181–190 of 400 posts
In my experience ICs make product, managers make people, directors make process and VPs make policy. Everyone over that is an approval step in budget requests.
Unless you're making a subtle joke that, nobody makes strategy... Which if so, then kudos for a nice joke
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,…
Could probably change that to "choose people they trust as first employees"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate arbiter. > The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founders of successful companies haven't earned their position. "The market is the ultimate arbiter" is the exact opposite of the idea that you need the perfect résumé and experience to get and do the job. That's what you seem to be misinterpreting about my comments. A retroactive assessment of someone's t…
> There's no reason to believe that this is true, other than the meritocratic article of faith that the most money and power always go to the people who work the "hardest", whatever that means. And the observations of ~everyone who has done both. I've done both and starting a company is way harder.
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> 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…
> You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.
Have you run a large company? I've run a small one so was forced to learn all of these skills, and let me tell you, it was hard, I found it much harder than learning how to code.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".
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> 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate arbiter. > The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founders of successful companies haven't earned their position. "The market is the ultimate arbiter" is the exact opposite of the idea that you need the perfect résumé and experience to get and do the job. That's what you seem to be misinterpreting about my comments. A retroactive assessment of someone's t…
> There's no reason to believe that this is true, other than the meritocratic article of faith that the most money and power always go to the people who work the "hardest", whatever that means. And the observations of ~everyone who has done both. I've done both and starting a company is way harder.
If climbing the corporate hierarchy is so much easier, then how high up the ladder did you get exactly?
Here are the Engineering VPs I have personally met / worked with. These are for billion-dollar-revenue companies (Banking and Health Care specifically)
1. 20-something year old Developer (not senior) who followed a non-technical CTO to a new company and got the VP title before.
2. Architect of a small start up that got bought - right time, right place.
3. Scrum master who was a friend of someone at the company who has no technical background.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There's no reason to believe that this is true, other than the meritocratic article of faith that the most money and power always go to the people who work the "hardest", whatever that means. And the observations of ~everyone who has done both. I've done both and starting a company is way harder.
Again, I've started a company, contrary to your previous assumption, and I know other people who have started companies. You don't speak for everyone or even most people. If climbing the corporate hierarchy is so much easier, then how high up the ladder did you get exactly?
Since you're unwilling to argue in good faith, we can resolve this.
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,…
However, I do agree with you on another point. At the companies I've worked at, it's the people in the middle of the hierarchy who have impressed me the most. The have incredible hyper fast minds with intimidating levels of reasoning skills. I've always found them to be the true heroes of companies in my mind. They aren't usually there at the beginning and either were hired for their skills, or quickly rose up from the bottom and earned their place.