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Is it, uhh, common knowledge that the important thing isn't how the team is organized or how they exactly do their job but that there are engineers paid and inc
by saalweachter 6y ago
Is it, uhh, common knowledge that the important thing isn't how the team is organized or how they exactly do their job but that there are engineers paid and incentivized and empowered to keep the status quo running flawlessly (or as close there to as possible) rather than being paid and incentivized and empowered to launch cool new features or make the money graphs go up?
The problem at most companies is that if you have two engineers, Alice and Betsy, and Alice launches a change that generated marketing buzz that gets spun into sales, and Betsy launches a change that prevented the site from going down over the seasonal rush, Alice gets promoted and Betsy gets told to work on more impactful projects.
Which isn't to say that Alice's work isn't important or promotion worthy, but you need an incentive structure that rewards both.
- mjayhn 6y agoIn my experience, Alice moves on to a cool new project to greenfield while Betsy gets stuck supporting Alices creation until they eventually get on-call burnout and quit. Alice checks in only when there's enough noise made either by angry customers, cto or angry SREs. That's my 10yrs+ ops experience, at least, and this is hugely exacerbated if Alice is put on such a high pedestal that they don't even have to be on-call with Betty at any point of the lifecycle.
- CoolGuySteve 6y agoI think ultimately this dynamic is why Google can't keep most products around for longer than 5 years.