In praise of “normal” engineers • Hacker News Board

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#81

Post by MontyCarloHall » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 8:24 PM UTC

tikhonj wrote: post #16

sorokod wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beyond budget constraints, those brilliant engineers may not be good team players. Their brilliance may be in the way of finding the necessary compromises and doing the required but not intellectually challenging work.

I dunno, almost all the brilliant engineers I've known have also been great team players and mentors. Not all, but I'd say it's pretty correlated. The reason brilliant assholes stand out is one of those statistical paradoxes whose name I've forgotten: somebody who's an asshole has to be brilliant to succeed, while team players can get pretty far with a wide range of skill levels.

You are thinking of Berkson's Paradox! [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkson%27s_paradox

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#82

Post by ghaff » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 8:26 PM UTC

almosthere wrote: post #65

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to share this mindset, and I still agree that individual ownership is possible for engineers. Unfortunately many, many engineers simply do not want it. I would reckon most if not all engineers are comfortable with ownership at the team boundary, but many simply do not care beyond that. It's just a day job. Individual ownership at the individual engineer boundary can breed distrust within a team or org, but oft…

I personally think _most_ people should treat their jobs as a _day_ job - unless they have actual ownership in the company (beyond what would be a 50-100k payout at option time)

I certainly did a ton of traveling/speaking/meeting with customers/sometimes late night calls in different time zones/etc. but I still treated it as colloquially a "day job," albeit not really a 9-5 one.

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#83

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 9:05 PM UTC

tikhonj wrote: post #67

maxsilver wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't have the competency to know what to reward. I'd even take this a bit further, and say this is basically an argument that the engineering manager, engineering/dept VP, and CTO all need to be engineers or past-engineers themselves, so they actually do have enough competency to know what to reward.

the best manager I ever had was a VP who came from a banking background—the key thing was not that he had written a lot of production software himself, but that he had seen what great software looks like (apparently he worked closely with the core Slang/SecDB guys), and was willing to trust engineers who could build similar styles of tools on the other hand, the recent skip-level I had that got me to quit in six mont…

What you are describing is direct technical experience. That the banker did have, but the one titled as engineer didn't.

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#84

Post by zkmon » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 9:31 PM UTC

At my company, I always prefer hiring average engineers with great attitude. Too many high-credential people with bad attitude were placed on high pedestals due to their perception-creating skills, and became immune to questioning. Once they bag that sweet perception from the boss, they also start bully around. Bosses would usually dismiss any data that goes against their perceptions. Mostly because going by perception is lot easier than looking into the data.

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#85

Post by tasuki » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 9:39 PM UTC

> The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. It doesn’t matter how fast an individual engineer can write software, what matters is how fast the team can collectively write, test, review, ship, maintain, refactor, extend, architect, and revise the software that they own.

Yes, and there are often teams of one. I am currently in such a team. Even though I work on a different problem than other "teams", I think it's reasonably easy to eyeball the relative productivity (not in my favour, in my current circumstances; though, to the credit of my superiors, they're being very patient with me).

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#86

Post by rebeccaskinner » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 9:43 PM UTC

I’ve been lucky enough to work on a number of teams in my career that are full of brilliant high performing people who are also kind, empathetic, and focused working together to deliver something to customers. These days I’m lucky enough to lead a team like that.

Counter to the article, in my experience these are the hardest teams to manage well because organizations typically aren’t set up to deal with them. Larger companies tend to lean into standardization and making things accessible to average engineers in ways that make high performing teams less effective and often demotivated.

I think this is an overly cynical approach that assumes that you can’t invest and grow people into exceptional engineers. In my experience you can if you are willing to invest in it, and the long term benefit of having more high performing engineers who aren’t being restricted from doing good work outweighs the cost of training and growing people.

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#87

Post by esafak » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

AlotOfReading wrote: post #4

There are large parts of this I really like, but it's hard to overstate just how much I disagree with the idea that "The only meaningful measure of productivity is impact to the business". The natural result of this view is a focus on quantifiable changes and short term thinking. The greatest value of experienced engineers is in avoiding landmines that will destroy a project or even a company. It's difficult to quant…

The company should be constantly striving to better quantify the unknown.

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#88

Post by dkkergoog » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

tikhonj wrote: post #14

> The smallest unit of software ownership and delivery is the engineering team. I see where this is coming from, but it's also pretty sad. In my experience, it tends to create environments where engineers are second-class citizens compared to managers or product: we're just responsible for "delivery", but can't independently make any real decisions beyond a tiny scope. Our timespan of discretion becomes measured in d…

[dead]

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#89

Post by FirmwareBurner » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

EPWN3D wrote: post #69

maxsilver wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They don't have the competency to know what to reward. I'd even take this a bit further, and say this is basically an argument that the engineering manager, engineering/dept VP, and CTO all need to be engineers or past-engineers themselves, so they actually do have enough competency to know what to reward.

Honestly, I don't even think that does the trick anymore. Once you're on the management track, you get infected with the same MBA bullshit as the rest of management, and your brain rewires itself around that culture and those incentives. I've worked for VPs who were former engineers, and they eventually lost their appreciation for the artistic side of the discipline and got obsessed with features, demoes, burn down c…

> they eventually lost their appreciation for the artistic side of the discipline

It's easy to obsess with the artistic side of the discipline when you're doing it on someone else's money and assume it's coming from an infinite bag.

Once you are a manager and given limited resources to get a job done by a certain date, art goes out the window and it's all about efficiency, you get paid to get the job done, not have pretty code.

I think people focusing on SW engineering being art have been spoiled by only working at companies with infinite money, like Google, who treat work as play in hopes that 1 in a million toys will be the next billion dollar idea. But open your own shop, get customers, hire people and let's see how much you'll care about their work being art VS efficient, when it's your dime on the line, then you'll embrace and understand the managerial mindset you've despised.

Re: In praise of “normal” engineers

#90

Post by tikhonj » Thu, Jun 19, 2025, 10:06 PM UTC

eikenberry wrote: post #76

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to share this mindset, and I still agree that individual ownership is possible for engineers. Unfortunately many, many engineers simply do not want it. I would reckon most if not all engineers are comfortable with ownership at the team boundary, but many simply do not care beyond that. It's just a day job. Individual ownership at the individual engineer boundary can breed distrust within a team or org, but oft…

In my experience this is mostly big-company vs. small company cultural differences due almost strictly to size and scaling. Small companies work best when individuals have ownership and large companies with team based ownership. They attract culturally like-minded people.

The highest-agency, highest-ownership team I worked on was at Target of all places. (To be fair, it was not a typical team for the company!) The VP who made that work learned that style of leadership from a decade in Strats at Goldman. Both are pretty big as companies go!

On the flip side, I've seen early-stage startups and scale-ups where engineers did not have real ownership. It's easy to get into a situation where an individual engineer "owns" a specific part of a startup... but can't make any real decisions on it because the founders want to dictate work at a week-to-week level or something.

It's a function of culture, not scale.