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I get your point at the basic level, but as engineers and managers, we need to stop this nonsense. Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside

I get your point at the basic level, but as engineers and managers, we need to stop this nonsense. Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies ? Could it be because those companies are full of people who somehow occupy important positions without understanding the basics of the engineering work. What's the value such busywork managers are adding, besides the anti-value of layers of explanatory communication and wasted time? The busywork folks should be working to understand where their salaries are coming from, not the engineers. Note that I am not saying all managers are useless (its also a part of my job), it's the people-and-ideas-managers who are useless in the technical setting. The point about technical debt should be a non-issue, why the hell would you have to explain that the technical debt is a bad thing? Did we not clear this issue many times over and establish zero technical debt as an engineering ideal a long time ago? Well it is because some person with 1/4 of your experience and competence somehow got lucky and talked themselves into one or two hierarchical positions above you. We need to start a pushback across the industry and stop allowing former accountants and humanist science graduates into "leadership" roles in IT.

dave4420 2y ago
There’s a difference between management knowing that it’s worth paying off tech debt in general, and management knowing that now is the right time to pay off this piece of tech debt in particular. Why pay off tech debt A and not tech debt B? Is this really more urgent than implementing feature C? I have some financial debts, but I prioritise paying off some over others, and even allow myself to buy myself nice things instead of paying off the mortgage early. The same principle applies with tech debt, except I have to justify my choices to my bosses instead of to my girlfriend.
dagw 2y ago
Could it be because those companies are full of people who somehow occupy important positions without understanding the basics of the engineering work. Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they would like to do than they have engineers to do it. The problem often isn't that they don't understand why fixing technical debt is important, it's to decide if fixing that particular technical debt right now is the best use of these resources right now. Also they might also know things that I might not know, like long term plans for and the relative profitability of different projects, which will affect how they make decisions. No point in spending effort fixing technical debt if that project/department is already slated for closure. Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every engineering and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the person two steps above me was basically always an engineer or at least has a science or technical background.
- swiftcoder 2y ago
  > Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they would like to do than they have engineers to do it I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-offs are... strange in that world. > Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every engineering and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the person two steps above me was basically always an engineer or at least has a science or technical background. I haven't found that to be common in the US. I've had a number of front-line managers who were (somewhat) recent engineer conversions, rarely had anyone above that level who was.
  - ryandrake 2y ago
    > I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-offs are... strange in that world. Never seen that in my life, and I've worked at small, medium, and huge companies. Sounds wild. So they actually have zero bugs in their bug tracker, and no feature on deck waiting to be built? What do they do all day? Typical case I've seen at many companies is: Team has N engineers, with a rough capacity to fix N x 2 bugs per week. Bugs come in at a rate of N x 3, and the bug backlog is N x 80 and constantly growing until the team does periodic "bankruptcy" ritual where they mass-close N x 50 bugs that they admit they'll never get to fixing. Repeat forever.
    - swiftcoder 2y ago
      No, the company obviously makes up work to occupy their spare engineering capacity - but the point in that era of BigTechs was to hoover up all the engineering talent, whether or not you needed it. A big chunk of the company would be off doing Greenfield projects that would mostly get cancelled before they ship, another big chunk is off working on multi-year rewrites of existing services (that never finish), every successful team sprouts spin-off teams with amorphous charters like "apply machine learning to service X"... It's a side effect of an incentive structure that drives all the managers to grow headcount as fast as they can (since you need more reports to justify promo), and money basically growing on trees in those places
chrisweekly 2y ago
"zero technical debt" is a pipe dream. Not all tech debt is equal; think "low-interest student loan or mortgage" vs "high-interest credit cards or payday loans".
- hansmayer 2y ago
  Well, that is why I said it was an ideal, something to strive for. Since we are in lecture-mode here, ever heard of objectives and key results? Think that would be a more fitting alternative to your black-and-white metaphor of low-interest vs. payday loan ...
  - nradov 2y ago
    It's not an ideal. There is an optimal level of technical debt to maximize shareholder value. Eliminating all technical debt makes no more sense than eliminating all financial debt. Used effectively, debt is a powerful lever. The trick lies in finding the optimal level based on incomplete information, and many corporate managers aren't very good at this.
    - hansmayer 2y ago
      By stating it should be zero, it is literally, by definition an ideal. That is not something you can decide on. Maximising shareholder value? Now, that is an ideal which is a root cause of many evils today.
      - nradov 2y ago
        Your claim of zero being the ideal level is not supported by any reliable data. You aren't qualified to make any statements about ideals.
        hansmayer 2y ago
        I am not sure you see the irony in your own statements.
shalmanese 2y ago
> Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies Mainly to prove you can sell, not that they can buy. Selling involves understanding the customer's needs, their tradeoff preferences, your value prop and being able to reflect that back to them. The minimum bar for successful selling requires you to demonstrate a certain degree of competence and due diligence that provides assurance that you're able to operate autonomously with trust.
- bruce511 2y ago
  That's an excellent summary!
- hansmayer 2y ago
  No, actually. He said it was a part of his job because they did not understand his work? So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?
  - shalmanese 2y ago
    > It's up to me to "sell" that benefit to upper management. There's no point in assuming they'll figure it out by accident. Part of my job is enumerating the value I add. Nowhere is that said. The benefit of them selling is not for the management to understand, it's for the worker to understand and be able to articulate as it will flow downstream to strategy. Maybe the management doesn't understand but my point is it's irrelevant. I've been in management situations where I've understood perfectly well and ones where I have zero clue, my requirements for you selling to me remain exactly the same which is I'm using it as a gauge of how much you understand.
    - hansmayer 2y ago
      > Because engineers are typically (although not always) terrible at business. Or marketing. Or Sales. Or whatever. You do realise that almost all of the unicorns and almost-unicorns of the last two decades were conceived, started and built by engineers, do you? Perhaps beacuse having ones brain primed to very hard problems, does not make it so hard to learn the "hard" business skills on the side after all, all the while coding up the product? But how would former humanities students get their "tech salaries" if we did not somehow convince engineers that they suck at what are honestly said, third-tier competencies.
bruce511 2y ago
Fortunately I don't work in such an organization, and I have extremely competent in my chain of command. The reason I explain the value of what I am doing (to both technical and non-technical managers) is because it helps them understand the bigger picture. Or perhaps it helps them understand that I see the big picture, so that they know (and I know) our goals are aligned. I am aware that not everyone is as fortunate as I am. I'd equally suggest that not many managers are fortunate enough to have engineers that can articulate what they are doing in terms they can understand. There are plenty of managers out there who are not team players. And probably more engineers who are equally unable to see the bigger picture. Which is unfortunate because when you learn to work together towards a common goal, it really improves everything.
- hansmayer 2y ago
  Please don´t take it as trolling - but if your higher ups are as competent as you say: why do you need to help them with the big picture ? Shouldn´t they be the ones setting it or at least directing? I am saying this because topics like improvement of performance and reduction technical debt were established as drivers of revenue a long time ago. That is why Amazon optimised the sh*t out of their checkout process and Google (before they were took over by the business types) obsessed about page loading times. Oh coincidentally - that was also the time when major tech companies were run mainly by engineers. Is that why their products used to be so much better? Too many "busyworkers" are now wasting everyone's time by having engineers explain "the big picture" so that they can present it at some meeting and take credit for. And in the process, the products get more entshittified every damn day.
m_rpn 2y ago
Man, you are making too much sense, somebody is going to have his feelings hurt by your words. Management is now trying to have even more control on the people that actually do things, and AI is being used as scapegoat to entrench their position. The reason is fear, because most managers couldn't do even 1/10 of the work people under them can do.

dave4420 2y ago

There’s a difference between management knowing that it’s worth paying off tech debt in general, and management knowing that now is the right time to pay off this piece of tech debt in particular. Why pay off tech debt A and not tech debt B? Is this really more urgent than implementing feature C? I have some financial debts, but I prioritise paying off some over others, and even allow myself to buy myself nice things instead of paying off the mortgage early. The same principle applies with tech debt, except I have to justify my choices to my bosses instead of to my girlfriend.

dagw 2y ago

Could it be because those companies are full of people who somehow occupy important positions without understanding the basics of the engineering work. Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they would like to do than they have engineers to do it. The problem often isn't that they don't understand why fixing technical debt is important, it's to decide if fixing that particular technical debt right now is the best use of these resources right now. Also they might also know things that I might not know, like long term plans for and the relative profitability of different projects, which will affect how they make decisions. No point in spending effort fixing technical debt if that project/department is already slated for closure. Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every engineering and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the person two steps above me was basically always an engineer or at least has a science or technical background.

swiftcoder 2y ago
> Every company I've ever worked at has more work that they would like to do than they have engineers to do it I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-offs are... strange in that world. > Also maybe it's a US vs EU thing, but at every engineering and IT company I've ever worked in Europe, the person two steps above me was basically always an engineer or at least has a science or technical background. I haven't found that to be common in the US. I've had a number of front-line managers who were (somewhat) recent engineer conversions, rarely had anyone above that level who was.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  > I've worked at a couple of BigTechs, where there were between 5-20x more engineers than actual work. The trade-offs are... strange in that world. Never seen that in my life, and I've worked at small, medium, and huge companies. Sounds wild. So they actually have zero bugs in their bug tracker, and no feature on deck waiting to be built? What do they do all day? Typical case I've seen at many companies is: Team has N engineers, with a rough capacity to fix N x 2 bugs per week. Bugs come in at a rate of N x 3, and the bug backlog is N x 80 and constantly growing until the team does periodic "bankruptcy" ritual where they mass-close N x 50 bugs that they admit they'll never get to fixing. Repeat forever.
  - swiftcoder 2y ago
    No, the company obviously makes up work to occupy their spare engineering capacity - but the point in that era of BigTechs was to hoover up all the engineering talent, whether or not you needed it. A big chunk of the company would be off doing Greenfield projects that would mostly get cancelled before they ship, another big chunk is off working on multi-year rewrites of existing services (that never finish), every successful team sprouts spin-off teams with amorphous charters like "apply machine learning to service X"... It's a side effect of an incentive structure that drives all the managers to grow headcount as fast as they can (since you need more reports to justify promo), and money basically growing on trees in those places

chrisweekly 2y ago

"zero technical debt" is a pipe dream. Not all tech debt is equal; think "low-interest student loan or mortgage" vs "high-interest credit cards or payday loans".

hansmayer 2y ago
Well, that is why I said it was an ideal, something to strive for. Since we are in lecture-mode here, ever heard of objectives and key results? Think that would be a more fitting alternative to your black-and-white metaphor of low-interest vs. payday loan ...
- nradov 2y ago
  It's not an ideal. There is an optimal level of technical debt to maximize shareholder value. Eliminating all technical debt makes no more sense than eliminating all financial debt. Used effectively, debt is a powerful lever. The trick lies in finding the optimal level based on incomplete information, and many corporate managers aren't very good at this.
  - hansmayer 2y ago
    By stating it should be zero, it is literally, by definition an ideal. That is not something you can decide on. Maximising shareholder value? Now, that is an ideal which is a root cause of many evils today.
    - nradov 2y ago
      Your claim of zero being the ideal level is not supported by any reliable data. You aren't qualified to make any statements about ideals.
      - hansmayer 2y ago
        I am not sure you see the irony in your own statements.

shalmanese 2y ago

> Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies Mainly to prove you can sell, not that they can buy. Selling involves understanding the customer's needs, their tradeoff preferences, your value prop and being able to reflect that back to them. The minimum bar for successful selling requires you to demonstrate a certain degree of competence and due diligence that provides assurance that you're able to operate autonomously with trust.

bruce511 2y ago
That's an excellent summary!
hansmayer 2y ago
No, actually. He said it was a part of his job because they did not understand his work? So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?
- shalmanese 2y ago
  > It's up to me to "sell" that benefit to upper management. There's no point in assuming they'll figure it out by accident. Part of my job is enumerating the value I add. Nowhere is that said. The benefit of them selling is not for the management to understand, it's for the worker to understand and be able to articulate as it will flow downstream to strategy. Maybe the management doesn't understand but my point is it's irrelevant. I've been in management situations where I've understood perfectly well and ones where I have zero clue, my requirements for you selling to me remain exactly the same which is I'm using it as a gauge of how much you understand.
  - hansmayer 2y ago
    > Because engineers are typically (although not always) terrible at business. Or marketing. Or Sales. Or whatever. You do realise that almost all of the unicorns and almost-unicorns of the last two decades were conceived, started and built by engineers, do you? Perhaps beacuse having ones brain primed to very hard problems, does not make it so hard to learn the "hard" business skills on the side after all, all the while coding up the product? But how would former humanities students get their "tech salaries" if we did not somehow convince engineers that they suck at what are honestly said, third-tier competencies.

bruce511 2y ago

Fortunately I don't work in such an organization, and I have extremely competent in my chain of command. The reason I explain the value of what I am doing (to both technical and non-technical managers) is because it helps them understand the bigger picture. Or perhaps it helps them understand that I see the big picture, so that they know (and I know) our goals are aligned. I am aware that not everyone is as fortunate as I am. I'd equally suggest that not many managers are fortunate enough to have engineers that can articulate what they are doing in terms they can understand. There are plenty of managers out there who are not team players. And probably more engineers who are equally unable to see the bigger picture. Which is unfortunate because when you learn to work together towards a common goal, it really improves everything.

hansmayer 2y ago
Please don´t take it as trolling - but if your higher ups are as competent as you say: why do you need to help them with the big picture ? Shouldn´t they be the ones setting it or at least directing? I am saying this because topics like improvement of performance and reduction technical debt were established as drivers of revenue a long time ago. That is why Amazon optimised the sh*t out of their checkout process and Google (before they were took over by the business types) obsessed about page loading times. Oh coincidentally - that was also the time when major tech companies were run mainly by engineers. Is that why their products used to be so much better? Too many "busyworkers" are now wasting everyone's time by having engineers explain "the big picture" so that they can present it at some meeting and take credit for. And in the process, the products get more entshittified every damn day.

m_rpn 2y ago

Man, you are making too much sense, somebody is going to have his feelings hurt by your words. Management is now trying to have even more control on the people that actually do things, and AI is being used as scapegoat to entrench their position. The reason is fear, because most managers couldn't do even 1/10 of the work people under them can do.