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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

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Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#81

Post by kemiller2002 »

throwway120385 wrote: post #77
ebiester wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is an important point. Many people lose sight of the idea that tomorrow doesn't matter if you don't survive today.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#84

Post by anonfordays »

throwway120385 wrote: post #77
ebiester wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This comment shows great understanding and experience. Too often engineers treat work like their pet/FOSS project and forget it's a business, and businesses are in business to make money, not pretty code bases.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#86

Post by Aurornis »

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…

> Most of management, past first-gen if the company was founded by engineers, is non-technical.

Comments like these make me remember that the tech world is very big and companies come in many different shapes.

I haven’t had non-technical management below the CEO level in many years.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#87

Post by bee_rider »

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…

I generally believe engineering is right in this sort of hypothetical. But, at some point if they really are focusing on code quality… I mean, ultimately the point of code quality is to deliver features/reduce maintenance over the long run, right? So if they really are doing a good job of improving code quality, over the long run they should have a good relationship with management and the political capital to make this request.

From an outside point of view, focusing on code quality and playing videogames instead of working look identical over the short term (or more realistically, working on little niche bits of the code or doing tidying-up busywork that doesn’t really improve the overall quality of the project—it could legitimately be hard to tell the difference). Of course, it should eventually become apparent that the latter group didn’t actually accomplish anything in that time.

“How do you balance the,” I guess it is a social thing/judgement call ultimately.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#88

Post by smugglerFlynn »

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…

CTO is "management" by definition. Do you mean to say most companies have non-technical CTOs who treat engineering as commodity?

That might have been the case with CIO/CTOs coming from pre-2010s era where they indeed were maintaining landscapes built from commodities or vendor solutions (i.e. on-prem server racks, CRM and ERP systems, networks, end user devices, subscriptions to cloud applications etc - some still do). Modern CTOs managing complex tech landscapes that were partially built in-house are rarely like that.

In my experience any CTO ties engineering, be it commodity or not, to value which is highlighted in the article, or get replaced. That's a key part of their role, if not 80% of it. If you think your CTO is underselling engineering contributions, he's either not doing a good job of making that value visible, or you overestimate these contributions.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#89

Post by InDubioProRubio »

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 yes for too long, doesn't blast- out of the airframes plug.
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