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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

#591

Post by xapata »

mehrdada wrote: post #515
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier Have you ever started a company that successfully exited? Or managed a product from cradle to grave? There is another comment in here about perspectives gained from taking on multiple roles. If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a…

> If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a product’s performance more than a linear multiplier Read more carefully.

How would you tell the difference between a high linear multiple and a low exponential coefficient? That hypothesis is nearly impossible to falsify and therefore nearly useless. The value in it is simply the encouragement to look for network effects, which are going to cause exponentiality.

BTW, ever heard of word of mouth advertising? That's by definition exponential.

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

#592

Post by mehrdada »

xapata wrote: post #591
mehrdada wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a product’s performance more than a linear multiplier Read more carefully.

How would you tell the difference between a high linear multiple and a low exponential coefficient? That hypothesis is nearly impossible to falsify and therefore nearly useless. The value in it is simply the encouragement to look for network effects, which are going to cause exponentiality. BTW, ever heard of word of mouth advertising? That's by definition exponential.

Valid points. We could debate this, but I am already sick of this subthread; the point is I never said sales does not add value or that the value it adds is small, which the GP accused me of, in a rather passive-aggressive tone.

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

#593

Post by Rapzid »

mo1ok wrote: post #269
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…

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…

I mean, a bad interface is a bad interface. There were a lot of issues with SOAP, but time to get a client going wasn't really one of them(the clients wrote themselves!). REST is generally a huge step backwards in that regard IMHO; I have the rise of proto bufs and gRPC to keep that opinion company though :)

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

#594

Post by sidlls »

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…

Competent product development is much more than "having ideas." It's not just a room full of under-educated monkeys in business suits generating random "ideas", mindlessly picking A/B test results or throwing darts at a wall. There's this caricature version of what they do that developers seem to have that just doesn't match reality. I wish my fellow developers would take some initiative to truly understand what product, sales and marketing actually do.

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

#595

Post by graphememes »

unabst wrote: post #567
graphememes wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is totally a sales pitch. You can tell because when confronted with an alternative that works and is viable you get the age ol' "Yeah well anything is possible" Of course, what is current was also possible, you're ignoring the fact you're buying into the current dogma and repeating it.

> you're buying into the current dogma and repeating it. Maybe, had I bought something. I did not buy my corporate structure. I built it. It sounds like you're saying all cars have four wheels because everyone is buying into the current dogma and repeating it. I'm saying, if you're building a car from scratch, there is a high likelihood you'll arrive at four wheels. As a matter of engineering, certain structures are…

I'd argue that what you did is even worse of a crime then. You didn't buy into it, you sold it. Still selling it, unwilling to try other things, not very visionary in my opinion.

Also, not all cars have four wheels, not all cars are gasoline powered, mechanic evolution is quite infantile whereas static business operations are not.

I would argue that also the industrial business ops are still infantile as well.

Just more sales.

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

#596

Post by jh3 »

alien_at_work wrote: post #564
beachy wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It's just too simplistic to assume that throwing money at the problem will solve your talent problems. Labor is a market exactly as any other: paying the highest price does not always get you the best quality but paying the lowest price always ensures you don't.

What you're saying is false, but what you're quoting is correct. I definitely wouldn't say "always".

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

#597

Post by alien_at_work »

thesash wrote: post #588
alien_at_work wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you end up with the "grassroots politician" problem: you go in to fix a problem but realize the money is just too good (now that you're the one getting it) to change the system.

Are you motivated by money in this situation?

Or the power or whatever. All I know is it seems to always turn out this way. The current generation can't be the first ones to ever want to change this, yet the system is as it is. This is my suspicion of why that remains the case.

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

#598

Post by alien_at_work »

jh3 wrote: post #596
alien_at_work wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's just too simplistic to assume that throwing money at the problem will solve your talent problems. Labor is a market exactly as any other: paying the highest price does not always get you the best quality but paying the lowest price always ensures you don't.

What you're saying is false, but what you're quoting is correct. I definitely wouldn't say "always".

I can't parse what you're saying. Are you saying the quote I replied to is correct?

In any case, I think always is close enough to fit. Yes, sometimes someone gets something very cheaply but that's usually because of ignorance or urgency from the selling party, deception, etc., etc. In a natural market interaction, if you're paying bottom dollar you are not and cannot be getting the best quality (unless you are in a scenario where the offering is flat: the best offering is also the worst).

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

#599

Post by simplify »

graphememes wrote: post #595
unabst wrote: post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you're buying into the current dogma and repeating it. Maybe, had I bought something. I did not buy my corporate structure. I built it. It sounds like you're saying all cars have four wheels because everyone is buying into the current dogma and repeating it. I'm saying, if you're building a car from scratch, there is a high likelihood you'll arrive at four wheels. As a matter of engineering, certain structures are…

I'd argue that what you did is even worse of a crime then. You didn't buy into it, you sold it. Still selling it, unwilling to try other things, not very visionary in my opinion. Also, not all cars have four wheels, not all cars are gasoline powered, mechanic evolution is quite infantile whereas static business operations are not. I would argue that also the industrial business ops are still infantile as well. Just m…

Even worse of a crime? Could you be more hyperbolic?

unabst did try "other things". Did you read the thread?

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

#600

Post by [deleted] »

taneq wrote: post #520
crdoconnor wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

You're right. It's critical not to let the troops catch a whiff of their individual importance or you'll have to start paying them closer to their actual value to you... and that's bad for profits.

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