Knowing where your engineer salary comes from • Hacker News Board

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#121

Post by pc86 » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:28 PM UTC

nradov wrote: post #113

throwway120385 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

In most organizations the engineering manager would share that prioritization responsibility with a product manager who acts as the voice of the customer. One simple approach is to just divide team capacity into two buckets: 80% for new features and customer bug fixes, 20% for tech debt. The specific percentages can vary based on circumstances.

"Some portion of your time is reserved to work on whatever you want to work on with no input from outside your small team" does not work long term and it does not work at scale.

Even among engineering software is somewhat unique in that we intentionally make sub-optimal decisions and then expect other departments not to raise an eyebrow when we demand time away from the next set of features to address (some of) those decisions, usually introducing more sub-optimal decisions in the meantime.

Nobody has figured out a better way to do it but it's easy to see why non-technical people would be inclined to think tech debt is just a way to do less "real work."

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#122

Post by ikiris » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:32 PM UTC

cjs_ac wrote: post #23

I think this is a problem that arises from people working in these gargantuan organisations where individuals can't see how their work contributes to the success of the organisation. They perceive the organisation as a construct built around social relationships rather than a construct that exists to drive some change in or generate profit from the surrounding economy, because they can't see how their work drives tha…

I can see how my work applies just fine, that doesn’t mean my VP+ agrees.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#123

Post by mkoubaa » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:34 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #120

mkoubaa wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Functionally 0% of companies are working on things as important or impactful as the atom bomb, and I include FAANG et al in that. Maybe a small handful of AI companies will actually put out something that important? But even most of them won't. 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 fiduciar…

That isn't the point; It's not about the importance

It's about specialized knowledge. To the owners of the business, making sure the business doesn't fail to deliver is existentially important.

Web developers are fungible. The guy who designed the carefully tuned graph database that runs on a custom Linux kernel with a custom tuned filesystem is not. If this sort of thing is critical to your business succeeding, that engineer might as well be Niels Bohr.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#124

Post by mkoubaa » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:35 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #116

mkoubaa wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you never worked in an organization that survived off of outside sales and employed really, really good sales teams? Of all the departments listed, engineering included, sales would probably be the last one I would consider a commodity.

If it's b2b SaaS sales is probably more important than engineering. If you're designing flight control software it isn't.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#125

Post by BJones12 » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:37 PM UTC

agentultra wrote: post #44

Mackenzie’s analysis holds a grain of truth and remains too simplistic. If you work at a company whose notion of value is purely dividends, get out. The aviation industry didn’t get profitable without regulation. Safety is a big part of the value generated. Spending on safety is not spending money putting more butts in seats and selling more tickets faster. But few people will choose to fly if the risk to their safet…

The profitability problem in the aviation industry was not a lack of regulation. The profitability problem was simply that there were a lot of countries pouring money into their flag-carrying airlines to enable them to operate at a loss. Since many competitors wanted to operate at a loss, the entire industry operated at a loss.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#126

Post by bruce511 » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:38 PM UTC

hansmayer wrote: post #16

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…

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…

Fortunately I don't work in such an organization, and I have extremely competent in my chain of command.

The reason I explain the value of what I am doing (to both technical and non-technical managers) is because it helps them understand the bigger picture.

Or perhaps it helps them understand that I see the big picture, so that they know (and I know) our goals are aligned.

I am aware that not everyone is as fortunate as I am. I'd equally suggest that not many managers are fortunate enough to have engineers that can articulate what they are doing in terms they can understand.

There are plenty of managers out there who are not team players. And probably more engineers who are equally unable to see the bigger picture. Which is unfortunate because when you learn to work together towards a common goal, it really improves everything.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#127

Post by bruce511 » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:41 PM UTC

shalmanese wrote: post #104

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…

> Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies Mainly to prove you can sell, not that they can buy. Selling involves understanding the customer's needs, their tradeoff preferences, your value prop and being able to reflect that back to them. The minimum bar for successful selling requires you to demonstrate a certain degree of competence and due diligence that provides assurance that…

That's an excellent summary!

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#128

Post by bruce511 » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:51 PM UTC

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #10

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…

How do you put numbers in there usually? I'm facing an issue at work where an important factor should be done to correct a serious design mistake, but it doesn't get in the way of any feature. It's probably the cause of a lot of loss of development time over the lifetime of the project, but I don physically know how much of a boost will it give to development. I know it will, but I wouldn't feel comfortable without q…

It can be tough, and in some cases measurable numbers are hard to find. That can make prioritization hard.

It's worth keeping open the option that "now is not yet the right time".

One key way to understand the situation well is to explore both thd upsides and downsides of the issue. Its almost never an obvious decision and being acquainted with all points of view really helps both to figure out what is right, whether it's worth doing, if now is the right time, and so on.

If it was obviously necessary it would likely already have been done, so it may be necessary, but it might not yet be time.

Sometimes it comes down to groundwork. Finding out who us affected, and how. (And if you can't find those people, that's a clue too.)

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#129

Post by keybored » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 6:54 PM UTC

ebiester wrote: post #68

tqi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It is, but at some point, so is management. So is any human capital past your key positions. I feel like managers - even good managers - understand that better than most. That isn't to say there isn't variation in humans - choosing the humans right for your team and organization will help advance a lot, but it really helps us to think of organizations as ant colonies. One person can slow it down, but very few can spe…

Most labor is a commodity in this system “past your key positions” (overpaid execs).

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#130

Post by keybored » Mon, Apr 07, 2025, 7:02 PM UTC

From the perspective of the business, you need to generate more money than your wage plus whatever else expenses that are associated with your employment. This surplus is what adds up to the profit.

Let’s just put the simplistic “be a profit center” thing at face value. The funny thing is that you can generate 10% surplus or 5X surplus. The difference in benefit to the company is large. But your benefit might not be much. Maybe a wage increase, maybe not. Maybe better job security.

Now others have already questioned the “profit center” line here. With so much alienation in the work force it becomes laughable to claim that you can point to a group of individuals as “the profit center” or “the cost center”. This reeks of political jockying. Is Sales the profit center? Without Sales nothing would be sold... but without Engineering there would be no product.

What ends up happening is that the people who insist the loudest are the ones who get promoted to Profit Center. Maybe.