How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management • Hacker News Board

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#111

Post by gvb » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 3:35 PM UTC

My summary/option: Technical leaders should be front-running the team so that, when less experienced engineers run into problems, the technical leader knows in what direction to point the team to find the solution to the problem.

Having technical leaders stuck on legacy Sisyphean tasks (a) sucks up the time that should be used front-running the team for solutions to future problems and (b) removes opportunities for less experienced engineers to learn new ideas and skills, hindering their education and development.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#112

Post by spopejoy » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 3:44 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #66

vinceguidry wrote: post #59

As a coder that's soon to be taking on a management responsibility, I definitely feel the weight of it, but I'm up for the task of figuring out leadership. I might well be more suited to it than a lot of engineers would, but I also think that management and leadership is less hard than it seems and that engineers would actually be better at it than their superiors if they would just give themselves a chance. The tric…

Ah, the innocence of the engineer on the cusp of a new management position. This is more or less what every engineer thinks when they start a "bridge position". Very few survive, because the reality is that the management world is much different than the world we engineers are used to, even after we have a lot of experience as an employed engineer. We think that since we've seen a lot of bosses come and go and met an…

Great anecdote about the perils of mgmt. But I think it shows that management in an org or sub-org that has a terrible culture is ... terrible.

I've been in and out of management, and how awful it is comes down to who's above you. I've had upper mgmt that was mercurial and weird, but ultimately fair and supportive when the chips were really down. Result: stress but no bullshit.

I've had upper mgmt that was "cool" and had me over to their $3m vaca house and threw great parties. When the shit hit the fan, things were weird, uncertain. In the end I was thrown under the bus. Result: foreground "mellow", background stress, bad outcome.

Whether or not I bought donuts for my directs had nothing to do with it. My approach toward employees was 1) service 2) work queue mgmt 3) technical mentorship. In so far as I stayed on the ball this worked out fine. Most issues were my mistakes, not some horrible political gaming fail.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#113

Post by icedchai » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 4:11 PM UTC

My experience has been that most managers wind up going to meetings all day and stop contributing technically.

I briefly (a couple years) managed a small team (How do you reward your skilled coders? Let them do real, interesting work and not deal with bullshit (this includes all the time wasting "agile" meetings.)

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#114

Post by thisGuysAccount » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 4:20 PM UTC

fit2rule wrote: post #107

enraged_camel wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>This is the problem: manager types >>There is no such thing, it is an absurd invention. Of course there is. Management as a career track attracts certain types of people, just like engineering. Every manager is different but they share a lot of common traits. Hence, "manager types."

These 'types' exist only to allow academia administrivia to be more open for profit. There is not such a thing as a 'manager type of personality', or 'a tech type' - this is an invention, utterly arbitrary, and a product of a corrupt education system that allows such a mythos to occur in order to cater to industrialization of human economy.

There might well not be a "managerial archetype".

Each company will have desired traits in their managers, whether they go for the servant leader or the authoritarian delegator, their desired traits will limit who they view as suitable for managerial positions. There will be "manager types," and to people who have worked for that company for 10, 15, 20 years, that is the "manager type" for all companies, in their view.

There are also some traits that _are_ required for managerial work, certainly not enough to define a personality type, but without them, people could not function in a delegating, influencing, or persuading position. They're the traits that allow people to perform those functions.

I'd certainly be willing to concede the point that those aren't even personality traits, but skillful applications of personality that could be developed.

TLDR: I agree with you, but there's enough nuance in what "types" could mean that you're looking at a discussion about very subtle things that many people might not consider at first.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#115

Post by mathattack » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 4:33 PM UTC

When I was at BigCo, they officially had 2 paths - one involved people leadership, the other technical leadership. The reality was technical leadership stopped a level below director, and only 2 or 3 even managed to make it that far. After 3.5 years there, it had a formative impact of pushing me away from both the company and technology. I recovered on both, but it's something one should take seriously on taking a job. I'm not sure that creating "Mega-consultants" works either, as it takes the emphasis away from delivery ownership.

That said, here are a few ideas in rank order from easy/feasible to crazy/radical:

1) Technical leaders of a certain level can not be overruled on technical decisions by non-technical leaders in the department.

2) Encourage the best to share their work outside the firm.

3) Smart people like to be with smart people. Pay up for a culture or cohort of superstars, not an individual superstar.

4) Provide time and monetary budget for architecture and technical debt that is owned and allocated by the best in the organization.

5) Allow technical stars to have the ability to change assignments at their will with a given notice period. (Yes it may cause problems, but the free market is always giving them offers)

6) Enable managers to raise technical pay without concern for bands. For example, the VP should be able to say, "I can hire 4 engineers for 100K each, or I can hire someone in the open market for 200K. Instead I will pay my internal superstar 220K since she will do it the best, even though it's way out of bands of someone with her seniority and level."

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#116

Post by Joeri » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 4:37 PM UTC

parfe wrote: post #39

clueless123 wrote: post #13

If a sales guy sells 10x, he gets 10x commision.. If a coder produces 10x, pay him 10x. What is so hard to understand about that ?

People hand the company money when sales do their job. No one hands the company money because you wrote an extra 1,000 lines of code this week down in your cube on B2. Just like the janitor who doesn't get paid 10x as much if he spends some extra time scrubbing the bathrooms.

Sales need something to sell. Jobs are paid based on the perception of how difficult it is to find someone to do it. CEO's are paid ridiculous amounts because the perception is almost no one can do the job. Janitors are paid little because the perception is almost anyone can do the job. The result of this is that many buildings are cleaned poorly, so nxt time you see a dirty bathroom, don't blame the janitor, blame the person hiring the janitor. The supply of good janitors is much more restricted than it appears, but that's because the person hiring typically can't see the value in paying more.

For programmers it's the same. Good programmers can make or break a business by building software which sells itself, or by building software with 10 times less effort, turning loss into profit, but many people hiring the programmers don't see it that way, so many programming jobs underpay, and many people paid to program have no business being anywhere near a keyboard.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#117

Post by geebee » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 4:37 PM UTC

mateo411 wrote: post #71

ionforce wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it flawed?

The figure 779,000 makes sense if you could take a programmer today and have him travel back in time to 1999. While the programmer was back in 1999 he(or she) would have access to everything that is available in 2014. The programmer would have access to the frameworks, the infrastructure(AWS), and everything else that we have available. The reason average programmers today don't make on average 779,000 dollars a year…

An easily commoditized skill can still generate a tremendous amount of value. However, the worker is unlikely to capture most of that value. In fact, if a worker captures all of the value, there would be no benefit to the employer.

The point of the post is that we aren't in a labor bubble, because the amount of value created by a programmer is much higher than the programmer's salary. For instance, suppose that a contractor installing marble countertops on luxury houses out in the desert gets paid 100k a year. It turns out that the value of those countertops is below 100k a year. This could be used to suggest that the jobs themselves will disappear (or salaries must drop dramatically), as the value they generate isn't sufficient to justify that pay.

Now suppose installing those countertops generate 200k a year in value, but that it is relatively easy. That would suggest that salaries could drop even though there is a surplus of value in the existing salary structure. However, it wouldn't suggest that salaries need to drop because value generated isn't sufficient to justify the pay level.

I think that's the point here - that the amount of value generated is so great that programmer salaries could remain high. It doesn't necessarily mean then will, just that we aren't in a salary bubble where salaries are higher than value generated.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#118

Post by alttab » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 5:37 PM UTC

solistice wrote: post #63

jghn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The best managers I've ever had were the ones that completely shielded the rest of us from the absolute BS that always exist. Go figure, those were the companies where the rank & file didn't think political BS existed - surprise, your manager was protecting you from that!

So essentially managers are people sysadmins. They make sure everyone is working, try to resolve conflicts and ideally make sure that everyone is running the right tools. What would be a people engineer in that vein?

Mentors and leaders.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#119

Post by morgante » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 5:38 PM UTC

A lot of people in this thread are pointing to the possibility of a technical track, but I just don't buy it.

Any technical track stops far short of the management track, even in the most enlightened of companies. Taken to an extreme, you don't get to be CEO off the technical track.

Ultimately, if you want more money and influence, you have to choose the management track. The technical track just exists to keep technical talent from leaving——look at any companies with technical tracks (ex. Facebook) and you won't find their top earners on it.

Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management

#120

Post by jghn » Sat, Nov 22, 2014, 5:41 PM UTC

solistice wrote: post #63

jghn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. The best managers I've ever had were the ones that completely shielded the rest of us from the absolute BS that always exist. Go figure, those were the companies where the rank & file didn't think political BS existed - surprise, your manager was protecting you from that!

So essentially managers are people sysadmins. They make sure everyone is working, try to resolve conflicts and ideally make sure that everyone is running the right tools. What would be a people engineer in that vein?

Yes. Although in my case when I was talking about my 'best managers', they were also the people who were brilliant and were really good at the tech side too. These people all just had a natural ability to navigate through the political BS while still being extremely competent software folks.