Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On Becoming a VP of Engineering

honeycomb.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 400 posts

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#171

Post by borski »

zer8k wrote: post #155
ska wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a tech based business, having competent engineering is table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.

If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of runn…

> You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.

No, you can’t. Source: I’ve tried.

Some? Sure, you can teach some of them. Hell, some become exceptional at it. Most could not care less about it, though, and are thus terrible at answering customer questions, doing sales, understanding how to optimize a funnel, negotiating a sales contract, or anything else.

Even doing demos is a taught effort, whereas some folks naturally give great demos.

It’s okay for there to be room for multiple important skillsets in a company. It’s not a zero-sum game.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#172

Post by lapcat »

morgante wrote: post #158
jt2190 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you’re taking issue with, as that’s his point: If the founder did not require someone else’s “approval” to take the position of CEO, why should, say, a developer believe that they need “approval” from their organization to think that they’re senior-level? It’s giving the hierarchy above way too much control of your career.

You don't need anyone's approval to decide to call yourself a "senior" developer (even if nobody else agrees). Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate arbiter. If you call yourself a senior developer, but can't perform as one, the market will correct your misconception—just like it knocks down incorrect founders. OP is the one obsesses with hierarchy. The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founde…

> Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate arbiter.

> The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founders of successful companies haven't earned their position.

"The market is the ultimate arbiter" is the exact opposite of the idea that you need the perfect résumé and experience to get and do the job.

That's what you seem to be misinterpreting about my comments. A retroactive assessment of someone's tenure in a leadership position is fundamentally different from a promotion to a leadership position, where the assessment necessarily comes before the tenure.

> Building a company from scratch is way more work than climbing a corporate hierarchy.

There's no reason to believe that this is true, other than the meritocratic article of faith that the most money and power always go to the people who work the "hardest", whatever that means. (I think that scrubbing toilets is hard work.)

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#173

Post by rfrey »

pc86 wrote: post #91
lmeyerov wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded. My point is it's an amazing marketing win by financiers. And here we are now, with what the weird minority do sounding like the expectation for startup business practices vs what most actually do.

"Startup" by definition is companies that need large-scale growth to succeed. Uber, DoorDash, those kinds of businesses are start-ups. It doesn't need to be VC investment necessarily, but it needs a lot of capital to get going and there's a certain amount of network effects. That's not marketing, that's what the word means. > Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded. Then they're probably not star…

> "Startup" by definition is companies that need large-scale growth to succeed

By your definition. And maybe a bunch of people who read the PG essay that narrowed the word that way. But not by the definition of 99.9% of economic participants.

Investopedia's definition, for example, bears no relationship to the PG definition. Neither does Webster's, dictionary.com's, or any entrepreneurship textbook you might find. Even Steve Blank doesn't define it that way.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#174

Post by marcosdumay »

will_gottschalk wrote: post #4

A quote really jumped out at me: > VPs of Engineering from frontend backgrounds are relatively rare, and it’s partly because the most pressing technical challenges a startup faces are often around scaling, reliability, and backend architecture. If we had been dealing with nonstop incidents, constant struggles with scaling, and major architectural challenges with our query and storage engine, someone with deeper backe…

> What I’ve noticed is that the code quality from those backend devs is quite awful.

In my experience, people that look at areas they don't know and think "I don't know of any problems there, it should be easy" have a very high likelihood of being bad at the things they know too.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#175

Post by ska »

zer8k wrote: post #155
ska wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a tech based business, having competent engineering is table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.

If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of runn…

Some of it is hubris, some just naivety.

It's very true that in a e.g. a "pure" software tech company, software engineers have much more power than they do in say an oil exploration company. This isn't surprising, it's the basics of being a profit center or a cost center. In this case engineering definitely has a "crash the company" lever; But this doesn't make the company succeed. In order to do that you need to understand the markets, customers, financing, etc. parameters, not just the tech. Knowing what to build, and what not to build, (and when) is usually more important than the tech, honestly. Hell, a huge swath of the "tech" sector isn't about doing much interesting on the tech side. Which isn't to say you can get away with crap work, just that it's mostly straightforward and you have to care.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#177

Post by ddq »

oblio wrote: post #25
lapcat wrote: post #15

I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position. I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company,…

> I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange I'll tell why several reasons this happens: 1. In many cultures this beaten into kids from an early age. There is no wide range of free will, just the family/tribe/clan/group hierarchy. 2. Hierarchies are... safe. You're part of a group, you roughly know where you stand. 3. Humans are social and inherently hierarchical :-) We've been like this for…

First two points, yes, though on point three I strongly disagree that modern mass hierarchy has existed on an evolutionary timescale. Neither Homo sapiens nor our ancestors ever had hierarchical groups larger than a village until we shifted from hunter-gatherer to agrarian around 10,000 years ago. The core concept is "natural" at a tangible, real scale where it can be seen as an extension of the parent->child form, but nothing in my research has yet refuted the idea that we're actually working against our brain machinery to scale up hierarchies orders of magnitude that defy visualization, though I can see the lizard brain appeal of submission to executive individuals. People can understand a president, CEO, captain. Parental figures. But a parent to thousands or millions, with dozens of steps between you and them? Seems like alienation would be a natural response.

Of course, this is all appeal to nature, but still an interesting perspective to consider.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#178

Post by lapcat »

no_wizard wrote: post #162
strikelaserclaw wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he would be pretty close to someone who went from nobody to a great CEO and founder but i don't think anyone in this world truly starts off on equal footing. Steve Jobs birth parents were both advanced degree holders, he got adopted by a blue collar family who lived in prime real estate bay area during the first rise of tech. Ultimately it is useless to compare people, we should judge people by their output r…

Jobs' adopt family matters more than his birth parents, beyond margin. He grew up middle class (maybe upper middle class, honestly) but his parents weren't executives or VPs, they had a more typical background and he did as well. I think that makes it vastly more relatable. I believe strongly this contributed to his fanaticism around his ideas and thoughts, as well as why he essentially failed as a CEO twice (Apple t…

> he essentially failed as a CEO twice (Apple the first time and NeXT computer was heading toward financial instability). Contrast this with Zuckerburg, who hit out of the park with Facebook.

This is not entirely accurate. Jobs didn't become CEO of Apple until 1997, after Apple acquired NeXT. He was not CEO of Apple before that. Zuck set up the IPO so that he could never lose control of Facebook. Jobs didn't have the benefit of that situation, and he did lose control of Apple in a power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley, which led to his departure from Apple and founding of NeXT.

To talk about Apple, we need to talk about Steve Wozniack too. Jobs wasn't even an engineer, while Woz was a brilliant engineer, and Jobs had the amazing bit of luck to be introduced to Woz by a friend while still in high school! Of course Jobs was able to see the potential of Woz's inventions, but the Apple II computer would not have been possible without Woz.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#179

Post by rgifford »

borski wrote: post #169
rgifford wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're missing what the previous commenter said. There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless. Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's…

There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention strategy and wasn’t managed well enough to adapt. Startup success requires skill and countless hours of hard work, period, and the leaders…

I agree: Conflict resolution, public speaking, salesmanship -- they're all valuable. They make for better people in this world.

When it comes to how these traits translate to the success of leaders or companies? I have no idea. I'd guess causation there is noisy. I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.

In a modern secularized world corporate leaders of large companies seem to take on the role of psuedo-religious figureheads that grant absolution and purpose in the face of the unknown and rob workers blind in return. Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?

It's all just soft skills though -- that's the differentiator, the secret sauce, what makes great leaders. So soft. So skilled. /s

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#180

Post by morgante »

lapcat wrote: post #172
morgante wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need anyone's approval to decide to call yourself a "senior" developer (even if nobody else agrees). Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate arbiter. If you call yourself a senior developer, but can't perform as one, the market will correct your misconception—just like it knocks down incorrect founders. OP is the one obsesses with hierarchy. The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founde…

> Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate arbiter. > The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founders of successful companies haven't earned their position. "The market is the ultimate arbiter" is the exact opposite of the idea that you need the perfect résumé and experience to get and do the job. That's what you seem to be misinterpreting about my comments. A retroactive assessment of someone's t…

> There's no reason to believe that this is true, other than the meritocratic article of faith that the most money and power always go to the people who work the "hardest", whatever that means.

And the observations of ~everyone who has done both. I've done both and starting a company is way harder.

Post reply on HN