6 ms·

"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experienc

"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that. Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. If engineering is not a commodity, they fear being called out for not being in touch with the grounded reality of the business, and fear the unpredictability this entails for their own operation. So they will tend to treat engineering like a commodity, generic and interchangable at will, and even deliberatly not recognize differential contribution by engineers to the company's success. This is also why once non-technical management has consolidated, rising from engineering into management will become very difficult, often requiring you deny your technical competences.

ozim 2y ago
But also company actually is much better off when it is not held hostage by couple of technical employees. Also every employee should be able to quit at any time and not affect business. So I disagree describing all like it is some evil scheme - that’s how businesses work.
- saagarjha 2y ago
  Is it better when it's held hostage by a couple of non-technical employees?
  - ozim 2y ago
    Non-technical employees are by definition replaceable. Unless they are sales reps that have good relations with customers.
    - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
      In that case, all employees bar sales reps are replaceable (and the reps are too, you just see the pain more).
- virgilp 2y ago
  There's a subtle but very important difference between making sure nobody is a "single point of failure" or bottleneck (heck, most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!), and recognizing that engineers are not fungible resources and should not be treated as such. I do agree that it's simpler for management to pretend that they are, and that's why great management is insanely rare. But great management, like great engineers, can make a huge difference in the success of a company / project.
  - blurker 2y ago
    > most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure! Sure, but that is a load bearing "great" for sure. Not every company is staffed with great, selfless engineers. I'm an engineer and I've worked at companies with engineers who actively resisted making themselves not a single point of failure because it gave them control and job security. I think it's not uncommon to have these types at companies and it really sucks when they have their management Stockholm syndromed because they make it hard for all the other "great" engineers to do their jobs.
    - datadrivenangel 2y ago
      The company not being able to run without you doesn't mean you have job security, it just makes the company hurt more when they fire you based on someone's spreadsheet.
      - blurker 2y ago
        Tell that to the gatekeeping engineers who think otherwise.
    - virgilp 2y ago
      Good managers will recognize that and know what those kinds of engineers are doing. Every company should have at least some good managers - seek them out, it's worth it. If you can't find one in current company, try to switch company - again, it's worth it IMO.
- mkoubaa 2y ago
  Would you say that the atom bomb project was held hostage by a couple of technical physicists? Obviously it can't succeed (in the desired time frame) without those specific people, and pretending like it can is lunacy.
  - pc86 2y ago
    Functionally 0% of companies are working on things as important or impactful as the atom bomb, and I include FAANG et al in that. Maybe a small handful of AI companies will actually put out something that important? But even most of them won't. The vast majority of companies are putting web forms over a database. Letting one or two people hold all the technical knowledge for something like that is borderline fiduciary negligence.
    - mkoubaa 2y ago
      That isn't the point; It's not about the importance It's about specialized knowledge. To the owners of the business, making sure the business doesn't fail to deliver is existentially important. Web developers are fungible. The guy who designed the carefully tuned graph database that runs on a custom Linux kernel with a custom tuned filesystem is not. If this sort of thing is critical to your business succeeding, that engineer might as well be Niels Bohr.
      - pc86 2y ago
        My point is 90% of companies have no specialized knowledge whatsoever and are staffed almost entirely by web developers. How many companies have an in-house tuned graph database? How many companies have custom Linux kernels? How many companies have custom filesystems?
        mkoubaa 2y ago
        90% of companies don't need to think too deeply about compensation, then.
dirtybirdnj 2y ago
I think your comment can be boiled down to "management doesn't respect engineers" That's the fundamental problem. Some MBA or book somewhere convinced people that respect and dignity were optional. Once they realized they could apply this to more than engineers they started painting the entire world with this bullshit.
- Clubber 2y ago
  I think they take them for granted not realizing that things can get much worse. I think they do this because they don't understand it. Ever been on a call with a company and they have to tell you, "You'll have to call back, our systems are down." This can cost millions an hour.
- hnthrow90348765 2y ago
  Personally I think it's just their social circles that reinforce this, not the boogeyman MBA stuff. Because at some level, yes, they can be intimidated by technical people and this is a defense to avoid the "why am I even employed" spiral. It would be nice if they could meet us half-way on the technical stuff. They regularly merge architects and sysadmins into developer roles making us learn more stuff.
- danaris 2y ago
  > Some MBA or book somewhere convinced people that respect and dignity were optional. Whatever the origin, this is actually a very serious problem that afflicts our society at large, well beyond MBA culture.
- ebiester 2y ago
  Let me take the opposite point - it isn't that management does or doesn't respect engineers, but that it does not respect them more or less than sales, or product, or marketing, or legal, or any other part of the system. If all of sales says "I am losing these deals because our competitors have X, and I cannot make my quota without X, and you do not make your numbers without X." - how do you balance that against a department head who says, "I cannot give you any features this quarter because we've been focusing on features over codebase health for too long?" Someone who says no for too long doesn't last.
throwaway98797 2y ago
make those with power like you and rewards will flow relation to company profitability is optional and often times counterproductive
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
  Basically, yes. You still should be able to make easy for those in power to argue that you 'deserve' it, but the dynamic is impossible to deny.
- dclowd9901 2y ago
  Yep, this. Being aligned with an influential and well-liked manager is probably the biggest indicator of your overall career trajectory at a company.
  - supportengineer 2y ago
    In my career experience, this type of successful and well-liked manager is likely to jump ship for a better offer.
- shalmanese 2y ago
  OK, but the people who keep on harping on this never seem to mention that the boss "liking you" is not about you cracking jokes and bringing in muffins on Thursday. It's about you being low drama and helping them achieve their KPIs in a way that helps them get promoted so they can bring you along with them. It's the guy/gal who you know needs to be informed that the feature they've been painstakingly working on for the last 2 months is scrapped due to a strategic realignment and now they're tasked on working on some non-revenue bullshit to win a turf war and their response is a shrug and brainstorming of how do we play this rather than getting all up in their feelings and require emotional babysitting for the next 2 months.
  - thevillagechief 2y ago
    Thank you. I tend to be clueless on office politics, and this is actually a really helpful reminder.
tqi 2y ago
What if they're right, and at a certain point engineering is a commodity?
- acedTrex 2y ago
  It is, until it isn't. Basically modern tech management is about flying as close to commodified engineering sun as possible without burning up.
  - sudoshred 2y ago
    I like this. Engineering is not a commodity in general but management “adds value” by ensuring engineers are interchangeable.
- ebiester 2y ago
  It is, but at some point, so is management. So is any human capital past your key positions. I feel like managers - even good managers - understand that better than most. That isn't to say there isn't variation in humans - choosing the humans right for your team and organization will help advance a lot, but it really helps us to think of organizations as ant colonies. One person can slow it down, but very few can speed it up, and they can only do so much. It's the network of communication that matters more than the person.
  - keybored 2y ago
    Most labor is a commodity in this system “past your key positions” (overpaid execs).
    - no_wizard 2y ago
      I often struggle to understand what executives do all day. I work (and have worked in many different orgs) with executives quite a bit, see insight into their process, and often come away underwhelmed instead of more confident in leadership. There are exceptions - I can think of a couple CTOs I know that are worth their weight in gold - but they are just that - exceptions. I will say, the smaller the organization, the more having the right executives is important though, but it seems that only lasts while headcount is sub ~200 people or so and executives maintain an active role with all pillars of the organization relevant to their function (e.g., it isn't weird for an IC to talk to the CTO from time to time about how their job is going)
Aurornis 2y ago
> Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Comments like these make me remember that the tech world is very big and companies come in many different shapes. I haven’t had non-technical management below the CEO level in many years.
- eek2121 2y ago
  I would love to work for a company like that. It seems like my experience with companies that have “people” vs folks with engineering experience is worse overall. My favorite jobs had all engineering talent, and management was smart enough to stay out of the way.
- fatnoah 2y ago
  It's multilayered. I've had technical and non-technical bosses at large and small companies, and the universal thing that made them "good" or "bad" was whether they gave me sufficient context and trusted me to get the work done. The best ones challenged me in good faith and provided honest feedback. Even stranger was the experience of my company being acquired by a large name-brand tech company. My manager (Director) and their manager (VP) were the worst kind...non-technical and second guessing everything in silly ways. Meanwhile, the co-founder and CTO popped into our tiny office one day because they were in town, rolled up to my desk and said "hey, you're fatnoah, right? I have some questions" and then pulled me into a conference room where we went deep on our entire tech stack. He got everything the first time and understood the how and why of what we built and why.
smugglerFlynn 2y ago
CTO is "management" by definition. Do you mean to say most companies have non-technical CTOs who treat engineering as commodity? That might have been the case with CIO/CTOs coming from pre-2010s era where they indeed were maintaining landscapes built from commodities or vendor solutions (i.e. on-prem server racks, CRM and ERP systems, networks, end user devices, subscriptions to cloud applications etc - some still do). Modern CTOs managing complex tech landscapes that were partially built in-house are rarely like that. In my experience any CTO ties engineering, be it commodity or not, to value which is highlighted in the article, or get replaced. That's a key part of their role, if not 80% of it. If you think your CTO is underselling engineering contributions, he's either not doing a good job of making that value visible, or you overestimate these contributions.
- pc86 2y ago
  C-suite executives are "management" only insofar as they are someone's direct supervisor and that person wants to make them happy. And if you've got brand new managers with single-digit years of experience reporting to them, sure they probably do a fair bit of people management. But that's not the norm. If you're at a sufficiently large company you'll have Presidents reporting to the C-suite, 3-5+ levels of VPs below that, 1-3 levels of directors, and a level or two of individual contributors. So you're approaching double-digit numbers of people between C suite and the people who should theoretically actually need day-to-day performance management. There is not a competent Executive Vice President or Division President in the world that needs to be managed by their boss.
nyeah 2y ago
This is an important point. But it doesn't conflict severely with the article. Sure, to first order, and in the short term, engineering work is often valued more or less at random. The valuation is driven by factors that we can't predict (or that we would really rather not predict). But to second order, and in the long term, engineering work is often valued according to whether it makes money. Often enough that it's worth paying attention to the article.
commandlinefan 2y ago
> decades of experience have disproved that Like most advice you find on the internet, the author of this piece is writing "the way the world ought to work" rather than the way there's any evidence that the world does work.
hayst4ck 2y ago
Admiral Rickover was likely the single most competent engineering manager in the last century and wrote this: Doing a Job https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory. The Defense Department does not recognize the need for continuity in important jobs. It rotates officer every few years both at headquarters and in the field. The same applies to their civilian superiors. This system virtually ensures inexperience and nonaccountability. By the time an officer has begun to learn a job, it is time for him to rotate. Under this system, incumbents can blame their problems on predecessors. They are assigned to another job before the results of their work become evident. Subordinates cannot be expected to remain committed to a job and perform effectively when they are continuously adapting to a new job or to a new boss. When doing a job—any job—one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in the job forever. He must look after his work just as conscientiously, as though it were his own business and his own money. If he feels he is only a temporary custodian, or that the job is just a stepping stone to a higher position, his actions will not take into account the long-term interests of the organization. His lack of commitment to the present job will be perceived by those who work for him, and they, likewise, will tend not to care. Too many spend their entire working lives looking for their next job. When one feels he owns his present job and acts that way, he need have no concern about his next job. Rickover would be a savage critic of society and American culture as it is now, he even was then. He was a man who successfully challenged people in power, which is why I imagine most people never hear of him. He won many political battles, but the same people he challenged remained in power. When they wrote the history books, they diminish his legacy, because they don't want stories of people successfully challenging power structures and especially not stories of people who challeneged corporate power, or prove that the government can do something better, cheaper, and more dangerous/complicated than corporations.
- lamp_book 2y ago
  Reminds me of Steve Jobs on consulting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc

ozim 2y ago

But also company actually is much better off when it is not held hostage by couple of technical employees. Also every employee should be able to quit at any time and not affect business. So I disagree describing all like it is some evil scheme - that’s how businesses work.

saagarjha 2y ago
Is it better when it's held hostage by a couple of non-technical employees?
- ozim 2y ago
  Non-technical employees are by definition replaceable. Unless they are sales reps that have good relations with customers.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    In that case, all employees bar sales reps are replaceable (and the reps are too, you just see the pain more).
virgilp 2y ago
There's a subtle but very important difference between making sure nobody is a "single point of failure" or bottleneck (heck, most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!), and recognizing that engineers are not fungible resources and should not be treated as such. I do agree that it's simpler for management to pretend that they are, and that's why great management is insanely rare. But great management, like great engineers, can make a huge difference in the success of a company / project.
- blurker 2y ago
  > most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure! Sure, but that is a load bearing "great" for sure. Not every company is staffed with great, selfless engineers. I'm an engineer and I've worked at companies with engineers who actively resisted making themselves not a single point of failure because it gave them control and job security. I think it's not uncommon to have these types at companies and it really sucks when they have their management Stockholm syndromed because they make it hard for all the other "great" engineers to do their jobs.
  - datadrivenangel 2y ago
    The company not being able to run without you doesn't mean you have job security, it just makes the company hurt more when they fire you based on someone's spreadsheet.
    - blurker 2y ago
      Tell that to the gatekeeping engineers who think otherwise.
  - virgilp 2y ago
    Good managers will recognize that and know what those kinds of engineers are doing. Every company should have at least some good managers - seek them out, it's worth it. If you can't find one in current company, try to switch company - again, it's worth it IMO.
mkoubaa 2y ago
Would you say that the atom bomb project was held hostage by a couple of technical physicists? Obviously it can't succeed (in the desired time frame) without those specific people, and pretending like it can is lunacy.
- pc86 2y ago
  Functionally 0% of companies are working on things as important or impactful as the atom bomb, and I include FAANG et al in that. Maybe a small handful of AI companies will actually put out something that important? But even most of them won't. The vast majority of companies are putting web forms over a database. Letting one or two people hold all the technical knowledge for something like that is borderline fiduciary negligence.
  - mkoubaa 2y ago
    That isn't the point; It's not about the importance It's about specialized knowledge. To the owners of the business, making sure the business doesn't fail to deliver is existentially important. Web developers are fungible. The guy who designed the carefully tuned graph database that runs on a custom Linux kernel with a custom tuned filesystem is not. If this sort of thing is critical to your business succeeding, that engineer might as well be Niels Bohr.
    - pc86 2y ago
      My point is 90% of companies have no specialized knowledge whatsoever and are staffed almost entirely by web developers. How many companies have an in-house tuned graph database? How many companies have custom Linux kernels? How many companies have custom filesystems?
      - mkoubaa 2y ago
        90% of companies don't need to think too deeply about compensation, then.

dirtybirdnj 2y ago

I think your comment can be boiled down to "management doesn't respect engineers" That's the fundamental problem. Some MBA or book somewhere convinced people that respect and dignity were optional. Once they realized they could apply this to more than engineers they started painting the entire world with this bullshit.

Clubber 2y ago
I think they take them for granted not realizing that things can get much worse. I think they do this because they don't understand it. Ever been on a call with a company and they have to tell you, "You'll have to call back, our systems are down." This can cost millions an hour.
hnthrow90348765 2y ago
Personally I think it's just their social circles that reinforce this, not the boogeyman MBA stuff. Because at some level, yes, they can be intimidated by technical people and this is a defense to avoid the "why am I even employed" spiral. It would be nice if they could meet us half-way on the technical stuff. They regularly merge architects and sysadmins into developer roles making us learn more stuff.
danaris 2y ago
> Some MBA or book somewhere convinced people that respect and dignity were optional. Whatever the origin, this is actually a very serious problem that afflicts our society at large, well beyond MBA culture.
ebiester 2y ago
Let me take the opposite point - it isn't that management does or doesn't respect engineers, but that it does not respect them more or less than sales, or product, or marketing, or legal, or any other part of the system. If all of sales says "I am losing these deals because our competitors have X, and I cannot make my quota without X, and you do not make your numbers without X." - how do you balance that against a department head who says, "I cannot give you any features this quarter because we've been focusing on features over codebase health for too long?" Someone who says no for too long doesn't last.

throwaway98797 2y ago

make those with power like you and rewards will flow relation to company profitability is optional and often times counterproductive

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
Basically, yes. You still should be able to make easy for those in power to argue that you 'deserve' it, but the dynamic is impossible to deny.
dclowd9901 2y ago
Yep, this. Being aligned with an influential and well-liked manager is probably the biggest indicator of your overall career trajectory at a company.
- supportengineer 2y ago
  In my career experience, this type of successful and well-liked manager is likely to jump ship for a better offer.
shalmanese 2y ago
OK, but the people who keep on harping on this never seem to mention that the boss "liking you" is not about you cracking jokes and bringing in muffins on Thursday. It's about you being low drama and helping them achieve their KPIs in a way that helps them get promoted so they can bring you along with them. It's the guy/gal who you know needs to be informed that the feature they've been painstakingly working on for the last 2 months is scrapped due to a strategic realignment and now they're tasked on working on some non-revenue bullshit to win a turf war and their response is a shrug and brainstorming of how do we play this rather than getting all up in their feelings and require emotional babysitting for the next 2 months.
- thevillagechief 2y ago
  Thank you. I tend to be clueless on office politics, and this is actually a really helpful reminder.

tqi 2y ago

What if they're right, and at a certain point engineering is a commodity?

acedTrex 2y ago
It is, until it isn't. Basically modern tech management is about flying as close to commodified engineering sun as possible without burning up.
- sudoshred 2y ago
  I like this. Engineering is not a commodity in general but management “adds value” by ensuring engineers are interchangeable.
ebiester 2y ago
It is, but at some point, so is management. So is any human capital past your key positions. I feel like managers - even good managers - understand that better than most. That isn't to say there isn't variation in humans - choosing the humans right for your team and organization will help advance a lot, but it really helps us to think of organizations as ant colonies. One person can slow it down, but very few can speed it up, and they can only do so much. It's the network of communication that matters more than the person.
- keybored 2y ago
  Most labor is a commodity in this system “past your key positions” (overpaid execs).
  - no_wizard 2y ago
    I often struggle to understand what executives do all day. I work (and have worked in many different orgs) with executives quite a bit, see insight into their process, and often come away underwhelmed instead of more confident in leadership. There are exceptions - I can think of a couple CTOs I know that are worth their weight in gold - but they are just that - exceptions. I will say, the smaller the organization, the more having the right executives is important though, but it seems that only lasts while headcount is sub ~200 people or so and executives maintain an active role with all pillars of the organization relevant to their function (e.g., it isn't weird for an IC to talk to the CTO from time to time about how their job is going)

Aurornis 2y ago

> Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Comments like these make me remember that the tech world is very big and companies come in many different shapes. I haven’t had non-technical management below the CEO level in many years.

eek2121 2y ago
I would love to work for a company like that. It seems like my experience with companies that have “people” vs folks with engineering experience is worse overall. My favorite jobs had all engineering talent, and management was smart enough to stay out of the way.
fatnoah 2y ago
It's multilayered. I've had technical and non-technical bosses at large and small companies, and the universal thing that made them "good" or "bad" was whether they gave me sufficient context and trusted me to get the work done. The best ones challenged me in good faith and provided honest feedback. Even stranger was the experience of my company being acquired by a large name-brand tech company. My manager (Director) and their manager (VP) were the worst kind...non-technical and second guessing everything in silly ways. Meanwhile, the co-founder and CTO popped into our tiny office one day because they were in town, rolled up to my desk and said "hey, you're fatnoah, right? I have some questions" and then pulled me into a conference room where we went deep on our entire tech stack. He got everything the first time and understood the how and why of what we built and why.

smugglerFlynn 2y ago

CTO is "management" by definition. Do you mean to say most companies have non-technical CTOs who treat engineering as commodity? That might have been the case with CIO/CTOs coming from pre-2010s era where they indeed were maintaining landscapes built from commodities or vendor solutions (i.e. on-prem server racks, CRM and ERP systems, networks, end user devices, subscriptions to cloud applications etc - some still do). Modern CTOs managing complex tech landscapes that were partially built in-house are rarely like that. In my experience any CTO ties engineering, be it commodity or not, to value which is highlighted in the article, or get replaced. That's a key part of their role, if not 80% of it. If you think your CTO is underselling engineering contributions, he's either not doing a good job of making that value visible, or you overestimate these contributions.

pc86 2y ago
C-suite executives are "management" only insofar as they are someone's direct supervisor and that person wants to make them happy. And if you've got brand new managers with single-digit years of experience reporting to them, sure they probably do a fair bit of people management. But that's not the norm. If you're at a sufficiently large company you'll have Presidents reporting to the C-suite, 3-5+ levels of VPs below that, 1-3 levels of directors, and a level or two of individual contributors. So you're approaching double-digit numbers of people between C suite and the people who should theoretically actually need day-to-day performance management. There is not a competent Executive Vice President or Division President in the world that needs to be managed by their boss.

nyeah 2y ago

This is an important point. But it doesn't conflict severely with the article. Sure, to first order, and in the short term, engineering work is often valued more or less at random. The valuation is driven by factors that we can't predict (or that we would really rather not predict). But to second order, and in the long term, engineering work is often valued according to whether it makes money. Often enough that it's worth paying attention to the article.

commandlinefan 2y ago

> decades of experience have disproved that Like most advice you find on the internet, the author of this piece is writing "the way the world ought to work" rather than the way there's any evidence that the world does work.

hayst4ck 2y ago

Admiral Rickover was likely the single most competent engineering manager in the last century and wrote this: Doing a Job https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experience, and corporate memory. The Defense Department does not recognize the need for continuity in important jobs. It rotates officer every few years both at headquarters and in the field. The same applies to their civilian superiors. This system virtually ensures inexperience and nonaccountability. By the time an officer has begun to learn a job, it is time for him to rotate. Under this system, incumbents can blame their problems on predecessors. They are assigned to another job before the results of their work become evident. Subordinates cannot be expected to remain committed to a job and perform effectively when they are continuously adapting to a new job or to a new boss. When doing a job—any job—one must feel that he owns it, and act as though he will remain in the job forever. He must look after his work just as conscientiously, as though it were his own business and his own money. If he feels he is only a temporary custodian, or that the job is just a stepping stone to a higher position, his actions will not take into account the long-term interests of the organization. His lack of commitment to the present job will be perceived by those who work for him, and they, likewise, will tend not to care. Too many spend their entire working lives looking for their next job. When one feels he owns his present job and acts that way, he need have no concern about his next job. Rickover would be a savage critic of society and American culture as it is now, he even was then. He was a man who successfully challenged people in power, which is why I imagine most people never hear of him. He won many political battles, but the same people he challenged remained in power. When they wrote the history books, they diminish his legacy, because they don't want stories of people successfully challenging power structures and especially not stories of people who challeneged corporate power, or prove that the government can do something better, cheaper, and more dangerous/complicated than corporations.

lamp_book 2y ago
Reminds me of Steve Jobs on consulting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-c4CNB80SRc