Equity is the entirely the answer for cutting through all the bullshit. At least in my head. I don't know how it plays in other people's minds but mine sounds like: "If we ship and go live, I get x% of all profit moving forward in my personal scrooge mcduck money bin". Pretty big carrot. It's kind of like time share in my own personal business, but I don't have much of the headache that goes along with running my own 100%.
This has some caveats, namely that equity in a 10k person org is often times not nearly as meaningful as equity in a 10 person org. Shipping your code 2 weeks early at Ford or Dell means what, exactly? If the code you are shipping is the business, then things are different. It also really helps if you care about the problem you are solving.
I'd say this - if the idea of direct equity/ownership doesn't get you excited about pushing simple & robust techniques, then you are completely in the wrong place. You should probably find a different problem space or industry to work in. Hollywood might be a better option if the notion of equity or straight ownership in the business still isn't enough to put your tech ego into a box.
I agree for small companies which are largely founder owned. I think outside of that, Equity doesnt do much because so much effort is put into obfuscating the value/share of the equity. If you cant see the cap table, and you cant see the preference overhang, the equity is as good as worth zero. There is no discernable value for a fraction with no denominator.
You see the most extreme versions of dangers of this in stories about governments and older companies having to pay insane salaries to bring FORTRAN or COBOL developers out of retirement to keep systems running. If you keep doing the simple solutions within the existing system, you risk creating a system so inbred that only the folks who built it can maintain it effectively.
For less extreme setups, it's still a balancing act to consider how much your unique and specific solution that is the simple option for you company starts closing you off of the larger hiring pools in more common technologies and patterns.
The demand for Fortran/Cobol experience has nothing to do with training. We need to make sure you are masochistic enough to trudge through the sludge.
“I think we should use a Kubernetes cluster!”
“You’re joking, surely? This is a tiny web site with mostly static content!”
Next project:
“For this web app, I propose we use Kubernetes…”
I've often found myself now having issues even updating my resume, because what I did for the last year at work barely is explainable to other people on my team, let alone to someone in HR at another company. Or the more simple explanation is something that sounds like I'm doing work barely more complex than an intern could have done. Which often isn't wrong, but the intern wouldn't know which simple work to do.
My years of experience in the company's stack and org is valuable to the company, and nontransferable elsewhere.
On average, and depending on skill. Incentives are hugely important (probably the most important metric any manager could work on), but even they do not guarantee results. If you hire so many juniors that nobody is there to upskill them fast, you only get one lottery ticket per employee. Conversely, if you hire a bunch of geniuses and fail to give them incentives to work on realisable, useful problems together, you get two lottery tickets per employee at twice the price.
(This comment feels woefully incomplete. Does anyone know of good resources to learn more about incentive structures and how they relate to individual and company success? I feel like the problem is that incentive structures change massively when companies grow, so even for unicorns there's just a short sweet spot where we can actually learn how they are supposed to look.)