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

Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

blog.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 632 posts

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#311

Post by PhasmaFelis »

edw519 wrote: post #156

Employee (individual contributor / middle manager) Pro: More work and fewer meetings LOL, IF ONLY! Another example that people in silicon valley (and yc in particular) have no idea what goes on in the real world. (HN reply in one window, with skype and webex open in 2 other windows, my 5th and 6th meetings today. I've been on HN for 10 years with over 5,000 contributions, almost all while in meetings, ignoring talkin…

And the execs have even more than that.

Do you see the irony in accusing others of not understanding the real world while making assertions based on personal anecdotes?

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#312

Post by ryandrake »

aswanson wrote: post #300
rpeden wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Use CRISPR to create hypoallergenic cats - Create a mobile cat service in a high end Winnebago or Gulfstream business jet; stock with hypoallergenic cats from step 1 - Use mobile cat service to fly/drive in to festivals and corporate events; create pop-up cat lounges where visitors can have a drink and pet a cat - ?? - Profit

CAAS (Cats As A Service) business. Acronym-ready. I like it.

Cats As The Service? :)

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#313

Post by jcmoscon »

sidlls wrote: post #252
nichochar wrote: post #42

This is rather true in practice, but I find it tremendously depressing. I have found that the executive path is actually the one that most of the scumbags take, it is the one that attracts the most people, and those people are usually not likable, they're salespeople that sell themselves all day. The third group, the one that actually creates value, is accurately represented as not as successful both in terms of mone…

I have a different (admittedly controversial) take, having been on the "tech ladder" for some time now (as a Senior SWE and Lead Engineer): most individual contributors overestimate how much value they actually provide, especially in the Bay Area. That isn't to say we're not under-appreciated and under-compensated (we are both). But realistically much of the time work we do is easily done by literally thousands of ot…

>"whether/how FP is just so much better than anything else" Hey, FP IS much better than anything else! Lol, this is me

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#314

Post by mo1ok »

bostonvaulter2 wrote: post #305
mo1ok wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and both disagree. I'm working right now for a client that is a large corporation that didn't do any of those "fad" things - and it is _tremendously_ costly. For example, one team has spent several weeks and thousands of dollars to get another team's SOAP integration working correctly, when it would have taken five minutes in REST. The codebase did not follow a "elegant" practice and is an absolute spaghetti…

> I agree though that working together is tremendously overvalued. I think you mean undervalued.

Oopsie. Fixed.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#315

Post by shimon »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #174
shimon wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot of insecure managers who don't want to be challenged on the merits of their decisions. There are also lots of individual contributors on teams who are strident in their beliefs even though they might be informed only from a narrow perspective. If you're a manager, you can address this by inviting thoughtful debate and sharing information. But if you're a non-manager employee, you can't always rely on…

What you're saying is true, you can't rely on your manager to always have time to listen to what you're saying. But at the same time that doesn't mean what you're saying isn't something the manager should have made time to listen to. Of course it's easy for me to criticize management when a lot of the startups I've worked at have gone out of business and a lot of the features I've been asked to build get canceled.

True. At the same time, even well managed startups are risky enterprises and we can't always be sure a feature is right before we ship it. (But we should try pretty hard.)

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#316

Post by sidlls »

s73ver_ wrote: post #265
ivanjovanovic wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I overall agree with your sentiment. I would though not agree fully about where you assume value is created. Usually, developers / middle managers do not create value. Mostly they are implementing ideas of others and in these ideas is most of value concentrated. I would say they deliver value but don't create most of it.

Ideas don't create value. Ideas represent the potential for value.

The deliberate process of developing ideas, otherwise known as "product development," has value.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#317

Post by disiplus »

sidlls wrote: post #252
nichochar wrote: post #42

This is rather true in practice, but I find it tremendously depressing. I have found that the executive path is actually the one that most of the scumbags take, it is the one that attracts the most people, and those people are usually not likable, they're salespeople that sell themselves all day. The third group, the one that actually creates value, is accurately represented as not as successful both in terms of mone…

I have a different (admittedly controversial) take, having been on the "tech ladder" for some time now (as a Senior SWE and Lead Engineer): most individual contributors overestimate how much value they actually provide, especially in the Bay Area. That isn't to say we're not under-appreciated and under-compensated (we are both). But realistically much of the time work we do is easily done by literally thousands of ot…

thats just if you sell shit that nobody wants but its marketing/sales reposnibility to sell it, then sure marketing and sales are more imporant. but if you create a product that is realy solving some problems then, the product is important and the team that created it.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#318

Post by yahna »

sidlls wrote: post #252
nichochar wrote: post #42

This is rather true in practice, but I find it tremendously depressing. I have found that the executive path is actually the one that most of the scumbags take, it is the one that attracts the most people, and those people are usually not likable, they're salespeople that sell themselves all day. The third group, the one that actually creates value, is accurately represented as not as successful both in terms of mone…

I have a different (admittedly controversial) take, having been on the "tech ladder" for some time now (as a Senior SWE and Lead Engineer): most individual contributors overestimate how much value they actually provide, especially in the Bay Area. That isn't to say we're not under-appreciated and under-compensated (we are both). But realistically much of the time work we do is easily done by literally thousands of ot…

The same just isn't true of product development, sales and marketing. Any one of those three teams, staffed well, will account for well more than the value of the entire engineering organization.

Okay, slash your engineering staff and double the sales people and lets see how you do.

How is any of that not done by thousands of other people as well? Especially sales.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#319

Post by arielweisberg »

koolba wrote: post #115
krat0sprakhar wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For someone who recently graduated and quite clueless about financial planning, do you have some resources to get started?

The usual generic financial advice I give is: - Maximize every retirement vehicle offered to you (max 401k, HSA, etc). - Pretend that any money you sock away for retirement doesn't exist. This is best done with automated withdrawals so you never even consider it money in your checking account. - Learn to cook. This doesn't actually save much money at the individual level but is huge for families. - Set up separate ac…

Avoiding new cars is not something I agree with.

A new inexpensive Toyota Corolla will have cheaper financing, fewer miles, and a longer warranty and fewer years at the starting to get expensive to maintain stage.

You also have to price in the true cost of an old car once it reaches the age of unreliability if you intend to drive into the ground. Just one failure on a road trip can result in expensive alternate transportation, towing fees, expensive and unreliable repairs, your time etc. Having a young reliable car has value and how much value it has depends on whether you have more money or time.

Used cars are over priced IMO. There is an argument to be made RE trading in cars at 100k before you need to do the tires, brakes, plugs, transmission fluid either the first or second time. So many things aren't priced into cars correctly. Depending on how much you pay for mechanical work it's overall cheaper and lower risk and requires less of your time.

Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee

#320

Post by frakkingcylons »

jdmichal wrote: post #242
frakkingcylons wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying it's impossible to save is misleading and it's laughable how often this myth about the Bay Area is perpetuated on HN. Unlike a lot of places in the US, the Bay Area has all of the following: * a meaningful degree of racial diversity (makes a big difference if you're not white) * comprehensive public transit (yeah, yeah BART and MUNI suck, but where I've lived in the US previously, they didn't even exist) * an…

This comment, in turn, is laughable from a guy in his 30's with a wife and toddler... We live on a single income and have our own house with a quarter acre of land. And this is in coastal Florida, not a economically-depressed city in the Midwest. We all need to accept that people are looking for different things in life. It's difficult to save money in SF, while also having a lifestyle that's relatively easy to maint…

You're right that it's difficult if you have a family. But there's a lot of room in between "impossible to save" and "saving is difficult".
Post reply on HN