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

blog.ycombinator.com

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

#551

Post by cbr »

JBlue42 wrote: post #164
cbr wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's cheaper than a studio? Splitting a several-bedroom apartment several ways. For example, where I live [1] a studio is $1,700 but one room in a 3br is $1,100. [1] http://www.jefftk.com/apartment_prices

Depends on where you live. When I looked into splitting a place here in LA, it was only $100 less than if I stayed in my studio, with less amenities. I'm lucky, as I'm rent-controlled, but even people I know that live in 4-bedroom houses in not great areas are paying only a little less.

It sounds like rent control isn't making this a fair comparison? We'd want to compare going out and renting a new studio vs 1/N of an Nbr.

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

#552

Post by mratzloff »

sshumaker wrote: post #463
JimboOmega wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given the prevalence of the methods discussed in the OP, that's kind of hard to do; e.g. I work for the CTO who is the co-founder, but doesn't have a strong management background. Recommend a place to start?

The problem probably isn't with you, it's with your environment. It's likely you're at the wrong company (see my comment above). If you work directly for the CTO my guess is that there aren't a lot of management opportunities at your current employer, period.

In which case the self-limiting thing he's doing is remaining with his current employer.

Look for a new job with the goal in mind of finding a mentor.

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

#553

Post by albertgoeswoof »

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…

> working at a low level with only machines below you is a safe and stable job

until your job is replaced by a machine

Yes you can get made redunant / fired as a manager, but people management is much less likely to be replaced by machines in the future

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

#554

Post by captainmuon »

How about the good old humble entrepreneur? You have a little bit of each category. In contrast to the founder of a startup, you are not going for exponential growth or a buy-out, but for a steady income. You'll have both technical and business tasks, but you can offload some to employees or contractors, so you can choose where your focus is to some extent.

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

#555

Post by ckastner »

kbart wrote: post #544
ckastner wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether the product is needed or not is irrelevant to my assertion.

Oh, come one, you don't need to be a marketing genius to create a product webpage, create social network presence, buy some Google ads or even start a Kickstarter campaign etc. so people can find you themselves . Being "invisible" at this age and time is only possible if you actively try to stay this way or make a product that nobody needs (I ruled out the former as it doesn't make any sense).

> Oh, come one, you don't need to be a marketing genius [...]

But your product does need some marketing, which is the point I was trying to make.

Marketing does not just "build on top of [Engineering]", they are codependent.

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

#559

Post by kbart »

ckastner wrote: post #555
kbart wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, come one, you don't need to be a marketing genius to create a product webpage, create social network presence, buy some Google ads or even start a Kickstarter campaign etc. so people can find you themselves . Being "invisible" at this age and time is only possible if you actively try to stay this way or make a product that nobody needs (I ruled out the former as it doesn't make any sense).

> Oh, come one, you don't need to be a marketing genius [...] But your product does need some marketing, which is the point I was trying to make. Marketing does not just "build on top of [Engineering]", they are codependent.

Of course, just as you need to sell it to make any money. I was talking about "marketing" and "sales" as in department sense, so what I want to say that you can run a company with just engineering department, but you can't run a company with just sales and/or marketing departments (in a product orientated business at least). Sure, it's probably not the most efficient way either. For example, in my previous job I was working in a small, niche company (optical equipment) that had only engineers (~40 total), CEO and an accountant and it was doing pretty good, we had hard times fulfilling all orders. All "marketing" we did was our CEO + few engineers going to the industry related conferences and shows to generate leads.

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

#560

Post by alien_at_work »

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.

>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.

There's no money in caring about the company long term. Increase in salary for an engineer comes in changing jobs, not internal promotion (which, for places where this is even a concept, is usually constrained by some arbitrary limit, where as job change depends on your negotiation skills and resume). We're optimising for what is successful.

>They're too busy arguing about whether Rust is our savior or how dumb blub programmers are, etc.

I know there are lame fan boys, but many of us are actually value focused and realize that a more powerful language is cheaper across the entire product life cycle. Having said that, I wouldn't feel too bad about using even Java these days because they've added enough stuff to lessen the impact of how awful the language is, that it probably doesn't make much of a difference. But you can't say that about every language, some languages are just too expensive time-wise to make sense in any setting.

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