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On Becoming a VP of Engineering

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Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#191

Post by littlestymaar »

dasil003 wrote: post #100
marcinzm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they'r…

Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up. I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. I…

> Hiring the right people is competence

It can be, or it can just be luck, which is the point of the comment you're responding to.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#192

Post by felipemnoa »

rgifford wrote: post #163
dasil003 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up. I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. I…

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…

>>We all need our delusions

Not to be an a-hole but says who and why? I think I prefer utter honesty, but ironically I may just be deluding myself.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#193

Post by nickserv »

JamesBarney wrote: post #185
nickserv wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to. Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team.…

> tech company engineering has to be good As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".

I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For me it's more about medium and long term success, not growing quickly and selling out a couple years later.

Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years.

Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#194

Post by jarjoura »

dasil003 wrote: post #100
marcinzm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they'r…

Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up. I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. I…

You sir sound like someone who is in that upper management realm. People ARE hard.

Something that has kind of annoyed me with upper management folks. At the companies I've worked for in the bay area, they all copy each other with the same management theories. They love to re-org and reshuffle to tree-shake out the fluff. They also love to drive towards exceedingly unrealistic goals because they expect pushback and want negotiating room. Now the latest craze seems to be that layoffs are good, even though I haven't heard one positive thing from anyone.

So I'm not sure these upper management folks, with their org debugging skills are actually doing things other than obfuscating the actual output of their orgs. If everyone is always moving around and assigned new goals, all it does is keep their org goal post actually undefined.

On the ground, sure, I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me. However, I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic. There has to be other strategies out there, or at least in our experiment driven culture, room to test out new ideas.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#195

Post by lapcat »

morgante wrote: post #189
lapcat wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, I've started a company, contrary to your previous assumption, and I know other people who have started companies. You don't speak for everyone or even most people. If climbing the corporate hierarchy is so much easier, then how high up the ladder did you get exactly?

I never said you hadn't started a company. I explicitly asked if you had—the opposite of assuming. Nothing in my comment assumed you hadn't. Since you're unwilling to argue in good faith, we can resolve this.

> I explicitly asked if you had—the opposite of assuming.

It felt like a rhetorical question, because without waiting for my answer, you presumed to explain to me, "Building a company from scratch is way more work than climbing a corporate hierarchy", and then you doubled down, presuming to know "the observations of ~everyone".

What exactly was the purpose of your question, and what is your response to the answer "Yes"?

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#196

Post by danielmarkbruce »

ddq wrote: post #170
danielmarkbruce wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people won't understand what you are saying. They just won't. It won't ever compute.

Part of me feels that pessimism, but another part of me believes every rational individual has at least one path to a more open mind, whether through music, art, study, self-reflection, dialog, mind-altering substances... all sorts of sources of inspiration. Most will probably never understand, but I won't stop lighting sparks and hoping they kindle in the minds of those with whom I choose to interact. That's what wo…

On this specific topic it's not pessimism and it has little to do with rationality. It's largely just spending time in organizations and watching what happens.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#197

Post by jimbokun »

zer8k wrote: post #101
marcinzm wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they'r…

> After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. C-levels get a lot of undeserved respect when in fact usually they're protected by a very (understandably) conservative board. The board will choose inaction over action in almost every case unless the failure is so bad it's publi…

The original thesis of YCombinator was that it's easier to teach people with strong technical skills how to business than to teach business people how to code.

So if you really think CEO is an easy job requiring little in the way of specialized skills, start a company, name yourself CEO, and make a fortune. What's stopping you?

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#198

Post by jimbokun »

ska wrote: post #137
zer8k wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed. Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. C-levels get a lot of undeserved respect when in fact usually they're protected by a very (understandably) conservative board. The board will choose inaction over action in almost every case unless the failure is so bad it's publi…

> 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.

Also, one of the key responsibilities of the CEO is to identify, recruit, and hire high performing engineers.

Jobs' great talent was identifying Woz and his potential. And then many more after him.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#199

Post by jimbokun »

JamesBarney wrote: post #185
nickserv wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to. Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team.…

> tech company engineering has to be good As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".

I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes radically as company size grows.

For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything.

With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering

#200

Post by jimbokun »

lapcat wrote: post #81
lordofmoria wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re forgetting that companies need both Visionary AND Execution focused leaders at the very top. I’m an execution through and through guy, but I learned early on that my co-founder’s ideal traits are the opposite of mine, and that’s what you’re seeing here. What’s being described is a classic Visionary - spontaneous, jumps around and can be distracting, yes - but crucially, is also an amazing innovator and motivat…

> You’re forgetting that companies need both Visionary AND Execution focused leaders at the very top. I'm not forgetting. And I'm not claiming that this promotion was a mistake. I am raising questions about the narrative that the author is telling/selling. Consider how you'll likely not see such a long-winded post from company founders explaining in detail why they chose themselves for their own jobs. They founded a…

What would be your alternative advice?
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