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What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#11

Post by markalexander »

glitchc wrote: post #8
esoterica wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep pretending like Silicon Valley engineers aren’t one of the single highest paid demographics in the entire country?

Initially this was true, certainly SV would use higher salaries to draw developers and engineers to the valley. But cost of living has exploded since then. A modern developer living in SV does not command a higher standard of living as food and housing costs are significantly higher than most of the rest of the country. A similar trend plays out on the east coast so it’s not just SV. It’s balanced by the CoL adjustme…

Sort of. Often a big chunk of your CoL is going into a massively appreciating asset. People always seem to ignore this when talking about the top n most expensive cities in the world. You can literally sell your apartment and go live in a mansion most other places on the planet when you feel like it.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#12

Post by Smaug123 »

A nontrivial part of this blog post is essentially saying "Silicon Valley practices leader-leader management more than most industries", in the sense of David Marquet's "Turn The Ship Around!". Points 1, 2, and 5 are precisely aspects of leader-leader management.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#14

Post by courtf »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #10
esoterica wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people keep pretending like Silicon Valley engineers aren’t one of the single highest paid demographics in the entire country?

Pay is nowhere remotely close to being proportional to impact on revenue though. Many engineers are much more offended by unmeritocratic pay than by absolute value of pay being low - hence why you can convince amazing engineers to work for peanuts at start-ups. I want the greatest share of the returns of my own labor I can get. If that results in very high salary, great, it’s earned. If I take a risk at a place where…

Exactly. The funny thing is the same people making the counter to your argument no doubt don't bat an eye at 8 figure annual salaries for the best sports players. The argument is the same in either case.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#15

Post by codesnik »

markalexander wrote: post #11
glitchc wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Initially this was true, certainly SV would use higher salaries to draw developers and engineers to the valley. But cost of living has exploded since then. A modern developer living in SV does not command a higher standard of living as food and housing costs are significantly higher than most of the rest of the country. A similar trend plays out on the east coast so it’s not just SV. It’s balanced by the CoL adjustme…

Sort of. Often a big chunk of your CoL is going into a massively appreciating asset. People always seem to ignore this when talking about the top n most expensive cities in the world. You can literally sell your apartment and go live in a mansion most other places on the planet when you feel like it.

hm. do many people in silicon valley buy their apartment or house there these days? Is it even accessible?

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#16

Post by opportune »

I have noticed that as SV companies get larger they tend to adopt the more "old school" approach. Not that it's a binary - it's a spectrum, and depending on management chain/how an org runs, people can have different experiences.

I think it's caused by

1. When you have very deep management chains you start to have lots of people with opinions on what you should do, how you should do it, who you should do it with. Even if on average most of them aren't micromanagers, it only takes a few.

2. As you grow you start pulling in more people with experience outside of SV who bring in culture with them. Note that "SV" is also not monolithic here. Companies like Microsoft (ok, technically not SV) are farther to the "traditional" side of the spectrum.

3. "Horizontals"

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#17

Post by libraryofbabel »

I agree with a lot of this article and it reflects the culture at the kind of places I like to work.

But - I'm curious what costs folks have seen in making this switch to giving engineers more autonomy and expecting them to be problem solvers for the wider business rather than code-factory workers. My hunch is that it's usually worth it - but what are the risks?

It's easy to mention a couple of anecdotes about some engineer who made an improvement or feature that represented millions of dollars for the company bottom line. But what about people going down strange rabbit holes, engaging in resume-driven development or following the allure of cool tech that isn't really needed for the use case (e.g. "let's use Cassandra for this!"), Not Invented Here syndrome, premature optimization, spinning up unnecessary microservices because that's the way to get promoted, building a fancy internal system that internal stakeholders don't actually need or want, etc. It's really really hard to simultaneously see the business big picture and also be down in the technical details, and very easy for engineers to fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect and go off in the wrong direction. Perhaps the few people who are able to do this well are able to compensate for all the waste, but I don't think we can assume that it leads to good results for the business in every case.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#18

Post by quicklime »

I've worked at both SV and traditional companies, and I feel like this very closely matches my experience.

One of the things I worry about is that even at companies that are doing "Agile transformations" and adopting methodologies like Scrum, in practice have "Product Owners" who are there to give instructions via Jira tickets. Other roles like "Business Analysts" are there to ensure that lowly developers never have to worry about things like understanding the business themselves.

So I get funny looks when I suggest that engineers should go talk to people in the business, and write design docs. Silicon Valley engineering practices can look very non-Agile to a lot people from traditional companies that are doing Agile.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#19

Post by erikerikson »

opportune wrote: post #16

I have noticed that as SV companies get larger they tend to adopt the more "old school" approach. Not that it's a binary - it's a spectrum, and depending on management chain/how an org runs, people can have different experiences. I think it's caused by 1. When you have very deep management chains you start to have lots of people with opinions on what you should do, how you should do it, who you should do it with. Eve…

Perhaps: as size increases, relationships don't scale and mechanisms of control and coordination become more shallow.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#20

Post by coderintherye »

libraryofbabel wrote: post #17

I agree with a lot of this article and it reflects the culture at the kind of places I like to work. But - I'm curious what costs folks have seen in making this switch to giving engineers more autonomy and expecting them to be problem solvers for the wider business rather than code-factory workers. My hunch is that it's usually worth it - but what are the risks? It's easy to mention a couple of anecdotes about some e…

What you noted of engineers going down rabbit holes of cool tech for cool tech sake is certainly an issue, which is why management must help keep in mind that the autonomy is given with a goal of "solve business problems." It requires a bit of careful management but it usually becomes clear over time who enjoys playing with new tech for the sake of new tech and who does it to try to find a solution to a problem. The former group can be put into a research team if the company is large enough otherwise they are likely not a good fit.

As for risks, the biggest problem I've seen from this cultural change in a company is the disharmony it creates between the people who enjoy task-driven work and just working their 9-5 vs. the people who enjoy creative problem solving. It usually works better to have that culture from the start and also why it is so hard to change a company's culture to this way of working because it disrupts a way being that almost everyone in the company is used to.

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