What if you had executives that actually understood the tech behind it? Isn't that also the point of the CTO being an important role in a company?
Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
511–520 of 632 posts
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#512Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> That isn't to say we're not under-appreciated and under-compensated This is possibly the most HN thing I've ever read. Bay Area developers are under-compensated?
I think he is thinking in terms of shares of the company, not salary. Salaries in the Bay are obviously higher than anywhere else, but what people want is to become millionaires when the company they work for sells to a bigger company.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#513what about...
• freelancer • advisor • fractional cto • performance consultant • various other vendors
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#514Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, sure, if you define "value of engineering" to be more than "value of X" you can say engineering is more valuable. That would be a contentious definition, though.
Note that I am not focusing on "value" per se. I was focusing on leverage, i.e. where you can find a "multiplier", and arguing engineering is where you can find superlinear amplications of value. It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier. It could be 10x, but even that is usually very big. Never exponential, or ev…
> It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier
Have you ever started a company that successfully exited? Or managed a product from cradle to grave?
There is another comment in here about perspectives gained from taking on multiple roles. If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a product’s performance, I gently suggest broadening your scope.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that I am not focusing on "value" per se. I was focusing on leverage, i.e. where you can find a "multiplier", and arguing engineering is where you can find superlinear amplications of value. It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier. It could be 10x, but even that is usually very big. Never exponential, or ev…
> It's really hard for me to imagine or come up with an anecdote where a sales process or marketing initiative has had more than a linear multiplier Have you ever started a company that successfully exited? Or managed a product from cradle to grave? There is another comment in here about perspectives gained from taking on multiple roles. If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a…
> If you can’t think of a single case of a great salesperson adding multiples to a product’s performance
more than a linear multiplier
Read more carefully.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That isn't to say we're not under-appreciated and under-compensated This is possibly the most HN thing I've ever read. Bay Area developers are under-compensated?
Relative to the value we add? Absolutely. The under-compensation is even worse elsewhere.
If software developers add so much value they should start their own business. Then they'll see how valuable sales and marketing is
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the note - I’m going to think about this.
Here is a twist on this to think about. Careers are made or broken on whether you get to be an idea person or an implementer. If you're an idea person you get the lion's share of the credit for anything that goes right, and can always blame your failures on the implementor. Plus ideas are easier to come up with than implementations. If you're an implementor you work hard, and then don't get much of the credit. But wi…
Is any of that true? Are ideas really that easy? Also these people aren't being paid for ideas. They're being paid for vision and the ability to guide that vision through to completion.
I've met FAR more competent implementers in my life than I have product owners. You seem (and others) seem to be arguing that there is some sort of market inefficiency here, but I don't see that.
And I say that as an implementer.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#518Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> - Never buy a new car. They're for chumps. > - Never lease a new car. That's for the biggest chumps. Disagree on the leasing if you have your own company. The lease payments are all interest and deductible from your income. Sure, you don't end up with a car but if you do a 36 month lease, your new car is under warranty the whole time. I've seen too many people suffer from the false economy of used cars. If you are…
> I've seen too many people suffer from the false economy of used cars
Just get a 1-2 year old low-mileage CPO vehicle. It should still have the original warranty active. Ideally you should also target brands with great warranties like Hyundai (100k miles/10 years). This is as far as I can tell close to the optimal financial strategy for car ownership.
Personally, though, I do buy new, and I pay cash so I never, ever have a car payment. I hate the feeling of paying off a car over years as it depreciates. I really prefer to just get it over with and then enjoy knowing that I totally own it, no strings attached.
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#519This 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…
I've come to the realization in my short career that 90% of my time will be spent on activities that produce 10% impact and 10% of my time will go towards activities that have 90% impact. But the 10% time producing 90% impact stems from the fact that I spent the other 90% doing mundane work and understanding the environment/product/whatever problem am working towards solving.
As an example, my company uses Django and the first 6-8 months I have spent hours debugging what would be a stupid issue like misconfigured Django or missing url. Eventually, that led me to optimizing the version of shell_plus that my company was using improving its bootup time by 200%(this was a rather large codebase). That's an instant 200% gain per developer/per django shell load and is probably the most impactful thing I've ever done. We estimated it would save around 6.67 hours of developer time per day(2 minutes saved - was originally 2.45 * 200 developers * 1 shell load every day)
Re: Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, without radically changing the economic system, your compensation will be, at most, the cost of replacing you, and the gap between your compensation and that figure depends on the information gap, and the chutzpah with which you negotiate. I'd wager that if developers renegotiated their contracts at the point where they were most irreplaceable on projects they would be able to extract a lot more money.
>I'd wager that if developers renegotiated their contracts at the point where they were most irreplaceable on projects I'd wager that most executives would rather pay 5 people to do the job of 2 or even simply bury their head in the sand and not admit to themselves that replacing you is going to be more costly than let you have that kind of leverage.
You're right. It's critical not to let the troops catch a whiff of their individual importance or you'll have to start paying them closer to their actual value to you... and that's bad for profits.