51–60 of 86 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t exchange “pride” for goods and services. The people that hold the power to give you raises and promotions don’t care about “craftsmenship”
Why are you so conditioned to think that fancier titles and more and more money is the end goal of it all?
The most respected and well paid senior engineers and managers at my company are all ex-ticket crushers. They put in their time being the kind of people that managers could trust to get stuff done and done right and done promptly. Trying to play games and fudge it only works in a company big enough that this sort of gamesmanship goes undetected beyond your immediate team. Or if you have a bad boss that isn't really k…
The problem with this is that because of salary compression, it’s usually better to job hop.
> Everything you could want from a company - promotions, bonuses, internal respect - comes from shipping projects True but what if you're stuck in a job where crushing Jira tickets is the metric?
> If you ship a project and your management chain begins talking about the next thing, stop improving that project. and this type of advice is precisely why the whole industry completely lost its ability to produce usable things.
The most respected and well paid senior engineers and managers at my company are all ex-ticket crushers. They put in their time being the kind of people that managers could trust to get stuff done and done right and done promptly. Trying to play games and fudge it only works in a company big enough that this sort of gamesmanship goes undetected beyond your immediate team. Or if you have a bad boss that isn't really k…
> The most respected and well paid senior engineers and managers at my company are all ex-ticket crushers. The problem with this is that because of salary compression, it’s usually better to job hop.
- job hoppers do not realize how often they are discarded for being that. where I work this is the FIRST and most important part of the CV review. job hopper CVs are immediately thrown out (and trust me, you want to work where I work). I have numerous colleagues that work elsewhere and all but one have exact same thing going on. no one in their right mind is going to invest into someone who will obviously leave in a couple of years.
- if you are at the right place and are valuable you will get paid accordingly. it is just that this notion of “I must hop to boost my earnings” is so pervasive in our industry that people seldom just hit up their managers etc for adjustment to compensation. no sane company is going to let go an employee who is valuable to them
This is cynical and accurate, and may crush your soul if you're not careful. Just don't get too caught up in mistakenly confusing "urgent" and "important" as this blog post (and many executives) seem to do. If you want to actually deliver value then that'll mean doing some amount of thankless and un-asked for work because nobody has noticed that if X/Y/Z isn't addressed/fixed/maintained then a major part/all of the c…
All large companies are dysfunctional. If you want to maximize your compensation, you play the game. The top end of enterprise dev is around the entry level of BigTech.
While at 50 I don’t want to play that game (been there done that), I would definitely give someone younger the same advice as the author.
> If you ship a project and your management chain begins talking about the next thing, stop improving that project. and this type of advice is precisely why the whole industry completely lost its ability to produce usable things.
You know what killed the dinosaurs, right? Impact.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The most respected and well paid senior engineers and managers at my company are all ex-ticket crushers. The problem with this is that because of salary compression, it’s usually better to job hop.
I disagree for two reasons: - job hoppers do not realize how often they are discarded for being that. where I work this is the FIRST and most important part of the CV review. job hopper CVs are immediately thrown out (and trust me, you want to work where I work). I have numerous colleagues that work elsewhere and all but one have exact same thing going on. no one in their right mind is going to invest into someone wh…
You say that as if companies are sane. Management may think you are valuable to them. But HR sets the salary bands. Management only has so much power over raises.
Another way to frame this is to not get too attached to your code. Tmrw it could be the cornerstone to a new line of business or it can be burned in the dumpster.
If management is doing their jobs in growing the team then this all works out. But if they’re letting those with tenure get first pick of new problems, then you can play the game, carving out your share of the spoils, and then offloading other things before your head explodes. Every thing you offload is a ladder rung for someone else.
That way you end up with code that is no longer your baby but still not on the trash heap.
As someone who's sat on both sides of the table, getting tickets done is incredibly valuable. I don't really think an engineer is worth their salt if they can't do this. However, there's a transition that needs to happen when they hit mid-level where they need to be able to synthesize what the ticket is asking for and implement the right thing. No ticket or product manager is perfect, and awareness is often times a b…
Getting a product manager to write technical tickets is generally a mistake, I would say.