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I tried working at a company with non-technical founders and leadership. I'd never do it again. It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to h
by dub 4y ago
I tried working at a company with non-technical founders and leadership. I'd never do it again.
It was like a poison when upper management didn't know how to hire competent engineering leaders. It seeps down into middle management and into the code and system architecture.
When you're an optimistic new hire you hope that things can change and you can be a part of it, but over time it becomes increasingly hard to imagine a future with a strong and wide enough cultural shift that the company could ever have the values that make working efficiently or building simple, scalable, reliable, adaptable software possible.
- hackernewds 4y agoThis seems like it could be handled by hiring ONE engineering leader for the engineering org - which is one spoke of the multi-spoke wheel that runs a modern day tech company. The HN crowd is biased, but it seems to overinflate the importance of IC engineering contribution vs the contributions of the collective - eng and non eng.
- koonsolo 4y agoBut that was my whole point, that in practice, successful companies seem to be run by the engineer, and not by some business type and a good CTO of some sort. I even forgot Mark Zuckerberg in my original post. So it seems that at the top level, you need to understand the engineering part to be successful. My guess is that the leader needs to have a vision for the product, market, but also the development. And if the last part is lacking, you cannot make up for it in the lower levels. Or maybe it's because an engineer better understands what can and can't be build, and so has a more realistic vision for the product to build. A non-engineer always needs to backtrack with an engineer how possible something is.