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

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

#491

Post by peterburkimsher »

My dad refused promotion at CERN several times. He continued to work as a testing engineer, and would not climb the corporate ladder into management roles. That reduced his paycheck.

When the company had financial trouble though, they fired all the middle managers and kept the engineers. He learned an important lesson - working at a low level with only machines below you is a safe and stable job.

I want to do the same. I'm now 28, so I have plenty of flexibility. But I'm worried that as I get older, there will be more pressure to go into management instead of staying in engineering. Companies want fun, young engineers who know all the latest tech - they don't want experience at the technical level.

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

#492

Post by BatFastard »

koolba wrote: post #115
krat0sprakhar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The usual generic financial advice I give is: - Maximize every retirement vehicle offered to you (max 401k, HSA, etc). - Pretend that any money you sock away for retirement doesn't exist. This is best done with automated withdrawals so you never even consider it money in your checking account. - Learn to cook. This doesn't actually save much money at the individual level but is huge for families. - Set up separate ac…

Good advice, the cooking is fun if nothing else.

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

#493

Post by BatFastard »

smileysteve wrote: post #308
koolba wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual generic financial advice I give is: - Maximize every retirement vehicle offered to you (max 401k, HSA, etc). - Pretend that any money you sock away for retirement doesn't exist. This is best done with automated withdrawals so you never even consider it money in your checking account. - Learn to cook. This doesn't actually save much money at the individual level but is huge for families. - Set up separate ac…

> - Learn to cook. This doesn't actually save much money at the individual level but is huge for families. I'd say it can save a ton of money at the individual level and is likely much healthier, and often time as well (probably biased because I can passively cook because I understand the science of cooking) My example meal that is paleo friendly is grilled chicken breast and frozen vegetables; my dinners cost ~ $3/d…

If you really want to save money on food, just fast frequently, saves a ton of time too.

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

#494

Post by crdb »

kartan wrote: post #378
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…

> 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. Why is it not true for them? Sales are not magic, it is a profession that can be learned. I have seen a lot of companies stating how important is sales, and how unique they are. It can't be true for all companies. It is li…

> 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.

Anecdote as counter-example: a previous employer was approached by a vendor which offered a solution developed by "former NASA specialists" (I think it was to manage inventory). The total cost of deploying it was around a million.

We tried hard to stop the executives from going ahead with it, but around $400k had been paid by the time we managed to kill the project when it became clear that a. the vendor did not actually have a product and was using us as the R&D guinea pig, taking advantage of the data from millions of our customers and b. the "NASA" part referred to one of their developers who had briefly interned with a NASA contractor.

So, the sales organisation managed to "create" $400k of "value" (in the sense of hard revenue in their bank account) without engineering being involved.

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

#495

Post by saimiam »

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…

>the one that actually creates value

What value is value if it can't be sold? Yes, there's intrinsic value in doing things because they need to be done but most of the work done in offices around the world derives its meaning from its worth to a buyer.

This being so(?), is the employee necessarily worth more, as you seem to imply, just because they are mashing away on tools rather than engaging with buyers or regulators, strategizing, and scheming?

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

#496

Post by Iv »

btilly wrote: post #465
mwseibel wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Here is a twist on this to think about. Careers are made or broken on whether you get to be an idea person or an implementer. If you're an idea person you get the lion's share of the credit for anything that goes right, and can always blame your failures on the implementor. Plus ideas are easier to come up with than implementations. If you're an implementor you work hard, and then don't get much of the credit. But wi…

I think it all boils down to playing the blame game. It takes time to do so and implementing an idea takes a lot of time. Having an idea is the easiest thing ever.

I can have five ideas before lunch with time to spate on blaming the people who will actually implement them for the past failures of my "great ideas with poor implementation"

But engineers/implementers who get into politics have a huge advantage: they can produce proofs, especially in tech. Nothing is more scary for an executive type than an engineer who refuses to be bullied into accepting the blame.

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

#497

Post by mehrdada »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #483
mehrdada wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

One of the most common fallacies you hear voiced by software people is that polynomial/exponential is bigger than linear, because they ignore the constant factors that matter in the concrete cases in the real world. The same fallacy leads to bad engineering choices and bad business choices.

There is definitely a lot of truth to this, but when talking about exponential growth in particular, the growth is often so huge that it eclipses any conceivable linear function in practice pretty quickly.

Also, given sufficiently large numbers, better asymptotic growth always beats. So this is less wrong when talking about huge businesses.

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

#498

Post by DannyBee »

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…

unfortunately, it seems feelings are a bit raw in this thread (a lot of people seem to have had a lot of bad experiences, and don't feel appreciated, which definitely sucks).

But i'd guess i'd say as a member of the likely scumbag group, i feel like you aren't really trying to see the multiple perspectives here. As someone else said, we all create value. It's rare successful companies can afford to keep people around who don't. It's much more likely "they don't create value in ways that you value", or value that you see. I think one of the things definitely holding you back here is the inability to see it from these other perspectives. You are telling yourself you understand people's motivations and goals (you think they are ambitious and trying to sell themselves to get ahead), but i don't think you really understand the perspective, just your story of it. And you definitely, even in these few sentences, have a clear bias and story about a ton of people.

" i wish it layed out a path of how to build an industry that doesn't attract all those ambitious selfish (executives) people"

I think you need to question your assumptions a lot here. You are assuming that such an industry could exist, or that it would be successful. You are assuming (as mentioned above) that your group is the only one that creates value. If that was really true, do you really believe the other groups would still exist?

Why wouldn't someone, in each industry, already have made a successful company that doesn't have those roles, and because they produce much more value, taken over?

I could believe you don't value what they do, but like the author, i don't believe that deserves the judgement you seem to. Assuming your definition of value is the right one, or better than others, is not a good place to start a real discussion from.

I think you would do well to rely less on personality stereotyping and more on understanding if you want to get to the place you desire (where the ambitious, selfish people you see, aren't causing you the annoyance they apparently do)

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

#499

Post by goatherders »

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…

I actually find "founder" is the route most scumbags take. Most of the ones I encounter take credit for other people's work and contribute little value. They also do a great job spending other people's money.

Next would be Employees. Jeez, those guys are the worst. Always thinking the ship will sink without them. If only the executives would listen to them the company would be on the right path.

Get off your high horse. You look foolish to all of us executives.

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

#500

Post by [deleted] »

hajile wrote: post #468
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why is it not true for them? Sales are not magic, it is a profession that can be learned Like software engineering. And like writing software, some people are better at it / enjoy it more than others. Software engineers and good salespeople are very well compensated because they're hard to replace. > I have seen a lot of companies stating how important is sales, and how unique they are. It can't be true for all com…

> Most companies, particularly most start-ups, suck at sales. "Great engineers, shit sales" is a more common failure mode in Silicon Valley than "sold something couldn't be built." Also, "good at sales" isn't a one dimensional metric. There are different sales processes, some of which some people (and consequently companies) are better at than others. Bad, derivative products hocked by hopelessly deluded people playi…

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