8 ms·

If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

215 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

lubujackson 2y ago
What an amazing article on "de-FAANGing" the perverse org/incentive structure of most startup/tech places. Would love to see more of this type of leadership in the real world.
- adastra22 2y ago
  The recent book The NVIDIA Way is about that org’s culture that prevent FAANG incentives from creeping in to destroy productivity.
- Sevii 2y ago
  I like how he says he doesn't need FAANG level people. Then his next paragraph describes working at FAANG. "We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers. (In theory, anyway, we’re not perfect.) So we’re looking for people who have peer leadership skills, who are great at teamwork, who will take ownership and make decisions on their own."
  - holografix 2y ago
    Exactly right. People who have “leadership” skills are the ones that pay attention to their own leadership and are manage up more than anything else. They usually repackage people’s work around them into their own, take ownership and defend loudly their territory (project ownership) and methodically build relationships with leadership. Having “leadership skills” and being good a team work are often orthogonal to each other.
    - khazhoux 2y ago
      > People who have “leadership” skills are the ones that pay attention to their own leadership and are manage up more than anything else. No, it's actually people who can put together a technical plan and drive its execution with other engineers, or who can clarify complex problems esp. when there are conflicting opinions, or who can see problems before they become disasters and organize the right group of people to take care of it... There are many examples of leadership, which have nothing to do with the sour view of managing-up or taking credit for others' work.
    - noirbot 2y ago
      I mean, that's the sour way to put it. As someone kinda stuck in that sort of position now, I own a project and have been able to do very little of the work because I'm spending 90% of my time making sure leadership actually makes decisions so I can get the decisions my team needs in order to proceed. I'm spending hours in meetings with other teams to get them to prioritize our dependencies and data access needs. If you're not lucky enough to have management that's exactly technically aligned to your project someone has to be managing up and paying attention to leadership or else expectations will be totally off from reality.
      - supriyo-biswas 2y ago
        This is not a sour way to put it; extreme levels of information hoarding, cookie licking[1] and building and defending fiefdoms were the norm from what I saw at my time at a FAANG. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091201-00/?p=15843 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091201-00/?p=15...
  - numbsafari 2y ago
    > FAANG level people "FAANG" isn't a "level", it's just a cluster.
gpi 2y ago
That was a breath of fresh air. Thank you James.
zeroonetwothree 2y ago
There’s a weird disconnect because on the one hand I agree you can’t measure productivity and on the other hand we all know that some engineers are vastly more productive than others. So what gives?
- throw5959 2y ago
  You can measure productivity by measuring the success, but that's kinda useless for day to day software engineering management.
  - Trasmatta 2y ago
    How do you define success? If a product bombs, is that because of the engineering or the product design?
    - throw5959 2y ago
      I don't think it's possible to answer generally. Track what matters for your business.
    - skeeter2020 2y ago
      if it's successful, it's because of sales. If it fails, engineering didn't build the right thing / was too slow - it really doesn't matter.
  - ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
    I tend to go by results, and for me, "results" means shipped* code that is used and accepted by end users**, can be maintained and extended***, and doesn't generate trouble tickets. * MVP doesn't count. ** Can include users inside the organization. *** It's OK if it requires senior-level ongoing support. I think expecting it to be maintained by monkeys is a bad idea.
    - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
      To me, "MVP doesn't count" feels like a crazy take -- in many roles, the _only_ ask is to produce a series of different MVP's. I guess maybe the definition of "MVP" is a bit squishy, and these people-who-ship-MVPs themselves make MVP-MVP's, which shouldn't count as shipped?
mrbluecoat 2y ago
+1 for Extreme Programming. I've been a fan from the beginning when Agile was all the rage and my recommendations for XP were met with blank stares.
- Trasmatta 2y ago
  I'm glad that it works for some people, but I did not like the forced pair programming in XP at all. And I found adherents to XP were even more cult like than Agile teams.
  - Salgat 2y ago
    Does XP and pair programming actually require two people to be simultaneously working together at the same time? My understanding is that this includes one person who codes while another person looks at the results and reviews them afterward. The two are still working closely together and exchanging feedback, just at different points in the process in an iterative loop.
    - NomDePlum 2y ago
      My understanding is that original meaning was that pair programming requires the pair work together at the same desk and machine. With the ability to share screens/IDEs remotely the need to be at the same desk may have shifted, but working together is intrinsic to pair programming I believe. The original text went into some detail about making the desk work for 2 people, and having screwdrivers available to do so, which for some reason always amused me.
    - p_l 2y ago
      No, the point is that both "driver" and "navigator" (as some pair programming referred to the roles) are looking at the coffee simultaneously, just one has the keyboard at the time. This is extended to "mob" programming where you have whole team of "navigators" and one person at keyboard.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    resist the oxymoron of agile zealot - the first rule is do what works for YOU
Sevii 2y ago
I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth time. Amazon does a good job of training new hire on the 'Amazon way'. Amazon does 6 pagers, they do design docs. Amazon does SOA. Amazon does not use relational databases. Everything has an API. Because of the 'Amazon way' and the training they do new team members understand at least some of the context and expectations. Is it the best way? Probably not but no one knows what the best way is anyway. At least they have a way. Saves a lot of effort compared to every new hire relitigating the process and architecture.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  > Amazon does not use relational databases Huh?
  - deskglass 2y ago
    Friends say they typically use Dynamo and that using a relational database requires approval from a vp (because of scaling concerns).
    - hyperliner 2y ago
      Related: Amazon kicked out Oracle from the company. Somewhere along the same timeline, the operational recommendation for teams was to not use relational databases. https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/amazon_ditches_oracle/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/amazon_ditches_oracle...
      - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
        Kicking out Oracle might have to do with factors outside the usage of relational databases...
mft_ 2y ago
A great post, well worth reading. The principles in the section on 'people' are applicable to any organisation in any industry. I especially liked the simple 'career ladder' example, for a) focussing on mostly on behaviour rather than knowledge, and b) for being simple to use and track progress with. (I've never seen anything like it in any of the large organisations I've worked in to date.)
theideaofcoffee 2y ago
This was a really great read, lots of insight and things to think about. But it's also depressing to see how good things could be and how poorly (IME) most orgs are run now. I know I've seen the exact 180-degree opposite of almost everything mentioned here: no team leadership or empowered people, no clear path to the next level for those interested, lack of communication, no emphasis on internal quality, overall pathological product choices (or lack thereof) and on and on. I'd kill to be part of an org that puts this much thought into everything.
joeldo 2y ago
> There’s more details here than I can explain today, but you can use the QR code to find a detailed article, including the documentation we use for the skills. Why not just provide a clickable link given this is an article on the web?
- jh00ker 2y ago
  > This is a transcript of my keynote presentation for the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025. Because the images are slides from a presentation that the audience could scan. >Thank you for listening. The text of the article appears to be the "talk-over."
- philbo 2y ago
  The clickable link is in the right margin just underneath the (first) QR code image: https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2024/update-on-software-engineering-career-ladder https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2024/update-on-software-e...
nine_zeros 2y ago
This is a very nice post - not because the actual suggestions are good, but it demonstrates what a really technically sound VP looks like. In most large tech companies, VP level people are so detached, delusional, and unskilled in engineering, that they end up undervaluing what engineers really do. They are unable to explain it beyond stack ranking them. As an example, this post talks about how simplicity and maintenance brings value. But my VP literally fired people who did not produce new complex impact. Just goes to show why so many people hate the big tech industry as employees. It is being run by charlatans who abscond from any real leadership.
gwern 2y ago
OP is an example of how AI-generated images are usually clutter. Not only do the images not add anything meaningful to the text, and arbitrary parts of the images could be deleted or randomized without affecting the reader's understanding, most of them could be randomly shuffled without anyone noticing. (Which makes them worse then clipart/stockart: if an article swapped the 'hacker hoodie' stockart with the 'neural net brain circuit' stockart, some readers would at least briefly be confused.)
- blululu 2y ago
  Came here to say exactly this. The ”author” didn’t even bother to use a decent quality image generator. The first image I saw maxed out my AI slop filter and I stopped reading. Made me wonder how much of the article was written by ChatGPT.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - drcwpl 2y ago
    Agree wholeheartedly, it was unfortunate that the author did not use a good image generator, or even correctly prompt Dall-E to get better images, his take on using AI then became rather flimsy. I gave up at this point!
LudwigNagasena 2y ago
Saying that you can’t measure productivity is a pseudo-truism and a cop out of doing your job. How do you measure productivity = how do you decide whom to promote; how do you decide whom to fire; how do you decide how to distribute bonuses; etc. If you can’t measure productivity, you can’t do your job as an engineering manager. It’s not a question that should have been asked 3 months into a job. It’s a question that should have been asked during the hiring interview.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  I think I agree with you - definitely about the cop-out part. It's kind of the wrong question; it's not "how do you measure productivity?" but you have some hypothesis, "what do you optimize?" If you're right, it might help you win (maybe you win or lose regardless) and you get credit. If you keep experimenting, you might get better or worse, adjust and repeat. I'm sick of these (implicitly) absolute measurement questions. I pretty much refuse to look at anything other than the delta.
- n4r9 2y ago
  So... how do you measure productivity? The engineering managers you refer to probably attempt to measure productivity, but may well fail to correctly identify high and low performers.
  - LudwigNagasena 2y ago
    There are quantitative measures like story points velocity, time to merge, code churn, etc. Those can be simply measured but also simply gamed, so they should be used with caution. There are qualitative measures like code maintainability, satisfaction of stakeholders, communication skills, system design skills, etc. Those have to be assessed using peer feedback, stakeholder feedback, 1-on-1's, activity during calls and meetings and so on. Those are harder to measure, but also harder to game.
    - n4r9 2y ago
      In my experience, not only are quantitative metrics gameable, but they depend greatly on accurate estimates (which just shuts the problem along) and tend to bias towards rushed implementations. You also have to be very careful to consider what duties the person has beyond pure coding, which can become time-consuming as they grow in seniority, such as mentoring juniors, engaging with product teams, or supporting product enquiries. The qualitative measures you mention describe "quality" rather than "productivity" (rate of good output). Both are aspects of performance, but are definitely distinct. I suspect that the best you can do for productivity is kind of a halfway house, where - as part of their feedback - a more senior developer indicates whether the rate of implementation met/exceeded/fell below expectations.
raldi 2y ago
What's the clickbait headline refer to? I can't find any mention of the company in a skim of the article.
- dang 2y ago
  I've replaced the clickbait title with a more representative sentence from the article.
paulcole 2y ago
> Everybody wants the best people in the business. A fundamental mistaken belief. Who wants to pay for the very best people when the 97,000th best person will do? Also how can you decide who the best people are when you can’t even measure their productivity?
joeyguerra 2y ago
...starts off by saying you can't measure productivity. Then proceeds to explain how to measure productivity. Very sneaky.
weinzierl 2y ago
Interesting, but not surprising, that Agility only made place 5, way behind Quality. It will soon be a quarter of a century since the Agile Manifesto has been published. It would be sad if we hadn't progressed since then.
- heeton 2y ago
  The article uses “Internal Quality” which has a specific definition for them. And their definition of agility is not derived from the manifesto or Agile. Indeed, they list Quality immediately followed by customer happiness (“loveability”) which is aligned with XP, the practice supported in the article. The agile manifesto isn’t the only way to deliver good results in software.
- sisve 2y ago
  I did not understand it as an ordered list? Just a set of 6 items. Did i miss anything? What makes you conclude that this is a priortized list? Profitability is number 6. Who cares about internal quality if you are not making money in the long run
- agos 2y ago
  if you'll allow some negativity, I wouldn't expect a talk at a "Scrum Gathering" to care much about the Agile Manifesto
switch007 2y ago
> We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers I've worked at various places where this was supposedly the system. Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites? Yeah not the ICs. It usually just means the C level will smile and nod while "listening" to your feedback instead of ignoring you completely Has anyone worked at a true inverted company where centuries of classical power structures are thrown out the window? I feel it can never be properly implemented unless in eg a cooperative
- Rygian 2y ago
  The "Valve Handbook for New Employees" was an interesting read. I still don't know how much is fact and how much is fiction, but I liked some of the ideas there.
  - Maxious 2y ago
    >"We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most," Valve developer Robin Walker tells Keighley, soundly rejecting the ethos that Valve has publicly carried as a torch for some time. The studio used a new Half-Life [Alyx, 2020] project as a way to focus the entire studio—even though, as we've previously reported, that project began life with more modest expectations in terms of length and content. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-over-including-half-life-3-in-new-steam-documentary-app/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...
- pjm331 2y ago
  To be fair - it says “tactical” decisions - not all decisions.
- InitialLastName 2y ago
  > Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites? To be clear, those are strategic decisions "what are our goals and how do we allocate resources to achieve them". Tactical decisions are "what specific actions do we take to use available resources to achieve goals".
magic_smoke_ee 2y ago
First, it would be worker-owned co-op with very little turnover and intense competition for the few roles that get filled.
abc-1 2y ago
I always feel like these manager types have drunk deeply from the koolaid for some reason. It’s a lot of words and processes that they usually cargo culted from somewhere else. A lot of it seems to boil down to “don’t be an idiot” and “actually care about your work”. They always have this air of superiority because they’re high up on the org chart. Like CEOs who think they’re the chosen ones, when plenty of people could do it just fine. I laugh hard when people like Zuck say software devs will be replaced by AI, not realizing an AI CEO probably wouldn’t have burnt 30 billion on a terrible metaverse flop.
- wodenokoto 2y ago
  Would it have bought instagram and whatsapp? Would it have identified major social media trends in competitors that couldn't be bought and outcompeted them at their own game? Would it have suggested developing your own ad platform or just should banner space per cpm? There is a lot to not like about Meta and Zuckerberg, but saying he's a bad business man is a little silly. Metaverse was a wrong and expensive move, but it was a wrong move they could afford.
  - miki123211 2y ago
    IMO metaverse was a bet. It's perfectly fine to take a bet that you're not 100% convinced will pay off (professional poker players and traders understand this on a very deep level), as long as the potential upside is massively larger than the downside. Zuck understood that Meta could take the hit if the metaverse bet didn't pay off, but that they'd be massively better off if it did, and they had their own platform. Apple's blatantly anticompetitive behavior around ATT was a prime example of what happens when your business is reliant on "platform overlords." I'm not fully convinced that the metaverse era is over, though. If they can get Orion costs down and put something of that quality into serial production, I think they still have a chance there.
    - Zanfa 2y ago
      > IMO metaverse was a bet. It was FOMO. They had no vision, they had no plan, it was clear that it was only a thing because it was a buzzword at the time. Just like every other company stuffing crypto-adjacent things everywhere. It might have been a bet, but it was obvious that it was a really terrible one.
zug_zug 2y ago
I don't usually love this type of post, but this one is the exception - very valuable. Just the section on how to rewrite alone communicates something incredibly valuable that grumpy-engineers like myself have great trouble getting others to understand. I don't have my mind made-up on XP, I've never worked at a place that actually supported collaboration (often workers spoke different first languages, vastly different experience levels, had minimal social graces, were uncomfortable asking questions), but I think it could exist with great effort and would have a lot of upsides.
- devin 2y ago
  It is likely a bit of nostalgia on my part, but one of my first gigs had an owner that was focused on XP being the way we worked, and given how junior the team was overall, I think it produced excellent results and made for a fun, lively atmosphere.
NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago
> It was September 2023 and my CEO was asking me a question. > “How are you measuring productivity?” This is sort of like your girlfriend asking you "how much do you love me". Except if you answer wrong, it's still more likely that your girlfriend will stay with you than that you'll keep your VP of engineering job.
languagehacker 2y ago
The advice seems reasonably good but I needed to bail on the post because of the cartoons. The anime crossed with precious moments style of illustration is just too creepy and inserts a lot of doubt to me personally on the authoritativeness of the author.
RainyDayTmrw 2y ago
This pervasive corporate fiction tires me out so much. Everyone says they hire the best candidate, they are leaders in their area, etc. It feels very much like dystopian literature, where everyone knows the thing to be false, but is compelled to say it is true nevertheless.
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
An article full of buzzwords and a semi-amusing story of how a manager successfully bullshitted a delusional CEO. Okay.
robinbrownford 2y ago
[dead]
fasten 2y ago
reminds me of a teammate who pushed for fast tests and clean code. most of us thought it slowed us down, until a big production bug hit. he pushed a fix in 15 min / his tests made it easy to find and solve. after that, we all bought in. small changes can make a huge difference.
rdsubhas 2y ago
Ah, this looks to be my favorite "non-management" bullshit game: Put stickies of words like "People" "Process" "Love" "Care" "Profitability" "Quality" and so on, pick some of those words and build a stupid story around those words. The story is usually summarized as "we'll have the best of the best people, doing best of the quality, with best of the best profitability, spreading much love". What about all the words that are not picked? That's for 2 years later, when they play the same game again. Here's the last but least favorite part: beat employees into memorizing those words, have them graded against these words based on entirely subjective interpretations, and reward those who are good at playing this game. Some people are just story tellers, not doers. Then I look at the profile of the author of this blog. Yeah, makes sense.

215 points by kiyanwang 2y ago

What an amazing article on "de-FAANGing" the perverse org/incentive structure of most startup/tech places. Would love to see more of this type of leadership in the real world.

adastra22 2y ago
The recent book The NVIDIA Way is about that org’s culture that prevent FAANG incentives from creeping in to destroy productivity.
Sevii 2y ago
I like how he says he doesn't need FAANG level people. Then his next paragraph describes working at FAANG. "We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers. (In theory, anyway, we’re not perfect.) So we’re looking for people who have peer leadership skills, who are great at teamwork, who will take ownership and make decisions on their own."
- holografix 2y ago
  Exactly right. People who have “leadership” skills are the ones that pay attention to their own leadership and are manage up more than anything else. They usually repackage people’s work around them into their own, take ownership and defend loudly their territory (project ownership) and methodically build relationships with leadership. Having “leadership skills” and being good a team work are often orthogonal to each other.
  - khazhoux 2y ago
    > People who have “leadership” skills are the ones that pay attention to their own leadership and are manage up more than anything else. No, it's actually people who can put together a technical plan and drive its execution with other engineers, or who can clarify complex problems esp. when there are conflicting opinions, or who can see problems before they become disasters and organize the right group of people to take care of it... There are many examples of leadership, which have nothing to do with the sour view of managing-up or taking credit for others' work.
  - noirbot 2y ago
    I mean, that's the sour way to put it. As someone kinda stuck in that sort of position now, I own a project and have been able to do very little of the work because I'm spending 90% of my time making sure leadership actually makes decisions so I can get the decisions my team needs in order to proceed. I'm spending hours in meetings with other teams to get them to prioritize our dependencies and data access needs. If you're not lucky enough to have management that's exactly technically aligned to your project someone has to be managing up and paying attention to leadership or else expectations will be totally off from reality.
    - supriyo-biswas 2y ago
      This is not a sour way to put it; extreme levels of information hoarding, cookie licking[1] and building and defending fiefdoms were the norm from what I saw at my time at a FAANG. [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091201-00/?p=15843 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20091201-00/?p=15...
- numbsafari 2y ago
  > FAANG level people "FAANG" isn't a "level", it's just a cluster.

gpi 2y ago

That was a breath of fresh air. Thank you James.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago

There’s a weird disconnect because on the one hand I agree you can’t measure productivity and on the other hand we all know that some engineers are vastly more productive than others. So what gives?

throw5959 2y ago
You can measure productivity by measuring the success, but that's kinda useless for day to day software engineering management.
- Trasmatta 2y ago
  How do you define success? If a product bombs, is that because of the engineering or the product design?
  - throw5959 2y ago
    I don't think it's possible to answer generally. Track what matters for your business.
  - skeeter2020 2y ago
    if it's successful, it's because of sales. If it fails, engineering didn't build the right thing / was too slow - it really doesn't matter.
- ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I tend to go by results, and for me, "results" means shipped* code that is used and accepted by end users**, can be maintained and extended***, and doesn't generate trouble tickets. * MVP doesn't count. ** Can include users inside the organization. *** It's OK if it requires senior-level ongoing support. I think expecting it to be maintained by monkeys is a bad idea.
  - pinkmuffinere 2y ago
    To me, "MVP doesn't count" feels like a crazy take -- in many roles, the _only_ ask is to produce a series of different MVP's. I guess maybe the definition of "MVP" is a bit squishy, and these people-who-ship-MVPs themselves make MVP-MVP's, which shouldn't count as shipped?

mrbluecoat 2y ago

+1 for Extreme Programming. I've been a fan from the beginning when Agile was all the rage and my recommendations for XP were met with blank stares.

Trasmatta 2y ago
I'm glad that it works for some people, but I did not like the forced pair programming in XP at all. And I found adherents to XP were even more cult like than Agile teams.
- Salgat 2y ago
  Does XP and pair programming actually require two people to be simultaneously working together at the same time? My understanding is that this includes one person who codes while another person looks at the results and reviews them afterward. The two are still working closely together and exchanging feedback, just at different points in the process in an iterative loop.
  - NomDePlum 2y ago
    My understanding is that original meaning was that pair programming requires the pair work together at the same desk and machine. With the ability to share screens/IDEs remotely the need to be at the same desk may have shifted, but working together is intrinsic to pair programming I believe. The original text went into some detail about making the desk work for 2 people, and having screwdrivers available to do so, which for some reason always amused me.
  - p_l 2y ago
    No, the point is that both "driver" and "navigator" (as some pair programming referred to the roles) are looking at the coffee simultaneously, just one has the keyboard at the time. This is extended to "mob" programming where you have whole team of "navigators" and one person at keyboard.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  resist the oxymoron of agile zealot - the first rule is do what works for YOU

Sevii 2y ago

I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth time. Amazon does a good job of training new hire on the 'Amazon way'. Amazon does 6 pagers, they do design docs. Amazon does SOA. Amazon does not use relational databases. Everything has an API. Because of the 'Amazon way' and the training they do new team members understand at least some of the context and expectations. Is it the best way? Probably not but no one knows what the best way is anyway. At least they have a way. Saves a lot of effort compared to every new hire relitigating the process and architecture.

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
> Amazon does not use relational databases Huh?
- deskglass 2y ago
  Friends say they typically use Dynamo and that using a relational database requires approval from a vp (because of scaling concerns).
  - hyperliner 2y ago
    Related: Amazon kicked out Oracle from the company. Somewhere along the same timeline, the operational recommendation for teams was to not use relational databases. https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/amazon_ditches_oracle/ https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/16/amazon_ditches_oracle...
    - rrr_oh_man 2y ago
      Kicking out Oracle might have to do with factors outside the usage of relational databases...

mft_ 2y ago

A great post, well worth reading. The principles in the section on 'people' are applicable to any organisation in any industry. I especially liked the simple 'career ladder' example, for a) focussing on mostly on behaviour rather than knowledge, and b) for being simple to use and track progress with. (I've never seen anything like it in any of the large organisations I've worked in to date.)

theideaofcoffee 2y ago

This was a really great read, lots of insight and things to think about. But it's also depressing to see how good things could be and how poorly (IME) most orgs are run now. I know I've seen the exact 180-degree opposite of almost everything mentioned here: no team leadership or empowered people, no clear path to the next level for those interested, lack of communication, no emphasis on internal quality, overall pathological product choices (or lack thereof) and on and on. I'd kill to be part of an org that puts this much thought into everything.

joeldo 2y ago

> There’s more details here than I can explain today, but you can use the QR code to find a detailed article, including the documentation we use for the skills. Why not just provide a clickable link given this is an article on the web?

jh00ker 2y ago
> This is a transcript of my keynote presentation for the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025. Because the images are slides from a presentation that the audience could scan. >Thank you for listening. The text of the article appears to be the "talk-over."
philbo 2y ago
The clickable link is in the right margin just underneath the (first) QR code image: https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2024/update-on-software-engineering-career-ladder https://www.jamesshore.com/v2/blog/2024/update-on-software-e...

nine_zeros 2y ago

This is a very nice post - not because the actual suggestions are good, but it demonstrates what a really technically sound VP looks like. In most large tech companies, VP level people are so detached, delusional, and unskilled in engineering, that they end up undervaluing what engineers really do. They are unable to explain it beyond stack ranking them. As an example, this post talks about how simplicity and maintenance brings value. But my VP literally fired people who did not produce new complex impact. Just goes to show why so many people hate the big tech industry as employees. It is being run by charlatans who abscond from any real leadership.

gwern 2y ago

OP is an example of how AI-generated images are usually clutter. Not only do the images not add anything meaningful to the text, and arbitrary parts of the images could be deleted or randomized without affecting the reader's understanding, most of them could be randomly shuffled without anyone noticing. (Which makes them worse then clipart/stockart: if an article swapped the 'hacker hoodie' stockart with the 'neural net brain circuit' stockart, some readers would at least briefly be confused.)

blululu 2y ago
Came here to say exactly this. The ”author” didn’t even bother to use a decent quality image generator. The first image I saw maxed out my AI slop filter and I stopped reading. Made me wonder how much of the article was written by ChatGPT.
- deleted 2y ago
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- drcwpl 2y ago
  Agree wholeheartedly, it was unfortunate that the author did not use a good image generator, or even correctly prompt Dall-E to get better images, his take on using AI then became rather flimsy. I gave up at this point!

LudwigNagasena 2y ago

Saying that you can’t measure productivity is a pseudo-truism and a cop out of doing your job. How do you measure productivity = how do you decide whom to promote; how do you decide whom to fire; how do you decide how to distribute bonuses; etc. If you can’t measure productivity, you can’t do your job as an engineering manager. It’s not a question that should have been asked 3 months into a job. It’s a question that should have been asked during the hiring interview.

skeeter2020 2y ago
I think I agree with you - definitely about the cop-out part. It's kind of the wrong question; it's not "how do you measure productivity?" but you have some hypothesis, "what do you optimize?" If you're right, it might help you win (maybe you win or lose regardless) and you get credit. If you keep experimenting, you might get better or worse, adjust and repeat. I'm sick of these (implicitly) absolute measurement questions. I pretty much refuse to look at anything other than the delta.
n4r9 2y ago
So... how do you measure productivity? The engineering managers you refer to probably attempt to measure productivity, but may well fail to correctly identify high and low performers.
- LudwigNagasena 2y ago
  There are quantitative measures like story points velocity, time to merge, code churn, etc. Those can be simply measured but also simply gamed, so they should be used with caution. There are qualitative measures like code maintainability, satisfaction of stakeholders, communication skills, system design skills, etc. Those have to be assessed using peer feedback, stakeholder feedback, 1-on-1's, activity during calls and meetings and so on. Those are harder to measure, but also harder to game.
  - n4r9 2y ago
    In my experience, not only are quantitative metrics gameable, but they depend greatly on accurate estimates (which just shuts the problem along) and tend to bias towards rushed implementations. You also have to be very careful to consider what duties the person has beyond pure coding, which can become time-consuming as they grow in seniority, such as mentoring juniors, engaging with product teams, or supporting product enquiries. The qualitative measures you mention describe "quality" rather than "productivity" (rate of good output). Both are aspects of performance, but are definitely distinct. I suspect that the best you can do for productivity is kind of a halfway house, where - as part of their feedback - a more senior developer indicates whether the rate of implementation met/exceeded/fell below expectations.

raldi 2y ago

What's the clickbait headline refer to? I can't find any mention of the company in a skim of the article.

dang 2y ago
I've replaced the clickbait title with a more representative sentence from the article.

paulcole 2y ago

> Everybody wants the best people in the business. A fundamental mistaken belief. Who wants to pay for the very best people when the 97,000th best person will do? Also how can you decide who the best people are when you can’t even measure their productivity?

joeyguerra 2y ago

...starts off by saying you can't measure productivity. Then proceeds to explain how to measure productivity. Very sneaky.

weinzierl 2y ago

Interesting, but not surprising, that Agility only made place 5, way behind Quality. It will soon be a quarter of a century since the Agile Manifesto has been published. It would be sad if we hadn't progressed since then.

heeton 2y ago
The article uses “Internal Quality” which has a specific definition for them. And their definition of agility is not derived from the manifesto or Agile. Indeed, they list Quality immediately followed by customer happiness (“loveability”) which is aligned with XP, the practice supported in the article. The agile manifesto isn’t the only way to deliver good results in software.
sisve 2y ago
I did not understand it as an ordered list? Just a set of 6 items. Did i miss anything? What makes you conclude that this is a priortized list? Profitability is number 6. Who cares about internal quality if you are not making money in the long run
agos 2y ago
if you'll allow some negativity, I wouldn't expect a talk at a "Scrum Gathering" to care much about the Agile Manifesto

switch007 2y ago

> We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers I've worked at various places where this was supposedly the system. Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites? Yeah not the ICs. It usually just means the C level will smile and nod while "listening" to your feedback instead of ignoring you completely Has anyone worked at a true inverted company where centuries of classical power structures are thrown out the window? I feel it can never be properly implemented unless in eg a cooperative

Rygian 2y ago
The "Valve Handbook for New Employees" was an interesting read. I still don't know how much is fact and how much is fiction, but I liked some of the ideas there.
- Maxious 2y ago
  >"We sort of had to collectively admit we were wrong on the premise that you will be happiest if you work on something you personally want to work on the most," Valve developer Robin Walker tells Keighley, soundly rejecting the ethos that Valve has publicly carried as a torch for some time. The studio used a new Half-Life [Alyx, 2020] project as a way to focus the entire studio—even though, as we've previously reported, that project began life with more modest expectations in terms of length and content. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-over-including-half-life-3-in-new-steam-documentary-app/ https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/07/valve-secrets-spill-o...
pjm331 2y ago
To be fair - it says “tactical” decisions - not all decisions.
InitialLastName 2y ago
> Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites? To be clear, those are strategic decisions "what are our goals and how do we allocate resources to achieve them". Tactical decisions are "what specific actions do we take to use available resources to achieve goals".

magic_smoke_ee 2y ago

First, it would be worker-owned co-op with very little turnover and intense competition for the few roles that get filled.

abc-1 2y ago

I always feel like these manager types have drunk deeply from the koolaid for some reason. It’s a lot of words and processes that they usually cargo culted from somewhere else. A lot of it seems to boil down to “don’t be an idiot” and “actually care about your work”. They always have this air of superiority because they’re high up on the org chart. Like CEOs who think they’re the chosen ones, when plenty of people could do it just fine. I laugh hard when people like Zuck say software devs will be replaced by AI, not realizing an AI CEO probably wouldn’t have burnt 30 billion on a terrible metaverse flop.

wodenokoto 2y ago
Would it have bought instagram and whatsapp? Would it have identified major social media trends in competitors that couldn't be bought and outcompeted them at their own game? Would it have suggested developing your own ad platform or just should banner space per cpm? There is a lot to not like about Meta and Zuckerberg, but saying he's a bad business man is a little silly. Metaverse was a wrong and expensive move, but it was a wrong move they could afford.
- miki123211 2y ago
  IMO metaverse was a bet. It's perfectly fine to take a bet that you're not 100% convinced will pay off (professional poker players and traders understand this on a very deep level), as long as the potential upside is massively larger than the downside. Zuck understood that Meta could take the hit if the metaverse bet didn't pay off, but that they'd be massively better off if it did, and they had their own platform. Apple's blatantly anticompetitive behavior around ATT was a prime example of what happens when your business is reliant on "platform overlords." I'm not fully convinced that the metaverse era is over, though. If they can get Orion costs down and put something of that quality into serial production, I think they still have a chance there.
  - Zanfa 2y ago
    > IMO metaverse was a bet. It was FOMO. They had no vision, they had no plan, it was clear that it was only a thing because it was a buzzword at the time. Just like every other company stuffing crypto-adjacent things everywhere. It might have been a bet, but it was obvious that it was a really terrible one.

zug_zug 2y ago

I don't usually love this type of post, but this one is the exception - very valuable. Just the section on how to rewrite alone communicates something incredibly valuable that grumpy-engineers like myself have great trouble getting others to understand. I don't have my mind made-up on XP, I've never worked at a place that actually supported collaboration (often workers spoke different first languages, vastly different experience levels, had minimal social graces, were uncomfortable asking questions), but I think it could exist with great effort and would have a lot of upsides.

devin 2y ago
It is likely a bit of nostalgia on my part, but one of my first gigs had an owner that was focused on XP being the way we worked, and given how junior the team was overall, I think it produced excellent results and made for a fun, lively atmosphere.

NoMoreNicksLeft 2y ago

> It was September 2023 and my CEO was asking me a question. > “How are you measuring productivity?” This is sort of like your girlfriend asking you "how much do you love me". Except if you answer wrong, it's still more likely that your girlfriend will stay with you than that you'll keep your VP of engineering job.

languagehacker 2y ago

The advice seems reasonably good but I needed to bail on the post because of the cartoons. The anime crossed with precious moments style of illustration is just too creepy and inserts a lot of doubt to me personally on the authoritativeness of the author.

RainyDayTmrw 2y ago

This pervasive corporate fiction tires me out so much. Everyone says they hire the best candidate, they are leaders in their area, etc. It feels very much like dystopian literature, where everyone knows the thing to be false, but is compelled to say it is true nevertheless.

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

An article full of buzzwords and a semi-amusing story of how a manager successfully bullshitted a delusional CEO. Okay.

robinbrownford 2y ago

[dead]

fasten 2y ago

reminds me of a teammate who pushed for fast tests and clean code. most of us thought it slowed us down, until a big production bug hit. he pushed a fix in 15 min / his tests made it easy to find and solve. after that, we all bought in. small changes can make a huge difference.

rdsubhas 2y ago

Ah, this looks to be my favorite "non-management" bullshit game: Put stickies of words like "People" "Process" "Love" "Care" "Profitability" "Quality" and so on, pick some of those words and build a stupid story around those words. The story is usually summarized as "we'll have the best of the best people, doing best of the quality, with best of the best profitability, spreading much love". What about all the words that are not picked? That's for 2 years later, when they play the same game again. Here's the last but least favorite part: beat employees into memorizing those words, have them graded against these words based on entirely subjective interpretations, and reward those who are good at playing this game. Some people are just story tellers, not doers. Then I look at the profile of the author of this blog. Yeah, makes sense.