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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

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Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#91

Post by thundergolfer »

sanitycheck wrote: post #21

It's very surprising to me that this needs to be said - but maybe that's because I've mostly worked in, let's say, 'resource constrained' environments. You focus on the stuff that keeps the money coming, or people start losing their jobs.

The author works at Github, so yes not so much a "resource constrained" environment. It matches my experience at a high growth company, Canva, where in places it was easy to see the connection to profit and in other places quite hard. There were people that didn't care about their connection to profit, and there were expensive employees doing "good work" done merely because it was good to do. Canva could do that because its margins are 80+% and it made almost $1B in revenue at the time.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#92

Post by dclowd9901 »

throwaway98797 wrote: post #45
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…

make those with power like you and rewards will flow relation to company profitability is optional and often times counterproductive

Yep, this. Being aligned with an influential and well-liked manager is probably the biggest indicator of your overall career trajectory at a company.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#93

Post by thundergolfer »

sandbach wrote: post #63

These Silicon Valley folks really ought to read some Marx. If low-level workers are a 'cost centre', why don't companies just get rid of them? Wouldn't they be more profitable if they removed everyone outside the 'profit centre' of senior management? Obviously not.

I'm not sure you understand Marx. The author probably has read Marx during their philosophy training.

'cost centre' does not mean a place that a capitalist is unable to perform exploitation. A cost center in Marxist terms can be understood as a department that participates in the money-commodity-money' (MCM') flow but doesn't directly complete the circuit to M'.

For example, delivering and receiving mail does not realize profit for most companies, but is an essential part of the business. If they spend $1,000,000 on the mail department in Q1, spending $2,000,000 in Q2 is likely to waste the extra $1,000,000. But spending zero in Q2 would cripple the company. That's a cost centre.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#94

Post by blurker »

virgilp wrote: post #42
ozim wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a subtle but very important difference between making sure nobody is a "single point of failure" or bottleneck (heck, most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!), and recognizing that engineers are not fungible resources and should not be treated as such. I do agree that it's simpler for management to pretend that they are, and that's why great m…

> most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!

Sure, but that is a load bearing "great" for sure. Not every company is staffed with great, selfless engineers.

I'm an engineer and I've worked at companies with engineers who actively resisted making themselves not a single point of failure because it gave them control and job security. I think it's not uncommon to have these types at companies and it really sucks when they have their management Stockholm syndromed because they make it hard for all the other "great" engineers to do their jobs.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#95

Post by datadrivenangel »

blurker wrote: post #94
virgilp wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a subtle but very important difference between making sure nobody is a "single point of failure" or bottleneck (heck, most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure!), and recognizing that engineers are not fungible resources and should not be treated as such. I do agree that it's simpler for management to pretend that they are, and that's why great m…

> most great engineers will actively work with management to make sure they're not single points of failure! Sure, but that is a load bearing "great" for sure. Not every company is staffed with great, selfless engineers. I'm an engineer and I've worked at companies with engineers who actively resisted making themselves not a single point of failure because it gave them control and job security. I think it's not uncom…

The company not being able to run without you doesn't mean you have job security, it just makes the company hurt more when they fire you based on someone's spreadsheet.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#96

Post by arijo »

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?

Perhaps that was true 50 years ago, but in an increasingly complex technological world, problems simply cannot be solved without increasingly advanced engineering skills.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#97

Post by shalmanese »

throwaway98797 wrote: post #45
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…

make those with power like you and rewards will flow relation to company profitability is optional and often times counterproductive

OK, but the people who keep on harping on this never seem to mention that the boss "liking you" is not about you cracking jokes and bringing in muffins on Thursday. It's about you being low drama and helping them achieve their KPIs in a way that helps them get promoted so they can bring you along with them.

It's the guy/gal who you know needs to be informed that the feature they've been painstakingly working on for the last 2 months is scrapped due to a strategic realignment and now they're tasked on working on some non-revenue bullshit to win a turf war and their response is a shrug and brainstorming of how do we play this rather than getting all up in their feelings and require emotional babysitting for the next 2 months.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#98

Post by fmbb »

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?

What if?

Are they?

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#99

Post by ebiester »

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…

So, I absolutely agree here that an engineering manager has to have the insight to tell truth from catastrophising on both sides. At the same time, I've seen sales orgs drive a department into the ground where everything comes to a screeching halt. I've seen times where that "feature X" is vaporware. Times when feature X is possible there because of different architecture choices. Newer entrants who learned from the older entrants. Features that look great for smaller customers that can't scale.

And all of those might be plausible answers. As you'd agree, nuance is key here. However, that is all from the department or product head. Now consider the CEO's perspective that has 8 equally loud voices all clamoring for resources.

My point is that it might not be disrespect but rather a management team that is trying to navigate competing priorities and economic realities.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#100

Post by teddyh »

> If your work isn’t clearly connected to company profit, your position is unstable

In my experience, only salespeople are clearly connected to profit. Everyone else is percieved as a cost.

> In other words, you’re probably depending on a kind-hearted manager (or CEO) who personally values your work.

Yes, this is the position for everybody except salepeople. Which means, in turn, that focusing your efforts to make the company profitable, as the articles advocates, is a grave mistake. You should focus on making your immediate manager profitable and successful. (For those who are fresh out of school, this is often a wildly different goal.)

The only situation in which the article’s advice makes any sense is if your immediate manager is also the company owner, who benefits personally and immediately if the company’s profits go up.

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