I think the most important thing is to have a conversation with your employees - ask them what do they want to do, and how do they want their career to evolve. Constantly keep in sync with your employees' desires, and you should be fine.
How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
41–50 of 158 posts
Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#42Am 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.
My observation is that the MBA degree is primarily valued by other MBA's.
Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It's management's job to be able to evaluate the contributions of their employees. If they can't, perhaps they're 0.5x managers.
Almost any process that measures human output will be gamed (optimizing for measured output rather than overall success). It's basically impossible to game sales without resorting to outright fraud, whereas there are all kinds of ways to game individual engineering output measurements, in ways that do not align with the business objective.
Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#44Having just become a co-manager for ~50 engineers, this is really interesting and timely advice. I don't pretend to have all the answers about how to reward great engineers, so hearing more people speak about this is really useful to me.
My initial reaction is "reward them with more things they can say no to" but that ends up being project management-y if not outright manager-y. I'm very curious to hear more specific examples where this isn't the case.
If anyone in NYC and is in a similar situation to me, I'd love to meet up for coffee to share notes. Or in SF, for that matter (I'm here about once a month). Email in my profile.
Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#45One 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 you believe responsibility over people, budgets, liabilities and policy is less stressful than responsibility over systems, you're high. As a programmer, let me tell you: people who have only ever done programming for a career have no clue how relatively easy they have it.
I've only done programming and research for my career and shudder when I look at my boss's job. Heck, I get stressed just being assigned an intern. People management isn't for everyone.
Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#46It's late so I'm going to screw this up but there are coders and there are leaders. The leaders think about other people and how to make those other people be successful. The coders are more about themselves. Which is fine, I'd just look for people who are trying to make other people be awesome.
Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#47Give 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.
If money is a means to an end, why not just find an employer who provides and supports that kind of work directly?
Those jobs are hard to find. If you have one, hold on to it.
Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#48Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Sales deals can be quite complex to measure as well.. IMHO is just that sales guys tend to be better negotiators, so they ask to get rewarded properly o go somewhere else with their skills.
Programmers go elsewhere to if not compensated appropriately, eventually. It just takes them a bit longer than sales guys.
Re: How to reward skilled coders with something other than people management
#50One 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 you believe responsibility over people, budgets, liabilities and policy is less stressful than responsibility over systems, you're high. As a programmer, let me tell you: people who have only ever done programming for a career have no clue how relatively easy they have it.
I suspect that the reason for the perpetuation of this myth is that, if a manager is doing their job really really well then all of that stress and BS is hidden from their directs.