4 ms·

>Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. I he

>Women I know who wrote software kept finding new roles where they'd be in management instead and then they moan that they liked writing code and miss it. I hear this a lot from men, too. We have a general problem in the industry of being bad at making senior engineering a rewarding career track.

mrkurt 6y ago
Right. We glamorize "management" in every way, even going so far as to label devs "individual contributors". As if they only contribute 1x while managers contribute multiples. I have this gut wrenching feeling that tech companies just can't be fixed. There's way too much that has to change and the powerful people don't have much incentive to do the work.
- marcinzm 6y ago
  I mean, this is an issue in every company on the planet, not sure why you single out tech. If anything large tech companies have the best IC paths out there.
  - kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
    This is true. Many other industries are absolute cesspools of corruption, nepotism, outright harassment and just all in all hellholes to work in, but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      Indeed, from people I know, working in a kitchen or as an auto parts delivery person is far, far worse for women than tech (not that tech should stop striving).
    - rutthenut 6y ago
      >> but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech I don't think so. Hollywood has certainly had a lot of issues in the press... Perhaps it's that you read more tech-focused media? Or the founders/CEOs of big tech companies have massively high profiles and that can work against them when there is bad news to report about them or their companies.
- jmchuster 6y ago
  Compare your best manager and your best engineer, and the manager _does_ contribute multiples more than the engineer does. You take this to the extreme, and the best CEOs in history have added additional billions in value to the companies that they've helmed.
  - atq2119 6y ago
    This is more of a function of the person's role than their individual contributions though. A CEO's decisions generally have far wider-ranging impact than an individual contributor's, but it's not a directly productive impact in the literal production sense. The CEO didn't personally add those billions of value, they enabled others to add that value. Ultimately, a CEO's decisions don't come out of a vacuum. The available options are created by ICs and percolate through management. The point of the CEO is to act as a sort of tie-breaker to ensure that decisions are actually made by choosing some of the options. At least that's the case in large established companies. Obviously the dynamics are different in a small startup where the CEO is also the founder, but if the startup is successful it'll eventually transition to the "large established company" case, even if the founder stays on as CEO.
    - jmchuster 6y ago
      Of course it's the role? Your generated value is always your individual contribution multiplied by the task that you chose to apply that effort to. If you replaced an excellent CEO with a mediocre CEO or with a bad CEO, then you might see, from some baseline, doubling of the company's a value, or erasing it to nothing, based on which direction you decide to set the company and its culture. If you're the CTO for the company, your choice of team structure and how you choose to influence technical architecture could lead to productive happy teams or slow miserable ones. If you're the engineer in charge of writing a service, you could set your team up for tons of technical debt down the road, or a smooth running service that's easily and safely extensible. If you're doing a bugfix, you could spend the time to truly understand and solve the issue, or throw another if loop to the pile that the next person will find and have to understand before they can make their own patch to the code. So, if you have the ability to spend a day on a single effort, one which will improve the life of one developer, or one that would improve the life of all developers, or one that would improve the life of all employees, there's obviously a preference from the company's perspective. And then you can consider things like, improving the life of people who don't even work at your company, but that's generally done on your own time, unless the company thinks that the reputation that they gain is worth giving you the time.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  No, managers don't contribute multiples; managers are responsible for the contributions of multiple people (teams) versus individual contributions of each person in the team.

mrkurt 6y ago

Right. We glamorize "management" in every way, even going so far as to label devs "individual contributors". As if they only contribute 1x while managers contribute multiples. I have this gut wrenching feeling that tech companies just can't be fixed. There's way too much that has to change and the powerful people don't have much incentive to do the work.

marcinzm 6y ago
I mean, this is an issue in every company on the planet, not sure why you single out tech. If anything large tech companies have the best IC paths out there.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 6y ago
  This is true. Many other industries are absolute cesspools of corruption, nepotism, outright harassment and just all in all hellholes to work in, but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    Indeed, from people I know, working in a kitchen or as an auto parts delivery person is far, far worse for women than tech (not that tech should stop striving).
  - rutthenut 6y ago
    >> but the media loves to shit almost exclusively on tech I don't think so. Hollywood has certainly had a lot of issues in the press... Perhaps it's that you read more tech-focused media? Or the founders/CEOs of big tech companies have massively high profiles and that can work against them when there is bad news to report about them or their companies.
jmchuster 6y ago
Compare your best manager and your best engineer, and the manager _does_ contribute multiples more than the engineer does. You take this to the extreme, and the best CEOs in history have added additional billions in value to the companies that they've helmed.
- atq2119 6y ago
  This is more of a function of the person's role than their individual contributions though. A CEO's decisions generally have far wider-ranging impact than an individual contributor's, but it's not a directly productive impact in the literal production sense. The CEO didn't personally add those billions of value, they enabled others to add that value. Ultimately, a CEO's decisions don't come out of a vacuum. The available options are created by ICs and percolate through management. The point of the CEO is to act as a sort of tie-breaker to ensure that decisions are actually made by choosing some of the options. At least that's the case in large established companies. Obviously the dynamics are different in a small startup where the CEO is also the founder, but if the startup is successful it'll eventually transition to the "large established company" case, even if the founder stays on as CEO.
  - jmchuster 6y ago
    Of course it's the role? Your generated value is always your individual contribution multiplied by the task that you chose to apply that effort to. If you replaced an excellent CEO with a mediocre CEO or with a bad CEO, then you might see, from some baseline, doubling of the company's a value, or erasing it to nothing, based on which direction you decide to set the company and its culture. If you're the CTO for the company, your choice of team structure and how you choose to influence technical architecture could lead to productive happy teams or slow miserable ones. If you're the engineer in charge of writing a service, you could set your team up for tons of technical debt down the road, or a smooth running service that's easily and safely extensible. If you're doing a bugfix, you could spend the time to truly understand and solve the issue, or throw another if loop to the pile that the next person will find and have to understand before they can make their own patch to the code. So, if you have the ability to spend a day on a single effort, one which will improve the life of one developer, or one that would improve the life of all developers, or one that would improve the life of all employees, there's obviously a preference from the company's perspective. And then you can consider things like, improving the life of people who don't even work at your company, but that's generally done on your own time, unless the company thinks that the reputation that they gain is worth giving you the time.
AdrianB1 6y ago
No, managers don't contribute multiples; managers are responsible for the contributions of multiple people (teams) versus individual contributions of each person in the team.