2 ms·
A hopefull adequate comparison would be this: you are a technical lead of at a company, you get really really high pay and you have a lot of fellow engineers un
by xiaq 9y ago
A hopefull adequate comparison would be this: you are a technical lead of at a company, you get really really high pay and you have a lot of fellow engineers under your command. You get handed a legacy system, and there are all all kinds of problems with it:
1. The system uses a database that is not duplicated.
2. The system has no monitoring.
3. The web frontend is written in PHP.
What do you do?
To fix 1, duplicate the freaking database.
To fix 2, add some freaking monitoring.
3 is presumably the hardest to fix. But remember that you get really high pay and you have a lot of engineers. What did the engineers at Facebook do? They fixed PHP.
Do you blame the previous team that made this horrible system? No. No. No. You own the system now. There are valid engineering approaches to fix. So fix it. It can take a while, but eventually you can fix it. In the worst case, you will have to rewrite. But that's still a feasible thing to do.
Now substitute technical lead with VP.
- knightofmars 9y agoI agree with this, the one thing I'll add is that you may also have to contend with the competing priorities of every other VP. Specifically in that Business Development VP may be saying, "We don't have time to do any of those things! We need X done now otherwise we won't get our customer!" And the technical VP response might be, "If we don't fix this now then we won't have _any_ customers." But in the end the financial state of the company will make the decision for you. If you're on the edge and you immediately need more customers to survive then you're going to forgo doing 1 & 2 and instead implement X that BD was requesting. Hoping that you can get enough breathing room in the near future to actually do 1 & 2.