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The other kind of staff software engineer

earthly.dev

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Re: The other kind of staff software engineer

#101

Post by trimbo »

> Someone at Thoughtworks sold Dominion Energy on the idea that Thoughtworks... if things go well, they will get follow-on business and maybe even a whitepaper.

...

> Market pressures don’t apply to internal teams

Market forces are constantly applied against internal IT teams, particularly in non-tech companies. The market force is replacing them with consultants. Sometimes they will make those employees train their own replacements[1][2].

Or that there are consultants that can't be fired. The project is over schedule, but too much sunk cost to replace them and no internal devs. A $6M project becomes a $1.25 billion project and fails in slow motion over a decade.[3]

Anyway, my point is that it's not as simple as "internal is always safe, consulting is always tougher".

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/04/us/last-task-after-layoff...

[2] - https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/11/03/after-pink-slips-ucsf...

[3] - https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/12/project-failure-case-...

Re: The other kind of staff software engineer

#103

Post by tl »

> In most cases, the easiest way to tell if you are line or staff is to look at the org chart of your business. You are line if your role makes up the largest fraction of the org chart.

If anything, the opposite is true. You are "line" when you are fewer in number having a more direct line to the power structure. In business, it is this, not your contribution that changes your negotiating leverage. In the original military example, mechanics, doctors, IT staff and dozens of other roles vastly outnumber actual soldiers.

Re: The other kind of staff software engineer

#104

Post by jstx1 »

the_only_law wrote: post #88
chadash wrote: post #65

Related to this article: The owner of a company (non-startup, but growing and profitable) I used to work for gave me great career advice. He said to always focus on things that produce revenue. If you aren't doing things that produce revenue, try to move into those areas if possible. His view was that revenue can soar 100%, 200%, 1,000%, 10,000% or however high. Cost savings, on the other hand, can only go down to a…

What’s sad is I’m pretty sure the team I work I’m collectively paid more money than we bring in yearly.

I've never had a job where this wasn't the case.

Re: The other kind of staff software engineer

#105

Post by irrational »

I work for a Fortune 500 company, but my entire career there (more than 20 years) has been focused on creating software used by 3rd part companies who sell our products (which range in size from a single booth in a Chinese marketplace to a mom and pop store in South America to a large multi store company in Europe). I suppose it is a staff position, but the primary people who drive where our product goes are outside the company I work for, which seems more like a line position. We are helping all these other companies with their core business of selling products. Products that my company makes.

However, my job is much more relaxed than that of a real line worker. We don’t charge any of these 3rd party companies for the software we build. So we never need to worry about things like billable hours. We are fairly free to decide what we want to work on. We have all the resources and benefits of a giant behemoth of a company to rely on. The job is almost never stressful and has great work-life balance. On the other hand, while I do have fantastic benefits and make a six figure salary, I am not making these $500k/year salaries I hear about. And we don’t have free food ;-)

Re: The other kind of staff software engineer

#107

Post by hathym »

nunez wrote: post #92
chadash wrote: post #65

Related to this article: The owner of a company (non-startup, but growing and profitable) I used to work for gave me great career advice. He said to always focus on things that produce revenue. If you aren't doing things that produce revenue, try to move into those areas if possible. His view was that revenue can soar 100%, 200%, 1,000%, 10,000% or however high. Cost savings, on the other hand, can only go down to a…

That owner was absolutely correct. If you can make the company money and you can prove how, the sky's the limit. You're much more likely to get a cut of profits over a cut of savings.

unless you work in sales, it is very hard to prove how lines of code can translate in more money for the company. maybe easier in startups but nearly impossible in big corps where everyone is just a cog in the machine

Re: The other kind of staff software engineer

#108

Post by belter »

nunez wrote: post #92
chadash wrote: post #65

Related to this article: The owner of a company (non-startup, but growing and profitable) I used to work for gave me great career advice. He said to always focus on things that produce revenue. If you aren't doing things that produce revenue, try to move into those areas if possible. His view was that revenue can soar 100%, 200%, 1,000%, 10,000% or however high. Cost savings, on the other hand, can only go down to a…

That owner was absolutely correct. If you can make the company money and you can prove how, the sky's the limit. You're much more likely to get a cut of profits over a cut of savings.

I worked as Consultant for several years and instead of a daily rate, always proposed for each of my large projects, that companies would pay me 0.5% of the money my activities made the company or 0.1% of the money I saved the company.

Not one ever took up on this offer...

Re: The other kind of staff software engineer

#109

Post by bluGill »

the_only_law wrote: post #88
chadash wrote: post #65

Related to this article: The owner of a company (non-startup, but growing and profitable) I used to work for gave me great career advice. He said to always focus on things that produce revenue. If you aren't doing things that produce revenue, try to move into those areas if possible. His view was that revenue can soar 100%, 200%, 1,000%, 10,000% or however high. Cost savings, on the other hand, can only go down to a…

What’s sad is I’m pretty sure the team I work I’m collectively paid more money than we bring in yearly.

Is your team an investment? I know we (not me, someone else I work with) asked our CEO about a team not making money, and he responded yeah, they started the team knowing it was a ten year investment, now it is looking like a 20 year investment and they are fine with it. My opinion is the team in question will never pay off the investment, but it will eventually come close enough to break even and the goodwill they generate for the company more than makes up the monitory loss. (How do you count someone who decides to buy our most profitable product vs a competitors because we have an unrelated product they use)

Re: The other kind of staff software engineer

#110

Post by rendall »

Goronmon wrote: post #18
rendall wrote: post #9

At one place I worked full-time, the time-tracking software explicitly had a checkbox, "billable", which meant this time can be directly billed to clients , and you were expected to be able to check that for some specific percentage of your working day. A marketing company. It was annoying and onerous, quite like the company itself, come to think about it. These days, as a freelancer, everything I do is "line", in th…

At one place I worked full-time, the time-tracking software explicitly had a checkbox, "billable", which meant this time can be directly billed to clients, and you were expected to be able to check that for some specific percentage of your working day. The percentage I'm expected to bill to clients is 100%, 8hrs a day. We are even expected to make up time spent on non-billable things like company or department meetin…

In that case, just don't sweat it. It's all billable. Lunch, too, apparently. That's just what the sales contract stipulates, so, it's not your problem.

The stress comes from deciding which hour you bill and which you don't. Bill all the things!

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