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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

#291

Post by Vinnl »

cbozeman wrote: post #248
tehjoker wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business people love to think that their knowledge is somehow on a plane that others can't approach, but we see how many dumb decisions are made on a daily basis. The business would be comprehensible and steerable to everyone in the company, including the janitor, if education were institutionalized.

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.

I don't know... We don't assume that people who make it through business classes can figure out engineering either.

That said, I do always try to bring along "business people" in engineering challenges and considerations, for which you don't need a full engineering degree. I do appreciate when I get the same treatment.

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

#292

Post by achow »

jayd16 wrote: post #240
achow wrote: post #187

No focus on a structured product definition and leaving it to engineers to 'figure it out' does not bode well for the end user or business itself. This is a real experience in a FAANG company - we were developing a new product in enterprise space targeted to small enterprise IT admins who may not be highly trained or experienced. One of tiny feature was the ability to download and self manage security certificates (u…

This actually just sounds like a successful example of agile design... A subtlety complex feature took a couple sprints to iterate on stakeholder feedback and fully define the business need. The story doesn't seem that bad to me.

In this particular example, the engineer and designer had very little incentive to make it bulletproof (as there was no check), and there was no guarantee that the decision taken were not wrong (ex. not complying to Security Standard XYZ.NNN)

There was no "stakeholder" feedback as there is seldom an owner for these kind of decisions. If PM is the 'stakeholder' then these folks would have asked her "why are you not defining this?"

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

#293

Post by engineeringwoke »

cbozeman wrote: post #248
tehjoker wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business people love to think that their knowledge is somehow on a plane that others can't approach, but we see how many dumb decisions are made on a daily basis. The business would be comprehensible and steerable to everyone in the company, including the janitor, if education were institutionalized.

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.

Eh. A lot of engineers really don't have the social skills to navigate the business situations. Some do, sure, and should be given the opportunity to shine. But I would still say the majority don't.

And what kind of "high level physics" do engineers know? A typical masters track doesn't cover the hard maths like in GR, sounds more arrogant than anything... kind of proving my point ;)

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

#294

Post by richardwhiuk »

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…

This kind of works fine until you have many customers.

If you have If you have > 10,000 customers, then this works fine, because you can rely on analytics.

If you have 100 - 500 customers, then it kind of breaks. You can't rely on analytics because those customers are too important, and you can't rely on 1-1 interaction with engineers because there are too many customers to consult on each change.

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

#295

Post by ido »

throwaway11121 wrote: post #264
dpeck wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree, same thing has led to massive growth of product mangers, product owners, and various other titles that do similar things. The devs still tend to have to ask a lot of questions to get anywhere useful but in these situations the P* roles at least give them some traction to work from and get movement.

Frankly, since I've moved to the Netherlands, every project I worked in seemed to exist exclusively to justify a comfy, lazy job for incompetent Dutch POs, scrum masters,"customer journey experts", copywriters, designers. There is way too much money in this country and an incredible amount of bullshit jobs.

Moved from where? It doesn't sound any different that what you'd get in any western country.

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

#296

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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.

I think a more correct statement would be that people are complicated, and therefore business is also complicated.

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

#297

Post by tsss »

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…

My problem with non-software companies is that they don't treat programmers as equals. To them they will always be "code monkeys" and below the mechanical or electrical engineers. These companies are led by people who think all programmers are stereotypical "nerds" and try to create software departments according to the script of The Big Bang Theory. Just look at this crap I was sent by a recruiter: https://www.mercedes-benz.io/ It's chock full of buzz words and infantilizing language. I don't want to "impact", "move the world" or whatever bullshit the marketing department can pull out its ass. I want good pay, good work-life balance and I want to be treated as a professional.

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

#298

Post by coldcode »

Aeolun wrote: post #169
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are people whose entire job consists of sitting in meetings and firing off emails. They can't conceive that other people do work collaborating outside of a meeting room.

Not just collaborating. Any kind of work. We plan 8 hours a day of work for developers, but they spend 4 hours in meetings, 2 hours fielding questions and just 2 actually working.

At my job its more like 10-12 hours a day, since you are counted on to do 6-8 hrs of programming despite all the other stuff.

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

#299

Post by pietrovismara »

29athrowaway wrote: post #212
LimaBearz wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s just the tip of the ice berg... I call it the tyranny of project managers. When I worked for a large multinational in SF, 100M+ users we operated very much in the “SV” style the article describes. I got to see how our satellite offices in other parts of the world operate; EVERYTHING was in calendar, work was tracked in 15 minute intervals, meeting about meetings, and follow up meetings after the meeting, and a…

Just print this FAQ and hang it by your desk. FAQ Q: What are you working on? A: Look at the issue tracker Q: Are you working on X? A: Look at the issue tracker Q: Are you still working on X? A: Look at the issue tracker Q: Is X finished? A: Look at the issue tracker Q: Did QA look at X? A: Look at the issue tracker

Basically every single standup, "update", meeting I've ever had with a manager could have been avoided by them looking at the issue tracker beforehand. Which I'm sure they did anyway, since they spend most of their days organizing the board. They just ask you questions to which they already know the answer.

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

#300

Post by pietrovismara »

avivo wrote: post #124

This mostly matches my experience...but I wonder if it ignores significant costs. In particular, how this impact long term maintenance vs. the desire to build new interesting things? (e.g., see https://themaintainers.org/ ). And what about people who just enjoy the act of coding — of wizzing through tickets and gathering points? For another potential cost, take the example given of the Like button in the piece. I'd b…

> And what about people who just enjoy the act of coding — of wizzing through tickets and gathering points?

That's not coding. Those people enjoy closing tickets and gathering points. That's fine, but they should try videogames, it's a similar experience but 100x more entertaining. Shame it generally doesn't pay.

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