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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

#21

Post by opportune »

quicklime wrote: post #18

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…

Yes! The proliferation and role of "business people" in traditional companies is IMO their defining characteristic. It shows how much or how little a business trusts engineers (and also engineer's "status" within the company, e.g. are they respected and valued or treated as a disposable resource) to run the business as general problem solvers.

The ironic thing about Agile is that it has a cottage industry of "scrum consultants", "scrum masters", project owners, etc. which advocate ostensibly for letting developers self-organize but which also has a vested interest for career and self-preservation reasons in inserting itself above software engineers in the decision making process.

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

#23

Post by walshemj »

esoterica wrote: post #4
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C'mon, you're too cool for higher pay and worker's rights. :D

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

Compared to other professions? maybe SV is just treating "Engineers" more like other older professions and has less of the class distinctions you see in the UK for example.

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

#24

Post by courtf »

opportune wrote: post #21
quicklime wrote: post #18

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…

Yes! The proliferation and role of "business people" in traditional companies is IMO their defining characteristic. It shows how much or how little a business trusts engineers (and also engineer's "status" within the company, e.g. are they respected and valued or treated as a disposable resource) to run the business as general problem solvers. The ironic thing about Agile is that it has a cottage industry of "scrum c…

I've long imagined a position just above the scrum masters: the scrum lord.

I see this position as a critical component of any agile strategy that seeks to maximize scrum master productivity, while still allowing scrum masters all the autonomy they need for their day-to-day duties.

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

#25

Post by markalexander »

codesnik wrote: post #15
markalexander wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

People in general or people in tech? Well what’s the typical mortgage multiple, 6 or 7 times salary? So for the latter, it seems pretty attainable to get an apartment at the lower end of the market to start out on. Correct me if I’m wrong, though.

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

#26

Post by dilyevsky »

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…

Depending on your budget the min SAG rate can be anywhere from ~100-1000/day so many sw engineers in fact make much more than most actors

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

#27

Post by walshemj »

quicklime wrote: post #18

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…

Then they don't understand what RAD / SCRUM is for - and I would bet had crappy outcomes before the switch.

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

#28

Post by Smaug123 »

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…

Related: the "Moral Maze" of Robert Jackall fame, recently "popularised" (if Less Wrong can be considered "popular") by Zvi Mowshowitz (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/23/mazes-sequence-summa...).

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

#29

Post by plorkyeran »

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…

The "SV style" runs into scaling problems. Engineers making product decisions requires that they have a solid grasp on everything the business cares about, which gets harder as the business gets bigger. Direct engineer -> engineer communication between teams is O(N^2) to organize things between N engineers.

As you grow I think reducing engineer autonomy is unavoidable, and the goal is merely to stick to reducing it and not eliminating it.

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