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How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

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Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#101

Post by maccard »

Aurornis wrote: post #65
getnormality wrote: post #15

It seems like this post can be summarized as follows: 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. 2. If your manager doesn't have something in particular they want you to do, you should figure out what they will want you to do in the future , and make any necessary preparations so that it will be doable when they want it. I'd say it's good advice. The only thing I would add i…

> 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. This point seems obvious, but it's one topics I've had to coach many early career people on over and over again. Many of the people who were having difficulties or heading toward PIP could be turned around by implementing a simple loop where they: 1. Ask their manager for the top priority, explicitly. Re-confirm the top priority e…

I completely agree. I've foudn that skill never goes away no matter how far you get. The trick is as you go higher up, spotting what comes next and knowing how to solve it faster.

> They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting.

I had a great manager when I was fresh and I watched someone else on the team go down this path and succeed. I know now that the difference was that they knew what was going to bite us in 2 weeks/2 months, and that it was partially experience and partially they had info on where the project was going that I didn't. But had I looked at what they were doing and mimic'ed it, I would have failed.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#102

Post by creer »

awesome_dude wrote: post #70
johnfn wrote: post #48

A lot of the frustration I typically hear in this camp is something like “well I shipped a huge refactor that cleaned up all the code, why does no one appreciate that?” One particular interaction that got me thinking was a few years ago listening to an acquaintance telling me how he spent months meticulously cleaning up the data pipeline and making it perfect, and how no one appreciated this work. Like, as an enginee…

Just for the record, those have intangible results. They improve maintainability, reduce vectors for bugs (which are always based on misunderstandings) and increase velocity. Absolutely none of those can be measured (hence intangible) which is why they are a hard sell

> Absolutely none of those can be measured

They can be estimated (with a wild range) and that's still useful: If that impact is clearly in the noise, drop it. If that impact is clearly huuuge then set up some ongoing measurements and get started step-wise and demonstrate results. If you think you need to rebuild the whole thing before seeing any results, you see the world in a way that won't happen (except if your business is not delivering solutions but is selling solutions - in which case carry on). That doesn't mean the ground idea is incorrect.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#103

Post by awesome_dude »

creer wrote: post #102
awesome_dude wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just for the record, those have intangible results. They improve maintainability, reduce vectors for bugs (which are always based on misunderstandings) and increase velocity. Absolutely none of those can be measured (hence intangible) which is why they are a hard sell

> Absolutely none of those can be measured They can be estimated (with a wild range) and that's still useful: If that impact is clearly in the noise, drop it. If that impact is clearly huuuge then set up some ongoing measurements and get started step-wise and demonstrate results. If you think you need to rebuild the whole thing before seeing any results, you see the world in a way that won't happen (except if your bu…

Can you demonstrate, or show how that would work (serious question)

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#104

Post by poisonborz »

I wish there were more articles on this topic. Politics is always something engineers have to suffer because, not a part of life in a way they could actively utilise, even though they are the core business-forming part of the lower ranking workforce.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#105

Post by anon84873628 »

MarkMarine wrote: post #73
elevatortrim wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean if 1-pagers helped you get recognition and advance your career, or if they helped your ideas come to life?

They helped my ideas be “lying around” and picked from when the crisis happened. In the source, the author says that when there is a crisis (an outage or similar) management will come to you and ask for help solving the problem and you should already have a solution ready to go. What I’ve found is that you should pre-seed your solutions with 1 pagers. Identify things that need to be improved, changes to solve tomorro…

Absolutely! I thought this was inherent in the Staff Engineer position in the first place, so was sort of surprised it needed to be stated in the article.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#106

Post by creer »

awesome_dude wrote: post #103
creer wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Absolutely none of those can be measured They can be estimated (with a wild range) and that's still useful: If that impact is clearly in the noise, drop it. If that impact is clearly huuuge then set up some ongoing measurements and get started step-wise and demonstrate results. If you think you need to rebuild the whole thing before seeing any results, you see the world in a way that won't happen (except if your bu…

Can you demonstrate, or show how that would work (serious question)

Sure. Let's take that idea:

> reduce vectors for bugs (which are always based on misunderstandings)

Is that really impossible to measure? (For cheap that is. Cheap measure, cheap estimate, cheap confidence). Is that really impossible to monitor?

Grab a random sample of 100 fixed bugs in the past 2 years. Go through them one by one. How many do you really seriously think would have been avoided? If it's not much more work, give it some weighting on confidence and impact or something. For how much addl work? Once you notice what you could count, restart from the top (re-randomize?) - it's only 100 bugs. Is it really 100%, or is it now that are looking at the data more like 10% at best? Was it really impossible to get data?

Now that you have an estimate, write it up and circulate it - It's risky: you could be volunteered to fix the problem and maybe you don't want that.

Would it really be impossible to monitor over the next year? (Still cheap data, cheap results - except if you really estimated 100% because now you were able to get real budget - even if too small - to attack it.)

Estimates, targets, budgets, deadlines are all different concepts. A fraught but carefully worked up estimate is rarely impossible.

Entire businesses get founded and funded on "impossible" estimates.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#107

Post by rzz3 »

>Powerful stakeholders are typically so stupid and dysfunctional that it’s effectively impossible for you to identify their needs and deliver solutions to them

I’m sorry, WHAT? How old is this author? “I fail to communicate effectively with anyone who isn’t an engineer because I lack the required empathy and perspective” is very different from “the average stakeholder is stupid and dysfunctional”. I stopped reading at this point because author is clearly someone who doesn’t take responsibility for their own failures in communication.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#108

Post by rustystump »

I think this article completely misses a critical point at staff level, being a force multiplier cross functionally.

Api is slow, api wasnt being gzipd, good snack, give snack to other eng, find more snack.

Oh look product doesnt have metric, get product the metric, now team look good because boss see what team do.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#109

Post by jlund-molfese »

creer wrote: post #96
jlund-molfese wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree! You have to also remember that, if you're the person pushing for something to be priority, it's your job to make it make sense to whoever is responsible for prioritization. The easiest way to do that is to speak the same language everyone else is. Your product manager probably speaks in dollars (or euros, renminbi, etc). If you provide a good-faith estimate (ballpark ranges are totally fine) that increased t…

Sure except that "saving money" is not what makes a company win, and so it's rightly not what makes a career. If you can show that building that new library for $X will streamline engineering by Y% which will allow doubling sales by launching 3 new products - NOW you have a good proposition. (Your "X future business scenario"). Saving money on the current product is only useful if the company has no clue where to go…

I don't disagree, but I'm not sure if you meant to reply to my comment? I didn't make any references to saving money; the point I'm making is that spending 10 hours this week in order to have 10 additional hours of capacity (ability to build out new features tied to revenue) every month is often a bargain that makes sense.

In the context of full-time engineers, "saving time" actually means that time will be reinvested into product feature development, rather than resulting in less spending on engineering pay. Similarly, engineers spending less time on support, means they can spend more time on feature development.

Re: How I influence tech company politics as a staff software engineer

#110

Post by yinser »

apwell23 wrote: post #53

> The easiest way is to actively work to make a high-profile project successful. This is more or less what you ought to be doing anyway, just as part of your ordinary job this involves you getting a chance to work on it in the first place. why would you in particular be getting to work on those projects? you have to first align yourself with VP and become their bitch. someone who they can trust. you should always fol…

You should consider finding a career coach, professional therapist. This level of pessimism can't be healthy.
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