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Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

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Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#121

Post by collyw »

nostrademons wrote: post #30
hangonhn wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I don't know. If you have a team that is able to consistently ship products that work and are well received by your existing client base, you probably do have some badass tech guys." From my experience, a good manager can ship with bad enginners but good engineers cannot ship with a bad manager. This is from the perspective from an engineer. We engineers need to stop kidding ourselves. We are good at certain problem…

Good engineers can ship with a bad manager, but it basically requires one of the engineers "managing up" and taking on the role of manager without pissing off his actual manager. That's a delicate balance to strike, but there are some folks (usually experienced engineers who have been around the block a few times, or folks who have previously held manager/executive positions but "downshifted" because they really like…

That sound like my situation where my team leader is not very experienced (or good in my opinion). As such I often refuse to do things the way he suggests. "Just do it like this". When the word "just" is part of the phrase, it means that he probably hasn't thought it out very thoroughly.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#122

Post by czbond »

theboss wrote: post #114
czbond wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you scale. I've met too many developers who say this until they're in a high growth environment.

My original point exactly. They get all these rails cloud heroku iOS guys and then how aren't the startups trapped? Ive never seen a job posting for an infrastructure all-around-guy

Fair. I've seen a lot of 'full stack' or 'back end' engineer postings - which i think is 'their version' of an infrastructure guy. If you think about it, how would a designer who has mainly pushed pixels describe that type of offering besides 'back end'?

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#123

Post by nostrademons »

collyw wrote: post #121
nostrademons wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good engineers can ship with a bad manager, but it basically requires one of the engineers "managing up" and taking on the role of manager without pissing off his actual manager. That's a delicate balance to strike, but there are some folks (usually experienced engineers who have been around the block a few times, or folks who have previously held manager/executive positions but "downshifted" because they really like…

That sound like my situation where my team leader is not very experienced (or good in my opinion). As such I often refuse to do things the way he suggests. "Just do it like this". When the word "just" is part of the phrase, it means that he probably hasn't thought it out very thoroughly.

When I've seen this done effectively, the engineer never outright refuses to do things the way their manager says. Instead, they take responsibility for educating their manager, in a way that the manager can understand and without threatening their ego. So if the manager says "Just do it like this", your response should be "That won't work because X, Y, and Z. However, I could do it like this, and it will have these costs and benefits and take me this long, and that's why I believe this is a superior course of action." At all points the decision is still up to the manager, but the senior engineer has brought enough data and experience to bear that they can convince their manager that it was a good idea to begin with.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#124

Post by lawtguy »

hangonhn wrote: post #106
Sakes wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't speak for management, but our team would inform their team on what was broken, and it would not get resolved in a timely fashion. We would get contacted by the client to resolve an issue on our end, and after some debugging we would consistently discover it was broken because of the other company. They couldn't produce code that worked. This could have been a management problem. For example maybe they simply…

"I guess the most direct answer would be, since it was a problem that I could have resolved with tech, I didn't see a reason why they couldn't resolve it with tech." That really captures how engineers think. I think I often think the same way but my gut feeling is that there might be a fallacy in that way of thinking. I can't think of it right now but your statement does give me a bit to think about. I'm not saying y…

There can be a lot more that's going on than just they are bad programmers:

- They are solving a fundamentally hard problem: it's a problem that at first glance looks easy, but turns out to be really really hard (for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem)

- They are under-resourced and/or over-committed: they know how to fix your problem, they just don't have time to do it.

- Your not paying them enough to make it worth fixing: similar to the above, but in this case you simply don't represent enough revenue to make the doing the fix cost effective. Especially if it's a problem only you have.

- They have architecture constraints that make it hard to fix the problem: a bad/simple/incorrect design may make fixing the problem very hard

- They have legacy code which was poorly written or simply coded very fast and is now brittle and difficult to fix.

- They have internal political problems which are preventing them from fixing the problem.

I'm sure there are more that others here on HN have seen.

The worse case I saw of this was with a contractor who underestimated how hard the problem was, under-resourced the project and the resources that where on the project where not very good engineers. That project crashed and burned so hard there were lawsuits.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#125

Post by clark-kent »

lazyjones wrote: post #120
zwass wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook: * HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler ( http://www.hhvm.com/blog/ ) * Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i... ) * Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scal…

Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a leading product.

Of course they are, facebook handles petrabytes of data. Their infrastructure will fall apart without such projects.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#126

Post by ihsotas »

clark-kent wrote: post #125
lazyjones wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a leading product.

Of course they are, facebook handles petrabytes of data. Their infrastructure will fall apart without such projects.

Yeah. OP has never worked near any of these companies. Writing some basic linear algebra routines in python doesn't mean you're doing the same work that Google has to.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#127

Post by zwass »

lazyjones wrote: post #120
zwass wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook: * HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler ( http://www.hhvm.com/blog/ ) * Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i... ) * Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scal…

Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a leading product.

Given that Facebook is motivated by profits, one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#128

Post by borplk »

zwass wrote: post #112
fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

Among many serious engineering projects at Facebook: * HHVM (open source) - A PHP runtime and JIT compiler ( http://www.hhvm.com/blog/ ) * Presto (open source) - A distributed SQL query engine working on hundreds of petabytes of data ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/presto-i... ) * Running graph algorithms on a graph with a trillion edges ( https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scal…

Almost all of these projects are the result of the size and scale of Facebook not the nature of the problem they are solving or their core business.

The nature of Facebook (or Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat) is a simple CRUD application that many people are capable of writing. The additional complexity is mostly due to the size of their user base.

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#129

Post by lazyjones »

zwass wrote: post #127
lazyjones wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are (were) any of these essential for Facebook's success? I doubt it. They are by-products of Facebook hiring talented people after they already had a leading product.

Given that Facebook is motivated by profits, one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

> one must assume that these projects are, in fact, essential to the continued success of the product.

In the same way that Google Reader, Google Wave, Google Base and dozens of other products were essential to continued success of Google for a while (before they were discontinued), just because they were developed at Google?

Re: Startup CEOs: you are overestimating your tech talent

#130

Post by [deleted] »

fleitz wrote: post #88

OTOH, most startups don't really need a great tech team. Exactly what highly technical problem is Evernote, Airbnb, Snapchat, or Twitter, or Facebook solving? I mean really deep technical problem like the news feed absolutely will not work with out some sort of huge breakthrough in AI, not that deep learning is 5% better than an SVM. Look at how well something simple like the points*timedecay system than HN uses for…

[deleted]
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