5 ms·

In short, you manage people. You tell others what to do and you think about what to do. It's technical management. You create impact off the work of others. Yo

In short, you manage people. You tell others what to do and you think about what to do. It's technical management. You create impact off the work of others. You tell 10x people to do 10x work and you get 10x the credit when management only is like 1x of talent and effort. I met a principle engineer who didn't know what a database transaction was and it still fits every description on this site. We shouldn't call these people engineers anymore. They are managers that don't need to do 1 on 1s.

DiscourseFan 1y ago
I guarantee you that the "10x" engineer would not be able to co-ordinate anything with any other team or department in the company. Of course the hierarchical structure of companies means that just having good people skills, and good management skills, means better compensation. But the most important skill in any capitalist economy is organizing labor, since capitalism is a way of organizing labor, so those who are the best at organizing and directing labor are the most well compensated since they are able to produce the most profits.
- BobbyJo 1y ago
  The most competent engineer I've ever worked with, the only one I'd consider 5x+, was fantastic at cross team collaboration.
- microflash 1y ago
  This is just another stereotype. I’ve seen plenty of managers struggling to form coherent communication where an engineer would express with perfect ease. The problem with communication comes when you add layers of bureaucracy between people, often under the guise that engineers can’t communicate.
lumost 1y ago
There needs to be roles for pure ICs. In deep tech orgs, it’s almost impossible to get work done unless you have a bench of folks with domain expertise, comfortable on your software, and in tune with and guiding product direction. Diluting the core IC responsibility in these orgs with mandatory influence/scope guidelines is counter productive. That being said, when I was in the role of a principal engineer at a major tech company - my ultimate responsibility was to get the project to success. What that meant on any given week could have alignment, coding, guiding, or reviewing.
light_hue_1 1y ago
> In short, you manage people. You tell others what to do and you think about what to do. As a principal scientist I definitely don't manage people. Mainly, people managers have power to tell people what to do and when. I have zero power over anyone. No one needs to listen to me. Ever. If people ignore me there's literally no one I can complain to. And no one tells me what to do. If I wasn't competent at my job I'd be sitting alone in an office staring at a wall. The reason why anyone would ever talk to me is because I have well over a decade of experience more than every other scientist in my org (200+ people) doing very complicated things, at scale, across many areas of AI/ML, and publishing many dozens of papers in top venues. So I know what I'm doing and can find problems, shortcuts, keep them from wasting time, find creative fixes to AI/ML issues, and see connections to business problems. Basically help scientists deliver better features faster. I can find new projects that those scientists are excited about. And I can communicate with product, managers, leaders about very complex technical ideas in ways that more junior scientists cannot. People in my org come to me because I provide value basically. Not because they have to. > You tell 10x people to do 10x work and you get 10x the credit when management only is like 1x of talent and effort. If only! 70% of the work I do is invisible small course corrections here and there across multiple orgs that fix things no one ever hears about but would be disasters down the road. 20% is working on projects that scale with many people. 10% is strategy for new experiments and projects. For the vast majority of what I do other people get 100% of the credit and my name is a small footnote at best. Maybe an example would help. Sorry that I need to be a bit vague. A large project recently was going in a particular direction. I saw two months ahead of time that this direction was going to run out of steam for a combination of science and business reasons. It would end up missing metrics. Leadership was asking for something that was broadly correct but subtly wrong. I spent a month finding a new direction that was the opposite of what everyone thought we had to do, finding the right small 1-2 person experiments to derisk the new direction, get senior people to understand it and agree to it, set up the correct relationships to make it viable, and then I had the evidence to convince project leadership and management to shift. A few days later we had a VP review and the response was that they're delighted with the direction, it's far better than they ever though, and this will be a flagship for an org with tens of thousands of employees. That review would have gone horribly without what I did because the problem I saw two months ahead of time would have surfaced and the project would be seen as dying and aimless. But the team got the credit for being on top of things as a whole, not me. As it should be. > They are managers that don't need to do 1 on 1s. I have more 1:1s than managers, because they can afford to just tell people what to do. I need to develop junior scientists, keep relationships up, stay on top of other orgs, business priorities, etc. Managers fail by creating chaos around them. Principals fail by becoming irrelevant.
procaryote 1y ago
Some companies suck at promoting the right people, but a good principal engineer is the 10x person, or someone who makes several teams more effective by helping them figure out the bigger technical issues. If you think management is like 1x talent and effort, you should try management for a bit.
- ninetyninenine 1y ago
  I have. It's more stressful. But it's still 1x talent and 1x effort. Anyone can do it, it's just harder in the same way being a garbage man is hard. 10x engineers don't need to be principals. The idea behind principals is that they don't do any engineering. They leverage the work of others to become 10x. It's very much considered a "leadership" or management role overall. A 10x engineer is usually literally a person who can output 10x through his own work alone. As a sidenote, with AI everyone is now 10x. So it's really a 20x thing now.
  - procaryote 1y ago
    I've seen zero people become 10x because of AI. Conservatively it seems closer to ±0.5x and it takes a while to figure out if it's + or - I didn't understand the point of managers until I got a good one. Perhaps you've just been unlucky
    - ninetyninenine 1y ago
      I literally see the opposite. What I'm seeing is if you're not using AI, you're going to be left behind. What used to take a week or more is now expected to be finished in a day thanks to AI. The expectations have shifted by a lot. I do know there are entire companies who have not bought into AI yet because the paradigm shift happened so quickly. The AI of 1 year ago could not make someone 10x. The AI of today can and if everyone knew about it, they would be using it. >I didn't understand the point of managers until I got a good one. Perhaps you've just been unlucky There is a point. The point is to set direction and to shield the engineer from politics. That is the point. Let me make it utterly clear: The role of leadership and management is REQUIRED. I never said otherwise. My point, however, is to say that the primary skill involved in setting direction and shielding the engineer from politics and all this "leadership" stuff is this: it is hard work, but it is not skilled work. The garbage man works hard, but anyone can do his job. There are certain people who do a shit job at being a garbage man and there are people who do a good job, but the overall job is considered unskilled labor. That is essentially what "leadership" is. And like the garbage man, the job is required. The main difference between the garbage man and the leader is essentially perception. Because leadership is essentially a form of control, perception is controlled. That means leaders are perceived to be better and they are thus paid more but the on the ground truth is that what they do is not skilled work.

DiscourseFan 1y ago

I guarantee you that the "10x" engineer would not be able to co-ordinate anything with any other team or department in the company. Of course the hierarchical structure of companies means that just having good people skills, and good management skills, means better compensation. But the most important skill in any capitalist economy is organizing labor, since capitalism is a way of organizing labor, so those who are the best at organizing and directing labor are the most well compensated since they are able to produce the most profits.

BobbyJo 1y ago
The most competent engineer I've ever worked with, the only one I'd consider 5x+, was fantastic at cross team collaboration.
microflash 1y ago
This is just another stereotype. I’ve seen plenty of managers struggling to form coherent communication where an engineer would express with perfect ease. The problem with communication comes when you add layers of bureaucracy between people, often under the guise that engineers can’t communicate.

lumost 1y ago

There needs to be roles for pure ICs. In deep tech orgs, it’s almost impossible to get work done unless you have a bench of folks with domain expertise, comfortable on your software, and in tune with and guiding product direction. Diluting the core IC responsibility in these orgs with mandatory influence/scope guidelines is counter productive. That being said, when I was in the role of a principal engineer at a major tech company - my ultimate responsibility was to get the project to success. What that meant on any given week could have alignment, coding, guiding, or reviewing.

light_hue_1 1y ago

> In short, you manage people. You tell others what to do and you think about what to do. As a principal scientist I definitely don't manage people. Mainly, people managers have power to tell people what to do and when. I have zero power over anyone. No one needs to listen to me. Ever. If people ignore me there's literally no one I can complain to. And no one tells me what to do. If I wasn't competent at my job I'd be sitting alone in an office staring at a wall. The reason why anyone would ever talk to me is because I have well over a decade of experience more than every other scientist in my org (200+ people) doing very complicated things, at scale, across many areas of AI/ML, and publishing many dozens of papers in top venues. So I know what I'm doing and can find problems, shortcuts, keep them from wasting time, find creative fixes to AI/ML issues, and see connections to business problems. Basically help scientists deliver better features faster. I can find new projects that those scientists are excited about. And I can communicate with product, managers, leaders about very complex technical ideas in ways that more junior scientists cannot. People in my org come to me because I provide value basically. Not because they have to. > You tell 10x people to do 10x work and you get 10x the credit when management only is like 1x of talent and effort. If only! 70% of the work I do is invisible small course corrections here and there across multiple orgs that fix things no one ever hears about but would be disasters down the road. 20% is working on projects that scale with many people. 10% is strategy for new experiments and projects. For the vast majority of what I do other people get 100% of the credit and my name is a small footnote at best. Maybe an example would help. Sorry that I need to be a bit vague. A large project recently was going in a particular direction. I saw two months ahead of time that this direction was going to run out of steam for a combination of science and business reasons. It would end up missing metrics. Leadership was asking for something that was broadly correct but subtly wrong. I spent a month finding a new direction that was the opposite of what everyone thought we had to do, finding the right small 1-2 person experiments to derisk the new direction, get senior people to understand it and agree to it, set up the correct relationships to make it viable, and then I had the evidence to convince project leadership and management to shift. A few days later we had a VP review and the response was that they're delighted with the direction, it's far better than they ever though, and this will be a flagship for an org with tens of thousands of employees. That review would have gone horribly without what I did because the problem I saw two months ahead of time would have surfaced and the project would be seen as dying and aimless. But the team got the credit for being on top of things as a whole, not me. As it should be. > They are managers that don't need to do 1 on 1s. I have more 1:1s than managers, because they can afford to just tell people what to do. I need to develop junior scientists, keep relationships up, stay on top of other orgs, business priorities, etc. Managers fail by creating chaos around them. Principals fail by becoming irrelevant.

procaryote 1y ago

Some companies suck at promoting the right people, but a good principal engineer is the 10x person, or someone who makes several teams more effective by helping them figure out the bigger technical issues. If you think management is like 1x talent and effort, you should try management for a bit.

ninetyninenine 1y ago
I have. It's more stressful. But it's still 1x talent and 1x effort. Anyone can do it, it's just harder in the same way being a garbage man is hard. 10x engineers don't need to be principals. The idea behind principals is that they don't do any engineering. They leverage the work of others to become 10x. It's very much considered a "leadership" or management role overall. A 10x engineer is usually literally a person who can output 10x through his own work alone. As a sidenote, with AI everyone is now 10x. So it's really a 20x thing now.
- procaryote 1y ago
  I've seen zero people become 10x because of AI. Conservatively it seems closer to ±0.5x and it takes a while to figure out if it's + or - I didn't understand the point of managers until I got a good one. Perhaps you've just been unlucky
  - ninetyninenine 1y ago
    I literally see the opposite. What I'm seeing is if you're not using AI, you're going to be left behind. What used to take a week or more is now expected to be finished in a day thanks to AI. The expectations have shifted by a lot. I do know there are entire companies who have not bought into AI yet because the paradigm shift happened so quickly. The AI of 1 year ago could not make someone 10x. The AI of today can and if everyone knew about it, they would be using it. >I didn't understand the point of managers until I got a good one. Perhaps you've just been unlucky There is a point. The point is to set direction and to shield the engineer from politics. That is the point. Let me make it utterly clear: The role of leadership and management is REQUIRED. I never said otherwise. My point, however, is to say that the primary skill involved in setting direction and shielding the engineer from politics and all this "leadership" stuff is this: it is hard work, but it is not skilled work. The garbage man works hard, but anyone can do his job. There are certain people who do a shit job at being a garbage man and there are people who do a good job, but the overall job is considered unskilled labor. That is essentially what "leadership" is. And like the garbage man, the job is required. The main difference between the garbage man and the leader is essentially perception. Because leadership is essentially a form of control, perception is controlled. That means leaders are perceived to be better and they are thus paid more but the on the ground truth is that what they do is not skilled work.