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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

#131

Post by fhrow4484 »

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…

Completely agree, see it at companies like Google turning more and more into deep management chains. Some of the good remains (code & documentation transparency, engineer to engineer communication), but much off the decision making is shifting up the chain

Do you mind expanding on what you mean by "Horizontals" here?

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

#132

Post by [deleted] »

celim307 wrote: post #46
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…

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 pro…

[deleted]

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

#133

Post by andrewjl »

abalashov wrote: post #97
jtdev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies will die...

It's probably easy to believe that if you're developing a SaaS app on the Pacific Coast, but in actually-existing reality -- no, they won't. Their business processes and products are often sclerotic, and so are vulnerable to disruption by smaller, more nimble startups. That's the central premise of virtually all B2B software from the Valley. But they certainly aren't going to die. In fact, large companies and enormou…

> In fact, large companies and enormous capital are required to take things from a "disruptive innovation" to a household name, to say nothing of providing an exit for SV startups.

I think this is becoming less and less true, unless one is competing with the tech giants directly. In the past enormous capital investment was required to build out the minimum viable capacity needed to serve larger customers or market segments. Today you can rent that capacity. In the future more and more types of capacity can become rentable, such as logistics, compliance, manufacturing, etc.

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

#134

Post by romwell »

fhrow4484 wrote: post #131
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…

Completely agree, see it at companies like Google turning more and more into deep management chains. Some of the good remains (code & documentation transparency, engineer to engineer communication), but much off the decision making is shifting up the chain Do you mind expanding on what you mean by "Horizontals" here?

>Some of the good remains (code & documentation transparency)

Not after the infamous need-to-know memo.

Team docs visibility defaulted to "only to people I explicitly share with" for almost a year now.

It's only a question of time until code branches follow suit.

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

#135

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

dilyevsky wrote: post #130
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m exclusively drawing the comparison with high demand actors / athletes. Perhaps athletes has the better clarity - many NBA players are paid more than their head coach, and even those paid less are still paid much more competitively to their revenue contribution than engineers by comparison.

Superstar athletes/actors have much higher roi - nobody is buying your product bc of star c++ developer you hired. Besides there are only like 50 or superstar players/actors at any given moment. Pretty sure you can find this many engineers who made millions

I guess we need data to back this up - I’m not buying it without more data. Even the top, top valued sports franchises only have estimated market caps in the range of $5 billion.

In other words, for small cap companies, yes, the ROI of athletes to their franchises is relatively higher than engineers to their companies. But for most of the SP500 this is not true, and there are lots of software-heavy companies with much higher market cap to the extent that even with 10k or 100k employees, I doubt an athlete’s ROI for a small sports franchise is proportional to the ROI of employees in the large company.

For example, virtually any engineer at a FAANG company should be making top pro athlete money (not considering endorsements). There are literally thousands of engineers at Amazon and hundreds at Netflix that have this ROI on the soaring revenues of these megacorps, to a much greater degree than athletes have on their teams.

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

#136

Post by bcrosby95 »

qppo wrote: post #53
jedberg wrote: post #33

The 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.

A question I like for non-tech businesses is: "do you see this as a software business or transitioning to become one?" Because these days every business has to be investing into software products, and the ones that don't recognize that the software is key to all their products are the ones that are dead folks walking. They're also great targets for SaaS consultant vultures.

I think a better question is: do you consider your software systems a competitive advantage?

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

#137

Post by mark-r »

jedberg wrote: post #33

The 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.

That's a good theory, but it doesn't always work that way. I was working on the most profitable product the company had, but was laid off anyway. The new 6 month CTO had a new idea for how software development should be done and I wasn't part of it. Meanwhile at my prior job in IT my boss begged me to stay, I think because I made him look good.

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

#138

Post by jtdev »

sidlls wrote: post #115
jtdev wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies will die...

Those companies have been around forever, and have will be around longer than most SV-like companies.

I’m genuinely interested in hearing about any examples of such businesses you might have.

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

#139

Post by WhitneyLand »

So then what... Yes it’s been true and knowable for many years now but, not many orgs change to a highly leveraged style. So then how to succeed at it?

Hard to address in a comment, easier to check for some big red flags.

What percentage of people involved have lived it before? If 0%, then I’m not sure it’s even possible. Similar to trying copy Disneyland. You could read a novel describing it but if no one‘s actually been there it’ll be a rough ride.

What’s the plan for anyone leading people? Some people freak out when people are newly crossing the triangle below them, more so if they don’t know why it’s important or how to adapt to it.

What are the checks to make sure your org is not just choosing a fancy name (I.e. digital transformation) and merely mapping old processes back onto it but with more overhead?

It seems like maybe that’s the mistake is to think about this as a process difference when really it’s a systemic and cultural difference.

Take the example of a stakeholder talking to a new hire. If stakeholders do it to ‘do the new process’ it’s not there yet. If they do it reflexively because they expect they may get useful feedback, then that’s a good sign.

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

#140

Post by ah88 »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #104
jedberg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done it myself, but I've hired people who were stuck in IT. Just don't talk negatively about your old job. "I'm looking to move because I want to have more impact". "The work I'm doing now is not core to company's success and I want to have more impact". Etc. I never looked down on someone who was doing boring work if that is what they were supposed to be doing. I'm looking for people who can communicate we…

I guess I’m worried about talking about how we have really poor development practices. It’s hard to describe what I do, they try to block people from learning about what their kanban card is for. I just write proprietary scripting language functions then fill out a Word document “unit test” about them. I guess I can editorialize and try to steer the conversation towards what I can bring to the company. Thanks for the…

That sounds not great. Two years into your career you need a better experience and great mentors. Get any job that is writing code. What's great is that you're only two years in, I see people like this 10 years into their career. They get laid off and can't find a job because they don't have any skills others value;
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