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On Becoming a VP of Engineering

honeycomb.io

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Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#131

Post by the_sleaze9 »

strikelaserclaw wrote: post #92
no_wizard wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but never discount someones background. His parents were successful executives and there were plenty of opportunities for him to be exposed to executive leadership (via Harvard, familial connections etc) Not like he went from nobody to somebody here, his background certainly allowed exposure to things many others would not have. I honestly would put Steve Jobs as the best example you can find of someone who…

I think he would be pretty close to someone who went from nobody to a great CEO and founder but i don't think anyone in this world truly starts off on equal footing. Steve Jobs birth parents were both advanced degree holders, he got adopted by a blue collar family who lived in prime real estate bay area during the first rise of tech. Ultimately it is useless to compare people, we should judge people by their output r…

I'm a huge proponent of origin stories, especially the true ones. Musk, Mozart, John Coletrane and Christiano Ronaldo, everyone has a story you can learn from.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#132

Post by wgottschalk »

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…

There's a few things that stood out to me from that codebase:

1. No unit tests. Integration tests broken weekly when external data source would change.

2. Hand rolled ORM resulting in inconsistent separation of concerns. Some controllers would use the ORM classes directly. Some would add layers of indirection. Some would make database calls directly in the indirection layers.

3. Database data model would "compress" dimensions to be clever. ex: the id field is a concatenation of a user supplied string + timestamp + some hard coded string prefix. In addition, there's multiple columns which represent similar concepts like "tenant", "customer", "team".

4. Several ongoing migrations created necessary but hard to understand backwards compatibility logic. Code breaks in strange ways when trying to add features because you have to remember there's 2^n different code paths.

5. No async code. Everything was a blocking call to the database resulting in unnecessarily slow api responses.

6. No indexes in the database to improve db perf

The managers didn't see this stuff. They just know features can take a while to get out the door so they respond by asking for more head count. Leadership sees that more backend devs are needed and hire more backend focused managers to try and manage the fact that there are scaling and perf issues.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#133

Post by jtmarmon »

wpietri wrote: post #112
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…

> I’ve worked at companies in the past where frontend is looked down upon because all of our leaders are backend/infra people. I think there's a lot going on here, but one of them is definitely gender. Front-end development is often feminine-coded and seen as lesser. E.g.: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/tailwind-and-the-femininity-of-c... I also think in tech-land we tend to associate leadership with male-coded traits.…

This article is hilariously bad. The argument goes:

I like CSS more than Tailwind -> Why don't people like CSS more? -> Maybe because 'CSS, which makes things look ‘pretty’, is considered feminine'

You're entitled to like CSS more, and I could even agree making things look pretty is feminine coded, but it obviously doesn't explain people's preference for Tailwind because Tailwind also exists to make things look pretty.

---

I've worked with plenty of female engineering leaders, and most of them have a backend background.

The reason for this imbalance has nothing to do with gender, but entirely to do with criticality. Given that frontends tend to read/write from the backend, the domain model is usually owned by the backend in most apps, meaning that capability design and expansion is gated by the backend.

Not to mention that screwing up your backend architecture is in 95% of cases a much much deeper problem than screwing up your frontend. A data migration is basically always harder than redesigning the UI for some app.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#134

Post by bradlys »

dasil003 wrote: post #86
gampleman wrote: post #7

> 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…

Startups scale faster than management skill sets. Being able to manage a team of 10 doesn’t translate to managing an of org of 100, let alone 1000. I’m not saying that’s what’s going on in your case, but it’s a legit reason in some cases: avoiding the Peter Principle.

In my experience, this "avoiding the Peter Principle" is rare for people who are founders/friends-of-founders.

I think that's where the complaint comes from. It's mainly that a lot of competent people get skipped because founders and friends of the founders keep just hiring their external favorites rather than promoting and rewarding people who are getting the company to where it is.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#135

Post by sib »

eru wrote: post #18
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,…

> 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…

If you're a founder of a venture-funded company, then you either merit your position by continuing to do well or the VCs will remove you, before you run the company into the ground.

Assuming you did not have enough negotiating leverage upon fundraising to put yourself into a non-removable position, a la Zuckerberg.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#137

Post by ska »

zer8k wrote: post #101
marcinzm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 publi…

> The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers

This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a tech based business, having competent engineering is table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#138

Post by dbish »

ShivTheShiv wrote: post #136
snickmy wrote: post #45

I'm reading this through the lens of the fact that a VP at honeycomb is probably comparable with a senior manager at a big tech company.

This person is learning how to be an effective manager of managers. It’s the equivalent of a director at a big company.

Manager of managers is “senior manager” at places like amazon and meta, not even director (source: was one at both these places, though at meta the official title was just engineering manager, you were labeled as a level as M2).

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#139

Post by opportune »

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,…

Really disagree with this - a lot of process-oriented checklist-following managers are actually terrible leaders. You don’t need to be particularly skilled to do that. As a CEO you can bring a lot more to the table than that, and delegate it if you need to - it’s not an uncommon skill - to focus on adding value by setting direction, fighting fires, focusing on whatever is currently the most important problem or project.

Obviously you can start your own company to reset the hierarchy according to your wishes. That doesn’t mean this CEO is unqualified though.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#140

Post by morgante »

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…

Have you ever started a company?

> The company founders suddenly made it to the top at the very beginning without any of that, without "deserving" anything.

When they started, they weren't at the "top" of anything. It's not like someone just handed them the CEO title of a successful firm.

Building a company from scratch is way more work than climbing a corporate hierarchy.

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