with new [crazy] ideas and/or feature
| [cruft] every other week it should be easy to prefer a
| warehouse with ready to use components over a scrap yard. If
| you need a set of usable tires a few times per year the scrap
| yard will provide. If you need a set of tires 20 times per
| day you want at least 200 sets of each kind stored in a
| convenient place. You probably live some place in between.
|
| edit: Also, timing is everything. Write down everything you
| want, add the pony. Wait for the right moment when their head
| is not raging with 50 deadlines.
|
| Most important imho is to not want anything but explain what
| options they have. If they want faster results they might be
| able to get them by attacking the technical debt.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > How do you put numbers in there usually?
|
| Make them up. If you're uncomfortable with this, ask ChatGPT
| to make them up for you. Most places don't have any real way
| to measure productivity or rate of feature delivery, so as
| long as you promise a reasonable number (5-10%) they have no
| way of contradicting you.
|
| Incremental refactoring is also the other classic way to do
| this. Slip bits into other tickets until you've slowly
| dragged the ship around. But it's not always possible.
| jeffparsons wrote:
| One way to communicate this is in terms of _schedule risk_,
| rather than straight-up lost productivity. E.g. for a
| particularly troublesome design flaw, you might estimate that
| for any given 4-week project there's a 20% risk of the
| project blowing out by an extra week due to that flaw.
|
| Depending on the stakeholder(s) you're dealing with,
| approaching it like this (as risk assessment/management)
| might help to convey the short-term impact of a long-term
| problem.
| bruce511 wrote:
| It can be tough, and in some cases measurable numbers are
| hard to find. That can make prioritization hard.
|
| It's worth keeping open the option that "now is not yet the
| right time".
|
| One key way to understand the situation well is to explore
| both thd upsides _and_ downsides of the issue. Its almost
| never an obvious decision and being acquainted with all
| points of view really helps both to figure out what is right,
| whether it 's worth doing, if now is the right time, and so
| on.
|
| If it was obviously necessary it would likely already have
| been done, so it may be necessary, but it might not yet be
| time.
|
| Sometimes it comes down to groundwork. Finding out who us
| affected, and how. (And if you can't find those people,
| that's a clue too.)
| Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote:
| Indeed, I was the one suggesting to not do the refactor
| because I couldn't find a reason. Today at standup though,
| a task that would take 1 hour once the refactor is done,
| will probably take about 2 days instead, so i'm back
| thinking about it (the refactor would take longer than 2
| days)
| hansmayer wrote:
| I get your point at the basic level, but as engineers and
| managers, we need to stop this nonsense. Think deeper about why
| do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies ? Could
| it be because those companies are full of people who somehow
| occupy important positions without understanding the basics of
| the engineering work. What's the value such busywork managers
| are adding, besides the anti-value of layers of explanatory
| communication and wasted time? The busywork folks should be
| working to understand where _their_ salaries are coming from,
| not the engineers. Note that I am not saying all managers are
| useless (its also a part of my job), it 's the people-and-
| ideas-managers who are useless in the technical setting. The
| point about technical debt should be a non-issue, why the hell
| would you have to explain that the technical debt is a bad
| thing? Did we not clear this issue many times over and
| establish zero technical debt as an engineering ideal a long
| time ago? Well it is because some person with 1/4 of your
| experience and competence somehow got lucky and talked
| themselves into one or two hierarchical positions above you. We
| need to start a pushback across the industry and stop allowing
| former accountants and humanist science graduates into
| "leadership" roles in IT.
| dave4420 wrote:
| There's a difference between management knowing that it's
| worth paying off tech debt in general, and management knowing
| that now is the right time to pay off this piece of tech debt
| in particular.
|
| Why pay off tech debt A and not tech debt B? Is this really
| more urgent than implementing feature C?
|
| I have some financial debts, but I prioritise paying off some
| over others, and even allow myself to buy myself nice things
| instead of paying off the mortgage early. The same principle
| applies with tech debt, except I have to justify my choices
| to my bosses instead of to my girlfriend.
| dagw wrote:
| _Could it be because those companies are full of people who
| somehow occupy important positions without understanding the
| basics of the engineering work._
|
| Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they
| would like to do than they have engineers to do it. The
| problem often isn't that they don't understand why fixing
| technical debt is important, it's to decide if fixing that
| particular technical debt right now is the best use of these
| resources right now. Also they might also know things that I
| might not know, like long term plans for and the relative
| profitability of different projects, which will affect how
| they make decisions. No point in spending effort fixing
| technical debt if that project/department is already slated
| for closure.
|
| Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every engineering
| and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the person two
| steps above me was basically always an engineer or at least
| has a science or technical background.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they
| would like to do than they have engineers to do it
|
| I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were
| between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-
| offs are... strange in that world.
|
| > Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every
| engineering and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the
| person two steps above me was basically always an engineer
| or at least has a science or technical background.
|
| I haven't found that to be common in the US. I've had a
| number of front-line managers who were (somewhat) recent
| engineer conversions, rarely had anyone above that level
| who was.
| ryandrake wrote:
| > I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were
| between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-
| offs are... strange in that world.
|
| Never seen that in my life, and I've worked at small,
| medium, and huge companies. Sounds wild. So they actually
| have zero bugs in their bug tracker, and no feature on
| deck waiting to be built? What do they do all day?
|
| Typical case I've seen at many companies is: Team has N
| engineers, with a rough capacity to fix N x 2 bugs per
| week. Bugs come in at a rate of N x 3, and the bug
| backlog is N x 80 and constantly growing until the team
| does periodic "bankruptcy" ritual where they mass-close N
| x 50 bugs that they admit they'll never get to fixing.
| Repeat forever.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| No, the company obviously makes up work to occupy their
| spare engineering capacity - but the point in that era of
| BigTechs was to hoover up all the engineering talent,
| whether or not you needed it.
|
| A big chunk of the company would be off doing Greenfield
| projects that would mostly get cancelled before they
| ship, another big chunk is off working on multi-year
| rewrites of existing services (that never finish), every
| successful team sprouts spin-off teams with amorphous
| charters like "apply machine learning to service X"...
|
| It's a side effect of an incentive structure that drives
| all the managers to grow headcount as fast as they can
| (since you need more reports to justify promo), and money
| basically growing on trees in those places
| t43562 wrote:
| Sometimes they're looking for the next big product that
| will make millions but IMO they never really stack the odds
| of that working against the chance of losing current
| business through not updating, improving their current
| offering to make it e.g. more sticky.
|
| Hence you work on "huge priorities" and then they turn out
| to attract 2-3 tiny customers....Meanwhile you have
| horrendous problems with things that _do_ sell that make
| them inconvenient for your customers such that they will be
| delighted to go elsewhere the moment they find out that
| your competition does it better.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| "zero technical debt" is a pipe dream. Not all tech debt is
| equal; think "low-interest student loan or mortgage" vs
| "high-interest credit cards or payday loans".
| hansmayer wrote:
| Well, that is why I said it was an ideal, something to
| strive for. Since we are in lecture-mode here, ever heard
| of objectives and key results? Think that would be a more
| fitting alternative to your black-and-white metaphor of
| low-interest vs. payday loan ...
| nradov wrote:
| It's not an ideal. There is an optimal level of technical
| debt to maximize shareholder value. Eliminating all
| technical debt makes no more sense than eliminating all
| financial debt. Used effectively, debt is a powerful
| lever. The trick lies in finding the optimal level based
| on incomplete information, and many corporate managers
| aren't very good at this.
| shalmanese wrote:
| > Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work
| inside (some) companies
|
| Mainly to prove you can sell, not that they can buy. Selling
| involves understanding the customer's needs, their tradeoff
| preferences, your value prop and being able to reflect that
| back to them. The minimum bar for successful selling requires
| you to demonstrate a certain degree of competence and due
| diligence that provides assurance that you're able to operate
| autonomously with trust.
| bruce511 wrote:
| That's an excellent summary!
| bruce511 wrote:
| Fortunately I don't work in such an organization, and I have
| extremely competent in my chain of command.
|
| The reason I explain the value of what I am doing (to both
| technical and non-technical managers) is because it helps
| them understand the bigger picture.
|
| Or perhaps it helps them understand that _I_ see the big
| picture, so that they know (and I know) our goals are
| aligned.
|
| I am aware that not everyone is as fortunate as I am. I'd
| equally suggest that not many managers are fortunate enough
| to have engineers that can articulate what they are doing in
| terms they can understand.
|
| There are plenty of managers out there who are not team
| players. And probably more engineers who are equally unable
| to see the bigger picture. Which is unfortunate because when
| you learn to work together towards a common goal, it really
| improves everything.
| moduspol wrote:
| 100%, although also:
|
| Try to be as objective as possible when evaluating that tech
| debt. It's possible (in many cases, probable) that the tech
| debt actually isn't as bad for the business as an engineer
| perceives, and it's quite possible there are other engineering
| efforts that are more worthy of development time and resources.
|
| Being willing and vocal about acknowledging and accepting that
| reality is also quite helpful.
| lesuorac wrote:
| > They throw themselves into various pieces of work that don't
| make money ... better screenreader support
|
| Truth hurts lol.
|
| This I think is where Capitalism is at odds with a lot of
| people's intrinsic values. Accessibility unarguable improves
| people's lives and many people are in software to make the world
| better but yeah if you want to make as much money (or maybe just
| more money) doesn't mean working on even a useful item; just a
| much demanded one.
| nthingtohide wrote:
| https://x.com/ben_el_baz/status/1908063819966067048
|
| Corollary : This is also the reason why people (i.e. Wall
| Street) who are close to / handle the money earn more money.
| Drinking straight from the firehose.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| That is why laws like the ADA exist: to give companies a
| financial incentive to make their products accessible.
| ajuc wrote:
| I worked at a company that makes machines reading
| books/press/whatever to people with impaired vision (or
| altogether blind).
|
| It wasn't the best paid job, but the satisfaction when you can
| talk with someone who uses your product daily for obvious life
| improvement beats any cozy bank job.
|
| This is a huge underdeveloped market BTW, and as the
| populations worldwide age it's only going to be more and more
| important.
| qweiop wrote:
| This line triggered me a bit, but later on they do give
| examples of how accessibility can be profitable. I think "not
| getting huge fines" due to (very important) laws, is a great
| example.
| mirawelner wrote:
| This sort of thing is why I decided to do research so I could
| work at universities and small startups! I figured that way I
| could be away from the corruption and selfishness that exists in
| large tech companies.
|
| Then my whole department got defunded. More fool me.
| 52-6F-62 wrote:
| Even many of those small startups are in the pocket of some
| unfavourable characters.
| BobbyTables2 wrote:
| I've also found some small companies have even worse politics
| and infighting than large companies.
|
| Having a great boss+team in a large company is probably the
| most ideal -- at least while it lasts.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> I've also found some small companies have even worse
| politics and infighting than large companies. _
|
| Also matches my experience and I think I can explain why.
|
| Small companies usually have tight social cliques (for better
| and for worse) which also translates to group think, more
| gossip, and less diversity of though as most people working
| there likely know each other form before or went to the same
| schools, worked at the same company before, etc.
|
| Therefore if you don't _click_ from the start with the core
| "gossip" group on all wavelengths, then your career prospects
| in the company are fucked.
| em500 wrote:
| Sayre's law: "Academic politics is the most vicious and
| bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
| kbrkbr wrote:
| Well, I left academia 20 years ago, because of the perceived
| corruption and selfishness. I guess you just need to be lucky,
| no matter where you go.
|
| Good luck anyways, I hope better times are on the horizon.
| sightbroke wrote:
| I would think there's almost more pressure in academia compared
| to private sector to sell your work as valuable.
|
| By that I mean, in order to advance in ones career (assuming an
| intensive research track) one needs to bring in research money
| (i.e. regularly apply for funding) then publish research that
| came from that funding.
|
| That funding needs to be managed (so basically a small business
| with allocating costs to equipment, labor, etc).
|
| Then "sell" that published research at conferences.
|
| Then manage/mentor a variety of students (because that's a key
| part of your labor supply).
|
| And maybe even teach on top of that.
|
| In private sector you just need to focus on your work making
| your boss/company money and if you want to manage people, learn
| how to communicate (listen and speak).
| beacon294 wrote:
| Replace "profitable" with "popular with management" and you're
| right on the money. Just don't get caught holding the hot potato
| when the wind shifts. And good luck figuring out when that is.
| kubb wrote:
| Positioning is key in sports and in corporations.
| suyash wrote:
| Haha, that's the most practical way to put it compared to the
| theoretical blog post.
| dagw wrote:
| And make sure your bosses boss knows who you are and how good
| you are, so that they'll want to keep you when your boss ends
| with said potato.
| nialv7 wrote:
| I have no words. this is just... so sad.
| sauercrowd wrote:
| Which part?
| poincaredisk wrote:
| If you don't want to feel like a cog in a heartless money
| making machine, all of it.
| t43562 wrote:
| I wouldn't take it quite as seriously as it takes itself.
| These articles like to lay down a view of the universe as
| if it was the first and last word but I don't think it is
| at all.
|
| We couldn't function at all if all companies failed to do
| work properly because of some odd decision about what's a
| cost and what isn't. If you have a toll bridge then fixing
| the bridge isn't a cost....unless you actually WANT it to
| fall down.
| woah wrote:
| It is not the responsibility of the rest of society to pay
| you a handsome salary for a programming hobby. If your code
| isn't generating enough value that someone wants to pay for
| it, it's about as useful as model trains.
| poincaredisk wrote:
| I never said it is. I responded to the question about
| "what's sad about it", and having idealistic ideas about
| the IT is common among newer/fresh programmers. And
| (almost?) nobody _wants_ to feel like a replaceable money
| making pawn, most[1] people in IT value self-realisation
| at least a bit. And some successfully gaslight themselves
| into believing that their backend work on their ad-
| sponsored e-commerce CRUD is somehow making the world a
| better place.
|
| Having said that, "value" doesn't have to be measured in
| euros. I personally work in a semi-governmental
| institution, and the main focus of my team is reducing
| the amount of cybercrime in my country. I still need to
| provide that value to earn good money, but I enjoy that
| more than working to make investors rich (there's nothing
| wrong with that though, and it usually pays better).
|
| [1] anecdotal, among my social groups, I don't really
| have hard data about this.
| nialv7 wrote:
| The part where employee whose work improves the life of
| people around them (by refactoring, work on tech-debt), or
| the life of people around the world in general (open source,
| accessibility, etc.) isn't rewarded financially. And somehow
| capitalists want me to believe people working to advance
| their own self interests will collectively benefit the
| society at large.
|
| Also the part where employees have to constantly justify
| their own existences. I just want to work on interesting
| things and be left alone.
|
| (To be fair I am exaggerating a bit, and I think the author
| is, too. I don't think the reality is as bad as presented.)
| sanitycheck wrote:
| It's very surprising to me that this needs to be said - but maybe
| that's because I've mostly worked in, let's say, 'resource
| constrained' environments. You focus on the stuff that keeps the
| money coming, or people start losing their jobs.
| t43562 wrote:
| Is that on the things that make money now or the speculative
| things you might make money on later?
|
| Almost everyone is resource constrained in that the ambition of
| non-dev management is always 10x what they have the money to
| pay for. I take that back a bit - I haven't worked for FAANG so
| perhaps they do have more people than real work.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| The author works at Github, so yes not so much a "resource
| constrained" environment. It matches my experience at a high
| growth company, Canva, where in places it was easy to see the
| connection to profit and in other places quite hard. There were
| people that didn't care about their connection to profit, and
| there were expensive employees doing "good work" done merely
| because it was good to do. Canva could do that because its
| margins are 80+% and it made almost $1B in revenue at the time.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| I think this is a problem that arises from people working in
| these gargantuan organisations where individuals can't see how
| their work contributes to the success of the organisation. They
| perceive the organisation as a construct built around social
| relationships rather than a construct that exists to drive some
| change in or generate profit from the surrounding economy,
| because they can't see how their work drives that change or
| generates that profit.
| ttoinou wrote:
| Or they're not trying to understand how it works
| moolcool wrote:
| But the relationships are what affords that change though,
| isn't it?
| ikiris wrote:
| I can see how my work applies just fine, that doesn't mean my
| VP+ agrees.
| cess11 wrote:
| My pet peeve in this area that pretty much always gets overlooked
| by technical people even if they're somewhat experienced in
| management and business, is compliance. It's always good and
| profitable to adapt to and preferably implement representations
| of laws and regulations, including 'soft' rules, like standard
| contracts, established business practices, non-compulsory laws,
| things like that.
|
| Even if no customer today cares about something, a form of
| employee compensation that is a bit unusual, say, or 'reversed'
| VAT declaration in invoicing, or whatever, if large actors in
| your segment do, and that's most likely the case, then you should
| at least build things based off the formalities in the local
| jurisdiction so that when your sales people get a big prospect on
| the hook you'll have an easy time adding what they need.
|
| It can also shield from legal or financial liabilities if someone
| gets angry at you, and your lawyer will be happier and possibly
| cheaper if they know you understand your legal environment. If
| you're doing an exit buyers will also appreciate good compliance,
| just like they appreciate other forms of risk management.
| CrossVR wrote:
| Running companies like this is how you end up with the current
| state of Boeing. Only valuing engineers who are directly earning
| you profit and firing the ones who only have an indirect role in
| your profit centers.
|
| > If your work isn't clearly connected to company profit, your
| position is unstable
|
| You know what really makes your position unstable as an engineer?
| Delaying a product over "safety" concerns, thereby doing work
| that's clearly connected to _preventing_ company profit. Only
| young, bright-eyed engineers would be naive enough to bring up
| safety concerns right?
| bravetraveler wrote:
| > Or even worse, engineers who are preventing you from making
| profit over "safety" concerns.
|
| Ugh, this.
|
| After doing SRE for nearly a decade and being utterly
| pigeonholed, I've come to believe it's more accurately placed
| in the _" controlled opposition"_ bucket than anything about
| either reliability or engineering.
| salawat wrote:
| Quality Assurance reporting in. Everybody talks a good game,
| then when you bring up compliance it's straight to the
| executive override.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Yeah. Company culture like the one mentioned in this document
| is toxic and will inevitably cause the company to fail.
| timestep wrote:
| I usually tell new hires this often; understand how this company
| makes money. Is engineering seen as a necessary cost or income
| multiplier on the balance sheet. In most companies, it falls in
| the land of IT, a cost center.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| "At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in
| proportion to how much money it makes the company"
|
| You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved
| that.
|
| Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by
| engineers, is non-technical.
|
| Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical
| engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a
| threath rather than an asset. If engineering is not a commodity,
| they fear being called out for not being in touch with the
| grounded reality of the business, and fear the unpredictability
| this entails for their own operation.
|
| So they will tend to treat engineering like a commodity, generic
| and interchangable at will, and even _deliberatly_ not recognize
| differential contribution by engineers to the company 's success.
|
| This is also why once non-technical management has consolidated,
| rising from engineering into management will become very
| difficult, often requiring you deny your technical competences.
| ozim wrote:
| But also company actually is much better off when it is not
| held hostage by couple of technical employees.
|
| Also every employee should be able to quit at any time and not
| affect business.
|
| So I disagree describing all like it is some evil scheme -
| that's how businesses work.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Is it better when it's held hostage by a couple of non-
| technical employees?
| ozim wrote:
| Non-technical employees are by definition replaceable.
|
| Unless they are sales reps that have good relations with
| customers.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| In that case, all employees bar sales reps are
| replaceable (and the reps are too, you just see the pain
| more).
| virgilp wrote:
| There's a subtle but very important difference between making
| sure nobody is a "single point of failure" or bottleneck
| (heck, most great engineers will actively work with
| management to make sure they're not single points of
| failure!), and recognizing that engineers are not fungible
| resources and should not be treated as such.
|
| I do agree that it's simpler for management to pretend that
| they are, and that's why great management is insanely rare.
| But great management, like great engineers, can make a huge
| difference in the success of a company / project.
| blurker wrote:
| > most great engineers will actively work with management
| to make sure they're not single points of failure!
|
| Sure, but that is a load bearing "great" for sure. Not
| every company is staffed with great, selfless engineers.
|
| I'm an engineer and I've worked at companies with engineers
| who actively resisted making themselves not a single point
| of failure because it gave them control and job security. I
| think it's not uncommon to have these types at companies
| and it really sucks when they have their management
| Stockholm syndromed because they make it hard for all the
| other "great" engineers to do their jobs.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| The company not being able to run without you doesn't
| mean you have job security, it just makes the company
| hurt more when they fire you based on someone's
| spreadsheet.
| blurker wrote:
| Tell that to the gatekeeping engineers who think
| otherwise.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| Would you say that the atom bomb project was held hostage by
| a couple of technical physicists?
|
| Obviously it can't succeed (in the desired time frame)
| without those specific people, and pretending like it can is
| lunacy.
| pc86 wrote:
| Functionally 0% of companies are working on things as
| important or impactful as the atom bomb, and I include
| FAANG et al in that. Maybe a small handful of AI companies
| will actually put out something that important? But even
| most of them won't.
|
| The vast majority of companies are putting web forms over a
| database. Letting one or two people hold all the technical
| knowledge for something like that is borderline fiduciary
| negligence.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| That isn't the point; It's not about the importance
|
| It's about specialized knowledge. To the owners of the
| business, making sure the business doesn't fail to
| deliver is existentially important.
|
| Web developers are fungible. The guy who designed the
| carefully tuned graph database that runs on a custom
| Linux kernel with a custom tuned filesystem is not. If
| this sort of thing is critical to your business
| succeeding, that engineer might as well be Niels Bohr.
| pc86 wrote:
| My point is 90% of companies have no specialized
| knowledge whatsoever and are staffed almost entirely by
| web developers.
|
| How many companies have an in-house tuned graph database?
| How many companies have custom Linux kernels? How many
| companies have custom filesystems?
| mkoubaa wrote:
| 90% of companies don't need to think too deeply about
| compensation, then.
| dirtybirdnj wrote:
| I think your comment can be boiled down to "management doesn't
| respect engineers"
|
| That's the fundamental problem. Some MBA or book somewhere
| convinced people that respect and dignity were optional. Once
| they realized they could apply this to more than engineers they
| started painting the entire world with this bullshit.
| Clubber wrote:
| I think they take them for granted not realizing that things
| can get much worse. I think they do this because they don't
| understand it. Ever been on a call with a company and they
| have to tell you, "You'll have to call back, our systems are
| down." This can cost millions an hour.
| hnthrow90348765 wrote:
| Personally I think it's just their social circles that
| reinforce this, not the boogeyman MBA stuff. Because at some
| level, yes, they can be intimidated by technical people and
| this is a defense to avoid the "why am I even employed"
| spiral.
|
| It would be nice if they could meet us half-way on the
| technical stuff. They regularly merge architects and
| sysadmins into developer roles making us learn more stuff.
| danaris wrote:
| > Some MBA or book somewhere convinced people that respect
| and dignity were optional.
|
| Whatever the origin, this is actually a very serious problem
| that afflicts our society at large, well beyond MBA culture.
| ebiester wrote:
| Let me take the opposite point - it isn't that management
| does or doesn't respect engineers, but that it does not
| respect them more or less than sales, or product, or
| marketing, or legal, or any other part of the system.
|
| If all of sales says "I am losing these deals because our
| competitors have X, and I cannot make my quota without X, and
| you do not make your numbers without X." - how do you balance
| that against a department head who says, "I cannot give you
| any features this quarter because we've been focusing on
| features over codebase health for too long?"
|
| Someone who says no for too long doesn't last.
| throwway120385 wrote:
| > Someone who says no for too long doesn't last.
|
| I actually think the engineering manager is probably in the
| wrong there, because if killer feature X is that critical
| to sales, then it needs to be prioritized in among the tech
| debt. It doesn't matter that the codebase health is not
| great if sales plummet. Being a good employee means
| sometimes prioritizing the health of the business and not
| the ergonomics of the work environment. And being a good
| manager means understanding when the health of the business
| is really at stake or whether the sales team is just
| throwing shade because they don't want to sell what the
| company has.
| kemiller2002 wrote:
| This is an important point. Many people lose sight of the
| idea that tomorrow doesn't matter if you don't survive
| today.
| anonfordays wrote:
| This comment shows great understanding and experience.
| Too often engineers treat work like their pet/FOSS
| project and forget it's a business, and businesses are in
| business to make money, not pretty code bases.
| ebiester wrote:
| So, I absolutely agree here that an engineering manager
| has to have the insight to tell truth from
| catastrophising on both sides. At the same time, I've
| seen sales orgs drive a department into the ground where
| everything comes to a screeching halt. I've seen times
| where that "feature X" is vaporware. Times when feature X
| is possible there because of different architecture
| choices. Newer entrants who learned from the older
| entrants. Features that look great for smaller customers
| that can't scale.
|
| And all of those might be plausible answers. As you'd
| agree, nuance is key here. However, that is all from the
| department or product head. Now consider the CEO's
| perspective that has 8 equally loud voices all clamoring
| for resources.
|
| My point is that it might not be disrespect but rather a
| management team that is trying to navigate competing
| priorities and economic realities.
| nradov wrote:
| In most organizations the engineering manager would share
| that prioritization responsibility with a product manager
| who acts as the voice of the customer. One simple
| approach is to just divide team capacity into two
| buckets: 80% for new features and customer bug fixes, 20%
| for tech debt. The specific percentages can vary based on
| circumstances.
| pc86 wrote:
| "Some portion of your time is reserved to work on
| whatever you want to work on with no input from outside
| your small team" does not work long term and it does not
| work at scale.
|
| Even among engineering software is somewhat unique in
| that we intentionally make sub-optimal decisions and then
| expect other departments not to raise an eyebrow when we
| demand time away from the next set of features to address
| (some of) those decisions, usually introducing more sub-
| optimal decisions in the meantime.
|
| Nobody has figured out a better way to do it but it's
| easy to see why non-technical people would be inclined to
| think tech debt is just a way to do less "real work."
| nradov wrote:
| Nah. I've seen that kind of capacity allocation work just
| fine on large teams and programs. It's not "whatever you
| want", the tech debt payments still have to be justified
| with escalating levels of approval required depending on
| effort and risk.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I generally believe engineering is right in this sort of
| hypothetical. But, at some point if they really are
| focusing on code quality... I mean, ultimately the point of
| code quality is to deliver features/reduce maintenance over
| the long run, right? So if they really are doing a good job
| of improving code quality, over the long run they should
| have a good relationship with management and the political
| capital to make this request.
|
| From an outside point of view, focusing on code quality and
| playing videogames instead of working look identical over
| the short term (or more realistically, working on little
| niche bits of the code or doing tidying-up busywork that
| doesn't really improve the overall quality of the project--
| it could legitimately be hard to tell the difference). Of
| course, it should eventually become apparent that the
| latter group didn't actually accomplish anything in that
| time.
|
| "How do you balance the," I guess it is a social
| thing/judgement call ultimately.
| InDubioProRubio wrote:
| Someone who says yes for too long, doesn't blast- out of
| the airframes plug.
| jack_h wrote:
| Code maintainability could be analogized to 5S in the
| manufacturing world. As a hypothetical let's say someone
| started assembling some product on the bare concrete
| warehouse floor because they had a pressing order to fill.
| A few months later it's just a mess of parts strewn about
| the floor that workers have to sift through to find the
| correct pieces for the assembly. The goal of a business is
| to make money, not have a clean workspace as a sibling
| comment mentioned. Ultimately this would leave a company
| vulnerable to a competitor who doesn't have such an
| expensive and inefficient production process though.
|
| I've worked on many, many features that never recouped
| their engineering cost despite the absolute assurance by
| sales that it was necessary. It would have been more
| effective long term to work on improving code
| maintainability so that we could better capitalize on
| features that substantially affect revenue in a positive
| direction. All too often I see that code maintainability
| only matters to the business when features can no longer be
| reliably and quickly delivered, but by then it's usually
| too late to really change course. This sort of balance also
| tends to drive all of the new fancy frameworks that cause
| so much churn as the signal from the business to
| engineering is that engineering needs to be able to pump
| out features very quickly but will not be given time to
| focus on maintainability so naturally this gets outsourced
| to someone else.
|
| To be fair, I have also been involved in an emergency
| project that if it wasn't completed in a very tight time
| frame the company would have lost 30% of their revenue and
| there would have been substantial workforce reductions. We
| did not focus on maintainability in this situation rather
| we focused on saving the company.
|
| Everything is a trade-off in business. My experience tells
| me companies generally focus on short term profit over long
| term concerns and there's very little in the way of
| feedback mechanisms that allow an inspection of these
| decisions in aggregate to see if the right balance is being
| struck.
| harrall wrote:
| Software engineers tend to downplay artists, designers,
| marketing and product.
|
| Frankly everyone downplays someone else based on their social
| circle. The only people who don't have wide social circles
| but most people don't.
| sunrunner wrote:
| "Everyone thinks their job in the Silo is the most
| important. Mine actually is." -- Juliette Nichols (also
| some Software Engineers)
| throwaway98797 wrote:
| make those with power like you and rewards will flow
|
| relation to company profitability is optional and often times
| counterproductive
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Basically, yes. You still should be able to make easy for
| those in power to argue that you 'deserve' it, but the
| dynamic is impossible to deny.
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Yep, this. Being aligned with an influential and well-liked
| manager is probably the biggest indicator of your overall
| career trajectory at a company.
| supportengineer wrote:
| In my career experience, this type of successful and well-
| liked manager is likely to jump ship for a better offer.
| shalmanese wrote:
| OK, but the people who keep on harping on this never seem to
| mention that the boss "liking you" is not about you cracking
| jokes and bringing in muffins on Thursday. It's about you
| being low drama and helping them achieve their KPIs in a way
| that helps them get promoted so they can bring you along with
| them.
|
| It's the guy/gal who you know needs to be informed that the
| feature they've been painstakingly working on for the last 2
| months is scrapped due to a strategic realignment and now
| they're tasked on working on some non-revenue bullshit to win
| a turf war and their response is a shrug and brainstorming of
| how do we play this rather than getting all up in their
| feelings and require emotional babysitting for the next 2
| months.
| thevillagechief wrote:
| Thank you. I tend to be clueless on office politics, and
| this is actually a really helpful reminder.
| pc86 wrote:
| I can't think of a scenario where it's directly
| counterproductive, at least not to the point where its
| counterproductivity overshadows the degree to which the
| people who make decisions like you.
| tqi wrote:
| What if they're right, and at a certain point engineering is a
| commodity?
| acedTrex wrote:
| It is, until it isn't. Basically modern tech management is
| about flying as close to commodified engineering sun as
| possible without burning up.
| sudoshred wrote:
| I like this. Engineering is not a commodity in general but
| management "adds value" by ensuring engineers are
| interchangeable.
| ebiester wrote:
| It is, but at some point, so is management. So is any human
| capital past your key positions.
|
| I feel like managers - even good managers - understand that
| better than most. That isn't to say there isn't variation in
| humans - choosing the humans right for your team and
| organization will help advance a lot, but it really helps us
| to think of organizations as ant colonies. One person can
| slow it down, but very few can speed it up, and they can only
| do so much.
|
| It's the network of communication that matters more than the
| person.
| keybored wrote:
| Most labor is a commodity in this system "past your key
| positions" (overpaid execs).
| no_wizard wrote:
| I often struggle to understand what executives do all
| day. I work (and have worked in many different orgs) with
| executives quite a bit, see insight into their process,
| and often come away underwhelmed instead of more
| confident in leadership.
|
| There are exceptions - I can think of a couple CTOs I
| know that are worth their weight in gold - but they are
| just that - exceptions.
|
| I will say, the smaller the organization, the more having
| the right executives is important though, but it seems
| that only lasts while headcount is sub ~200 people or so
| _and_ executives maintain an active role with all pillars
| of the organization relevant to their function (e.g., it
| isn 't weird for an IC to talk to the CTO from time to
| time about how their job is going)
| mkoubaa wrote:
| The other departments are arguably more so. Law, sales,
| finance, marketing.
| hosteur wrote:
| HR, management...
| pc86 wrote:
| Have you never worked in an organization that survived off
| of outside sales and employed really, _really_ good sales
| teams? Of all the departments listed, engineering included,
| sales would probably be the last one I would consider a
| commodity.
| mkoubaa wrote:
| If it's b2b SaaS sales is probably more important than
| engineering. If you're designing flight control software
| it isn't.
| arijo wrote:
| Perhaps that was true 50 years ago, but in an increasingly
| complex technological world, problems simply cannot be solved
| without increasingly advanced engineering skills.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of software engineers are
| building garden-variety CRUD apps.
| michaelt wrote:
| Engineering might be a commodity if you're "building
| garden-variety CRUD apps"
|
| But a lot of companies aren't - or at least, they don't
| _think_ they are.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| Which is like saying most software is reading, modifying
| and writing memory. Technically true, but not at the
| level it tells the story.
| supportengineer wrote:
| If that was really true, the world would need only ONE
| generic CRUD app. It just needs to operate at scale.
| fmbb wrote:
| What if?
|
| Are they?
| hayst4ck wrote:
| A job is a commodity if your manager knows how to do your job
| right now.
|
| There is a subtlety. Your manager might be able to do your
| job, with time, but if they haven't spent time understanding
| the same data you have or the greater context of what you are
| doing, then they won't be able to come to the same
| conclusions you do.
|
| Therefore your manager must trust your judgement because they
| do not have sufficient data to make the judgements you make
| yourself. This necessary deference is what prevents
| commoditization. Judgement is also unequal, being informed by
| experience and quality, further denying commoditization
| because all engineering decisions are not equal.
|
| The corollary is also clear. If a manager thinks they know
| better than you and treats you like a commodity, then you are
| forced into performing a job in a dogmatic rather than
| analytical or informed way. You may be asked to do things
| that don't make sense or are even directly counter to the
| organizations goals because they don't know things you know.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded
| by engineers, is non-technical.
|
| Comments like these make me remember that the tech world is
| very big and companies come in many different shapes.
|
| I haven't had non-technical management below the CEO level in
| many years.
| eek2121 wrote:
| I would love to work for a company like that. It seems like
| my experience with companies that have "people" vs folks with
| engineering experience is worse overall. My favorite jobs had
| all engineering talent, and management was smart enough to
| stay out of the way.
| fatnoah wrote:
| It's multilayered. I've had technical and non-technical
| bosses at large and small companies, and the universal thing
| that made them "good" or "bad" was whether they gave me
| sufficient context and trusted me to get the work done. The
| best ones challenged me in good faith and provided honest
| feedback.
|
| Even stranger was the experience of my company being acquired
| by a large name-brand tech company. My manager (Director) and
| their manager (VP) were the worst kind...non-technical and
| second guessing everything in silly ways. Meanwhile, the co-
| founder and CTO popped into our tiny office one day because
| they were in town, rolled up to my desk and said "hey, you're
| fatnoah, right? I have some questions" and then pulled me
| into a conference room where we went deep on our entire tech
| stack. He got everything the first time and understood the
| how and why of what we built and why.
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| CTO is "management" by definition. Do you mean to say most
| companies have non-technical CTOs who treat engineering as
| commodity?
|
| That might have been the case with CIO/CTOs coming from
| pre-2010s era where they indeed were maintaining landscapes
| built from commodities or vendor solutions (i.e. on-prem server
| racks, CRM and ERP systems, networks, end user devices,
| subscriptions to cloud applications etc - some still do).
| Modern CTOs managing complex tech landscapes that were
| partially built in-house are rarely like that.
|
| In my experience _any_ CTO ties engineering, be it commodity or
| not, to value which is highlighted in the article, or get
| replaced. That 's a key part of their role, if not 80% of it.
| If you think your CTO is underselling engineering
| contributions, he's either not doing a good job of making that
| value visible, or you overestimate these contributions.
| pc86 wrote:
| C-suite executives are "management" only insofar as they are
| someone's direct supervisor and that person wants to make
| them happy. And if you've got brand new managers with single-
| digit years of experience reporting to them, sure they
| probably do a fair bit of people management. But that's not
| the norm. If you're at a sufficiently large company you'll
| have Presidents reporting to the C-suite, 3-5+ levels of VPs
| below that, 1-3 levels of directors, and a level or two of
| individual contributors. So you're approaching double-digit
| numbers of people between C suite and the people who should
| theoretically actually need day-to-day performance
| management.
|
| There is not a competent Executive Vice President or Division
| President in the world that needs to be managed by their
| boss.
| nyeah wrote:
| This is an important point. But it doesn't conflict severely
| with the article.
|
| Sure, to first order, and in the short term, engineering work
| is often valued more or less at random. The valuation is driven
| by factors that we can't predict (or that we would really
| rather not predict).
|
| But to second order, and in the long term, engineering work is
| often valued according to whether it makes money. Often enough
| that it's worth paying attention to the article.
| commandlinefan wrote:
| > decades of experience have disproved that
|
| Like most advice you find on the internet, the author of this
| piece is writing "the way the world ought to work" rather than
| the way there's any evidence that the world does work.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| Admiral Rickover was likely the single most competent
| engineering manager in the last century and wrote this: _Doing
| a Job_ https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm
|
| _Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with
| transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging
| and rewarding so that his people will remain with the
| organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully
| from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory.
|
| The Defense Department does not recognize the need for
| continuity in important jobs. It rotates officer every few
| years both at headquarters and in the field. The same applies
| to their civilian superiors.
|
| This system virtually ensures inexperience and
| nonaccountability. By the time an officer has begun to learn a
| job, it is time for him to rotate. Under this system,
| incumbents can blame their problems on predecessors. They are
| assigned to another job before the results of their work become
| evident. Subordinates cannot be expected to remain committed to
| a job and perform effectively when they are continuously
| adapting to a new job or to a new boss.
|
| When doing a job--any job--one must feel that he owns it, and
| act as though he will remain in the job forever. He must look
| after his work just as conscientiously, as though it were his
| own business and his own money. If he feels he is only a
| temporary custodian, or that the job is just a stepping stone
| to a higher position, his actions will not take into account
| the long-term interests of the organization. His lack of
| commitment to the present job will be perceived by those who
| work for him, and they, likewise, will tend not to care. Too
| many spend their entire working lives looking for their next
| job. When one feels he owns his present job and acts that way,
| he need have no concern about his next job._
|
| Rickover would be a savage critic of society and American
| culture as it is now, he even was then. He was a man who
| successfully challenged people in power, which is why I imagine
| most people never hear of him. He won many political battles,
| but the same people he challenged remained in power. When they
| wrote the history books, they diminish his legacy, because they
| don't want stories of people successfully challenging power
| structures and especially not stories of people who challeneged
| corporate power, or prove that the government can do something
| better, cheaper, and more dangerous/complicated than
| corporations.
| tybit wrote:
| > At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in
| proportion to how much money it makes the company
|
| If you look at what it actually takes to get promoted at most
| tech companies I'd say this isn't generally true at many big tech
| companies.
|
| Being on a very lucrative part of the product may not get you as
| much "impact" on your promotion packet as if you are working on a
| platform/infra touching the whole org. Even if that platform
| isn't generating the company much money even indirectly.
| jgeada wrote:
| OK, now explain where management's salary comes from.
|
| They don't produce anything, at best they're taste arbiters and
| at worst parasitic middle men that happen to control the budget;
| funny how that always means they get more of it.
|
| The best long term performing companies are run by technical
| people that happen to be competent managers. As soon as the
| professional managerial class takes over they quickly figure out
| their most profitable move is to cheapen out on engineering and
| trade in the future for bonuses right now; they'll be long gone
| when the company craters.
| t43562 wrote:
| Absolutely. Some genius outsources IT to Malaysia....I ask for
| an IP address to be statically assigned to a test machine and
| the ticket is opened and closed.....next day the IP has
| changed. Repeat x20 till we give up - telephone calls and
| complaints notwithstanding. Someone closes 20 tickets and looks
| productive because that's the way they're being managed.
|
| I bet the MBA who made this happen got a promotion and wouldn't
| understand how they crippled everyone.
|
| I admit this is an old story but IMO it does show you how
| management by people who don't know and don't care screws a
| company quietly. That's a famous company that did in fact have
| a major problem.
| agentultra wrote:
| Mackenzie's analysis holds a grain of truth and remains too
| simplistic.
|
| If you work at a company whose notion of value is purely
| dividends, get out.
|
| The aviation industry didn't get profitable without regulation.
| Safety is a big part of the value generated. Spending on safety
| is not spending money putting more butts in seats and selling
| more tickets faster. But few people will choose to fly if the
| risk to their safety is too great.
|
| Software does have similar responsibilities. People hate losing
| their money, having their private data leaked, having their
| entire production run screwed up because of a software error. It
| can cost a business a lot of money. Cutting corners to bring new
| features to the table doesn't exactly add to the value the
| company brings to their customers. You also need to respect their
| privacy, do what's required to avoid security errors, programming
| errors, etc.
|
| _Update_ : This article, and Mackenzie's advice, is decent if
| you're trying to _survive_ at such a company and you can 't get
| out yet.. for reasons. But I would aim your career towards
| getting out at some point because such a company will never value
| your work.
| BJones12 wrote:
| The profitability problem in the aviation industry was not a
| lack of regulation. The profitability problem was simply that
| there were a lot of countries pouring money into their flag-
| carrying airlines to enable them to operate at a loss. Since
| many competitors wanted to operate at a loss, the entire
| industry operated at a loss.
| t43562 wrote:
| I have often ended up working on the billing system - nobody
| cares if it functions and I don't know why. It pulls in the money
| every month and if it makes mistakes the company loses
| money.........!!!!.....
|
| In the same companies people do care about the UI ...even when it
| has about 2-3 unique users per day. I won't explain how this
| translates to being able to function as a company at all - just
| to say it does because most selling is actually through
| salespeople.
|
| So what I get from the OP's dose of "realism" is that everything
| is about perception and hopes for the future etc. The things that
| are making money now are assumed to be able to carry on doing so
| forever without attention. Just as some people buy a car and
| never look after it. When the day of disaster comes they're
| surprised.
|
| Some companies implement new features to make a sale. So there's
| a continual struggle to complicate an already complicated
| system......but you're not allowed to refactor or spend time
| upgrading from gcc 4.3 or whatever because that's not work that
| leads to a sale. So each new feature takes more and more effort
| of course....and when you lose developers their replacements
| don't understand the convoluted codebase so bugs can't be fixed
| and customers don't renew their contracts.
|
| So you do need to work for profitable companies rather than the
| kind of slow motion car-crash companies that are trying to do
| something which cannot really support itself.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _nobody cares if it functions and I don 't know why. It pulls
| in the money every month and if it makes mistakes the company
| loses money.........!!!!....._
|
| But no _individual manager_ loses anything compared to their
| colleagues. There is nothing for them to lose by not caring.
| cdavid wrote:
| This article makes the naive assumption that "what is making
| money" is an objective thing.
|
| Once a company reaches a certain size, basically once it has a
| financial planning department w/ different VPs owning their PnL,
| who is making money increasingly becomes a social construct. "how
| to get promoted" by spakhm is much more closer to how a large,
| successful org works IMO: https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-
| get-promoted
|
| I've seen this in my career multiple times. For example, when I
| was involved in search for some companies, we would demonstrate
| through A/B testing that we would make X more money per month.
| Executive team changed, they decided that "A/B test does not work
| and slows us down", the definition of making money changed, we
| overnight went from a money-aking org to a cost center.
|
| Nowadays, most companies are pushing GenAI everywhere. Most of
| those things don't make money, and yet a lot of promotions will
| be obtained across the board until the tune ends.
| t43562 wrote:
| Thank you. "Spearheading" is always valued and the way to do it
| is to leave for some new initiative somewhat before everyone
| realises the current one is a turd. The blame then attaches to
| the people left holding the turd.
| Hjack wrote:
| But still there are objective metrics by which you can track
| which products are making money and which are not. You can do
| ALL the financial manipulation to an extent, but everyone above
| bragging VPs/Directors know which product lines are making
| money yoy
| cdavid wrote:
| Say you are meta. You know that a big stream of revenue is
| ads. You are an engineer working for one of the myriad ML
| model around feeds, ads click prediction, whatever. Those ML
| models are in production, and cost a lot of money to maintain
| / operate. How much you are a cost center or a money maker
| will depend on a lot of non objective choices.
|
| The essential issue is attribution, which fundamentally
| requires some choices about how money is actually made. Even
| when everybody is in good faith, there are reasonable ways to
| agree. And people are rarely in good faith around those
| things.
| Hjack wrote:
| Ads are still bread and butter for Meta. The first to go
| will be the folks who are in vogue bcoz of cultural
| reasons, eg. diversity, green, etc. I would even go the
| extent of saying that a lot of open source maintainers will
| also be axed, the day Meta stops making ad money and fights
| for survival. The issue of `attribution` is to be decided
| at last, when anyway the house is partially burned and the
| company is fighting for survival. I am talking about the
| initial phase, where a lot of engineers work on teams that
| make no monetary/value sense for company and are there,
| bcoz manager/CEO don't care or are kind(mostly former).
| cdavid wrote:
| Sure, but things like DEI, OSS, are tiny minority in most
| companies. At least they were in the companies I've
| worked at.
|
| You mentioned that attribution is to be decided when
| house is burnt, but that certainly not my observation.
| Which department is responsible for what revenue is what
| senior leadership fights over all the time, whether times
| are good or not.
| Anon1096 wrote:
| You have chosen a very very poor example in calling out
| Meta Ads. I can assure you that the entire org has a
| massive magnifying glass over it with insane amounts of
| data analysis, every % change in revenue is absolutely
| attributable to exactly what group brought it about whether
| it be DC hardware, ML teams, or backend infra. It is the
| lifeblood of Meta with many billions flowing through it of
| course it isn't just being cowboy'd with random changes
| that have undefined impact on yoy revenue.
| cdavid wrote:
| I am not saying mature companies are "YOLO-ing" this
| randomly, but that many assumptions are made about how
| the input metrics trickle back to revenue/profits, and
| those can change. The attribution exists, but how it is
| done is far from an objective thing. E.g. how do you
| translate CTR into revenue ? How do you value an
| additional user ?
|
| This can also be seen with cost saving. There are
| numerous examples on HN when people wonder why reducing
| the cost of something by X millions was not recognized
| (e.g. https://x.com/danluu/status/802971209176477696).
| Based on my own experience, most likely explanation is
| that's because there was no item related to this in the
| financial planning to be recognized.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Well said. Young engineers must understand that there is no
| problem more sales can't fix. Your brilliant solution to problem
| X must pass the sales test for it to be considered a true success
| story for your company.
| xivzgrev wrote:
| Oof this article hits like a kick to the nuts.
|
| Ive been unhappy with my career growth in past several years, and
| basically it's because I worked on products / projects that did
| not make a ton of money.
|
| I knew this intellectually of course, work on revenue generating
| things, but emotionally I gravitate toward such reasons that it's
| good for customer, or this is high risk / high reward, it's more
| interesting, etc.
|
| If I had kept this heuristic as my North Star, I would be further
| ahead and making more money.
|
| I'm not sure if emotionally I could have done it - I was offered
| a management position if I moved OFF a high revenue product, so
| that would've been hard to say no to. But in the long run, with
| hindsight, it would've been the right choice.
| tonnydourado wrote:
| > It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you get paid
| for work because it's important
|
| Is it? Maybe I'm out of touch, or used to a different work
| culture (non-US, consultant), but that's kinda obvious, you're
| paid because you make money.
|
| Also, no one that knows a single teacher or nurse would ever fall
| into the trap of thinking that salary is proportional to job
| importance.
| sandbach wrote:
| These Silicon Valley folks really ought to read some Marx.
|
| If low-level workers are a 'cost centre', why don't companies
| just get rid of them? Wouldn't they be more profitable if they
| removed everyone outside the 'profit centre' of senior
| management? Obviously not.
| thundergolfer wrote:
| I'm not sure you understand Marx. The author probably has read
| Marx during their philosophy training.
|
| 'cost centre' does not mean a place that a capitalist is unable
| to perform exploitation. A cost center in Marxist terms can be
| understood as a department that participates in the money-
| commodity-money' (MCM') flow but doesn't directly complete the
| circuit to M'.
|
| For example, delivering and receiving mail does not realize
| profit for most companies, but is an essential part of the
| business. If they spend $1,000,000 on the mail department in
| Q1, spending $2,000,000 in Q2 is likely to waste the extra
| $1,000,000. But spending _zero_ in Q2 would cripple the
| company. That 's a cost centre.
| woah wrote:
| Marx was a techno-utopian sci-fi author who insisted his
| fiction was non-fiction and was proven wrong 100 years ago.
| Where is the dictatorship of the proliteriat?
| shireboy wrote:
| Interesting article. I'm currently trying to justify "tech debt"
| to upper management. The way I try to communicate it: we can move
| faster and better on business requirements if we delete unused
| code/upgrade legacy dependencies/etc. Both need to happen at the
| same time, though, and that's where it gets hard: "this feature
| request would be so much easier if I upgraded to Angular vlatest"
| runs the risk of always paying tech debt and never providing
| value.
| snozolli wrote:
| I mean, I've never worked with a project manager who generated
| one iota of business value... Just stirring up drama, inserting
| themselves into decisions that they can't understand, and calling
| unnecessary meetings with management that they should be handling
| on their own. I think there's a lot to be said for simple
| _visibility_ to management. Also, ignorant overconfidence seems
| to be something that management _loves_.
| esafak wrote:
| This article offers advice for ICs. Well-meaning managers should
| remember to set up the analytics to connect work to revenue. That
| which is not measured is not valued, so be sure to measure what
| matters.
| stego-tech wrote:
| The article makes good career advice in general: understand what
| pays your salary, and contribute enough such that your costs are
| offset by your labor. For engineers, that means understanding how
| the company makes money, or how you can save the company money,
| and then focusing on those things.
|
| As many, _many_ others have pointed out however, modern
| companies, _especially modern tech companies_ , aren't operating
| from that mindset. Presently they're all championing _products_
| for the sake of the product itself, rather than sticking to their
| profit centers. It 's why everyone for the past decade or so has
| engaged in a "checkbox race" of adding the latest fad to their
| product suite, regardless of its value to said product or its
| customers in the first place. Likewise, internal politics has
| shifted to prioritize those working on the "right" product, as
| opposed to recognizing those who create the most value. It's a
| large reason why enshittification continues to grow: leadership
| doesn't care about value, product, or engineering, so much as
| they want the latest shiny thing to add to their sale sheet and
| make the Board and/or Shareholders "happy".
|
| My own data points supporting this theory:
|
| * Cutting a cost-center's AWS costs by 60% and saving the
| equivalent of my TC every 2.5 months (~$1.3m/year) got me sent to
| the Private Cloud team
|
| * Building multi-cloud showback wasn't recognized because I
| wasn't on the Public Cloud team (a new team rebuilt it two years
| after I'd finished it)
|
| * Building a Cloud-as-a-Service model with AI Agent hooks got me
| RIFed
|
| So to add a caveat to the OPs own article for others based on my
| own experiences: if your organization isn't prioritizing value
| regardless of origin, your position is unstable. In those cases,
| you need to either find a way onto the "right" team if the
| company is important to you, or you need to brush up your resume
| and find an exit post-haste. Creating value in a company that
| doesn't acknowledge or respect it is a huge red flag that I
| naively thought tech companies ("we're a meritocracy!") wouldn't
| display, but I was gravely mistaken.
| 0rzech wrote:
| > At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in
| proportion to how much money it makes the company (directly or
| indirectly).
|
| I really wish it were like that, but IMHO it's more of an
| exception to the rule than the rule. At least this is my
| experience of being an engineer and a manager.
| sakex wrote:
| The anomaly here are AI researchers
| dabrorius wrote:
| I vaguely remember the engineering code of ethics, I'm pretty
| sure it goes against most things expressed in this post.
| teddyh wrote:
| > _If your work isn't clearly connected to company profit, your
| position is unstable_
|
| In my experience, only salespeople are clearly connected to
| profit. _Everyone else_ is percieved as a cost.
|
| > _In other words, you're probably depending on a kind-hearted
| manager (or CEO) who personally values your work._
|
| Yes, this is the position for everybody except salepeople. Which
| means, in turn, that focusing your efforts to make the _company_
| profitable, as the articles advocates, is a grave mistake. You
| should focus on making _your immediate manager_ profitable and
| successful. (For those who are fresh out of school, this is often
| a _wildly_ different goal.)
|
| The only situation in which the article's advice makes any sense
| is if your immediate manager is also the company owner, who
| benefits personally and immediately if the company's profits go
| up.
| groone wrote:
| My software engineer job is to destroy my own position by solving
| all the problems and automating the job away. I have done it
| multiple times over my career.
| keybored wrote:
| From the perspective of the business, you need to generate more
| money than your wage plus whatever else expenses that are
| associated with your employment. This surplus is what adds up to
| the profit.
|
| Let's just put the simplistic "be a profit center" thing at face
| value. The funny thing is that you can generate 10% surplus or 5X
| surplus. The difference in benefit to the company is large. But
| your benefit might not be much. Maybe a wage increase, maybe not.
| Maybe better job security.
|
| Now others have already questioned the "profit center" line here.
| With so much alienation in the work force it becomes laughable to
| claim that you can point to a group of individuals as "the profit
| center" or "the cost center". This reeks of political jockying.
| Is Sales the profit center? Without Sales nothing would be
| sold... but without Engineering there would be no product.
|
| What ends up happening is that the people who insist the loudest
| are the ones who get promoted to Profit Center. Maybe.
| Hjack wrote:
| The whole trend of cracking FAANG/MAANG interviews has made this
| notion of not having self-awareness/understanding of where money
| comes far more entrenched. Folks who crack these interviews feel
| like they are passing sermons from top of 'tech' hill to other
| noobs, not knowing in effect that their minuscule value is as
| long is company is making profit. The day that stops, everyone's
| job is on the line and especially folks who are away from centers
| which make money.
| utbabya wrote:
| Metrics for things like FCP, better screenreader and refactor are
| less straightforward so having the capability to correctly
| evaluate the cost and benefits, making the right judgement calls
| and communicating it to everyone is vital.
|
| Not mentioned in the article but this implies the importance of
| hiring. Having the right people to build the culture together,
| sitting in the room to discuss the priority of these things can
| turn a filibuster popping clown fiesta into productively working
| out actual competitive advantages for the company.
| mathattack wrote:
| Are any jobs really secure? You still need to show output if
| you're in a profit center, and sometimes things happen outside
| your control.
|
| More commentary below:
|
| https://open.substack.com/pub/therosen/p/knowing-where-your-...
| 0xTJ wrote:
| Reading this from somewhere that "engineer" is a protected title
| (Canada), this is a weird read.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| > I regularly see stories like "I convinced my idiot bosses to
| finally let me do only tech debt work, and would you believe they
| fired me after a few months?"
|
| > "it's so unfair that I haven't been promoted - look at all this
| amazing accessibility/standards/open-source work I've been
| doing!"
|
| Stories like these might exist, but I genuinely haven't seen a
| story like either case.
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