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On Becoming a VP of Engineering

honeycomb.io

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Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#101

Post by zer8k »

marcinzm wrote: post #36
eru wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company, and this is true of anyone who started their own companies, including the ones that are now BigCos. Founders don't need any specific qualifications or characteristics to merit their positions. If you are involved in starting a company, you _get_ the position of CEO, CTO, etc essentially arbitrarily. That's initially. After a while you merit your pos…

>After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they'r…

> After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.

Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. C-levels get a lot of undeserved respect when in fact usually they're protected by a very (understandably) conservative board. The board will choose inaction over action in almost every case unless the failure is so bad it's public. CEO types are not as fungible.

The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers who by-and-large are fungible "human capital" paid as little as the company can possibly get away with in the current market. This is the only industry where CEOs are held with reasonably high esteem. Perhaps it's because engineers think they will become one one day. Or maybe it's because tech CEOs are ascribed some sort of god-engineer status when the reality is most of them couldn't even pass their own 18 phase 5 day interview + colonoscopy their engineers do.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#102

Post by epups »

lapcat wrote: post #81
lordofmoria wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re forgetting that companies need both Visionary AND Execution focused leaders at the very top. I’m an execution through and through guy, but I learned early on that my co-founder’s ideal traits are the opposite of mine, and that’s what you’re seeing here. What’s being described is a classic Visionary - spontaneous, jumps around and can be distracting, yes - but crucially, is also an amazing innovator and motivat…

> You’re forgetting that companies need both Visionary AND Execution focused leaders at the very top. I'm not forgetting. And I'm not claiming that this promotion was a mistake. I am raising questions about the narrative that the author is telling/selling. Consider how you'll likely not see such a long-winded post from company founders explaining in detail why they chose themselves for their own jobs. They founded a…

Not sure what point you're trying to make here. You can go and start your company any time, sure, but I would much rather be a VP in a medium sized startup than a founder. And to get to VP, even in a small organisation, you certainly need competence.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#103

Post by wpietri »

lapcat wrote: post #15

I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position. I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company,…

Totally agreed with this: "I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange"

On the one hand, we are social primates. And primates gonna prime. But I personally have very little interest in hierarchy; it mainly seems irritating and counterproductive to me. Obviously, looking around at the world, I'm a outlier here. But perhaps the strangest thing to me is how often neurotypical people can't even talk about the power dynamics that they are clearly participating in. You see it in big things, of course. But also in the small, as when the stated purpose of a meeting (e.g., "stand-up meeting") is wildly different than the actual purpose (a sit-down meeting where the manager gets to feel important and reestablish dominance over those lower down in the power hierarchy).

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#104

Post by zer8k »

> Nonetheless, I think we were all glad we went through this process. Above a certain level, leadership promotions have to be about what the company needs, not the individual, and it was valuable to imagine together what a great VP of Engineering for Honeycomb might look like.

Of course the author talks about it like he was plucked from the heavens to get the position. I would too.

The reality is none of the "what I did" section actually matters. This person was half decent at their job for long enough, and played the political jockeying game well enough, to get the position. Every corner office position is earned through politics not talent in your field. Most companies have something like a distinguished engineer position for the top 0.05% IC.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#105

Post by wpietri »

marcinzm wrote: post #56
koheripbal wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most startups fail. You need to be good to succeed.

I've been mostly in startups for the last 10+ years. Until recently the main thing you needed to be good at is getting more VC money. That is correlated to certain measures of success but having a ton of free money means you can patch a lot of failures over that would bankrupt most companies. Then either sell or IPO before the house of cards came down. It's been interesting watching over the last year as that strateg…

On the one hand, I'm grateful that era is finally coming to an end. Things were so much saner after the dot-com bubble popped.

On the other, I really worry that we now have a generation of entrepreneurs and employees who have only ever known a bubble environment. Many will have a hard time adapting to the actual reality of running functioning businesses.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#106

Post by packetslave »

zer8k wrote: post #104

> Nonetheless, I think we were all glad we went through this process. Above a certain level, leadership promotions have to be about what the company needs, not the individual, and it was valuable to imagine together what a great VP of Engineering for Honeycomb might look like. Of course the author talks about it like he was plucked from the heavens to get the position. I would too. The reality is none of the "what I…

Interesting that you (and others in this thread) automatically assume the author is a "he"

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#107

Post by epups »

lapcat wrote: post #15

I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position. I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company,…

Do you promote people at your company based on the same principles you declare as universal? Or do you at least try to promote the more efficient/useful people?

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#108

Post by wpietri »

pc86 wrote: post #91
lmeyerov wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded. My point is it's an amazing marketing win by financiers. And here we are now, with what the weird minority do sounding like the expectation for startup business practices vs what most actually do.

"Startup" by definition is companies that need large-scale growth to succeed. Uber, DoorDash, those kinds of businesses are start-ups. It doesn't need to be VC investment necessarily, but it needs a lot of capital to get going and there's a certain amount of network effects. That's not marketing, that's what the word means. > Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded. Then they're probably not star…

I would draw the line slightly differently. Bootstrapped startups are still startups. So for me the definition is more "company exploring a novel technology, product, or business model". Most new businesses are doing something that's well understood. Opening a new restaurant or corner store is hard, but it doesn't have the same need to figure out something fundamentally new.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#109

Post by DrammBA »

harrygeez wrote: post #33
will_gottschalk wrote: post #4

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 backe…

> What I’ve noticed is that the code quality from those backend devs is quite awful Without knowing which metrics you use to measure the code quality, my hunch says you are focusing on the wrong thing. I am a frontend engineer turned tech lead. I think we developers choose our focuses based on our personal inclinations and what we value, and usually what I would notice is people who choose frontend work have differen…

I'm a 5 yoe frontend developer and I agree completely with you, backend/infra can be so much more complex than frontend. In my current company I participate on many hiring interviews for our team, and the backend interviews are incredibly savage compared to what's being discussed on a regular frontend interview. Even if I tried I can't bring the frontend interviews to that level of intensity because frontend simply doesn't have enough depth. It's a miracle I get paid a similar salary to them.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#110

Post by systemvoltage »

wpietri wrote: post #103
lapcat wrote: post #15

I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position. I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company,…

Totally agreed with this: "I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange" On the one hand, we are social primates. And primates gonna prime. But I personally have very little interest in hierarchy; it mainly seems irritating and counterproductive to me. Obviously, looking around at the world, I'm a outlier here. But perhaps the strangest thing to me is how often neurotypical people can't even ta…

I think it was Marc Andreessen who said it that you’d rather be upfront with hierarchy than to pretend it doesn’t exist and have it form chaotically and without control.

I remember reading about some flat team structure at Gore Inc. in the 90’s and it was an epic failure.

Military relies on it more explicitly when you really need to get things done. In abstract sense, the military is more similar to companies than being different.

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