Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 632 posts

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

#431

Post by kevan »

nostrademons wrote: post #405
mo1ok wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and both disagree. I'm working right now for a client that is a large corporation that didn't do any of those "fad" things - and it is _tremendously_ costly. For example, one team has spent several weeks and thousands of dollars to get another team's SOAP integration working correctly, when it would have taken five minutes in REST. The codebase did not follow a "elegant" practice and is an absolute spaghetti…

SOAP was the fad before REST. And spaghetti code is usually the result of fulfilling customer's requests without taking (/wasting, depending on your perspective) the time to rewrite & refactor. This'll probably come across as depressing to most of the engineers in the audience, but I don't see this as an example of a company that did anything wrong. Rather, it's a company that did everything right but did it too earl…

Spaghetti code and cumbersome integration methods are just forms of tech debt. Tech debt in any form isn't inherently good or bad. Just like financial debt it's a tool that can be used to achieve a desired business goal. When misused it often harms the company but won't be fully realized for several months or years.

Things taking a week when they could take 30m is your company paying interest on that debt. To determine if taking on that debt was a good idea you need a lot more context. e.g. the Cobol mainframes that run the financial system are difficult and expensive to maintain, but it's still cheaper than the alternative: rewriting those systems.

Most startups take on massive amounts of tech debt because it helps them move faster and the company not failing is way more important. Once a company is out of startup mode it should balance goals a bit more thoughtfully.

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

#432

Post by JimboOmega »

sshumaker wrote: post #371
JimboOmega wrote: post #114

My experience has been that jumping from employee to any level of executive is the absolute hardest step, at least for me. I think once you are a team lead and have some number of direct reports, you can then start jumping your way up that ladder. But going from 0 to 5 direct reports has often seemed impossible. I'd be open to tips on how to do it.

A manager isn't an executive. In addition to new skills, there are also mental shifts necessary at various stages in your career, as you climb to increasing levels of leadership. You can see this on the IC track as well for top-tier tech companies - there is a step-function difference in mindset at certain levels. Jumping from IC to line manager, as you suggest, is one; you need to recognize you are no longer shippin…

You're saying what's necessary to do the job, not what's necessary to get it - which is my bigger problem. I don't feel that I want to remain an IC forever; become a true technical expert and honing that skill further is not a path that I personally want to focus on

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

#433

Post by JimboOmega »

ryandrake wrote: post #422
JimboOmega wrote: post #114

My experience has been that jumping from employee to any level of executive is the absolute hardest step, at least for me. I think once you are a team lead and have some number of direct reports, you can then start jumping your way up that ladder. But going from 0 to 5 direct reports has often seemed impossible. I'd be open to tips on how to do it.

I've found that going from zero to one direct reports is the toughest step (still trying to get there) on the ladder.

I had one for about 6 months, though it didn't do me much good later on.

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

#434

Post by pcsanwald »

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.

The skillset is fuzzier, but the results are not fuzzier, as reflected by common practices of sales compensation across the industry.

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

#435

Post by sidlls »

mehrdada wrote: post #426
slg wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don't have anything to sell. Without sales and marketing, you will also have a hard time. It is collaboration what brings success. The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that enginee…

> sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does (I cannot distinguish product development from engineering as cleanly as you do, but on sales and marketing...) Can't disagree more. At least with the definitions I have in my head, this sentence is logically inconsistent with such definitions. Engineering is the way you get non-linear leverages. Sales and marketing, almost always give…

Well, sure, if you define "value of engineering" to be more than "value of X" you can say engineering is more valuable. That would be a contentious definition, though.

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

#436

Post by kamakazizuru »

mehrdada wrote: post #426
slg wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don't have anything to sell. Without sales and marketing, you will also have a hard time. It is collaboration what brings success. The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that enginee…

> sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does (I cannot distinguish product development from engineering as cleanly as you do, but on sales and marketing...) Can't disagree more. At least with the definitions I have in my head, this sentence is logically inconsistent with such definitions. Engineering is the way you get non-linear leverages. Sales and marketing, almost always give…

interestingly, a lot of enterprise Saas software is "sold before its built", by which i dont mean its complete vaporware, but its a very common practice to build a shitty first product, sell sell sell, and only after the first 10-20 customers are on board, do these companies start to spend more on engineering etc. Even after that, in order to sustain the machinery of building product, you need to keep selling. I think both are important, but in the technical world we tend to seriously underestimate how important sales it. At the end of the day, you can have the best alogrithms, the most elegant code and the sexiest UI, but if you dont have someone taking it to customers, and bringing their feedback back, all you have is a beautiful product without a business.

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

#437

Post by clay_to_n »

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #95
koolba wrote: post #51

Regardless of which path you'd like to go down, learn some basic financial planning, frugality, and learn to live like a miser. It'll pay dividends, both figuratively and literally. Regarding the executive path, or more generally any management role, learn early on if it's for you. If you're the type that gets caught up in human interest stories, considers it inhumane to fire low performers, or generally believes in…

For someone who recently graduated and quite clueless about financial planning, do you have some resources to get started?

Good resources already posted, but this is also worth reading as an intro to thinking about income + costs of living as it pertains to early retirement: http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

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

#438

Post by slg »

mehrdada wrote: post #426
slg wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don't have anything to sell. Without sales and marketing, you will also have a hard time. It is collaboration what brings success. The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that enginee…

> sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does (I cannot distinguish product development from engineering as cleanly as you do, but on sales and marketing...) Can't disagree more. At least with the definitions I have in my head, this sentence is logically inconsistent with such definitions. Engineering is the way you get non-linear leverages. Sales and marketing, almost always give…

I agree it is hard to draw a line between the two, but there are some decisions that occur outside of the technology inolved that I would consider product development. Twitter increasing the character limit to 280 is a prime example. There is no technological reason why that should or needed to happen. It was motivated purely by the product. Although you could argue the initial 140 limit is closer to the tech side.

I also think that many people, especially in the tech industry, don't understand the scope of functions included in "sales and marketing". It isn't just sales people calling up customers trying to sell enough to reach their quota. It is nearly everything involved in revenue generation of a company.

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

#440

Post by slg »

vvanders wrote: post #418
slg wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don't have anything to sell. Without sales and marketing, you will also have a hard time. It is collaboration what brings success. The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that enginee…

More efficient engineering ships features faster, not just cheaper, which lets you respond quicker, which gets you more users/clients/your favorite metric.

Shipping faster is really just another form of cheaper. It isn't a linear relationship (the whole 9 women working for 1 month thing), but there is no question that dedicating more resources to a problem can help fix it quicker, especially with the frequency that companies are acquired in tech.

I am not sure that Facebook creating Instagram Stories to compete with Snapchat is a definitively better solution than Twitter buying Periscope to compete with Meerkat. Either way, you still need someone to think up those new features, communicate them to the public, and sell them to your customers.

Post reply on HN