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

What does a Director of Engineering do?

hashtagcoder.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 114 posts

Re: What does a Director of Engineering do?

#91

Post by missosoup »

darkerside wrote: post #81
lliamander wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at those kinds of organizations, read the documents, put in the work, and got promoted...by switching companies :). In my experience, the companies that do have those documents (and not all do) don't actually really use them or make much reference to them in 1-on-1's or reviews. That's because management's perspective is that they are interested in how well you are doing at the job they hired you for, not…

In my experience, I've seen plenty of promotions from within (and experienced my fair share as well). They just take a while to happen. But then, I've been at multiple companies for over 5 years. That's probably about how long it takes to watch someone grow from an individual contributor into a leader, including leadership skills as well as building reputational and political capital across the organization. Patience…

> Patience is a virtue.

Your anecdata doesn't align with actual studies that indicate frequent job changes as the optimal strategy for maximising income.

Your loyalty isn't worth anything to your employer in the current market. Those times ended several decades ago.

Here's some counter anecdata: after graduating, I doubled my salary and seniority twice in 3 years with two job hops. If I stayed at my first employer, I'd be lucky to be making a third of what I am now and none of the career prospects that have become available.

I'm in my mid 30s and have a seniority level that lifers at my current employer hope to achieve sometime in their mid 40s if ever.

Re: What does a Director of Engineering do?

#92

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

lliamander wrote: post #23

> I used to think hard work leads to promotion. This is because I didn't understand why different positions exist outside of a title change. Now I see things a bit differently. If an individual on my team is working hard, I'm going to keep them where they are because they're getting the job done. Rather, I'm looking to elevate my 10x engineer - not the one that's the doing their job well but the one thats mentoring t…

I think it's time that our industry retired the notion of the 10x engineer the same way we don't use the terms "rock star" and "ninja" anymore.

Re: What does a Director of Engineering do?

#95

Post by RobRivera »

missosoup wrote: post #91
darkerside wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, I've seen plenty of promotions from within (and experienced my fair share as well). They just take a while to happen. But then, I've been at multiple companies for over 5 years. That's probably about how long it takes to watch someone grow from an individual contributor into a leader, including leadership skills as well as building reputational and political capital across the organization. Patience…

> Patience is a virtue. Your anecdata doesn't align with actual studies that indicate frequent job changes as the optimal strategy for maximising income. Your loyalty isn't worth anything to your employer in the current market. Those times ended several decades ago. Here's some counter anecdata: after graduating, I doubled my salary and seniority twice in 3 years with two job hops. If I stayed at my first employer, I…

How many hops through the FAANG circuit did you make, if you mind me asking?

Re: What does a Director of Engineering do?

#96

Post by nickm12 »

irrational wrote: post #62
lliamander wrote: post #23

> I used to think hard work leads to promotion. This is because I didn't understand why different positions exist outside of a title change. Now I see things a bit differently. If an individual on my team is working hard, I'm going to keep them where they are because they're getting the job done. Rather, I'm looking to elevate my 10x engineer - not the one that's the doing their job well but the one thats mentoring t…

I don't understand why people want to be promoted. I've worked for the same company for nearly 2 decades. I'm basically doing the same job as when I started. I don't want more work or more responsibilities. I'm happy staying in my groove. In that time my pay has more than doubled. Recently my boss informed me that they were giving me a 15% raise. I didn't ask for a raise. I don't have to do any more work. Frankly I'v…

This is a good attitude. Promotion is not just "more of the same" but is really moving to a different job and it may not be a job you like better.

That said, people want to get promoted largely for some combination of increased status, power, and income. I don't think it's worth taking a job you dislike for these things, though. Life's too short.

Re: What does a Director of Engineering do?

#97

Post by Traster »

bluGill wrote: post #31
Traster wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll tell you what amazes me: If you look at any reasonably large engineering organisation they will likely have guidance published from HR stating what the criteria are for different job roles, and they'll actually be pretty similar across different organisations. You might be a Senior Software Engineer at one place but called a Staff engineer at another place, but they're broadly comparable, and the seniority crite…

What is more amazing is their managers who have figured out how to work the system are not telling people that. Your job should be helping your people get where they want to go so if they can't get there tell them why. I've wasted years working hard and trying to gain influence only to realize that the areas I was getting influence in didn't matter to anyone so I was condemned to get good jobs but no promotion. It ha…

You can tell employees this stuff over and over, some are just not ready to hear it.

Re: What does a Director of Engineering do?

#98

Post by spugody »

majormajor wrote: post #82
cozos wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather have your organization be filled with engineers that output high quality work or so-called Staff Engineer influencers? Personally I would rather most to be the former. Doers are important (probably the most important) and should be rewarded, IMO. Hard work and no promotion leads to quitting. Getting promoted to Staff etc is more about being put on important projects, building relationships with manag…

Organizations that are filled purely with "doers" who don't make their coworkers better provide a great perpetual need for people to come in and clean up the mess later at often higher pay. :p But maybe there's more than just "sloppy isolated doers" and "no-code-writing influencer staff timewasters"... A doer who does help everyone around them keep the codebase clean too... well... yep, that's the influencer part. So…

In my experience, there are few of those type of valuable influencers around and they have a limited career path. Maybe a promotion or two above standard engineer, but that is it.

Those that rise higher to the very senior positions are are able to promote their image, regardless of how much value that actually provide, and in fact they often provide negative value. That is in IT structures. Our primary mechanism for promotion at Big Corp is "influence". But influence is measured in a completely stupid manner by people who have been promoted to senior positions via the same completely stupid process.

People who come up with a "risk reduction" methodology and manage to sell it to someone senior, that requires all engineers to start adhering to this new methodology, which provides very little risk reduction but negatively impacts a huge amount of productivity, is very likely to get promoted.

For example, one person may have inadvertently done something stupid on a production host such as running CPU intensive operations on huge log files. So instead of looking at the correct fix, which would be to immediately form a small, very capable team of engineers tasked with going across the firm and helping teams get log files streamed off correctly, so engineers have very little need to go onto prod hosts, nope, some person with "influence", will decide with no consultation and no notice that all engineer access to prod hosts is gone. So now to support our applications we have to ask a support team to transfer large files around our network in an ad-hoc manner just so we can perform the analysis we need. Not only is this not much risk reduction, it completely hinders engineers ability to do a good job, which negatively impacts the company.

Yet this person if he isn't already senior, will be able to in the yearly review hugely sell his "risk reduction" exercise and will almost certainly be seen by the other idiots as someone equally capable as themselves and worthy of a similar position.

Re: What does a Director of Engineering do?

#99

Post by emddudley »

_jal wrote: post #74
dchyrdvh wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with this "help others" mindset lose competition against their more ruthless peers. If you had a business, would you help others to compete with you?

I've worked with someone who couldn't tell the difference between a coworker and a competitor, and I hope I never do again.

How do you tell the difference? I am not aware of having ever worked with "competitors". My coworkers are my team mates, so naturally I help them when they get stuck.

Re: What does a Director of Engineering do?

#100

Post by emddudley »

dchyrdvh wrote: post #48
bluGill wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is more amazing is their managers who have figured out how to work the system are not telling people that. Your job should be helping your people get where they want to go so if they can't get there tell them why. I've wasted years working hard and trying to gain influence only to realize that the areas I was getting influence in didn't matter to anyone so I was condemned to get good jobs but no promotion. It ha…

People with this "help others" mindset lose competition against their more ruthless peers. If you had a business, would you help others to compete with you?

I would fire anyone in my organization who saw themselves as a ruthless competitor against their peers.
Post reply on HN