51–60 of 265 posts
I'd suggest you read your company's financial statements. You'll find headings like "cost of revenue" or COGS, "General & Administrative" and others like one-off costs for mergers. All of these will have different dynamics, and in each company the dynamics may be different.
I don't understand our modern tech culture of saying maintenance is the last on the list; always getting chopped and cut; never getting a decent budget. In 20 years and several different companies I have always heard this but never agreed with it. Sure, the company wants new features to market, but the company also wants things to freaking work. During layoffs and hiring freezes I have seen SRE type orgs fair better…
Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business. Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features. From the developer's point of view maintenance also a thing to avoid. You cannot put a maintenance as a shiny point to your CV. Everyone wants to see your achievements, projects you shipped, and with modern technology, of course.
It depends on the incentives I suppose - if commission and bonuses for sales people comes only from new sales, then sure, maintenance is irrelevant and will be ignored.
>> Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features.
No, that's not true at all. If sales people are properly incentivised to sell support contracts (their base salary being a percent of maintenance fee for example) then it will be sold like crazy. I have seen this happen at my company - at one point we did not need new sales to be profitable - just raking support contracts fees was enough to keep up costs and then some.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I already worked for companies where there were management changes at a crazy pace, I'm not sure that all of them got promoted and I have the impression that some of them might have been fired as well. I don't want to start a flame war but it's much easier to replace a manager than a technical person, a technical job is boring and most people don't want to do it while management relies more on soft skills, something…
Most people don't want to do technical jobs? That's not my experience at all. We've had vacant management positions for months because nobody wants to do that role. We'd get no volunteers internally and only a handful of suitable candidates would apply from outside.
But you can always check on linkedin the many hundreds of people who apply to any managerial position.
In addition to knowing which bucket your salary comes from, I think it is also useful to know how your organization values building software. Because this affects your career just as much. * Is your company selling software development hours (consulting)? I'm this car you'll be valued for client relations skills and the ability to bang out acceptable software. * Is your company selling a software product (product com…
first company is good for starters to get to know others.
third should be avoided if you want to stay in software and not transition to management. You will always be seen as a necessary evil, your problems not understood while others working on core products will be perceived as an asset.
second one is the one to make a career in software dev.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management. When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of e…
Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my experience there are two things that bring layoffs: poor sales and bad product management. When I was at Travelocity they had by far the best brand awareness and marketing. They also had the best pricing algorithms resulting in massive profit margins compared to the competition. Nonetheless they were destroyed in the marketplace. The biggest killer is that Expedia invested heavily in sales to the sacrifice of e…
Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!
In addition to knowing which bucket your salary comes from, I think it is also useful to know how your organization values building software. Because this affects your career just as much. * Is your company selling software development hours (consulting)? I'm this car you'll be valued for client relations skills and the ability to bang out acceptable software. * Is your company selling a software product (product com…
this. first company is good for starters to get to know others. third should be avoided if you want to stay in software and not transition to management. You will always be seen as a necessary evil, your problems not understood while others working on core products will be perceived as an asset. second one is the one to make a career in software dev.
In my case, I might've been lucky, though. One of the co-founders had a CS degree and deeply valued the productivity boost we got from custom software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business. Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features. From the developer's point of view maintenance also a thing to avoid. You cannot put a maintenance as a shiny point to your CV. Everyone wants to see your achievements, projects you shipped, and with modern technology, of course.
> Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features. That does not seem to be true in many B2B areas. Software suppliers are selling maintenance and support contracts to their customers. Think ERP.
For maintenance, if "you'll see this role smeared into product development" and "We give you a generous 2 days every sprint to take care of shit that's annoying," the budget here is R&D, not "Maintenance."
Similarly, Growth and Developer Relation engineers are often (usually?) in the Product org.
If these roles are actually in the R&D/Product Development budget, the "laws" about budget management don't apply cleanly enough that they can be a "law."
In addition to knowing which bucket your salary comes from, I think it is also useful to know how your organization values building software. Because this affects your career just as much. * Is your company selling software development hours (consulting)? I'm this car you'll be valued for client relations skills and the ability to bang out acceptable software. * Is your company selling a software product (product com…
I am asking because I am working in a company with similar business model and I am trying to figure out what category does my work belong to.
thank you.
EDIT: fix msg