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Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

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Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#171

Post by shalmanese »

hansmayer wrote: post #170
shalmanese wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, actually. He said it was a part of his job because they did not understand his work? So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering 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.

Nowhere is that said.

The benefit of them selling is not for the management to understand, it's for the worker to understand and be able to articulate as it will flow downstream to strategy.

Maybe the management doesn't understand but my point is it's irrelevant. I've been in management situations where I've understood perfectly well and ones where I have zero clue, my requirements for you selling to me remain exactly the same which is I'm using it as a gauge of how much you understand.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#172

Post by musicale »

> If you want your work to be valued (i.e. you don’t want to be reshuffled or fired), and you want to work on personally-satisfying features like accessibility, or UI polishing, or anything else not directly connected to profit - you need to go and work for a very profitable company.

"When we work on making our devices accessible by the blind, I don't consider the bloody ROI." -Tim Cook

Except that not-very-profitable Apple of the 1990s still cared about accessibility, UI, industrial design (PowerBook, Duo/dock, Newton, eMate...), and sustainability, even before the return of Steve Jobs and their subsequent meteoric rise. In the short run it probably looked like bad business, but Jony Ive started out on the Newton, after all...

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#173

Post by bruce511 »

hansmayer wrote: post #170
shalmanese wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

No, actually. He said it was a part of his job because they did not understand his work? So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?

>> So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?

Because engineers are typically (although not always) terrible at business. Or marketing. Or Sales. Or whatever.

In other words, a successful business needs many skills. One of those skills is management. It's inevitable that top management (who's core skill is hopefully, well, business) needs to people to do the other skills. Marketing, Sales, Engineering, and so on.

Hence those skilled people need to communicate with management in ways in which management can understand. They can then make sure everyone has aligned goals. It's no good if engineers are doing one thing, marketing is doing something else, sales is targeting the wrong demographic, and so on.

It seems to be a unique conceit of software engineers that "management just gets in the way". When, more realistically, management is trying to communicate the business requirements, and we feel we know better.

Most engineers (again, not all) are terrible at the actual business part. The list of failed companies, multi-year solo projects that never sell a single copy, and so on are evidence of this. Joel made his name writing (literally) "The business of software".

So back to your question;

>> why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?

because how else will engineers know what to do?

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#174

Post by weitendorf »

hayst4ck wrote: post #149
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…

Admiral Rickover was likely the single most competent engineering manager in the last century and wrote this: Doing a Job https://govleaders.org/rickover.htm Complex jobs cannot be accomplished effectively with transients. Therefore, a manager must make the work challenging and rewarding so that his people will remain with the organization for many years. This allows it to benefit fully from their knowledge, experien…

The thing is, Rickover was working on nuclear submarines for the US between 1950 and 1958. He could attract the best engineers because nuclear energy was THE cutting edge technology of the time, the budget was enormous, the project was extremely interesting, and people were literally building something that they thought would protect them and their families from a nuclear attack from the USSR (or another Holocaust; Rickover was Jewish).

It's like, what if you were working at a Frontier AI Lab in 2024 but also living in the aftermath of a bioweapon that selectively killed INTJs that like rockclimbing and anime, and you need to build really good AI by 2030 because if you don't you and all your friends will die of Huntington's Disease?

And then you told people that building great teams and getting things done is easy, even when they're "Moving the Munitions Depot 30mi Down the Road Because We Didn't Renew The Lease" or "Integrating OpenTelemetry With The Ingestion Service For The Staging Environment"; just frame those as "Actually the Most Ambitious Logistics Project in the South-Central District Since the Similar One 3 Years Ago" or "Revolutionizing PreProduction Observability in the Portion of the EMEA SRE org under Joe"! It should be just as easy to motivate the 23 year old trying to secure the bag and become a passport bro to update staging as it is to motivate the best engineers in the world to use cutting edge technology to protect their loved ones from an imminent danger!

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#175

Post by blackhaj7 »

cdavid wrote: post #53

This article makes the naive assumption that "what is making money" is an objective thing. Once a company reaches a certain size, basically once it has a financial planning department w/ different VPs owning their PnL, who is making money increasingly becomes a social construct. "how to get promoted" by spakhm is much more closer to how a large, successful org works IMO: https://spakhm.substack.com/p/how-to-get-promo…

Hadn’t read “how to get promoted” before!

Damn that’s a good read and sadly rings true

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#176

Post by stogot »

shalmanese wrote: post #97
throwaway98797 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Gee, you said what I’ve been thinking for years.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#177

Post by hansmayer »

bruce511 wrote: post #126
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…

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…

Please don´t take it as trolling - but if your higher ups are as competent as you say: why do you need to help them with the big picture ? Shouldn´t they be the ones setting it or at least directing? I am saying this because topics like improvement of performance and reduction technical debt were established as drivers of revenue a long time ago. That is why Amazon optimised the sh*t out of their checkout process and Google (before they were took over by the business types) obsessed about page loading times. Oh coincidentally - that was also the time when major tech companies were run mainly by engineers. Is that why their products used to be so much better? Too many "busyworkers" are now wasting everyone's time by having engineers explain "the big picture" so that they can present it at some meeting and take credit for. And in the process, the products get more entshittified every damn day.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#178

Post by virgilp »

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…

Good managers will recognize that and know what those kinds of engineers are doing. Every company should have at least some good managers - seek them out, it's worth it. If you can't find one in current company, try to switch company - again, it's worth it IMO.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#179

Post by nradov »

hansmayer wrote: post #169
nradov wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an ideal. There is an optimal level of technical debt to maximize shareholder value. Eliminating all technical debt makes no more sense than eliminating all financial debt. Used effectively, debt is a powerful lever. The trick lies in finding the optimal level based on incomplete information, and many corporate managers aren't very good at this.

By stating it should be zero, it is literally, by definition an ideal. That is not something you can decide on. Maximising shareholder value? Now, that is an ideal which is a root cause of many evils today.

Your claim of zero being the ideal level is not supported by any reliable data. You aren't qualified to make any statements about ideals.

Re: Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

#180

Post by hansmayer »

nradov wrote: post #179
hansmayer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By stating it should be zero, it is literally, by definition an ideal. That is not something you can decide on. Maximising shareholder value? Now, that is an ideal which is a root cause of many evils today.

Your claim of zero being the ideal level is not supported by any reliable data. You aren't qualified to make any statements about ideals.

I am not sure you see the irony in your own statements.
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