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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

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Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#71

Post by ebiester »

dirtybirdnj wrote: post #43
PeterStuer wrote: post #34

"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that. Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. I…

I think your comment can be boiled down to "management doesn't respect engineers" That's the fundamental problem. Some MBA or book somewhere convinced people that respect and dignity were optional. Once they realized they could apply this to more than engineers they started painting the entire world with this bullshit.

Let me take the opposite point - it isn't that management does or doesn't respect engineers, but that it does not respect them more or less than sales, or product, or marketing, or legal, or any other part of the system.

If all of sales says "I am losing these deals because our competitors have X, and I cannot make my quota without X, and you do not make your numbers without X." - how do you balance that against a department head who says, "I cannot give you any features this quarter because we've been focusing on features over codebase health for too long?"

Someone who says no for too long doesn't last.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#72

Post by moduspol »

bruce511 wrote: post #2

I work on a product that has been built over 25 years. Lots of the work I did years ago is to ensure the product longevity. Lots of the work I do now is to ensure it lasts another 25 years. Thats good, but its only the start of "my work". It's up to me to "sell" that benefit to upper management. There's no point in assuming they'll figure it out by accident. Part of my job is enumerating the value I add. By all means…

100%, although also:

Try to be as objective as possible when evaluating that tech debt. It's possible (in many cases, probable) that the tech debt actually isn't as bad for the business as an engineer perceives, and it's quite possible there are other engineering efforts that are more worthy of development time and resources.

Being willing and vocal about acknowledging and accepting that reality is also quite helpful.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#73

Post by hansmayer »

chrisweekly wrote: post #49
hansmayer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point at the basic level, but as engineers and managers, we need to stop this nonsense. Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies ? Could it be because those companies are full of people who somehow occupy important positions without understanding the basics of the engineering work. What's the value such busywork managers are adding, besides the anti-value of layers of…

"zero technical debt" is a pipe dream. Not all tech debt is equal; think "low-interest student loan or mortgage" vs "high-interest credit cards or payday loans".

Well, that is why I said it was an ideal, something to strive for. Since we are in lecture-mode here, ever heard of objectives and key results? Think that would be a more fitting alternative to your black-and-white metaphor of low-interest vs. payday loan ...

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#74

Post by harrall »

dirtybirdnj wrote: post #43
PeterStuer wrote: post #34

"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that. Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. I…

I think your comment can be boiled down to "management doesn't respect engineers" That's the fundamental problem. Some MBA or book somewhere convinced people that respect and dignity were optional. Once they realized they could apply this to more than engineers they started painting the entire world with this bullshit.

Software engineers tend to downplay artists, designers, marketing and product.

Frankly everyone downplays someone else based on their social circle. The only people who don’t have wide social circles but most people don’t.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#76

Post by stego-tech »

The article makes good career advice in general: understand what pays your salary, and contribute enough such that your costs are offset by your labor. For engineers, that means understanding how the company makes money, or how you can save the company money, and then focusing on those things.

As many, many others have pointed out however, modern companies, especially modern tech companies, aren't operating from that mindset. Presently they're all championing products for the sake of the product itself, rather than sticking to their profit centers. It's why everyone for the past decade or so has engaged in a "checkbox race" of adding the latest fad to their product suite, regardless of its value to said product or its customers in the first place. Likewise, internal politics has shifted to prioritize those working on the "right" product, as opposed to recognizing those who create the most value. It's a large reason why enshittification continues to grow: leadership doesn't care about value, product, or engineering, so much as they want the latest shiny thing to add to their sale sheet and make the Board and/or Shareholders "happy".

My own data points supporting this theory:

* Cutting a cost-center's AWS costs by 60% and saving the equivalent of my TC every 2.5 months (~$1.3m/year) got me sent to the Private Cloud team

* Building multi-cloud showback wasn't recognized because I wasn't on the Public Cloud team (a new team rebuilt it two years after I'd finished it)

* Building a Cloud-as-a-Service model with AI Agent hooks got me RIFed

So to add a caveat to the OPs own article for others based on my own experiences: if your organization isn't prioritizing value regardless of origin, your position is unstable. In those cases, you need to either find a way onto the "right" team if the company is important to you, or you need to brush up your resume and find an exit post-haste. Creating value in a company that doesn't acknowledge or respect it is a huge red flag that I naively thought tech companies ("we're a meritocracy!") wouldn't display, but I was gravely mistaken.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#77

Post by throwway120385 »

ebiester wrote: post #71
dirtybirdnj wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your comment can be boiled down to "management doesn't respect engineers" That's the fundamental problem. Some MBA or book somewhere convinced people that respect and dignity were optional. Once they realized they could apply this to more than engineers they started painting the entire world with this bullshit.

Let me take the opposite point - it isn't that management does or doesn't respect engineers, but that it does not respect them more or less than sales, or product, or marketing, or legal, or any other part of the system. If all of sales says "I am losing these deals because our competitors have X, and I cannot make my quota without X, and you do not make your numbers without X." - how do you balance that against a de…

> Someone who says no for too long doesn't last.

I actually think the engineering manager is probably in the wrong there, because if killer feature X is that critical to sales, then it needs to be prioritized in among the tech debt. It doesn't matter that the codebase health is not great if sales plummet. Being a good employee means sometimes prioritizing the health of the business and not the ergonomics of the work environment. And being a good manager means understanding when the health of the business is really at stake or whether the sales team is just throwing shade because they don't want to sell what the company has.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#78

Post by 0rzech »

> At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company (directly or indirectly).

I really wish it were like that, but IMHO it's more of an exception to the rule than the rule. At least this is my experience of being an engineer and a manager.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#79

Post by mkoubaa »

tqi wrote: post #60
PeterStuer wrote: post #34

"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that. Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. I…

What if they're right, and at a certain point engineering is a commodity?

The other departments are arguably more so. Law, sales, finance, marketing.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#80

Post by mkoubaa »

ozim wrote: post #38
PeterStuer wrote: post #34

"At successful tech companies, engineering work is valued in proportion to how much money it makes the company" You would think that, but decades of experience have disproved that. Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical. Most are (more or less) aware that somewhere technical engineering in software is needed, but they feel that as a threath rather than an asset. I…

But also company actually is much better off when it is not held hostage by couple of technical employees. Also every employee should be able to quit at any time and not affect business. So I disagree describing all like it is some evil scheme - that’s how businesses work.

Would you say that the atom bomb project was held hostage by a couple of technical physicists?

Obviously it can't succeed (in the desired time frame) without those specific people, and pretending like it can is lunacy.

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