Fortune favors the bold.
On Becoming a VP of Engineering
161–170 of 400 posts
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#162Earlier 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…
Jobs' adopt family matters more than his birth parents, beyond margin. He grew up middle class (maybe upper middle class, honestly) but his parents weren't executives or VPs, they had a more typical background and he did as well. I think that makes it vastly more relatable. I believe strongly this contributed to his fanaticism around his ideas and thoughts, as well as why he essentially failed as a CEO twice (Apple the first time and NeXT computer was heading toward financial instability). Contrast this with Zuckerburg, who hit out of the park with Facebook.
Zuckerburg by contrast had a bigger ecosystem around him to lean into and a lot more exposure to executive types and "elites". Facebook didn't happen after a string of failures, and I don't believe ever came realistically close to failing either.
That's not to say either are talent-less. Zuckerburg was a very talented engineer and by all accounts has a good business acumen for the markets he's addressing. Steve Jobs likewise had a very good litmus test ability and really good foresight into technology, design, and user experience. I don't want to diminish that. However, not accounting for their ecosystem will do little to understand how they got to where they are.
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#163Earlier 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…
Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up. I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. I…
You're missing what the previous commenter said.
There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless.
Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's "figured out slot machines." My response: "Dude, that's awesome!" I'm not about to burst his bubble on the random, ambivalent jitter of the universe. We all need our delusions, who am I to take his?
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#164A 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.…
At smaller companies, at least, my observation has been that frontend (in fact, design, even if unable to write code) seemed to have a big leg-up on positive visibility among important stakeholders, clients, owners, and managers, and to have an easier time moving up the promotion ladder than backend.
A demo of improved API response times, even if accompanied by pretty graphs (extra work purely for self-promotional purposes) just doesn't get the ooohs and aaaahs and "can we see that again?"s and "can you forward me these slides?" that a design mock-up of a prettier button can. And when back-end supports feature development, it's still the front-end that people are looking at when it's demo'd. Basically the only thing that gets a big reaction from non-tech-folks from the backend is when you manage to make a large opex number a lot smaller, and even then, no guarantee.
Requires backend-experienced folks in the right places to counterbalance this, and a lot more effort on the part of backend folks to make their naturally-hard-to-"read" and relatively-boring (to look at, anyway) work flashier and more prominent.
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#165Earlier 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…
Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up. I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. I…
My god, I could not have put this better myself. Thanks.
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#166I wish Honeycomb employees would spend some time on improving their product in a tangible way instead of writing blog posts. I've had the missfortune of using Honeycomb at work and for any systems that interact with more than a couple of services it's simply unusable. I don't get why there's all the hype around the company?
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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" d…
Isn’t it good for tests to fail when things change? Are you saying that the data source is not abstracted properly like with a repository pattern?
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of runn…
I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to.
Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team.
And of course good executives are also incredibly important, how many companies have been run into the ground because of bad management?
So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long term success.
Oh and for what it's worth my CEO writes code ;-)
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up. I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. I…
You're missing what the previous commenter said. There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless. Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's…
There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention strategy and wasn’t managed well enough to adapt.
Startup success requires skill and countless hours of hard work, period, and the leaders who are successful rarely look the same. It also requires some luck, but you need both.
I also used to deride soft skills. I learned, over time, that they’re extremely valuable, and deriding them doesn’t take away their power.
I think nearly every engineer would be well served by attending a good conflict resolution and “how to influence people” course. My 21-year-old self would smack me for saying that, but I’ve learned things since then.
Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
Most people won't understand what you are saying. They just won't. It won't ever compute.
Part of me feels that pessimism, but another part of me believes every rational individual has at least one path to a more open mind, whether through music, art, study, self-reflection, dialog, mind-altering substances... all sorts of sources of inspiration. Most will probably never understand, but I won't stop lighting sparks and hoping they kindle in the minds of those with whom I choose to interact. That's what worked for me, at least.