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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

#301

Post by [deleted] »

engineeringwoke wrote: post #293
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.

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 ;)

[deleted]

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

#302

Post by username90 »

ColFrancis wrote: post #269
romwell wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

> Not after the infamous need-to-know memo. I couldn't find that memo, could you please link to a copy?

It said that everything should only be shared on a need to know basis, basically ending the culture of all documents being open by default unless there is a need to hide it. When that change took into effect all documents I had were automatically set to hidden and I had to reshare them with everyone who needed to see them.

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

#303

Post by toyg »

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 is just dependent on thousands of factors that are fundamentally impossible to control. You can model pretty much every factor of it, individually, but you can't model the whole matrix because some parameters are random and wide (earthquakes, pandemics, etc) and some you cannot account for (were you were born and from whom, what education you get and where, who you can befriend, how your brain works, etc etc).

I think one has to differentiate between "complex" and "complicated". Complex stuff requires Big Brains. Business is not complex, all its processes are simple and fairly well-understood; but it is complicated by the interaction of so many factors.

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

#304

Post by cody3222 »

This feels similar to the "MBA cofounder" profile of someone who has the mindset: if I just had an engineer to build my idea then this would be big.

Every engineer knows it doesn't work that way (but many who charge by the hour w/ consulting may be happy to take the job for a while).

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

#305

Post by pc86 »

dpeck wrote: post #210
danielheath wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many companies, the 'product' department exists to protect the owners from the leverage developers would have if they had access to the business context.

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.

I would tweak that just a bit that bad developers just want to be told what to build.

The best engineers I've ever worked with and for were constantly asking "why" and would get incredibly frustrated in this "Product Owner runs the backlog" type of organization.

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

#306

Post by pc86 »

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…

> requiring the engineering staff to do a Socratic-like process to pull tangible requirements out

If you've got good business analysts, this is what they're supposed to be doing.

I think if you have great product people, great business analysts, and great developers, the system of PO-Analyst-Developer can work. The problem is that BAs and product people aren't generally making a ton of money, so the great ones will move on to more lucrative positions, and great developers get bored quickly if they're just given a list of JIRA tickets. So pretty soon, one of the three things breaks down then all hell breaks loose. The product folks don't have a clear business vision. The analysts are soft technically and don't know what questions to ask. The developers are either building a space shuttle when they need a bike, or they don't know how to build the bike in the first place.

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

#307

Post by kochikame »

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").

I hate the word “alignment” with a passion.

It never means “let’s do things in a coordinated and mutually beneficial way”. It always means “you will do the thing that I want you to do, or the way I want you to do it”.

Weasel word, if ever there was one.

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

#308

Post by klmadfejno »

Stratoscope wrote: post #243
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I eventually got an NPS e-mail from them, I gave them a 1, and explained that I couldn't get through to actual engineers so we gave up, and then a solution engineer followed up and apologized and informed me that if there was anything they could do, to let them know. I never wanted to bang my head against the monitor harder than in that moment.

For anyone like me who had never seen the term "NPS e-mail", this seems to explain it pretty well: https://www.questionpro.com/blog/nps-email/ (I don't know anything about this company and am not endorsing them, just noting it as a reference.)

NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. It's supposed to get a sense of % favorable - % unfavorable and leaving out the middle.

I've seen this at many companies and its one of my biggest pet peeves. Almost nobody uses it correctly. They don't net anything. They take the average. It's not clear at all why it's any different from any other score. I think most people think its some sort of collection or measurement thing rather than a calculation on the data. I hate it. Reeks of innumeracy.

Not that it really matters if you use average vs. nps...

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

#309

Post by cjfd »

coredog64 wrote: post #193
jrott wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure you're going far enough there. Obviously we need a scrum king to guide our scrum lords as they help our scrum masters transform our organization.

What are the perks that flow from the divine right of scrum kings?

The right to make all your slaves refine user stories for the next forty years, of course.....
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