111–120 of 184 posts
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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.
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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've worked on many, many features that never recouped their engineering cost despite the absolute assurance by sales that it was necessary. It would have been more effective long term to work on improving code maintainability so that we could better capitalize on features that substantially affect revenue in a positive direction. All too often I see that code maintainability only matters to the business when features can no longer be reliably and quickly delivered, but by then it's usually too late to really change course. This sort of balance also tends to drive all of the new fancy frameworks that cause so much churn as the signal from the business to engineering is that engineering needs to be able to pump out features very quickly but will not be given time to focus on maintainability so naturally this gets outsourced to someone else.
To be fair, I have also been involved in an emergency project that if it wasn't completed in a very tight time frame the company would have lost 30% of their revenue and there would have been substantial workforce reductions. We did not focus on maintainability in this situation rather we focused on saving the company.
Everything is a trade-off in business. My experience tells me companies generally focus on short term profit over long term concerns and there's very little in the way of feedback mechanisms that allow an inspection of these decisions in aggregate to see if the right balance is being struck.
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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…
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"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 ...
"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
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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.
"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…
There is not a competent Executive Vice President or Division President in the world that needs to be managed by their boss.
"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…
Like most advice you find on the internet, the author of this piece is writing "the way the world ought to work" rather than the way there's any evidence that the world does work.
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Perhaps that was true 50 years ago, but in an increasingly complex technological world, problems simply cannot be solved without increasingly advanced engineering skills.
The overwhelming majority of software engineers are building garden-variety CRUD apps.
But a lot of companies aren't - or at least, they don't think they are.
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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.
The vast majority of companies are putting web forms over a database. Letting one or two people hold all the technical knowledge for something like that is borderline fiduciary negligence.