Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee • Hacker News Board

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#381

Post by unabst » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:35 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #368

unabst wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are always exceptions. The point is, what works works, and if you're forced to make things work, before you know it, you'll find yourself looking awfully similar to those in a similar situation. There is a reason why these business structures are so common. They work.

Is it that they're the only way that works? Or is it that everyone just assumes they're the only way? E.g. Valve took a radically different approach to management and organisational structure and seems to have been very successful.

Of course not... hence the exceptions, and room for innovation, and opportunity for those seeking that innovation.

But if you just need something that works, copying a wheel is easier than reinventing one. Better yet, just buy one.

Furthermore, understanding the reasons why the most common wheel is what it is will provide invaluable insight into making a better wheel if it comes to that. It will also tell you the market forces or anything else at play. The reasons why anything works will exist and be real, if that thing that works exists and is working already.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#382

Post by untilHellbanned » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

mwseibel wrote: post #43

nichochar wrote: post #42

This is rather true in practice, but I find it tremendously depressing. I have found that the executive path is actually the one that most of the scumbags take, it is the one that attracts the most people, and those people are usually not likable, they're salespeople that sell themselves all day. The third group, the one that actually creates value, is accurately represented as not as successful both in terms of mone…

Thanks for the note - I’m going to think about this.

Isn't just distributing the wealth more evenly?

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#383

Post by sidlls » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:38 PM UTC

biohax2015 wrote: post #355

yahna wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same just isn't true of product development, sales and marketing. Any one of those three teams, staffed well, will account for well more than the value of the entire engineering organization. Okay, slash your engineering staff and double the sales people and lets see how you do. How is any of that not done by thousands of other people as well? Especially sales.

Sales is more difficult than engineering. There, I said it.

I disagree. Sales is fuzzier than engineering and requires a different set of skills and methods to resolve problems.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#384

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:42 PM UTC

lliamander wrote: post #356

i_cant_speel wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He talks about both why the third group is less successful and how people within that group can potentially improve their situation within the current system. Are you able to provide a cliff note or two about why they are less successful and how to improve their situations?

Why are line level engineers less successful? In short, the Gervais Principle[1]: "Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves." What to do about it? These things: * recognize that as software professionals we own the means of production *…

[deleted]

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#385

Post by Chiba-City » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:44 PM UTC

I founded a company that helped many other 90-00's founders along with some legacy industries in crisis. I am a reader so I read many business books. But I missed two specific dynamics I wish I had known earlier.

First, executives will routinely attempt to take the founders' roles. Industries vary widely, but they are roughly "showy spenders" and not savers. Many have no experience in new ventures. They have ridden high and will panic against adversity. If they cannot flee in an overall industry downturn, they will feed on the founders. Be very careful to make "executive" expectations brutally clear and consequences for any and all hubris terminal.

Second, many founders want to be 1-hit wonders. Unlike our industry ecosystem building heroes, they are neither in the ecosystem nor interested in developing the ecosystem. They want in to get out ASAP. Their short termism sadly translates into teaching bad examples to employees.

Nevertheless, the information rich life of the "small rooms" where plans are crafted and industry roads remapped on whiteboards are truly the most wonderful teachers anyone can expect to access.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#386

Post by beachy » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:48 PM UTC

charlesdm wrote: post #380

hahamrfunnyguy wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a manager I disagree. The right people are difficult to come by. Sure an engineer can be replaced - but in how many weeks or months, and what about the knowledge leaving the company?

Isn't this just also dependent on pay? Let's take a ridiculous example, but if someone were to offer me, say, $1m (a year) to work on a specific key niche project (i.e. something that fits within my skill set and where I could add tremendous value) then I would happily move wherever around the world. Pay more -> you'll probably get a (significantly) higher amount of qualified applicants?

You seem to assume its easy to sort the wheat from the chaff.

If you offer $1m per year (which is a ridiculous premise from the get go), you'll maybe get more good candidates (though a lot would assume there was something weird going on and would balk), but you'll certainly also get way more bad candidates, including many who are cunning and able to take up a lot of your recruiting bandwidth, and maybe cunning enough to actually talk their way in - making your problem worse.

It's just too simplistic to assume that throwing money at the problem will solve your talent problems.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#387

Post by beachy » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:49 PM UTC

sidlls wrote: post #383

biohax2015 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sales is more difficult than engineering. There, I said it.

I disagree. Sales is fuzzier than engineering and requires a different set of skills and methods to resolve problems.

They're both hard.

Rockstar salespeople are just as impressive in action as rockstar developers.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#388

Post by crdoconnor » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:52 PM UTC

ouid wrote: post #329

sidlls wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different (admittedly controversial) take, having been on the "tech ladder" for some time now (as a Senior SWE and Lead Engineer): most individual contributors overestimate how much value they actually provide, especially in the Bay Area. That isn't to say we're not under-appreciated and under-compensated (we are both). But realistically much of the time work we do is easily done by literally thousands of ot…

Well, without radically changing the economic system, your compensation will be, at most, the cost of replacing you, and the gap between your compensation and that figure depends on the information gap, and the chutzpah with which you negotiate. I'd wager that if developers renegotiated their contracts at the point where they were most irreplaceable on projects they would be able to extract a lot more money.

>I'd wager that if developers renegotiated their contracts at the point where they were most irreplaceable on projects

I'd wager that most executives would rather pay 5 people to do the job of 2 or even simply bury their head in the sand and not admit to themselves that replacing you is going to be more costly than let you have that kind of leverage.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#389

Post by cableshaft » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:56 PM UTC

defined wrote: post #364

volkk wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't that depend on your definition of creating value? Im biased because I'm a developer perhaps, but I think that these ideas would all be theoretical concepts if these developers weren't actively building them. Perhaps I have a pessimistic view of the industry, but I've worked at 4-5 startups now (4-5 because one I'm on the fence about calling a startup) and I've come to find that the most value was always "crea…

This. Seen the same thing in 3 startups. Add me to the anecdata. It would be awesome if we could get statistically significant numbers of people to report on this effect, although how to avoid selection bias etc. is beyond me atm.

Happened at a company I worked for after we were bought by a larger corporation. And we were a company of 500+ employees.

Although we had a CTO that grew up with the company (used to be a programmer there) that reported direct to the CEO at the smaller, now we have no CTO and at least 5 layers in between us and the new CEO.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#390

Post by throw2016 » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 9:58 PM UTC

nichochar wrote: post #42

This is rather true in practice, but I find it tremendously depressing. I have found that the executive path is actually the one that most of the scumbags take, it is the one that attracts the most people, and those people are usually not likable, they're salespeople that sell themselves all day. The third group, the one that actually creates value, is accurately represented as not as successful both in terms of mone…

This is a popular perspective among some technical folks but it's a bit insular. You could tar employees with some tag, there must be space to separate good and bad executives.

A lot of technical folks seem to have very little understanding or even interest in what for instance marketing and sales do. There are generalizations and often anecdotal knowledge that passes for understanding.

Developing software is just one small part of the process of creating value. Software does does sell itself. Creating demand and getting customers is incredibly difficult, expensive and unpredictable. If your target is advertisers based on users then acquiring users and advertisers is equally challenging.

As a thought experiment, get the best technical team and develop a product. Now after it is done, then what, how to do make money, how do you sell it or get users?