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What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#121

Post by OJFord »

arexxbifs wrote: post #60
qppo wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A question I like for non-tech businesses is: "do you see this as a software business or transitioning to become one?" Because these days every business has to be investing into software products, and the ones that don't recognize that the software is key to all their products are the ones that are dead folks walking. They're also great targets for SaaS consultant vultures.

I dearly hope my cast iron skillet will never require a firmware upgrade.

But it's sold by a company with a website, and if it's in-house, (probably quite a big 'if') its developers probably don't want to be lumped in with its phone line, office PC etc. sysadmins (and I'm sure it's mutual).

I think that's the point. Cookware's just a further-from-tech example of it.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#122

Post by courtf »

Roboprog wrote: post #98
klipt wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why settle for scrum lord when you could be scrum king? Scrum emperor? One day even scrum Pope?

God-Emperor of Scrum. The code must flow.

Now fly my scrumlings! Bring me their estimates! Eeehehehe

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#123

Post by jedberg »

bigiain wrote: post #116
jedberg wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yeah I don't think asking if they are a "software business" is actually a good question. But I'd still be wary of working for them if their software engineers were in IT.

On the other hand, would you _ever_ have even _considered_ working for Juicero?

Haha I would not, but that has nothing to do with where their software engineers were classified in their org. ;)

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#124

Post by avivo »

This mostly matches my experience...but I wonder if it ignores significant costs.

In particular, how this impact long term maintenance vs. the desire to build new interesting things? (e.g., see https://themaintainers.org/). And what about people who just enjoy the act of coding — of wizzing through tickets and gathering points?

For another potential cost, take the example given of the Like button in the piece. I'd be curious what Justin Rosenstein now thinks of the example of the Like button. The author says "The business impact of this button is well in the billions: allowing Facebook to (re-) target ads, and "track" users outside of the Facebook site. [...] Everyone is better off for it: the people with the idea and the business." Does everyone here include the users and world?

Perhaps if we had better metrics, this SV would work for everything. But in the current world, with profit, data, and growth metrics being incentivized, it may have real societal costs.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#125

Post by gwbas1c »

I once had a rather prestigious developer position in a Silicon Valley company. The "approachability" was a double edged sword.

One problem I fought was that a lot of people expected handholding from me, or wanted me in their meeting to "feel important." There really is value to having your manager act as a gatekeeper.

Another problem I had was that less ambitious people in other departments (support, qa,) would throw their work over the wall to me. I eventually had to get involved with triage to train the other managers to push back on this.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#126

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

opportune wrote: post #21
quicklime wrote: post #18

I've worked at both SV and traditional companies, and I feel like this very closely matches my experience. One of the things I worry about is that even at companies that are doing "Agile transformations" and adopting methodologies like Scrum, in practice have "Product Owners" who are there to give instructions via Jira tickets. Other roles like "Business Analysts" are there to ensure that lowly developers never have…

Yes! The proliferation and role of "business people" in traditional companies is IMO their defining characteristic. It shows how much or how little a business trusts engineers (and also engineer's "status" within the company, e.g. are they respected and valued or treated as a disposable resource) to run the business as general problem solvers. The ironic thing about Agile is that it has a cottage industry of "scrum c…

These are people whose entire job consists of sitting in meetings and firing off emails. They can't conceive that other people do work collaborating outside of a meeting room.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#127

Post by spfzero »

quicklime wrote: post #18

I've worked at both SV and traditional companies, and I feel like this very closely matches my experience. One of the things I worry about is that even at companies that are doing "Agile transformations" and adopting methodologies like Scrum, in practice have "Product Owners" who are there to give instructions via Jira tickets. Other roles like "Business Analysts" are there to ensure that lowly developers never have…

When I was managing engineers, I would insist that the engineer talk 1:1 to the engineer on the client (or customer) side when doing fixes or feature enhancements that happened to be requested from outside the company. This always caused consternation among scrummasters and product managers, and there always had to be a discussion about it. But it sped things up tremendously, because the engineer could do things like say "well, what if we did this other thing instead, which would give you what you need, and also solve another problem we have". In almost all cases the other engineer was happy to talk to our engineer, and very easy to work with. This needed to be a private conversation as well, so that both parties not need to worry about optics. Preferably phone. Once a scrum-master tried to insist that these conversations take place on a public slack channel so that we could "capture" it! And yes I understand why, but it would have skewed the process into something less effective.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#128

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

klipt wrote: post #36
courtf wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've long imagined a position just above the scrum masters: the scrum lord. I see this position as a critical component of any agile strategy that seeks to maximize scrum master productivity, while still allowing scrum masters all the autonomy they need for their day-to-day duties.

Why settle for scrum lord when you could be scrum king? Scrum emperor? One day even scrum Pope?

Value based scrum black belt.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#129

Post by lifeisstillgood »

I have occsssionally espoused "metric-driven-development" where a metric is defined and measured and then a release is tagged with that metric - and over a period the release is seen as a success or fail if it moves the metric.

This keeps everything focused on the important usually externally facing issues.

Re: What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not

#130

Post by dilyevsky »

mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #120
dilyevsky wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on your budget the min SAG rate can be anywhere from ~100-1000/day so many sw engineers in fact make much more than most actors

I’m exclusively drawing the comparison with high demand actors / athletes. Perhaps athletes has the better clarity - many NBA players are paid more than their head coach, and even those paid less are still paid much more competitively to their revenue contribution than engineers by comparison.

Superstar athletes/actors have much higher roi - nobody is buying your product bc of star c++ developer you hired. Besides there are only like 50 or superstar players/actors at any given moment. Pretty sure you can find this many engineers who made millions
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