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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

#321

Post by anthonypasq »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #126
opportune wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! The proliferation and role of "business people" in traditional companies is IMO their defining characteristic. It shows how much or how little a business trusts engineers (and also engineer's "status" within the company, e.g. are they respected and valued or treated as a disposable resource) to run the business as general problem solvers. The ironic thing about Agile is that it has a cottage industry of "scrum c…

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.

yep, and thank god. Because I sure as hell dont want to do that as a developer

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

#322

Post by ndiscussion »

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 ;)

Doesn't this basically argue that "business" is basically the same thing as schmoozing?

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

#323

Post by tehjoker »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #312
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.

Maybe. If you have ever been in a relationship, you know how irrational people are: ergo, ability in logic and mathematics plays little role. Went to MIT in engineering/science, and I would do a mental face-palm when I heard other engineers try to ‘sell’ what they are working on. It’s the “curse of knowledge” where you forget how to relay ideas because you forget your axioms have been updated but the person you are t…

Oh yea, I don't mean to say that every single individual can run every single aspect of the business personally. Marketing and social skills are not evenly distributed, but they can all understand it at least, provide input, and have a conversation about it, and I believe, often avoid critical errors.

This goes a little further beyond this point I was making, but I also see collective decision making like this as being more fair. Everyone at the buisness is affected by these decisions, so everyone should share in the decision making process. Natural leaders and experts should become apparent and people will listen to them if they don't attempt to bludgeon them with their credentials.

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

#324

Post by mmcnl »

baxtr wrote: post #245
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…

I think it also depends a lot on the type of dev and if they want to take responsibility. I have experienced many devs that just didn’t care about the business and design side of things. “Leave me alone and go talk to the product owner”, was something I gotten quite often. But, to be fair I often also got “We want to be more involved in decision making”.

Exactly, a lot of devs complain about meetings and just want to code.

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

#325

Post by 29athrowaway »

pietrovismara wrote: post #299
29athrowaway wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let A and B ∈ Team. After standup, ask A what B did yesterday, what is B working on today whether or not B is blocked. And viceversa.

Then wait for 30 min, do the same. Then wait 3 hours, do the same.

What will happen? they will forget about it because it is irrelevant to them.

Therefore the scrum ceremonies are just bullshit and a waste of time.

Quod erat demonstrandum. Fuck scrum.

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

#326

Post by dilyevsky »

comp_throw7 wrote: post #263
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 muc…

This seems like it's incorrectly estimating orders of magnitude. Some actual numbers: In 2019, Google's gross revenue was ~$162b. ~$76b went to "costs of revenue", ~$26b went to R&D, and ~$11b to stock-based compensation. It's unclear what % of costs of revenue is attributable to "salaries of software engineers", though. Let's approach it another way. Google employs 30k+ SWEs, the vast majority of which are in the US…

Also consider that top athletes can only sustain that level of pay for max 10y while engineers generally can increase their comp for much longer. All in all I don’t think it’s a good comparison bc film/sport industries have constrained supply and demand - there’s only so many teams/films each year and only so many players/credited roles.

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

#327

Post by rmk »

What this article is saying in a very roundabout way is that companies whose primary products are software, hardware or hardware/software artifacts will 'get' engineers better than companies whose primary products are not these things.

If you have worked for a few years in this industry, you would know this.

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

#328

Post by hderms »

austincheney wrote: post #272
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…

Regular practice in other industries don’t need Agile to work fast, be creative, or hold people to account for their work. How is software different in this regard?

I think in a lot of industries the work "speaks for itself" like a creative agency or people producing widgets. For creative work you can walk through the assets produced and everyone can theoretically see that there is value being created. I believe software development gravitates towards heavy processes mostly because it's hard for "decision makers" to accurately gauge good software from bad, or even understand what progress is being made at all.

Having more engineers in decision making positions certainly helps, but I think it boils down to whether the organization is set up for trust.

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

#329

Post by hderms »

plutonorm wrote: post #253
gwbas1c wrote: post #125

I once had a rather prestigious developer position in a Silicon Valley company. The "approachability" was a double edged sword. One problem I fought was that a lot of people expected handholding from me, or wanted me in their meeting to "feel important." There really is value to having your manager act as a gatekeeper. Another problem I had was that less ambitious people in other departments (support, qa,) would thro…

Yeah, but if you are like me someone who always wanted to get out of software completely, this would have been a god send. But over here in the UK I've never been at a company that has allowed me to even have a sniff of the business side. And I'm nearly 20 years into an IT career spanning 8 different companies.

As an outsider observer I always get the feeling companies in the UK are particularly guilty of viewing developers as a resource which merely produces code and which should be kept separate from the business. Not sure why that is but I feel like I read something to that effect every month.

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

#330

Post by eru »

ta988 wrote: post #218
eru wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm, that is a weird conclusion to draw from the observations. The article and the conversation here suggests that the Silicon Valley model is a good way to give developers more leverage and also to get more out of them. That model is generally far from cooperatives and still has plenty of hierarchy. Getting 'organised' and into cooperatives might still work, I don't know? I'm just saying that the available evidence…

I would be interested if you have a few names of software cooperatives (still running or not). I don't think a company's purpose is necessary to eat the world but that's going into opinions so I will refrain.

> I don't think a company's purpose is necessary to eat the world but that's going into opinions so I will refrain.

I agree. I just mention it because the companies that 'eat the world' will be the ones people have heard of. And those are not collectives.

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