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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

#151

Post by titanomachy »

jedberg wrote: post #111
PascLeRasc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I’m worried about talking about how we have really poor development practices. It’s hard to describe what I do, they try to block people from learning about what their kanban card is for. I just write proprietary scripting language functions then fill out a Word document “unit test” about them. I guess I can editorialize and try to steer the conversation towards what I can bring to the company. Thanks for the…

If I was interviewing you and you told me "my current company has very bad development practices" and then gave me a list of all the things you think they are doing wrong and all the ways it could improve, I'd probably be really impressed. Then I'd ask you why you don't change those things, and I would hope you'd tell me a story about how you tried to change it but got blocked, or maybe small changes you are making t…

Good advice. Also: don't blame the people around you for why you couldn't fix something. Even if it's because your manager was a short-sighted idiot, or the senior engineer on your team was jealously guarding his territory, you don't have to say that in the interview. See if you can reframe it in a more blame-neutral way.

For example, if you couldn't remove a bad pattern because it was too deeply entrenched for you to handle it yourself, and you couldn't get anyone more senior interested: that's expected for a junior developer and probably wouldn't be held against you.

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

#152

Post by Osiris »

The big take away for me here is: does the company see engineers as a "cost center" or a "profit center"?

You can almost directly correlate the "traditional" approach to seeing engineering as a cost center, while startups/S.V. style companies see engineering as a profit center, and they treat their employees accordingly.

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

#153

Post by mandeepj »

jedberg wrote: post #33

The best way to tell if a company values engineers is to ask which cost center they are in. Is it IT? Then they will treat you like a cog and consider you just a cost to the company. Is it Product? Then they will consider you valuable and critical to the company's success.

> The best way to tell if a company values engineers is to ask which cost center they are in.

Duh! Companies don't put all the engineers in one cost center. It's either by teams/product/business unit/function

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

#154

Post by abalashov »

mark-r wrote: post #137
jedberg wrote: post #33

The best way to tell if a company values engineers is to ask which cost center they are in. Is it IT? Then they will treat you like a cog and consider you just a cost to the company. Is it Product? Then they will consider you valuable and critical to the company's success.

That's a good theory, but it doesn't always work that way. I was working on the most profitable product the company had, but was laid off anyway. The new 6 month CTO had a new idea for how software development should be done and I wasn't part of it. Meanwhile at my prior job in IT my boss begged me to stay, I think because I made him look good.

Can relate to the latter. I've left about half a dozen jobs before striking out on my own, and the places where my boss actively pleaded with me to stay were places where I was definitely an operations cost centre and a galaxy away from anything resembling a profit centre or a revenue driver.

Politics. I was competent, precocious, energetic, participated in many meetings and liaised with lots of teams with which people in my position don't usually liaise, bailed out some people in other parts of the business with unexpected skill sets and initiative, and made the manager look good.

Meanwhile, the one job I was actually fired - not laid off - from, I was sitting very close to the money train.

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

#155

Post by DoofusOfDeath »

courtf wrote: post #122
Roboprog wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God-Emperor of Scrum. The code must flow.

Now fly my scrumlings! Bring me their estimates! Eeehehehe

Meh. A real Evil Scrum Lord makes his victims enter the data by themselves into Jira.

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

#156

Post by bumby »

Osiris wrote: post #152

The big take away for me here is: does the company see engineers as a "cost center" or a "profit center"? You can almost directly correlate the "traditional" approach to seeing engineering as a cost center, while startups/S.V. style companies see engineering as a profit center, and they treat their employees accordingly.

I think part of this is because in SV a software engineer is closer to the value creation of the end product. In a traditional company, the software developers are more of an enabling function than a primary one

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

#157

Post by abalashov »

andrewjl wrote: post #133
abalashov wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably easy to believe that if you're developing a SaaS app on the Pacific Coast, but in actually-existing reality -- no, they won't. Their business processes and products are often sclerotic, and so are vulnerable to disruption by smaller, more nimble startups. That's the central premise of virtually all B2B software from the Valley. But they certainly aren't going to die. In fact, large companies and enormou…

> In fact, large companies and enormous capital are required to take things from a "disruptive innovation" to a household name, to say nothing of providing an exit for SV startups. I think this is becoming less and less true, unless one is competing with the tech giants directly. In the past enormous capital investment was required to build out the minimum viable capacity needed to serve larger customers or market se…

To make many things a household name, one has to compete with the giants directly. I am not necessarily referring to the 'tech' economy. Most uses of tech are not in the 'tech industry' itself but to fulfill ulterior aims in other sectors.

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

#158

Post by chris11 »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #104
jedberg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done it myself, but I've hired people who were stuck in IT. Just don't talk negatively about your old job. "I'm looking to move because I want to have more impact". "The work I'm doing now is not core to company's success and I want to have more impact". Etc. I never looked down on someone who was doing boring work if that is what they were supposed to be doing. I'm looking for people who can communicate we…

I guess I’m worried about talking about how we have really poor development practices. It’s hard to describe what I do, they try to block people from learning about what their kanban card is for. I just write proprietary scripting language functions then fill out a Word document “unit test” about them. I guess I can editorialize and try to steer the conversation towards what I can bring to the company. Thanks for the…

You can talk about wanting more ownership. That can include talking about working closely with end users and making long term design decisions.

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

#159

Post by pm90 »

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…

Keep in mind that Agile (using the term loosely) was invented by software consultants who wanted to maximize the value they provided to the business they worked with. It’s a formalization of the ideas to make them more “acceptable” to execs and the decision makers (who care about such things).

When applied to in house engineering teams, it is largely ineffective if it doesn’t come with the same kind of freedom that highly paid software consultants get. This is manifested concretely in how many companies have corrupted agile methodologies by focusing too much on the perfecting practices (or “ceremonies”) rather than focusing on the foundational principles.

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

#160

Post by ilaksh »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #104
jedberg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't done it myself, but I've hired people who were stuck in IT. Just don't talk negatively about your old job. "I'm looking to move because I want to have more impact". "The work I'm doing now is not core to company's success and I want to have more impact". Etc. I never looked down on someone who was doing boring work if that is what they were supposed to be doing. I'm looking for people who can communicate we…

I guess I’m worried about talking about how we have really poor development practices. It’s hard to describe what I do, they try to block people from learning about what their kanban card is for. I just write proprietary scripting language functions then fill out a Word document “unit test” about them. I guess I can editorialize and try to steer the conversation towards what I can bring to the company. Thanks for the…

I am sure this will just get buried, but you could consider searching for a company that appreciates honesty.
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