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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

#281

Post by PeterisP »

spamizbad wrote: post #227
dpeck wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience it is the opposite of that. Many ‘product’ groups exist because engineering teams kept complaining about meetings and just wanted to be told what the build. Collectively as a profession we have ceded away many of the things that made software development unique and powerful over the last 10 or so years.

This is true, but I've also seen "product leaders" in organizations not articulate a clear vision, requiring the engineering staff to do a Socratic-like process to pull tangible requirements out of said "product leader". It's a tedious process so I'm not surprised engineers throw their hands up and just have a PM do it. I do think SV puts more trust in their engineering teams to produce polished software, whereas oth…

On the other hand, I can certainly imagine situations where the requirements aren't "hardcoded" but rather they are flexible and heavily driven by what's feasible and what's hard from the engineering perspective (so they can't be "pulled out" from the product leader), and determining that vision properly requires involvement of engineers and can't [technically can, but the outcomes suck] be prepared by someone else and just handed off to engineering.

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

#282

Post by rorykoehler »

jrcplus wrote: post #277

I was at Apple during the golden SJ era and it was like this. I remember asking my manager (in my first year or so, fresh out of school) about something and he replied "That's what we're paying you for!" I was at Skype during the eBay years and it was similar. Lots of autonomy. Then Skype got sold, Silverlake instituted Scrum training for everyone, and well, look what happened. Product owners took over; the engineers…

We have product and tech roles in our company. Product always goes to tech for design and implementation advice. This is taken care of during sprint planning. I see product getting a lot of hate from engineering types recently. It just smacks of myopia. Engineers are being well paid because the company makes good money from the whole solution not just the technical implementation. What an engineer thinks is important may not be that important from the business perspective which is where product comes in. If product wants to do something that will cause technical problems that's where engineering comes in. It's a team effort. As an analogy no soccer team fields only goalkeepers or only strikers etc.

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

#284

Post by oblio »

lordnacho wrote: post #259
cbozeman wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to admit, its pretty arrogant to think someone can make it through high-level physics, chemistry, mathematics, logic, etc., but can't figure out your business classes. Almost makes me laugh out loud.

So much this. I actually studied a joint course of Engineering and business, which was supposed to be two thirds of the Engineering course, two thirds of the business course. When you put it together the Engineering was still about two thirds of the total, with the business stuff mainly being simple things that took a long time to read. Everyone thought it was unsubstantiated just-so stories (Betamax, five forces, et…

Business is super complicated. It's more complicated than science, because it's not science.

Science is "easy" because we can model it, to a degree.

Non-science is so hard that we can't even model it, it's that complicated. So instead we try to voodoo our way around it, rely on simple heuristics, history, etc.

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

#285

Post by PeterisP »

andirk wrote: post #215
pm90 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s some value in capturing these conversations for the record. If eg the engineer engaged in these conversations decided to leave, it would preserve the record for the person replacing them. I do agree that if this process is used to score political points though, then it loses all value. Maybe a compromise is to capture the summary of these conversations somewhere. But honestly if an org has become this politic…

The idea of capturing ppl's conversations is weird. Details of that work are captured in the project stories and version control commits.

There's a big difference between internal work and external work, where that discussion can matter a lot in antagonistic disputes (in court or outside of it) over whether a particular change (and its consequences) was requested or not, and if so, by whom and when.

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

#286

Post by kubanczyk »

closeparen wrote: post #56
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…

4. Middle managers are going to do something with their days. Once the growth frenzy stops and they're longer occupied by procuring and filling headcount, they go the next thing they know, implementing systems of surveillance ("accountability") and control ("alignment").

Or, in short, "middle managers gotta middle manage".

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

#287

Post by marcus_holmes »

loceng wrote: post #258
boffinism wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe the product managers would have defined the spec both faster and equally correctly in all the details, if they'd done it in advance before getting the engineers involved? (My guess from experience of comparable situations would be no, but keen to hear alternative perspectives)

That would depend on the experience and domain expertise of said project manager, no?

Also on their willingness to defer to the engineers when the problem involves some technical details that need to be got right.

I've seen it too many times where the non-technical manager gets to make technical decisions and refuses to listen to the engineers.

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

#288

Post by koushikn »

dependsontheq wrote: post #246

This is a good article but there is a causality problem. I know a lot of pure software companies in the EU that work like that. If software is your core business, developers are in the loop at every decision, if your core business is building power plants...they are not. Now the Marc Andressen argument might be that software eats the world and everybody should run their business like this, and that might actually be…

Good point on having developers in loop in a software business. Tesla might be a counter example, where it is often touted to be run like a "tech" company. Are developers in loop in the design of non-software stuff? (is chassis design an example? or maybe not?) The other point on triangular communication with middle managers I think is known problem that Musk has publicly spoken about..

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

#289

Post by 3pt14159 »

oblio wrote: post #284
lordnacho wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this. I actually studied a joint course of Engineering and business, which was supposed to be two thirds of the Engineering course, two thirds of the business course. When you put it together the Engineering was still about two thirds of the total, with the business stuff mainly being simple things that took a long time to read. Everyone thought it was unsubstantiated just-so stories (Betamax, five forces, et…

Business is super complicated. It's more complicated than science, because it's not science. Science is "easy" because we can model it, to a degree. Non-science is so hard that we can't even model it, it's that complicated. So instead we try to voodoo our way around it, rely on simple heuristics, history, etc.

Business isn't really all that complicated. It's just opaque and intersects with other things that are complicated, like finance and law.

But the man who invented 1-800-GOT-JUNK and plastered the phone number on the side of every one of his bins was not some better of Richard Feynman. He understood one thing really well: If you solve a problem, have simple messaging, and unabashedly self-promote you will win.

The lawyers, and accountants, and technologists, will all come and help you with the complicated stuff in exchange for a piece of that mountain of cash.

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

#290

Post by gcatalfamo »

The article forgets one detail though: while attributing much of the fault in the traditional managers saying their engineers "Here's a ticket. Do this. Don't think.", there is also a class of engineers that actually seek this "state", less rewarding but also much less challenging altogether. If you try the SV model with them you will fail.
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