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

What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 339 posts

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

#141

Post by titanomachy »

plorkyeran wrote: post #29
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 a…

> Direct engineer -> engineer communication between teams is O(N^2) to organize things between N engineers.

This isn't true in my experience. I'd say it's more like a binary search than a fully-connected network. I talk to my immediate team first. If they can't help, I dig through the company-wide documentation and codebase, then message people who have done or considered something similar to what I'm trying to do; they either give me the information I need, or direct me to someone more likely to have it. Each hop gets me closer to an answer, and I typically end up having to talk to 1-3 engineers rather than the O(500) who work in my organization.

Part of the reason this works is because there are a handful of very senior engineers who have a good sense of what's going on across a big part of the company. Complex requests often get routed through one of these people, and they always seem to know who to talk to. I guess that's a form of hierarchy, but without the "command-and-control" aspect. I see it as an occasional escape hatch rather than a primary means of problem-solving.

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

#142

Post by mark-r »

bigiain wrote: post #113
KaiserPro wrote: post #54

The article uses JIRA is a touchstone that seems to equate to no autonomy. I think this is wrong. I have worked at a good number of places, including a FAAMG. The freedom that was given to me directly correlates to company size & seniority. When I was younger, I didn't get much autonomy, why? because I was a naive arrogant prick. I would dream up solutions to problems that didn't exist. I would make existing problems…

Jira, for all it's warts, is a massively configurable piece of software that can be deployed/used in a hugely broad variety of ways. I once worked at a place where Jira was without doubt a positive force within the company. There was an Altassian-trained Jira specialist working there who collaborated setting up each Jira project, and provided ongoing advice/assistanece to users (both PMs and devs). This was in a comp…

Yes, Jira is very configurable. But whether you'll be allowed to configure it is an open question.

I worked on a team that had a very finely tuned Jira workflow. Then one day we discovered that all our customizations had been eliminated. The company had decided that it wanted all configurations to be based on a company standard, and no deviations would be allowed. We weren't even warned ahead of time.

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

#143

Post by MauranKilom »

_antix wrote: post #105

This article hit me hard. I work in a non Silicon Valley-like company. I became a developer because I thought I love coding. But I found out that, in fact, I love problem solving. Tightly defined Scrum tasks make me sad and I would love to have more autonomy.

I strongly encourage you to go out and find such a job then! You certainly don't have to move to SV to find one, and we spend too much of our lives at work to forego the opportunity of having work we're passionate about.

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

#144

Post by RHSeeger »

OJFord wrote: post #121
arexxbifs wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dearly hope my cast iron skillet will never require a firmware upgrade.

But it's sold by a company with a website, and if it's in-house, (probably quite a big 'if') its developers probably don't want to be lumped in with its phone line, office PC etc. sysadmins (and I'm sure it's mutual). I think that's the point. Cookware's just a further-from-tech example of it.

I'd be perfectly happy being lumped in with the Sys Admins. They are, in most companies, the most misunderstood role. There's an expression that basically says "When things are going great, everyone wonders what sysadmin does. When things are going poorly, everyone wonders what sysdamin does". A good sysadmin team is amazing and, in many cases, vital to a successful business.

I think the only other role that gets ignored as much is the Executive Assistant(s). Much like sysadmin, good ones make sure everything runs smoothly, and should be prized like gold.

Being viewed as a value multiplier (like good instances of the above should be) is a fine goal in life.

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

#145

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

spfzero wrote: post #127
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…

When I was managing engineers, I would insist that the engineer talk 1:1 to the engineer on the client (or customer) side when doing fixes or feature enhancements that happened to be requested from outside the company. This always caused consternation among scrummasters and product managers, and there always had to be a discussion about it. But it sped things up tremendously, because the engineer could do things like…

I've been the client engineer before, trying to get through the opaque 'solution support' folks to the actual engineers of the product. No dice. We could never get the problem solved and we ended up ditching the product.

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

#146

Post by MauranKilom »

lukashrb wrote: post #41

Are there any German companies that work like this?

Yes, there are. By density you'll probably find most of them in Munich or Berlin. Some fields are of course more amenable to one or the other style (e.g. automotive middleware is not going to be done SV-like), and I wouldn't have high hopes with large, old, traditionally non-software companies. I would look at startups/small/medium companies where the founder(s) come from an engineering background.

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

#147

Post by abalashov »

jtdev wrote: post #138
sidlls wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're almost asking the parent to prove a negative, by positing the imminent or foreseeable death of the established economy and asking someone to argue against it.

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

#148

Post by Osiris »

jedberg wrote: post #111
PascLeRasc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If I was interviewing you and you told me "my current company has very bad development practices" and then gave me a list of all the things you think they are doing wrong and all the ways it could improve, I'd probably be really impressed. Then I'd ask you why you don't change those things, and I would hope you'd tell me a story about how you tried to change it but got blocked, or maybe small changes you are making t…

I've actually asked this question in an interview before to a candidate. "Is there anything about the process you work in now that you would change, and how would you do it differently?"

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

#150

Post by Osiris »

_antix wrote: post #105

This article hit me hard. I work in a non Silicon Valley-like company. I became a developer because I thought I love coding. But I found out that, in fact, I love problem solving. Tightly defined Scrum tasks make me sad and I would love to have more autonomy.

I'm the same way. I spend a good amount of my time being pulled into production issues or debugging a particularly difficult issue with the product. In both of those cases, the "code" changes often take only a few minutes, the problem solving can take hours.

I get a lot of satisfaction from that. Of course that means that as a team lead/manager, I have to have a lot of self discipline to allow my team members to do the same and not try to solve every problem.

Post reply on HN