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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

#531

Post by evgen »

goatherders wrote: post #505
mehrdada wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew something like that would come up, hence my use of "almost". But I actually disagree with your example. I was expecting something like Dollar Shave Club to be used as a counterexample, where the entire value is arguably produced by marketing. While I don't have metrics (and it is hard to even define a good metric to distinguish the leverage produced by marketing vs. excellent product development when they exis…

Good grief. The entire premise was that owning a Mac made you different, unique. People bought the thing because they identified with THAT not because of specs. How do I know this? Because everyone remembers the commercial and how it made them feel and almost no one remembers the machine and what it did comparative to other options at the time.

You have conflated cause and effect here so much it is hard to untangle just where you diverged from reality, but the 1984 ad was not as important as you think. It ran once. Once. It became important as an icon later, but "everyone" doesn't remember how the commercial made them feel because most of them didn't see it. The Mac was, at the time, such a marvel of hardware and software engineering and so radically different than what was available at the time that it almost sold itself. You probably could not have picked a worse example to try to make the sales vs engineering case.

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

#532

Post by eikenberry »

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…

Calling them an idea person is, I think, unfair. The idea is the simple part. It is taking this idea to market, getting people to implement it, that is not easy. I'm not saying the implementors deserve the level of credit they get, but reducing the organizers to simple 'idea person' is somewhat disingenuous.

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

#533

Post by hohenheim »

sidlls wrote: post #466
btilly wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't agree. I'm always in an engineering role. Yet at multiple companies I've implemented A/B testing, come up with ideas for features, implemented them, tested them, and have seen growth of the bottom line in the 10-40% range. I've heard much from product and marketing at the same companies about the amazing things that they are coming up with and how they will grow the company. I've tested those. Most of the win…

This is partly why I wrote what I did about it being a self-inflicted problem: most engineers simply don't take that initiative, and many of the ones that do are thinking of features for resume driven development more than for the company's health. They're too busy arguing about whether Rust is our savior or how dumb blub programmers are, etc.

The answer to your original comment answered this. Engineers would avoid cv-driven-development if recruiters and head-hunters didn't use key-word based searches and rewarded developer CV riddled with most buzz, admittedly a bad thing. So I hardly see this as self-inflicted, it is wrong but that is what market is looking for.

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

#534

Post by quadcore »

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've thought about that quite a lot lately. Here is the strongest explanation of why things are like that and why it's gonna be very difficult to change.

For at least a million year, you would have improved your chances of survival by sticking with a physically stronger mate than you are. This guy can beat the wolf when you cant, and maybe more importantly here, he may be able to beat the other tribal chiefs when you cant.

Guess how bad people stick to this habit even today. They literally have a brain forged to command them to do that. In practice what happen is that people will confirmation-biased you, they either gonna find out everything you do well, or everything you do badly depending on how badass you are. They will fill forms and say: "look, here are the reasons why we promoted him".

From what I've seen, even at Amazon which is a big geniuses recruiter - and therefore should be able to crack this problem - (amazon also have a form "reasons not to promote" which, if you're following, is kinda smart but mostly wishful thinking), people get promoted mostly based on the following leadership principle: the guy who's most likely to beat the wolf is gonna be promoted. I've experienced it first hand.

There is a light in the tunnel though. From my observations, I can tell that Amazon, for example, is able to recruit based on skills. Note that at this point, the social bonds aren't made yet which is why it works. This might also explains why you go up the ladder more easily by getting recruited - aka move diagonally. So the best thoughts I've been able to come up with is that, somehow, promotion should try to be like recruitment. Both intuitively and counter-intuitively, I think people should get promoted by people who don't know them, by some sort of recruitment process because we know we can fix that one. In any ways, I guess there is a fantastic startup to be made here.

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

#535

Post by hohenheim »

goatherders wrote: post #502
leeoniya wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

onboarding an engineer - even a great one - is notoriously expensive, because they need to understand the product in extreme detail that a salesperson never will - not even close. there are many good engineers, but they are very difficult to replace. in addition, more engineers does not always translate to faster delivery, so there is a natural limit to how many should exist to build out a specific product. there are…

No, there aren't many good sales people. No, they can't be trained in much less time. And no, there aren't necessarily more of them. This is probably the most "I'm a technical founder and I have something to say!" thread I've seen here in a while.

Neither you, or your parent comment, provided justification. "There are many good sales people", "There aren't many good sales people". Plain statements, little reasoning. Both worthless.

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

#536

Post by hohenheim »

kevan wrote: post #431
nostrademons wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 determi…

"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."

We should print this and hang it on every wall of every room in which a piece of code is written. It is the most misunderstood and misused concept of Software Engineering.

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

#537

Post by subway »

kamakazizuru wrote: post #436
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…

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 thin…

This is exceedingly common. It also makes a helluva lot of people miserable.

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

#538

Post by kbart »

slg wrote: post #414
kartan wrote: post #378

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. 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. 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…

"The distinction is that product development, sales and marketing can act as multipliers in a way that engineering seldom does."

If you don't have a product, you can multiply zero as much as you want, it's still zero. Engineering provides base value, everything else is just build on top of it.

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

#539

Post by dade_ »

peterburkimsher wrote: post #491

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 sam…

The problem with the 2008 crash is that is has possibly created one of the most risk averse generations ever. Companies don’t have desires or feelings, but the owners and managers do. Many like people in their teens and 20’s because they are naive, which is helpful when you need to convince people to work harder for a title or some imaginary threat. Check out the Icarus Deception.

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

#540

Post by kbart »

eradicatethots wrote: post #477
jedberg wrote: post #271

The advice I always give to a new college grad is try and get a job at one of the big tech companies. The work and the mission may not be exciting, but there is huge room for growth and often the large companies have programs especially designed for career growth for new college grads. But don’t get stuck. The job will comfortable. After a few years it’s time to move on. Maybe you’ve found a few folks to cofound with…

It sounds very stressful to work at a major company

I've found the opposite to be true. In a big company you usually have a strict role and responsibilities, know what and when to do, there are established procedures for basically everything and if something unexpected happens, you know whom to call. In small, young (startup) companies you are forced to be jack-of-all-trades, take responsibilities depending on situation and there's nobody around to give an advice. Sure, it might be fun to be that-guy-who-keeps-everything-running when everything works fine, but when production server stops, you have no idea what has happened and nobody to call, all the fun ends very fast. Both ways have their cons and pros and my advice would be to try both, to see which one suits you best.
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