51–60 of 67 posts
> 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.
> 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.
Yep. In my experience, the only people who like sprint planning and retros are the PMs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was thinking more about all of the employees at the company who aren’t VP level and are paid significantly less than this. When a company espouses “about average” compensation as one of their core principles while simultaneously espousing excellence in everything else, there’s a mismatch.
We're paid decent enough for SF bay startup salaries. Worldwide, regardless of where we live/work. This works out quite advantageously for having a distributed workforce, and means many folks earn very top of market for where they happen to live (if there is even a tech market where they live!) Also, salary bands are transparent both to employees and applicants.
> 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.
I don’t just sit around thinking “god I had a schedule I was stressed about keeping. You know what I need right now? A two hour meeting with eight people including my boss and my boss’s boss where I have nothing to say and nothing to hear. If I could pick one thing to change in my life, it would be that I have to go to bed early every single fucking day because I’m worried if I don’t I won’t get enough sleep and it’ll be a struggle to wake up and do work early tomorrow morning.”
Fuck your routine. I thrive on control. Let me have control.
Shouldn't that be obvious to anyone who's worked in a corporate environment for more than a minute?
>Charity once said an off-hand sentence that became a mantra for my transition into the VP of Engineering role: “Directors run the company.” Shouldn't that be obvious to anyone who's worked in a corporate environment for more than a minute?
Beware of the "ould"
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)…
And thus the VP Eng has to make posts like these to make the work appear more notable and honorable. When the post is so light on substance, it indicates the VP Eng is fundamentally struggling to focus the team. And as a bonus, the VP Eng gets their story out in front of investors.
Honeycomb had some great ideas and lots of momentum around 2020-21. They seem to have stopped innovating and are quickly falling behind.
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…
But what you wrote seems like a very intricate way of saying "In the end, no matter how much I want other things in my job, I personally am not cool with giving up on the money".
There are people who are willing to work different jobs or for different companies – let's say the Wikimedia foundation – and be okay with the pay not being as high as it could be at Google, doing similar work, because they derive something from it that's not measured in money.
And that's also important because most companies will simply never be able to generate Google money and still need excellent people to work on good and valuable projects.
Figure out what you value. If, in the end, it's mostly the money and you don't see any value in what the company offers you outside of that, just be honest about it and take the money.
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)…
Sometimes decision making ends up primarily in the hands of the VP Eng and Directors because none of the ICs really care too much about the underlying product or customer. That’s not to say the ICs aren’t smart but rather the management has found an unglamorous yet profitable (or potentially profitable) problem. Unglamorous can also mean the company is struggling for traction and so it’s not even clear what there is…
In my experience it's also not that hard to make ICs care about the business and try to drive it forward even if it's not glamorous. Make their promotions, yearly reviews and raises be partially based on the business impact tied to the projects they were on. There's side effects of that to manage but even if the monetary gains aren't massive the team will care a lot more. Of course, many managers don't actually like it when their team point blank asks them "what's the value of this project, looking at data it's not going to help the business."