Are there any German companies that work like this?
What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
41–50 of 339 posts
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#42I'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…
So true.
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#43From personal experience on the product side, if you want to be more involved with the business, I'd recommend you work on two things from this article. First, curiosity is an absolutely must have. Without it, you'll not be able to truly learn what a customer is looking for. Second, demonstrate you can "talk with another engineer" without manager facilitation. It's a signal of ownership that I guarantee people will notice.
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#44Interesting, what the author describes has been the norm at every company I have worked at, and I've never worked for an SV company.
Same.
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#45From personal experience on the product side, if you want to be more involved with the business, I'd recommend you work on two things from this article. First, curiosity is an absolutely must have. Without it, you'll not be able to truly learn what a customer is looking for. Second, demonstrate you can "talk with another engineer" without manager facilitation. It's a signal of ownership that I guarantee people will n…
I've done both of these my entire career and no one ever cared, mostly because it's not remarkable.
Do you work somewhere that has a large management apparatus? These behaviors are sort of bare minimum expectation in smaller companies. It sounds like you perceived developers as a group to be mostly anti-social curmudgeons.
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#46I'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…
We had a large disconnect between product and engineering. The directors solution was to have mandatory 8 hours of sprint ceremonies a week where we would review the definition of “bug” and “epic”, every week. We also were required to sit in on all team meetings regardless if it was your team. We had two full time scrum masters for a team of six engineers.
I suggested instead engineers get looped earlier into the process with stakeholders. The director said it was a bad idea as we couldn’t possibly hope to understand the business side of things.
Very glad I got out
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#47Money
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#48This is probably because Silicon valley companies have tech cofounders and first early hires are also engineers who become involved in important decision making beyond engineering, like product and even strategy. This creates a culture of empowering engineers.
On the contrary, companies where tech is an afterthought-- well why would you empower your engineers to make business critical decisions if you're running a hospital or a sports team.
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#49These things (1. autonomy for software engineers; 2. curious problem solvers, not mindless resources; 3. internal data, code, and documentation transparency; 4. exposure to the business and to business metrics; 5. engineer-to-engineer comms over triangle-communication; 6. investing in a less frustrating developer experience; 7. higher leverage --> higher {autonomy, pay}; the "biggest" is a repeat of 2) seem like plausible differences between "SV" and "traditional" companies.
I wonder if there's data (survey? perhaps correlated with compensation?) to back up and establish magnitude and trend/diffusion or refute any or all?
Also would be interesting to look at those characteristics for non-employer open source projects and government. There would surely be lots of variation across projects and departments/governments, as there would be across companies, though I'd guess for non-employer open source 1, 2, 3, 5 would be very high, 4, 6, 7 unclear or lacking, and for government possibly even lower than traditional companies across the board? Just speculating, again, curious about data, or more speculation. :)
Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not
#50The best way to tell if a company values engineers is to ask which cost center they are in. Is it IT? Then they will treat you like a cog and consider you just a cost to the company. Is it Product? Then they will consider you valuable and critical to the company's success.
I'm lucky enough to make products for our company while being in IT, so it is a hybrid. With data driven decisions becoming more important to businesses these days, I see IT's transitional role as the cost side (vs. profit side) starting to change.