1) What are some of the best things you value at your job?
2) What are some of the things you wish you could change about your organization?
3) Besides money what is the one thing you wish your organization would offer you?
4) What is one thing the Founder or CEO could do to improve the leadership in your organization?
1. The money was good ($175k as director of engineering in Los Angeles) and the hours were 9-5.
2. I wish I had more autonomy to manage my team. Although I was director, engineering was basically under the control of product and upper management. Unfortunately they knew nothing about how engineering works.
3. A chance to define a new role, possibly R&D or skunk works, so I could contribute but not be bound by the traditional management hierarchy.
4. Ultimately nothing, since he was the problem. He is CEO of a tech company but he can't even plug in a thumb drive. He has said in the past he views engineering as "black magic" because he doesn't understand it.
In my experience the CEO/Founder can be classified as either of two types:
1) Great sales guy but has no deep concept of the technology his product is based on and other related aspects such as technical debt. Can be really hard to explain why something is more complicated than it looks to him, etc.
2) Great technical guy who can't sell. If you're not doing something conceptually new it can be difficult to acquire customers if your selling is weak.
I wonder if any one has encountered the unicorn CEO/Founder who's great at both of these things?
IMO if you're the lead of the engineering organisation then you have the responsibility to convince your CEO when you feel you're right. As director it comes with a responsibility to do some politicking.
2. There should be a clearer channel to communicate with the different stakeholders. I might have good product ideas, regardless of what my designation is (engineer, in my case). There should be an easier way to get feedback on ideas - good or bad.
3. Lopsided workloads should be regulated. It will be nice if all teams were equally loaded. In my case, I have a very reasonable schedule, but in some of my friends' case they work really hard!
4. Give people more responsibilities! Nothing teaches leadership like taking up ownership.
1) What are some of the best things you value at your job?
The clients I work for are huge, well known companies. The work is interesting, and I'm learning a lot from the other developers. They like to encourage professional growth.
3) Besides money what is the one thing you wish your organization would offer you?
Getting to work remotely as often as I'd like, which would be like 3-4 days a week. Higher matching for the retirement plan comes in second.
2) Putting less skilled people in middle mgmt on top of engineers (thats a big putoff bcoz we do check their profiles), measuring work more, valuing people that actually work more
3) Sports area, occasional hangouts, spare time for personal projects
4) News updates, taking reviews, giving feedback, more involved, valuing tech stuff, following future market trends