31–40 of 158 posts
Am I the only coder who's always wanted to move into the business side eventually? I go back and forth on if I want to pursue an MBA every couple years or so (though I doubt the education would be worth it, it'd be a stamp on my resume for wanting to go that direction). Working with brilliant people and managing people problems are very complex and interesting to me.
If a sales guy sells 10x, he gets 10x commision.. If a coder produces 10x, pay him 10x. What is so hard to understand about that ?
The challenge from the business side is to evaluate reliably how to measure "10x" in this context. While there is widespread agreement that some programmers are significantly more productive than others (maybe even 10x as productive), there is much less agreement on how, exactly, such productivity is measured. With sales, it's very easy: you count Dollars In The Door. Maybe you also count something like New Customer…
This is a problem not just for coders but almost any technical area. A loooong time ago when I was still in engineering I worked for Big Corp, Inc. and they had a designation for master technical talent, I forget the name, so let's just call them Jedi Masters. It was a non-management path for those who didn't want to go the management route but it recognized their value to the company. If you reached this level you h…
One thing that always fails with that is that management always get more money. Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before) Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary) Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's…
> Plus.. the director job is generally going to mean a
> more relaxed job
If a sales guy sells 10x, he gets 10x commision.. If a coder produces 10x, pay him 10x. What is so hard to understand about that ?
This is a problem not just for coders but almost any technical area. A loooong time ago when I was still in engineering I worked for Big Corp, Inc. and they had a designation for master technical talent, I forget the name, so let's just call them Jedi Masters. It was a non-management path for those who didn't want to go the management route but it recognized their value to the company. If you reached this level you h…
One thing that always fails with that is that management always get more money. Wanna be a tech leader paid 150k? (fancy title, +- same salary as before) Or wanna be a director paid 250k? (fancier title, way bigger salary) Kinda difficult not to choose the "free tesla every year" isn't it? Plus.. the directory job is generally going to mean a more relaxed job (albeit less interesting for an engineer maybe, but that's…
This is why IBM created a separate path back in the 1950s so good technical people didn't have to become managers in order to be promoted. There are many ways to provide leadership, and not every manager leads much.
I was probably an OK manager, but didn't feel that I would move up any further without doing some things that I didn't want to do, such as relocate.
Our managers don't actually spend a lot of their time managing people. Rather, they work on administrative and information processing tasks, and step in as small project managers.
If a sales guy sells 10x, he gets 10x commision.. If a coder produces 10x, pay him 10x. What is so hard to understand about that ?
Give me equity stake. I don't want to manage, I want to come out of the end ready to start my own venture or retire and do what I love and build and awesome open source project to give back to the community.