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Getting things “done” in large tech companies

seangoedecke.com

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Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#201

Post by bdangubic »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #189
kunzhi wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, 20 years experience of actually doing things here. I've spent 10 of those years now doing consulting with everyone from 3-person pre-series-A startups all the way up to the Fortune 50. Let me unequivocal: you can spend 30-40 years at a company doing absolutely nothing while getting paid for it. Do not let anyone try to convince you otherwise. I've seen such much unethical bloodsucking in my career that at this…

> Let me unequivocal: you can spend 30-40 years at a company doing absolutely nothing while getting paid for it. Maybe this was true for 40 years from the 70s to the 2000s, or maybe even the 80s-10s, but I don't think this is true anymore Certainly not in software engineering, in a world run by JIRA

oh man, respectfully but this cannot be further from the truth. SWEs have successfully convinced everyone that profession “is not about just coding” (you see a sea of these statements here on HN in 100x daily posts “will LLMs replace us”) and hence tools like Jira only amplify ability to do (mostly) nothing

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#202

Post by aprdm »

whstl wrote: post #157
aprdm wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This really depends on the company. There are many companies where eng has way more weight than PM. And that eng aren't so divorced from customers. Even big tech.

I kinda keep hoping to get into one of those but so far only tiny startups are like this. Maybe I should go back to big tech.

Yeah I should go one step deeper, on big tech, it also depends a lot on the org inside the company sometimes.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#203

Post by whatever1 »

We need a spinoff system where big companies can easily offload legacy products that do not align anymore with the company’s direction / bottom line.

Does it make sense for Google today to be building Wi-Fi routers? No. The entitlement is not there, superstar engineers would not want to work at this project since only marginal contributions are needed.

Would I love to be an owner of a smart WiFi router company with excellent UI, integration with Google products, established sales and roadmap? Heck yes.

There just seems to be so much red tape around these that companies prefer to simply kill such products.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#205

Post by gnabgib »

rk06 wrote: post #204

Honestly, i agree with this article. But i have seen a better article in past Article https://www.seangoedecke.com/how-to-ship/ HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111031

You're aware this is the same author, and this copy is just a recycle of that 2024 article?

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#206

Post by whstl »

kunzhi wrote: post #173
whstl wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the most dysfunctional organizations you can't spend 10 years doing nothing. GP was achieving what their bosses asked of them. It's just that it didn't align with their own professional goals of improving the product they work on.

Sorry, 20 years experience of actually doing things here. I've spent 10 of those years now doing consulting with everyone from 3-person pre-series-A startups all the way up to the Fortune 50. Let me unequivocal: you can spend 30-40 years at a company doing absolutely nothing while getting paid for it. Do not let anyone try to convince you otherwise. I've seen such much unethical bloodsucking in my career that at this…

“Absolutely nothing” is still doing what is asked of you by a boss. Unless you’re talking CEOs fooling the board, of course.

Not contributing meaningful things is an arbitrary metric that is often only used to put people down. One can build the whole product and there will still be some asshole claiming they did the easy part or “you didn’t work enough in it to know what’s like”.

The incompetence here lies 100% with person keeping the employee.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#207

Post by jamesfinlayson »

whstl wrote: post #66
abhisek wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you define a good PM? I have been looking for this definition for a while. In my startup experience, it seems to me the best PMs are the CTO and the early engineers who has near infinite business and user context.

Same experience, IME founders make amazing PMs, because they care about the company and they care about people not wasting their time. Not OP, but I can answer: They're ok with ideas coming from someone else, check the ego at the door and listen to both engineers and customers. They make engineers work less and produce more value. Most important, they don't have a "vision", they help organize the team so the team has…

> They're not competing with the engineering manager or lead developer for some sort of leadership.

Yep. Most of the managers that I've had that have been promoted from engineering have felt that their role is also tech lead, and have been poor at both being a tech lead and a product manager.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#208

Post by whstl »

FireBeyond wrote: post #190
whstl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or at least hold them accountable for failing to get things done and communicating badly with developers. Which is something that I'm yet to see. In previous companies, as an engineering manager, I had to burn a huge amount of political capital to steer my team in the right direction, several times. My people (engineers) want to achieve their goals and create value, and the higher-ups want working software making mon…

But that can go both ways. As a PM at a previous "engineering-led" company I was on more than one occasions given a prototype that Engineering had been working on for several months (with zero Product awareness, let alone input), and told "here, shoehorn a PRD and PMF around what we already built". In this case, the failure was my PM leadership. I said "I'm not sure about this, I think we need to do more research and…

Yep exactly that.

It doesn’t matter how much you work or how quantitatively successful you are, there will always be a narcissistic asshole ready to put you down for some made up reason.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#210

Post by codingbot3000 »

whstl wrote: post #120
codingbot3000 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity: Why didn't you continue being product manager?

Good question. Mostly politics, I guess? The CTO was about to be fired, so I had nobody to fight for me. The Chief of Product didn't like the optics of a non-PM being more successful than a PM in delivering work. (EDIT: As I said, I delivered from start-to-finish 3 projects that other teams had considered "impossible", mostly because of bad specifications and overengineering, often caused by PM miscommunication. The…

Sad to hear this.

There seems to be, at least in more enlightened companies, a slight momentum away from the current "classic" org structure of having separate Product and Tech departments staff dysfunctional Scrum teams. Going towards smaller delivery teams and managers who cover product as well as people leadership. The Basecamp folks have been doing this for a while, apparently.

This might open another chance for you to use all your skills.

(Of course, you cannot find this in any MBA program afaik, they all seem to teach the CPO/CTO Enterprise Slow-Motion Scrum blueprint, so if the tide will turn, it will take a while...)

I also find the "classic" org structure quite limiting. I've found that experienced "builders" can take on more senior functions such as people management and product management. No matter if their original speciality was dev, UX, or QA. Today I consider the simple-minded hierarchical structures most companies build, as well as their dysfunctional team structures, a colossal waste of talent and energy.

Good luck to you!

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