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Dear CTO: it's not 2015 anymore

• deleted 2y ago
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• rbrown 2y ago
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• Circlecrypto2 2y ago
  Software ate the world. Meditate on this and the points this article is making becomes clear. Big tech no longer needs to hoard talent.
  • 0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
    Well that remains to be seen. Companies did not get in the position they are in today because of the leadership principles of today - it was past workers and leadership. This trend of spitting on the legacy of those who built it up will quickly reverse the second they get disrupted themselves due to their complacency. I've seen this at my last company. They treated workers well and built a great product. Soon the employees were hampering "profits" and only got contempt. After everybody quit the situation is perfect from a business POV - zero expenses and a selling product with happy customers. Except there is total stagnation and customers are excitedly waiting for the next "big update". The company does their best to keep the facade up but how sustainable is it really? You can only milk so much until your core product is outdated or no longer fits the market.
• gyre007 2y ago
  > They coddle rather than manage At one of the gigs I had, the VP of Engineering was running the engineering department like your good uncle rather than actually managing it so it becomes a well oiled high performing department. And it showed. And not in a good way. It set the company back badly.
• hall0ween 2y ago
  “Engineers” here mean software engineers. Or the author thinks this culture pervades all engineering disciplines - which is not the case.
• smackay 2y ago
  This is a re-run of the end of the first dot-com boom where the rest of the organisation got some payback against the pampered and coddled engineers who built the web sites in between foosball games. Except this time around when your engineers are able to create agents, what do you need the rest of the organisation for. Software is eating the world, and it's only just getting started.
  • ramesh31 2y ago
    >Software is eating the world, and it's only just getting started. More like software is eating software now. I don't think anyone is prepared for the fact that practically all junior/midlevel SWE roles are going to be automated away in the next couple years. We'll look back at the last 20 years as a golden age similar to the 20th century postwar period of manufacturing jobs in the US.
    • gopher_space 2y ago
      It'd be easier to develop an MBA in a box, and exactly zero people are prepared for dealing with that landscape. We're entering an era where the traditional Labor --> Management --> Capital structure no longer needs to apply, and yet everyone thinks Labor is the unnecessary middleman.
• Spivak 2y ago
  It is crazy the genuine anger that some senior leadership has over the tiniest most inconsequential perks like beer, ping pong tables, work flexibility, and not getting micromanaged to death. They worked their ass off getting up at 4am something something grind corporate ladder to get to play golf and go to sports games as work expenses and these entitled 20-somethings show up expecting to not get treated like shit and not have to kiss ass so hard it qualifies as a rimjob to get ahead? The audacity! It's unreal the amount of I suffered so you should have to as well. It's so depressing how much leverage the SW engineering field needed to get treatment like how everyone should have always had it. The default is so skewed to employers being able to grind their employees to dust and getting thanked for it. Companies should be constantly worried about retention across all their positions and have to treat their employees well because of it.
  • mschuster91 2y ago
    > Companies should be constantly worried about retention across all their positions and have to treat their employees well because of it. Some large ones went the other way with collusion and undocumented "blacklists".
  • iterateoften 2y ago
    It’s pretty twisted. I went to open an office in a different country and help the engineers there. The country had an exchange rate favorable to the usd and a much lower cost of living on the low end, but if you wanted to live like I did back in California the cost was almost comparable. Maybe I was saving like $1k a month. But the ceo and management threw a fit that I was “living like a king” because I wasn’t living in squalor. I just was renting a decent apartment in a decent neighborhood. My apartment was still not as nice as my place back in the bay if I count all the furniture, amenities, etc Meanwhile the ceo back in San Francisco was the one living like a king with multiple assistants, private chefs, and chauffeurs. They were enraged that my life was too good for their standards while paying me the exact same as they had been.
    • whatshisface 2y ago
      It's funny that they said that, because in other industries expats often live like actual kings (okay, not kings but at least US ambassadors.)
• rKarpinski 2y ago
  "Engineers have been spoiled rotten for the last two decades[...] employers offered unlimited PTO" In what world does unlimited PTO spoil engineers? It removes the companies liability for vacation days and shames employees into taking less time off.
  • sudofail 2y ago
    I've had "unlimited PTO" for most of my 15 year career. I've never been able to take at most, 3 weeks off due to the reasons you mentioned.
    • therealdrag0 2y ago
      I have unlimited and I set myself a goal for 25 days a year, which I usually hit, not including company holidays (~11).
  • recursivedoubts 2y ago
    unlimited PTO is an accounting gimmick so the company doesn't have to carry PTO balances as a liability and pay them out if you leave
  • ckmiaomix 2y ago
    Author here! Came when I saw my Substack blowing up. This isn't to imply that engineers are universally treated well, but that RELATIVE to other workers, they held far more bargaining power and faced better working conditions across the board. Most companies outside of the tech bubble don't even have the concept of unlimited PTO. There's probably something broader to be said re: this point on bargaining power of workers in general, but this is above my pay grade.
    • realitychx2020 2y ago
      >> This isn't to imply that engineers are universally treated well, but that RELATIVE to other workers, they held far more bargaining power and faced better working conditions across the board. Most companies outside of the tech bubble don't even have the concept of unlimited PTO. One might also argue that US residents disagree with you so much that they arent applying to tech jobs in sufficient quanities. The pay and benefits are not worth it when compared to the instability, stress, "benefits", and chaos -- and instead we hire foreigners who are more desperate for the work, and thus willing to work for perks like "Unlimited PTO". It isnt like there arent smart people in the US who can do these jobs, its more that the smart people go to jobs with real benefits and real perks -- cushy jobs on Wall St or senior management or government jobs where you dont have to do anything.
• anotherhue 2y ago
  > They’re strolling into conversations with their CFOs on ‘productivity’ with developer sentiment surveys in hand. > Their teams are sitting ducks. It’s painful to watch.
• Salgat 2y ago
  And here I am thinking the rest of the workforce needs to be treated better, rather than using how poorly the rest of the workforce is treated as the ideal example to go by.
  • ckmiaomix 2y ago
    Hi! Author here - that's actually...kinda the point. The good treatment you mentioned doesn't organically happen. Your leaders have to fight for it and maintain it. And eng leaders...just aren't in the fight right now. If good eng leaders actually stepped up and brought the ethos of enabling creativity, autonomy, and well-being to the rest of the org, everyone would be in a better place.
    • collingreen 2y ago
      That point did not come through AT ALL. Your article reads like the exact opposite - it has nothing about encouraging engineering leaders to spread humane work environments to other departments or even a suggestion that people deserve it. You called engineers "spoiled rotten".
      • ckmiaomix 2y ago
        LOL read literally the last 4 paragraphs. "Other functions would do well to bring the same kind of focus on enabling productivity, happiness, and autonomy to their workers. In fact, CTOs-turned-CEOs I know tend to be some of the most kind, creative, and abundance-minded leaders I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. They have an inherent understanding on the importance of culture and making people feel valued."
        • bluepizza 2y ago
          > LOL read literally the last 4 paragraphs. OP gave you valuable feedback on how your point is not getting across. Should you edit, or should you lol and snark is a personal choice for you to make. But OP is just trying to help you.
• zb1plus 2y ago
  The further I go into my career, the more see the it the opposite way. I think business people are overvalued compared with most software engineers. If software engineers take the time to learn the "business", they can build their own companies that eclipse those started by the typical MBAs who view engineers as "pampered and coddled" cost centers. I think after the bubble pops, we'll see new companies that led by engineers and creatives conducting orchestras of AI that will allow them end the need for the typical corporate business people.
  • Vegenoid 2y ago
    I hope you are right, and I think looking at the past there is some truth to this. After the dotcom bubble burst and the 2008 crash, those are the times when a lot of strong engineering-focused tech companies were started.
  • disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    As long as those engineers are willing to do mostly sales and marketing, I would agree with you. Otherwise probably not, sadly.
  • freefaler 2y ago
    It's not that skills prevents starting a company, it's the amount of risk & uncertainty people are happy to live with. Programmers like predictability because what you'd do if your compiler gave a different result every time you compile your code? A rational person getting a 300K salary would be better off on average than a small business owner after 5 years. Sales people are paid a high percentage of the deal they close because they need to produce a consistent result in inconsistent environment. Also businesses can easily measure the output of a sales person, but it's way harder to measure a programmers output in a larger team.
    • xerox13ster 2y ago
      > what you'd do if your compiler gave a different result every time you compile your code? Start calling their job Prompt Engineering.
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• nine_zeros 2y ago
  This is one of the main reasons why incidents, outages, dev environment breakages need to be surfaces up to the C-Suite. Put a $ sign on all of them. Show that these are increasing over time - which it is always. The CEO then asks, how can we make this better? The savvy CTO and VP says, we need more engineers and more headcount and retention to merely flatline the increase. Get the headcount and raises. Do this every year because the nature of software is that it is not a spend == returns. It is a spend to even keep the lights on - it is a bespoke utility that builds your business and gets customers to pay you - thus requiring constant maintenance.
• whatshisface 2y ago
  This article sort of gets it, but misses it in the end. Engineering essentially "works for" product management because the product is the value they provide, and the product people ultimately are the ones who defend the resources required to realize their plans. If you are an engineer, the person who goes to leadership with plans that require you to work is your number one internal advocate. ...and for what it's worth, presenting refactoring as a part of delivering on new development goals is the absolute truth.
  • ckmiaomix 2y ago
    Product management's job is not to explain engineering. Engineering does not work for product management. Product's job is to figure out what to build by working with all stakeholders and customer input.
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• orev 2y ago
  Software engineering (and many other parts of IT) is at its core a creative process, and the “coddling” is what creates an environment where creativity becomes possible. You can’t get into the zone/flow if you’re constantly worried about who’s trying to screw you over, or when you feel you have a gun to your head about some metric you need to hit. Of course those things are going to happen, this is work after all, but the idea is to try to reduce those things as much as possible. Many of those benefits are made with that goal in mind, and employee retention just follows from having a good environment. IT people are happiest when they can get into flow and work on something really cool, and will move to other companies who provide that environment.
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• recursivedoubts 2y ago
  > Are engineers a bunch of spoiled, overpaid geeks who were long overdue for a reckoning? will no one rid me of these meddlesome engineers? ever since tech took off in business the C-suite has resented developers: we are overpaid relative to the other peons, we talk back and, above all else, we are physically ugly first it was outsourcing, now it's AI and yet, despite it all, the codemonkey abides
  • Vegenoid 2y ago
    People are always convinced that new and better software will reduce our need for software engineers, but the contradiction is plain to see. While AI could potentially be different, I am extremely doubtful that integrating AI into everything will mean we need less devs.
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• givemeethekeys 2y ago
  > In other words, a culture where engineers don’t need to do anything that they don’t want to do. Wish I'd received the memo our "great engineering culture" was based on getting things done.
• aftbit 2y ago
  IMO, these layoffs are not caused by AI or because Google suddenly doesn't need engineers. Instead, we're seeing at least four effects collide: 1. Growth can't last forever. Big tech is moving from an exponential phase to a sigmoidal one. Expect to see less spending and more focus on efficiency. It takes fewer people to keep the profit engine going than it does to build something totally new from the beginning. 2. What goes up must come down. Paradoxically, even though half of the world shut down, COVID led to a giant market boom. Head counts went up dramatically from 2020 to 2022. Tons of cash was thrown at the market. 3. 0% Fed rate is over (for now). It costs money to borrow money, and investors can get actual non-zero returns in a "risk-free" investment. Now companies need to justify their spending, reduce debt, and show returns that are commensurate with their risk in the new environment. Raising interest rates cools the economy precisely by forcing layoffs and cutbacks. 4. "R&D" (which includes a substantial amount of software engineering work) now must be capitalized and amortized over five years (at least in the US). This is a much less tax-advantageous position than existed before 2021, and new guidance in late 2023 made it clear that this applied to much of our industry.
  • maerF0x0 2y ago
    > Big tech is moving from an exponential phase to a sigmoidal one. I'd propose a modification of "Big Tech" to "Ad Tech" or "Marketing Tech". There's still exponential growth available in nascent or underdeployed technologies -- AR/VR, blockchain/crypto applications (beyond just ICO), AI, IoT, Autonomous machines (maybe that's AI to you), are a few that come to mind. I'd wager the next "Google" will be in one of those, OpenAI may already be it.
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  • ufmace 2y ago
    I feel like all of this is true, but represents the larger background forces. I think a big factor in why it's hitting relatively hard now is the Musk takeover of Twitter - he laid off a ton of engineers, and nothing much happened. I think that was a shock to much of Big Tech that most of their orgs are really feather-bedded with people who aren't actually doing much to support the core business.
• closeparen 2y ago
  Developers as people are happiest when productive. A company can say you need to sit in the useless meetings, write the TPS reports, use the shitty desktop, and wait 12 weeks for IT approval to update packages like everyone else because this is the grown up world and you’re not special. This might be a social status regulation play, but crucially it’s not an efficiency or cost saving play. Developers like forward progress and the things they complain about are generally the time wasters.
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• RobRivera 2y ago
  "The promise of AI put the nail in the coffin" Statements that are so vague and so casually made as if they were fact simply sends my alarms ringing and makes me question both the intent and the arguments of the writing. It is and different market, markets change over time. I think that's a non controversial statement.
• collingreen 2y ago
  This article is a roller coaster of the authors very mixed emotions and thoughts. It hits all the b-school tropes from "workers should be grateful for their employers not the other way around" to "retention is waste" while also saying how valuable engineering is and how the best companies they worked for had leaders that came with the exact mindset being attacked here. Add in a little "see how good of a writer I am" thrown in for flavor. The structured abuse makes the short blips of "I'm trying to help you" feel hollow and tacked on in response to someone's feedback on an early draft. The funny bit is the article completely understands the problems, it just makes all the wrong conclusions. Aside from a "workers should be property" vibe, the author very clearly identified that modern business leaders think of engineering as magic, aren't taught anything about it in business school, and can't be bothered to learn about it. It is an absolutely bonkers idea that anyone running a software company doesn't need to know even the basic ideas underpinning their software. Maybe, as an engineer, I have a very different view of what "leadership" is but this gives me the same feeling as an entitled kid inheriting dads business and being angry about the salary of the senior folks that make it work without even stopping to consider why they might make what they make or if it is a good deal. Unfortunately there are lots of people who think and act this way. The author is right in some ways because of it - there will always be people who see someone getting paid well but don't understand the value of it and their response will be to try to knock them down a peg instead of trying to understand the why.
  • FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
    The solution is to gleefully disrupt these people. They can't keep doors on airplanes.
• rbrown 2y ago
  Why was this flagged? Just thought it was an interesting post and seems like it sparked a lively conversation
• rbrown 2y ago
  This became a much more engaged conversation than I expected! I interpreted the writer as saying that 1. Communicating your value to other departments is a skill that you can learn 2. Learning how to do this lets you own the narrative within an organization 3. Owning your department's narrative is how "normal" work relationships work 4. That engineering hasn't needed to do this before is an anomaly 5. Now's a good time to learn
• BlackCad 2y ago
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