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On Becoming a VP of Engineering

honeycomb.io

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Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#4

Post by will_gottschalk »

A quote really jumped out at me:

> VPs of Engineering from frontend backgrounds are relatively rare, and it’s partly because the most pressing technical challenges a startup faces are often around scaling, reliability, and backend architecture. If we had been dealing with nonstop incidents, constant struggles with scaling, and major architectural challenges with our query and storage engine, someone with deeper backend and operational experience likely would have been chosen for the job, not me. Because of Ben, Ian, and other incredibly talented ICs on our team, and some of the solid design decisions the founding team made that bought us a lot of technical runway, these concerns were not top of mind for our leaders. Goals like executing well against our product strategy and leveling up our user experience were instead the concerns of the day, and there I could be more helpful.

I’ve worked at companies in the past where frontend is looked down upon because all of our leaders are backend/infra people. What I’ve noticed is that the code quality from those backend devs is quite awful. I wonder if there exists an inverse relationship between leadership representation and engineering talent?

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#6

Post by yawnxyz »

> While Charity has deep experience in the domains of infrastructure & operations, databases, and backend engineering, I come originally from design, frontend, and product engineering, and I take a particular joy in collaborating with product management and ux design.

I had trouble figuring what they actually did, and what they currently do in their VP role. There's a lot of lip service, but it's not entirely clear what the person now spends most of their days doing.

Even the quote "coming from design, frontend and product engineering" doesn't tell me much (I'm also exactly that; I work on projects from doing sketches to Figma layouts to building front-end/mid-end in Sveltekit, build APIs in FastAPI, etc. etc.) — what did they excel at to get the VP job, and what do they miss the most about being in the trenches to... doing what they do now?

There's a ton of words on here but I don't really know what it says.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#7

Post by gampleman »

> If I went looking for another startup to join at some point in the future, I would specifically look for an exec team or founding team that could cite examples of building up high performers for internal promotions — and swiftly recognizing and rewarding those already having impact outside of their role-defined scope.

Yeah in my experience this seems very rare. The default in most start ups I've seen is that when a new level in the hierarchy becomes necessary and/or available (i.e. the existing person leaves) is to hire externally.

I guess the rationale is that if everyone is doing some necessary job and they are good at it, it's better not to mess with it. But needless to say, I find this very demotivating. Much more so than if I am passed for the promotion but a colleague gets it, because I know that if there is a culture of promotion and progression, I might have a fair chance next time. But if its always external hires, then my whole career at this company is in the same position I started with.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#10

Post by vasco »

yawnxyz wrote: post #6

> While Charity has deep experience in the domains of infrastructure & operations, databases, and backend engineering, I come originally from design, frontend, and product engineering, and I take a particular joy in collaborating with product management and ux design. I had trouble figuring what they actually did, and what they currently do in their VP role. There's a lot of lip service, but it's not entirely clear w…

There's a few steps removed from the trenches to VPE. Check out "The Manager's Path" book for an overview of the different expectations of a current day smaller-than FAANG-like companies and the path of an engineer going up through management.
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