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On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

honeycomb.io

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Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#21

Post by icedchai »

unholyguy001 wrote: post #17
Aurornis wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for a company that appears to only have 200 employees I was wondering how big the company was. 200 employees isn’t a small company any more, but the bureaucracy and alignment challenges described in the post made it feel more like a 2000 person company.

Yeah exactly. 200 is still a level where everyone knows everyone in their team and all the leaders know each other personally. I mean spending a lot of time aligning with other leaders. How many director + leaders can there be? Five? Similarly how heavyweight can the planning and performance process be when you are that small?

You’d be surprised how many layers there can be even in a small org.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#22

Post by neilv »

rfrey wrote: post #15

> While engineering teams often thrive on routine and ritual (sprint planning, on-call rotations, recurring retros, etc.) My eyes rolled back so hard I'm not sure they'll ever face forward again. Lotta good stuff in this essay, but that one missed the mark a bit.

There absolutely are engineering teams that like the routine and rituals of sprints, their version of "Agile", etc. And thrive, in a sense. (But I've not heard of anyone liking anything about on-call, except for extra pay.)

I'm normally concerned when that seems to be going on, especially in a startup...

For example, in a big company, the problems and coordination and politics are usually hard... so you might "thrive" if all you need to do is sprint tasks, you feel individually unblocked and productive, your individual metrics/reviews look good, and maybe your team looks good as far as anyone can tell.

I'd be careful with that in an early startup, which usually (unless it's more a "growth" scheme) needs to be more effective, efficient, and creative than a large, entrenched company.

(You can have some people be doing such brilliant holistic coordination in a startup, so that others can just go through routines and rituals, with their ducks lined up to plink, and get the right great startup execution out the other end... But I don't know how often or how well that actually happens.)

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#23

Post by marcinzm »

Other have noted how bureaucratic this seems to be for a 200 person company but to me it also seems so top down/hierarchical. Strategy that flows top down with little visibility, input or involvement from ICs except when forced to avoid the ICs getting too annoyed (why aren't the ICs trusted to help more directly contribute to the strategy?). A VP being involved in helping teams say no versus the teams (or their EMs) being empowered to do so (do the other teams/execs have such fragile egos?).

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#24

Post by dalyons »

nickstinemates wrote: post #16
Aurornis wrote: post #9

This series of blog posts have had some really great insights. However, they’ve also left me feeling uneasy for reasons I couldn’t really put my finger on. It finally clicked when I read the section justifying the company's low compensation: > Industry data shows that Honeycomb is about average in this as a series D startup, not an outlier. I have friends who are line managers at larger companies who take home more t…

What is left unsaid: working at a startup at an executive level typically involves whole percentages of equity in the company. If honeycomb continues to succeed and there's some sort of exit or liquidation (which can happen in series D, E rounds for select individuals like executives) then I am sure the total comp is not "about average" but instead much greater than average.

Yeah for executive positions like VP the vast majority of the comp is in stock. At a bigco that will be liquid, at a startup it won’t, hence the difference in “market rate”. But the startup equity is theoretically worth much more, it’s a huge risk but you have to on some level believe the valuation, or you wouldn’t take the job.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#25

Post by marcinzm »

rfrey wrote: post #15

> While engineering teams often thrive on routine and ritual (sprint planning, on-call rotations, recurring retros, etc.) My eyes rolled back so hard I'm not sure they'll ever face forward again. Lotta good stuff in this essay, but that one missed the mark a bit.

A lot of the essay is along the same lines to me. Top down product strategy that teams then simply execute on versus being co-creators of. In that environment you want rituals/routine since it avoids the team thinking about things that are seen as the purvey of others.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#26

Post by Aurornis »

icedchai wrote: post #21
unholyguy001 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah exactly. 200 is still a level where everyone knows everyone in their team and all the leaders know each other personally. I mean spending a lot of time aligning with other leaders. How many director + leaders can there be? Five? Similarly how heavyweight can the planning and performance process be when you are that small?

You’d be surprised how many layers there can be even in a small org.

Oh I know it happens, but that doesn't make it good.

The only way to get a lot of layers in a small org (200 people) is to have very low fan-out, which is inefficient.

For simplicity, imagine a company with 4 C-level executives at the top. Each of them manages 4 reports, and each of their reports manages 4 people, and so on down the layers. In this simplified example you could have 340 people in a company and still only have 4 layers of management (4 + 16 + 64 + 256).

You could even get the 4 C-level executives and their 16 top-level reports into a single room every week if you had to.

The company in this blog post has almost half as many people (according to parent comment) yet the bureaucracy described within sounds like they have layer upon layer of removal to the point that it's a full-time job for many people just to move information around.

The only times I've seen this happen have been when executives get too focused on 1:1 communication and like to fill their calendars up with recurring meetings with fixed sets of participants. The 1:1 communication turns into a slow game of telephone and the recurring meetings consume all of their time with talk that feels like "work" but could have been replaced with a lot of as-needed e-mails and targeted meetings organized on demand.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#27

Post by Aurornis »

dalyons wrote: post #24
nickstinemates wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is left unsaid: working at a startup at an executive level typically involves whole percentages of equity in the company. If honeycomb continues to succeed and there's some sort of exit or liquidation (which can happen in series D, E rounds for select individuals like executives) then I am sure the total comp is not "about average" but instead much greater than average.

Yeah for executive positions like VP the vast majority of the comp is in stock. At a bigco that will be liquid, at a startup it won’t, hence the difference in “market rate”. But the startup equity is theoretically worth much more, it’s a huge risk but you have to on some level believe the valuation, or you wouldn’t take the job.

> At a bigco that will be liquid, at a startup it won’t, hence the difference in “market rate”.

Keep in mind that the compensation was described as "about average" relative to other series D startups. They readily admitted that it was significantly lower than big companies.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#29

Post by icedchai »

Aurornis wrote: post #26
icedchai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’d be surprised how many layers there can be even in a small org.

Oh I know it happens, but that doesn't make it good. The only way to get a lot of layers in a small org (200 people) is to have very low fan-out, which is inefficient. For simplicity, imagine a company with 4 C-level executives at the top. Each of them manages 4 reports, and each of their reports manages 4 people, and so on down the layers. In this simplified example you could have 340 people in a company and still o…

I've seen such bureaucracy at a previous employer. Company is a little over 25 people (including a few that are contractors.) There are 3 people in the C suite, at least one VP, at least 4 directors. There were endless meetings, like you describe. The whole management structure needed to be torn down. People would rather go to meetings and update internal status spreadsheets instead of doing any real meaningful work.

Re: On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

#30

Post by dclowd9901 »

Aurornis wrote: post #9

This series of blog posts have had some really great insights. However, they’ve also left me feeling uneasy for reasons I couldn’t really put my finger on. It finally clicked when I read the section justifying the company's low compensation: > Industry data shows that Honeycomb is about average in this as a series D startup, not an outlier. I have friends who are line managers at larger companies who take home more t…

Might explain previous allusions to not being able to find a good external VP to fit the role.
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