On Becoming a VP of Engineering | Hacker News Reader

On Becoming a VP of Engineering

honeycomb.io

286 pointsendlessloops240 comments

I found this part amusing: "Charity [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists". It looks like an almost inadvertent admission. In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position.

I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company, and this is true of anyone who started their own companies, including the ones that are now BigCos. Founders don't need any specific qualifications or characteristics to merit their positions. They choose themselves for leadership, and then they choose their friends as the first employees. Only much later does hiring become formalized. No matter how much you want to believe that hierarchy is a "meritocracy", the founding of the hierarchy was undoubtedly chaos. Chaos is a ladder. ;-)

I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange, and I honestly never considered my former bosses to be "better" than me. As far as I've seen, corporate ladder climbing is essentially political. This post reminds me a lot of the endless series of essays about what makes a "senior engineer". These are all written by people whose minds have been thoroughly corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with an inner need to justify it.

> I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company, and this is true of anyone who started their own companies, including the ones that are now BigCos. Founders don't need any specific qualifications or characteristics to merit their positions.

If you are involved in starting a company, you _get_ the position of CEO, CTO, etc essentially arbitrarily.

That's initially.

After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.

Often, that's a much more honest and brutal way of measuring merit, than any evaluation.

Big companies need the evaluation, because eg Google is not going to go bankrupt, if they have one lazy and incompetent VP.

Compare https://gwern.net/backstop

I like this take. I would only change "by making it succeed" with "by not running out of money", which in my mind have slightly different connotations.

If you look at "by making it succeed" and then you want to define what success is, then you could end up with "by not running out of money" again.

You could run your company into the ground but constantly getting bailed out by investors with sunken theory syndrome.

If you can woo investors that much, I'd count that as success. You should probably stop running your silly company, and hire out your skills in investor-schmoozing to other people.

>After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.

That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they're competent.

Most startups fail.

You need to be good to succeed.

You need to be good enough to succeed. People needn't go beyond that to maintain a status quo.

> to maintain a status quo

Startups are explicitly disrupting the status quo. Yeah, one needs to be good enough to do that but it’s nothing to downplay. That is hard in a world of established actors.

Leadership matters, Apples history is a prime example of this as shown by first faltering without Steve Jobs and then becoming the most profitable company after he rejoined.

Nonetheless, you're still attributing way too much to the ability of the leadership. After all, that story is so remarkable precisely because it's pretty much the only well known example of this.

Even Steve failed with Next, and had to sell it to Apple.

I like the description someone made on HN that "NeXT acquired Apple for minus 400 million".

DoubleClick got an even better deal, acquiring Google for -$3.1 billion ('08 dollars)

> You need to be good to succeed.

You need to be good, somewhat lucky, and have product/market fit to succeed.

Being good creates the luck. I'm not saying it does not happen the other way around but it's fantastically rare to just "luck out" your way in to success.

Product/market fit doesn't fall out of the sky either. It's created by being good.

Most companies are not startups. There are plenty of bumbling people running million dollar (and thats it forever..) businesses. And they are the boss.

I've been mostly in startups for the last 10+ years. Until recently the main thing you needed to be good at is getting more VC money. That is correlated to certain measures of success but having a ton of free money means you can patch a lot of failures over that would bankrupt most companies. Then either sell or IPO before the house of cards came down. It's been interesting watching over the last year as that strategy started to no longer work.

That is only something like 1% of businesses: money-burning VC-funded companies who have to advertise enough to get more VC money or die.

But the vast majority of companies referred to as "startups" versus "small businesses" fall into that category. We can discuss the other case but the person I replied to explicitly said "startups."

Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded. My point is it's an amazing marketing win by financiers. And here we are now, with what the weird minority do sounding like the expectation for startup business practices vs what most actually do.

"Startup" by definition is companies that need large-scale growth to succeed. Uber, DoorDash, those kinds of businesses are start-ups. It doesn't need to be VC investment necessarily, but it needs a lot of capital to get going and there's a certain amount of network effects. That's not marketing, that's what the word means.

> Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded.

Then they're probably not startups, but just tech businesses. Nothing wrong with that - they're objectively better in my opinion - but let's not call them something they're not just because we like the word or we want the cachet of being associated with something we're not.

I would draw the line slightly differently. Bootstrapped startups are still startups. So for me the definition is more "company exploring a novel technology, product, or business model". Most new businesses are doing something that's well understood. Opening a new restaurant or corner store is hard, but it doesn't have the same need to figure out something fundamentally new.

Yep.

Numbers-wise, I'd think VC-funded startups merit the distinction. They're (a) relying on financiers to make their strategy work (b) there's significant positive & negative impacts of that decision vs everyone else (c) they're the minority.

Startups using non-VC revenue are the majority and also doing all sorts of great work in invention+innovation in tech, business model, doing with scalable ideas, etc. VC $ buys things like press relationships and "X raised Y" headlines, but thankfully the days of breathless capital raise news on tech crunch are much more zzz now.

> "Startup" by definition is companies that need large-scale growth to succeed

By your definition. And maybe a bunch of people who read the PG essay that narrowed the word that way. But not by the definition of 99.9% of economic participants.

Investopedia's definition, for example, bears no relationship to the PG definition. Neither does Webster's, dictionary.com's, or any entrepreneurship textbook you might find. Even Steve Blank doesn't define it that way.

> Until recently the main thing you needed to be good at is getting more VC money

It's always better to be getting money by selling to customers. It's amazing how well that works and how much less capital you need to grow.

If your goal is to make a lot of money (not just some money) then using VC money to get there is a very reasonable play. Just siphoning some money from later rounds could give you tens of millions. You don't even need to succeed after that as a business. The goal for many founders isn't to run a long term business but to make money.

> You don't even need to succeed after that as a business. The goal for many founders isn't to run a long term business but to make money.

Getting a big exit is my goal as a founder. Investor capital is spent to get to that exit. People who have the goal of making money off investors make self-enriching, bad for the company decisions.

This really depends on a definition of success that includes creating massive money burning firepits. Now to be fair some of the chief firepit architects got very rich doing so.

On the one hand, I'm grateful that era is finally coming to an end. Things were so much saner after the dot-com bubble popped.

On the other, I really worry that we now have a generation of entrepreneurs and employees who have only ever known a bubble environment. Many will have a hard time adapting to the actual reality of running functioning businesses.

On the contrary: I've seen more companies succeed despite their management than because of it.

This is true about a lot of positions. Once secured, as long as nothing goes terribly wrong, nothing changes.

Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up.

I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. It's also not helped by the fact that management skill has a low floor, since it's so hard to assess, thus everyone has had bad managers and they really make your life miserable. But at the upper end of management skill with large org sizes, the problem of debugging orgs and understanding the outputs of systems of people is way harder than software due to the human element. Even just getting accurate information and assessments is non-trivial given the underlying incentives and politics. In this type of environment, competence looks completely different from how a craftsperson thinks about it.

You're missing what the previous commenter said.

There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless.

Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's "figured out slot machines." My response: "Dude, that's awesome!" I'm not about to burst his bubble on the random, ambivalent jitter of the universe. We all need our delusions, who am I to take his?

There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention strategy and wasn’t managed well enough to adapt. Startup success requires skill and countless hours of hard work, period, and the leaders who are successful rarely look the same. It also requires some luck, but you need both.

I also used to deride soft skills. I learned, over time, that they’re extremely valuable, and deriding them doesn’t take away their power.

I think nearly every engineer would be well served by attending a good conflict resolution and “how to influence people” course. My 21-year-old self would smack me for saying that, but I’ve learned things since then.

I agree: Conflict resolution, public speaking, salesmanship -- they're all valuable. They make for better people in this world.

When it comes to how these traits translate to the success of leaders or companies? I have no idea. I'd guess causation there is noisy. I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.

In a modern secularized world corporate leaders of large companies seem to take on the role of psuedo-religious figureheads that grant absolution and purpose in the face of the unknown and rob workers blind in return. Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?

It's all just soft skills though -- that's the differentiator, the secret sauce, what makes great leaders. So soft. So skilled. /s

> I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.

That would be a bad bet. There are a few leaders that are like this and build short-term successful companies, and there are fewer yet that are like this and are able to build long-term successful ones. There will always be sociopaths who are master manipulators, but it isn’t limited to leadership. I know plenty of engineers who get hired at multiple roles illegally and outsource their jobs to fiverr, and if they get caught they simply quit before or after a PIP and get a new gig.

The vast majority of leaders really do care, and these stories and assumptions do those leaders a disservice, because good leadership/management takes real effort, time, and hard work. Manipulation quickly loses you the trust of your team and causes them to leave, hurting your cause.

> Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.

Retention. If you can find a set of people who share a common set of values, they are easier to retain because everyone is aligned on where we need to get and how we want to get there.

Alignment is extremely important for success. A founder can force alignment for a while, but the whole company is far better off if alignment occurs due to intrinsic belief systems.

> But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?

That’s not the point of having values. When we came up with them for Tinfoil, they came from the team and we debated and reviewed them annually, and changed them as needed.

The point was to make sure we are on the same page when it comes to hiring, and it also helped in two other ways:

1) Making hiring more objective. No more “I didn’t think she fit our culture” nonsense. Now you had to point to specific examples which were antithetical to our values. If we didn’t get to see a certain one, it told us what to ask next.

2) Making it easier for peers to managers to call out problems. If someone was out of line, or suggesting something that flew in the face of a value we’d agreed upon, anyone was enabled to politely point out that was against our values. The rule in how to respond to that was a polite thank you for pointing it out, and we never really ran into issues with it.

What I found fascinating was that by having this set of values, engineers and others were actually more likely to point out a manager’s or exec’s issue, and did so. When they did, they were almost always right, and things got adjusted.

But what I found exceptionally surprising was how much it helped engineers talk to each other in the office. When you have a common set of beliefs and things you want to do to embody, it’s much easier to maintain alignment.

Also, we were upfront about these before the offer; nobody had to join, and all of our values were argumentative. That is, they were active opinions that could trivially be disagreed with and cogent arguments could be made against them. That was ok! This was what we wanted to do.

An example of a bad value: innovation. Literally nobody wants to not be innovative. Terrible value, gets nothing across.

An example of a good value: use the right tool for the job. We strongly believed in being polyglots and using the right tool for the job, rather than building with what we already knew (unless that was the right tool). Plenty of companies make the argument that we are all Python because then we all speak the same language and things are faster to build. That’s a legitimate argument, neither is right or wrong; but we picked the former. If you preferred the latter, there are plenty of places to work that fit better!

> That would be a bad bet.

It's a terrible bet. But it's the direction American corporate leadership has overwhelmingly been heading for the past couple decades [1] [2].

I get the sense you've had the good fortune to run and work in smaller startups in The Bay Area that have been unprecedentedly democratic in the scheme of human enterprise. I'm guessing you've also had the good fortune to do that during a 3 decade span of falling interest rates that drove money into VC and startups in a similarly unprecedented fashion. Everyone plays nice when they're eating good.

I studied social sciences / economics and it gave me a lot of perspective when I went to SF for tech work. The history of American labor is one of asymmetrical power and blood. This isn't a notion we've disabused ourselves of and grown beyond. Between the early 1800s and early 1900s the US saw decades of terrorism against workers by corporate leaders. Look into Labor Wars [3], The Pullman Strike [4], The Battle of Blair Mountain [5], The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire [6]. After labor laws cemented and wars settled, corporate leaders moved towards globalization to start the process all over again in other countries and hollowed out middle America to do so.

Historically, the defining traits of American corporate leadership are amorality and self-pursuit. Startups have this silly habit of sitting around to LARP as altruists that might, maybe stumble into billions of dollars. Like if they talk about company values, truisms, and team building enough it changes gravity. Who is getting paid what? That's all that matters. If you're making a half a percent over four years as the 5th hire at a startup, you're getting screwed unless your founder is the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. I think workers and the general public are waking up to this and getting tired of lip service and signaling from leaders that play altruist or cut throat as they see fit.

I'm using the pronoun 'you' in that last paragraph generally, more as in the pronoun 'one.' I'm not specifically berating you. I'm glad you exist and I appreciate you sharing your experience and talking with me! It was a rewarding discussion. All the best.

1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/261463/ceo-to-worker-com...

2. https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/14zgfv3/oc...

3. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/themine...

4. https://jacobin.com/2022/07/great-upheaval-railroad-strike-1...

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...

> If you're an altruist, prove it. Make less than 200k a year, including stock grants (with appreciation factored in).

I did, with the exception of when the sale happened. For the first three years, I paid myself $30k. For the next two, $50k. For the next one, $70k. For the next one, $90k. Only in the last two years did I pay myself $160k.

When we sold, I gave up over half my RSUs and distributed them across the engineering team. I tried to give them all up (because I was well covered by the cash portion of the sale) but the acquirer wouldn't let me, since they wanted me to be incentivized to stay.

My cofounder gave up none of hers, despite being equal partners with me.

I suspect most of my team would work for me again, whereas the same is definitely not true of my cofounder.

Being cutthroat works short-term, and you may win big. But you get one shot at that, usually, with only a few "star-studded" exceptions (Adam Neumann, for example).

Being "altruistic" (which is not the word I'd use; I'd use "a decent human being who understands how negotiation works and what a BATNA is") works long-term.

> Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.

Its simple because only few people find it condescending or nonsense. Most people I know either ignore it without judgement or find it valuable at work.

Ignoring soft skills or social graces work fine in some privileged roles where hard skills have some great premium. As one can see in case of top chefs, doctors, movie stars, sports people, high skill engineers etc.

For others listening to corporate leaders sermons is just way of life not some unbearable atrocity.

>For others listening to corporate leaders sermons is just way of life not some unbearable atrocity.

Pretty sorry state of affairs, correct? Implicate in all this talk of soft skills is the fact that it can also a force for manipulation of the holocaust league.

What? Please clarify, because at first glance it sounds like you’re making an extremely racially charged analogy?

And no, it isn’t necessarily a sorry state of affairs; having to sit through a talk you’re uninterested in is hardly a terrible price to pay as compared to most other labor.

>What? Please clarify, because at first glance it sounds like you’re making an extremely racially charged analogy?

in a manner speaking, yes it's a radically charged analogy, I'm making.

>And no, it isn’t necessarily a sorry state of affairs; having to sit through a talk you’re uninterested in is hardly a terrible price to pay as compared to most other labor.

There's a collective price that we all pay when we regard all those sermons to be just a simple nuisance. A familiar quote will put it in a better perspective than I can: "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." Of course I agree that if you're the only one who opposes the sermon, you risk your livelihood.

>>We all need our delusions

Not to be an a-hole but says who and why? I think I prefer utter honesty, but ironically I may just be deluding myself.

>>We all need our delusions

>Not to be an a-hole but says who and why? I think I prefer utter honesty, but ironically I may just be deluding myself.

Well, ahem, yes, most people will call you deluded :)

My god, I could not have put this better myself. Thanks.

> Hiring the right people is competence

It can be, or it can just be luck, which is the point of the comment you're responding to.

Sure, but it's always both in large scale human endeavor. We're not talking about virtuosic performance that is more or less the direct result of talent + obsessive practice. That's why I'm equally uninterested in those who claim it's all luck as those who worship and hang on every word of prominent tech billionaires. I'm more interested in applying human agency than trying to come up with a theory for success—the latter is inevitably biased navel-gazing.

You sir sound like someone who is in that upper management realm. People ARE hard.

Something that has kind of annoyed me with upper management folks. At the companies I've worked for in the bay area, they all copy each other with the same management theories. They love to re-org and reshuffle to tree-shake out the fluff. They also love to drive towards exceedingly unrealistic goals because they expect pushback and want negotiating room. Now the latest craze seems to be that layoffs are good, even though I haven't heard one positive thing from anyone.

So I'm not sure these upper management folks, with their org debugging skills are actually doing things other than obfuscating the actual output of their orgs. If everyone is always moving around and assigned new goals, all it does is keep their org goal post actually undefined.

On the ground, sure, I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me. However, I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic. There has to be other strategies out there, or at least in our experiment driven culture, room to test out new ideas.

I'm actually middle management at a largish SV company, but I have also been leadership at smaller startups as well as the developer bootstrapping a 2-person SaaS app to 6-figure revenue, in addition to over a decade as a vanilla web developer working as an employee and freelancer.

What this experience has taught me is a visceral understanding of the leadership position (where you are responsible for the life and death of a company) and the IC position (where you are responsible for the nuts and bolts of shipping and operating internet-based software). In a small company it's easy to understand both sides. Once a company gets large the gulf is enormous.

I won't debate all your observations, other than to say that they are reductive and not reflective of the motivations and reasoning of executives I've known and worked with. To take one example:

> I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic

Chaos is not a goal (let alone obsession)— it is the merely the result of allowing significant individual agency among the creatives and craftspeople that do the work. The reason SV executives accept this is because reducing chaos requires a stronger command and control structure, but command and control structures don't work for building quality software products. Ultimately there are always minute details in the code and UX that end up being crucial and having outsized impact beyond where they are discovered. Most employees have your attitude of caring only about what is immediately asked of them by their supervisor ("I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me"), but you actually need a healthy mix of people at the ground level who are intrinsically motivated by the overall quality of the product, and will work to resolve things with the global optimum in mind even if its "not their job". This is incredibly difficult work—often going unrecognized, or even posing a career risk, in some cultures—but absolutely necessary for any company that depends on customer satisfaction. The only way this can work is if the culture allows for good ideas to be floated from anywhere and acted on without being squashed by a rigid official-org-enforcing processes and bureaucracy.

>I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser.

IMHO, hiring (and retaining, letting go) is hard skill not a soft one.

> After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.

Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. C-levels get a lot of undeserved respect when in fact usually they're protected by a very (understandably) conservative board. The board will choose inaction over action in almost every case unless the failure is so bad it's public. CEO types are not as fungible.

The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers who by-and-large are fungible "human capital" paid as little as the company can possibly get away with in the current market. This is the only industry where CEOs are held with reasonably high esteem. Perhaps it's because engineers think they will become one one day. Or maybe it's because tech CEOs are ascribed some sort of god-engineer status when the reality is most of them couldn't even pass their own 18 phase 5 day interview + colonoscopy their engineers do.

> The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers

This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a tech based business, having competent engineering is table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.

If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.

I am an engineer. Some of what I say is hubris about it. But I think its neither controversial nor false that engineers hold all of the power in a tech company. The skill gap is not a bijection. You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan. You cannot teach most executives to write even half competent software. Outside of the scrappiest start ups VPs of engineering I have reported to generally have been out of engineering for a long time. It's strange to ascribe such a title to someone so out of touch with their field.

I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to.

Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team.

And of course good executives are also incredibly important, how many companies have been run into the ground because of bad management?

So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long term success.

Oh and for what it's worth my CEO writes code ;-)

> tech company engineering has to be good

As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".

I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For me it's more about medium and long term success, not growing quickly and selling out a couple years later.

Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years.

Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.

I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes radically as company size grows.

For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything.

With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.

> most engineers are terrible at selling

Selling often involves . . . not lying exactly, but "creative truthing." Engineers tend to dislike that. And not just software engineers.

> You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.

No, you can’t. Source: I’ve tried.

Some? Sure, you can teach some of them. Hell, some become exceptional at it. Most could not care less about it, though, and are thus terrible at answering customer questions, doing sales, understanding how to optimize a funnel, negotiating a sales contract, or anything else.

Even doing demos is a taught effort, whereas some folks naturally give great demos.

It’s okay for there to be room for multiple important skillsets in a company. It’s not a zero-sum game.

Some of it is hubris, some just naivety.

It's very true that in a e.g. a "pure" software tech company, software engineers have much more power than they do in say an oil exploration company. This isn't surprising, it's the basics of being a profit center or a cost center. In this case engineering definitely has a "crash the company" lever; But this doesn't make the company succeed. In order to do that you need to understand the markets, customers, financing, etc. parameters, not just the tech. Knowing what to build, and what not to build, (and when) is usually more important than the tech, honestly. Hell, a huge swath of the "tech" sector isn't about doing much interesting on the tech side. Which isn't to say you can get away with crap work, just that it's mostly straightforward and you have to care.

I've much rather bet on a company with a great CEO and mediocre developers than one with a mediocre CEO and great developers. If you're building the wrong product it doesn't matter if Carmack or Linus is writing the code the company will fail. And judging from the code and technical competence I've seen, it's isn't uncommon for a company to succeed with mediocre devs

> You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.

Have you run a large company? I've run a small one so was forced to learn all of these skills, and let me tell you, it was hard, I found it much harder than learning how to code.

Exactly this. I worked at a small startup where we had great engineering talent. It was hard to find in this area. We got a product built, shipped, running with beta B2B customers... then it fell flat on its face.

After the initial release, there was little to no marketing, poor go-to-market strategy, and slow sales. This was all the CEO's realm. Sales and marketing is hard.

> If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.

I’m not sure Twitter is a good case study of CEOs being interchangable.

> If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground

Why was that again? That 80% of the engineering team, uhm, “walked”?

Also, one of the key responsibilities of the CEO is to identify, recruit, and hire high performing engineers.

Jobs' great talent was identifying Woz and his potential. And then many more after him.

The original thesis of YCombinator was that it's easier to teach people with strong technical skills how to business than to teach business people how to code.

So if you really think CEO is an easy job requiring little in the way of specialized skills, start a company, name yourself CEO, and make a fortune. What's stopping you?

> Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company.

My comment was specifically talking about startups. Not about stable companies. Please see context of the preceeding comment, too.

Almost all new businesses fail. Calling every one of those failed founders, Eg, of coffee shops, or software companies, or board game stores, a dumpster fire—is an asshole move

If A then B does not mean if B then A.

If you're a founder of a venture-funded company, then you either merit your position by continuing to do well or the VCs will remove you, before you run the company into the ground.

Assuming you did not have enough negotiating leverage upon fundraising to put yourself into a non-removable position, a la Zuckerberg.

Yep, I completely agree. A huge amount of people have been brainwashed into the American corporate chain of command and there is so much assumption that because people have X title, they're actually qualified for that title. Title inflation is everywhere and anecdotally, titles are just used as vehicles for pay increases and tenure recognition, not meritorious.

edit: didn't mean to say this is an American-specific thing :)

> A huge amount of people have been brainwashed into the American corporate chain of command

LOL. This is not American specific in any way, lest you think the US invented the military, too :-p

You say this is an American thing. Is there a country you are thinking of that has this less engrained? My experience working with foreign cultures is often that organizations are more hierarchical, not less.

Probably it's all very hierarchical but it definitely differs in level and degree between cultures.

Anecdotal examples:

- Brazil (~10 years experience): very, very hierarchical, your manager/boss is up on the totem pole, societal status, etc. In non-tech environments you can expect to be berated, chastised, and generally abused as an underling. There are good bosses, of course, but using a dumb generalisation the culture is "I'm better than you because I'm higher in the hierarchy". In the end underlings will be bad mouthing the boss at any opportunity behind the boss's back but will pay lip service in front of them, politically-heavy work environments.

- USA (limited experience ~1-2 years), very hierarchical, politically-heavy, bosses can demand stuff from you and it's expected to bow down to their whims.

- Sweden (~10 years experience): not so hierarchical, consensus-based approach for decisions, a manager is a different position (more laterally viewed than upwards), challenging bosses decisions/opinions in a respectful way is encouraged, someone higher in the hierarchy forcing underlings to their will is very badly viewed (and usually a "failure of leadership" because you couldn't convince people on your vision).

> - USA /../ > - Sweden /../

In my observation, USA is a lot more like your description of Sweden. I think this came with the popularity of servant leadership[1]. Even the military (in some branches?) is aiming for sharing goals instead of orders and promoting self-organizing teams because hierarchies don’t scale. At least according to books like It’s Your Ship and Extreme Ownership.

The realization in management science of the past ~20 years has been that people only do things when they understand the goal and agree with the plan. They also need leeway to change the plan if it isn’t working.

This future is of course not equally distributed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Servant_leadership

US Military absolutely teaches "servant leadership".

And "Do what I say leadership" at other times.

My outsider perspective is that the military trains its members in leadership skills[1] at practically every level, because modern great-power approaches to warfare rely on heavy devolution of decision-making and leadership such that leadership is a regular component of the job at all but (perhaps) the very lowest ranks, and because almost anyone might end up needing to act as a leader, situationally, even if they ordinarily don't do much of that.

(though, of course, an order's still an order—but, even there, their training in proper order-crafting focuses heavily on not making orders any more restrictive than necessary, so those receiving them have as much flexibility as possible to achieve the objective as they see fit—what you want, not how to do it, that kind of thing)

[1] Hey, look, training people, what a crazy idea, eh, corporate America? And not just with snake-oil bullshit seminars or online "courses" (videos with quizzes anyone with two functioning brain cells could have aced without watching the videos) or other box-checking crap that passes for training in the corporate world—actual training.

> Even the military (in some branches?) is aiming for sharing goals instead of orders and promoting self-organizing teams because hierarchies don’t scale.

This is incorrect. We consolidate most of our decision making at the small team leader level. Title and role, because of that, are explicitly not intwined. Lance Corporals can lead Sergeants if they possess the experience to do so. This is more common in the infantry. Small team leader have always practiced servant leadership; the idea that you eat last, take first watch, are the first in and last out on patrols is as old as time herself.

> I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange

I'll tell why several reasons this happens:

1. In many cultures this beaten into kids from an early age. There is no wide range of free will, just the family/tribe/clan/group hierarchy.

2. Hierarchies are... safe. You're part of a group, you roughly know where you stand.

3. Humans are social and inherently hierarchical :-) We've been like this for possibly millions of year, you're working against lots of brain machinery trying to fight this. It's probably doable but far from easy.

> We've been like this for possibly millions of year, you're working against lots of brain machinery trying to fight this.

I think my brain is wired differently. Maybe that was a birth defect; it wouldn't be the only one.

> It's probably doable but far from easy.

That's certainly true.

First two points, yes, though on point three I strongly disagree that modern mass hierarchy has existed on an evolutionary timescale. Neither Homo sapiens nor our ancestors ever had hierarchical groups larger than a village until we shifted from hunter-gatherer to agrarian around 10,000 years ago. The core concept is "natural" at a tangible, real scale where it can be seen as an extension of the parent->child form, but nothing in my research has yet refuted the idea that we're actually working against our brain machinery to scale up hierarchies orders of magnitude that defy visualization, though I can see the lizard brain appeal of submission to executive individuals. People can understand a president, CEO, captain. Parental figures. But a parent to thousands or millions, with dozens of steps between you and them? Seems like alienation would be a natural response.

Of course, this is all appeal to nature, but still an interesting perspective to consider.

First, I didn’t read that at all as a remark about someone’s qualifications. It seems a straightforward and friendly admission of where 2 different styles exist. Acknowledging those style differences is a _good_ and healthy thing and not a tacit appeal to hierarchy.

Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling, bosses, and equate the founding of the company with founding of a hierarchy. If you, who claim to be skeptical of the hierarchy, can’t stop doing that how can you expect those around you who are trying to model their behavior off of you?

In knowledge industries managers aren’t leaders, they are support staff. The best software managers and executives know this and do everything in their power to make it easy for the actual leaders and experts, the IC doing the work (yes including that intern you just hired) to get on with it.

But one of the support functions of the executive team is to set that expectation by example.

> In knowledge industries managers aren’t leaders, they are support staff. The best software managers and executives know this and do everything in their power to make it easy for the actual leaders and experts, the IC doing the work (yes including that intern you just hired) to get on with it

That’s just lip service.

Who goes to the annual offsite, the quarterly planning, manages or sets the budget, decides on initiatives. Not the ICs

Why in companies that espouse this servant leadership nonsense does it take 3 months to get approval for a new monitor?

This whole “servant leadership” crap is just PR. Every year there is a new orange coloured book about Leadership and some new cult-like idea filters down the layers.

But companies are the same hierarchy they have been for hundreds of years.

Completely agree and in my specific company they have this concept of "Highest Performers" who get to go to an annual offsite/party for a week. Guess who only gets picked? Directors and VPs. It's almost satirical how unaware leadership is or the optics they emit.

You and I might have worked at the same company. They’d call it the Top-100 Summit or whatever, where the “best innovators” would gather to decide the direction of the product lines. Who were these “top” innovators? You already said it: Directors and VPs. Comical.

> First, I didn’t read that at all as a remark about someone’s qualifications.

It wasn't. That's why I said, "It looks like an almost inadvertent admission." The rest of the blog post, though, is explaining in detail why the author qualified for their promotion.

> Second, your whole comment is littered with implicit reinforcement of the hierarchy. You use terms like underling, bosses, and equate the founding of the company with founding of a hierarchy. If you, who claim to be skeptical of the hierarchy, can’t stop doing that how can you expect those around you who are trying to model their behavior off of you?

I don't understand this comment. Of course I used terms to describe hierarchies. How can one talk about about thing, even critically, without using terms to describe it?

"Support staff" who by strange coincidence get paid a lot more money than the people they supposedly "support" and also have the power to hire and fire them. Hmm...

> "Support staff" who by strange coincidence get paid a lot more money than the people they supposedly "support" and also have the power to hire and fire them. Hmm...

One wonders why hierarchical thinking endures. Hmmm…

Some people are afraid to question authority. You have to sugercoat the message a few times before they can stomach the complexities of social hierarchies.

In modern, tech-enabled knowledge industries managers aren't leaders, they are just a waste of money that could instead go to the people actually getting things done.

I disagree with this. People add burden, that burden increases exponentially (to a point), and that burden is taken on by managers.

Some management is better than others, of course. But they ARE necessary.

This isn't 100% true. Some are good leaders and protect their team from BS and distractions, letting them focus on getting things done instead.

Unfortunately good leadership is so rare that it's not worth having the entire category just to retain the 1 in a million good leaders.

This is a venture capitalist-minded audience, so “when in Rome”. Text often lacks important tone so try reading the comment aloud and add an air of disgust when you encounter a word that you interpret as loaded with implication.

That critique doesn’t really hold up or add value to the discussion. Its thesis resembles “yet you participate in society, curious” and bad-faith tone policing, but that’s just my interpretation. Could just be miscommunication or a differing moral framework.

Yes. This hit right in them feels. Our world is a lie and it's full of people who believe the opposite and go out of their way to prove you wrong

Even though currently less popular, I think Zuckerberg is a great example of this. He went from a college kid to a top 20 CEO with no formal training, except running his company.

He might have received some subset of formal education along the way. He could've hired some private tutors, etc.

Almost certainly. But it he didn't first become qualified as a CEO, and then get the job.

Perhaps, but never discount someones background. His parents were successful executives and there were plenty of opportunities for him to be exposed to executive leadership (via Harvard, familial connections etc)

Not like he went from nobody to somebody here, his background certainly allowed exposure to things many others would not have.

I honestly would put Steve Jobs as the best example you can find of someone who went from "nobody" to CEO

I think he would be pretty close to someone who went from nobody to a great CEO and founder but i don't think anyone in this world truly starts off on equal footing. Steve Jobs birth parents were both advanced degree holders, he got adopted by a blue collar family who lived in prime real estate bay area during the first rise of tech. Ultimately it is useless to compare people, we should judge people by their output regardless of where they started.

I'm a huge proponent of origin stories, especially the true ones. Musk, Mozart, John Coletrane and Christiano Ronaldo, everyone has a story you can learn from.

Jobs' adopt family matters more than his birth parents, beyond margin. He grew up middle class (maybe upper middle class, honestly) but his parents weren't executives or VPs, they had a more typical background and he did as well. I think that makes it vastly more relatable. I believe strongly this contributed to his fanaticism around his ideas and thoughts, as well as why he essentially failed as a CEO twice (Apple the first time and NeXT computer was heading toward financial instability). Contrast this with Zuckerburg, who hit out of the park with Facebook.

Zuckerburg by contrast had a bigger ecosystem around him to lean into and a lot more exposure to executive types and "elites". Facebook didn't happen after a string of failures, and I don't believe ever came realistically close to failing either.

That's not to say either are talent-less. Zuckerburg was a very talented engineer and by all accounts has a good business acumen for the markets he's addressing. Steve Jobs likewise had a very good litmus test ability and really good foresight into technology, design, and user experience. I don't want to diminish that. However, not accounting for their ecosystem will do little to understand how they got to where they are.

> he essentially failed as a CEO twice (Apple the first time and NeXT computer was heading toward financial instability). Contrast this with Zuckerburg, who hit out of the park with Facebook.

This is not entirely accurate. Jobs didn't become CEO of Apple until 1997, after Apple acquired NeXT. He was not CEO of Apple before that. Zuck set up the IPO so that he could never lose control of Facebook. Jobs didn't have the benefit of that situation, and he did lose control of Apple in a power struggle with Apple CEO John Sculley, which led to his departure from Apple and founding of NeXT.

To talk about Apple, we need to talk about Steve Wozniack too. Jobs wasn't even an engineer, while Woz was a brilliant engineer, and Jobs had the amazing bit of luck to be introduced to Woz by a friend while still in high school! Of course Jobs was able to see the potential of Woz's inventions, but the Apple II computer would not have been possible without Woz.

I wasn't using him as a rags to riches story... by whatever means he acquired those leadership skills, they have been key to his success. This suggests that general leadership is more important for a CEO than credentials, experience, or resume.

This is all true until a board w/ a enough voting power to impact C level hiring/firing decisions is installed.

Half agree.

Successful founders get to remain CEO (or CTO, or whatever). Unsuccessful ones don't: their investors push them out, or the company tanks.

Along the way to obtaining any position, there's a lot of partially correlated signals you have to send, and they're different between different paths. To become CEO at an established company, you might have to show prior experience, know how to wear a suit and tie, etc.

To become CEO of your own startup, you have to show investors or customers something else, but I'm not sure those signals are less bullshit: you might find that wearing shorts or playing League of Legends during investor calls somehow convinces people you're a super genius.

Basically, there's always an element of bullshit, because we're humans, and our judgment is tempered with all sorts of irrational biases.

I don't think that means that an essay on "what it takes to do $job" is inherently bad, though.

> These are all written by people whose minds have been thoroughly corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with an inner need to justify it.

This is really the truth, especially in giant corporations. It's really fun when you are part of a startup and sell to a big company and they realize that not one member of the startup would have been hired by HR, and suddenly, the team members from the startup getting the promotions over the HR approved, pedigreed bigco employees.

> I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange, and I honestly never considered my former bosses to be "better" than me.

It is generally always about politics. I have been through many re-orgs, various people go up and down in esteem like the tides based on whatever the prevailing sentiment is this year. Position in the hierarchy reflects that along with personal relationships with the right people, and a big dollop of luck.

There is little correlation of ability to your level, of course. Success often depends on who is under you, and how you can spin their output (good and bad).

Startups are almost inherently messy, so agreed, I think it helps dispel a myth of perfection that some folks have.

Founders have the most context across the engineering, product, marketing, sales, customers, partners, team, etc. They do need to change gears as the company hits progressive phase changes, but someone who has already managed a few transitions and has that rare context is a strong candidate for the next.

A big part of the job becomes hiring & delegating... Including checklist ppl. Ex: Why you see technical CEOs with COO/CRO/COS that can help manage the business ops sides that are very checklist driven.

You’re forgetting that companies need both Visionary AND Execution focused leaders at the very top.

I’m an execution through and through guy, but I learned early on that my co-founder’s ideal traits are the opposite of mine, and that’s what you’re seeing here.

What’s being described is a classic Visionary - spontaneous, jumps around and can be distracting, yes - but crucially, is also an amazing innovator and motivator of people.

In a successful startup, you need both Visionaries and Execution people.

I recommend Rocket Fuel - https://www.amazon.com/Rocket-Fuel-Essential-Combination-Bus...

I was founding engineer ("CTO") of a startup a couple years ago, and I completely agree. We had the CEO who had domain expertise in our market, but who had never ran a tech company and was not technically proficient. I on the other hand was technically proficient, but I also never ran a tech company.

This lack of execution expertise doomed us; we really needed a strong operations role. We made good progress on the product itself, but hit a wall when it came time to ask for money from investors.

I was in a similar position, working as CTO under a first time CEO where we built a small team, product, got some limited traction, but follow-on execution completely failed. It was incredibly hard. It depresses me to this day, thinking about where it all went wrong. I probably won't ever do it again.

It’s very difficult. I spent almost 2 years without income, supporting myself with my savings. It’s a tough pill to swallow.

> You’re forgetting that companies need both Visionary AND Execution focused leaders at the very top.

I'm not forgetting. And I'm not claiming that this promotion was a mistake. I am raising questions about the narrative that the author is telling/selling. Consider how you'll likely not see such a long-winded post from company founders explaining in detail why they chose themselves for their own jobs. They founded a company because they wanted to, and they didn't care whether they had exactly the right experience and qualifications.

The narrative is about slowly making your way up the corporate ranks, gaining experience, working hard, achieving qualifications, and deserving your promotion. The author feels that this kind of story is encouraging, uplifting, that is shows you too can make it to the top, but I actually think it's kind of a disservice, an attitude that can hold people back. The company founders suddenly made it to the top at the very beginning without any of that, without "deserving" anything. If you think you have to "earn" your position, you've already bought into the myth of the hierarchy. The best reason to be ambitious is the realization that the people above you are just as flawed as you are.

If anything, competence is often overlooked in promotions. For example, from the article: "I didn’t get promoted right then (it wasn’t the right time) but we also stopped looking for an external hire." Why wasn't it the right time?

Not sure what point you're trying to make here. You can go and start your company any time, sure, but I would much rather be a VP in a medium sized startup than a founder. And to get to VP, even in a small organisation, you certainly need competence.

> And to get to VP, even in a small organisation, you certainly need competence.

I don't know if I agree with that. Anyway, competence comes at various levels.

If you open a company right now, what would be your criteria for promotion?

You can get to VP without competence. Staying there requires it. You don't necessarily have to be the most competent person possible but there is a floor.

> You don't necessarily have to be the most competent person possible but there is a floor.

Heh, well that's not really saying much.

Floor = minor negative impact to the business due to your (in)competence.

So from what I've seen and learned, there's definitely a difference between being truly smart/visionary/creative etc vs just being "not dumb". And while I suppose the latter could also be deemed a kind of competence, I think what the others are driving at boils down to this - people with connections or just a knack for politics and schmoozing can get pretty far ahead and many underlings often mistake their rise for some sort of amazing technical or creative ability.

> And to get to VP, even in a small organisation, you certainly need competence.

Being extremely competent is one way to get into these positions, but it's hardly the only way.

These positions are often given to people who are viewed as the most loyal, most credentialed, most connected, or most polished. Competency is often assumed, or even wished for, but it may not be the driving force behind the decision making.

I've been a at a couple high-growth startups. The number of people who get hired or promoted into VP positions for no reason other than having the right connections and being loyal for empire-building purposes was shocking.

Most people won't understand what you are saying. They just won't. It won't ever compute.

Part of me feels that pessimism, but another part of me believes every rational individual has at least one path to a more open mind, whether through music, art, study, self-reflection, dialog, mind-altering substances... all sorts of sources of inspiration. Most will probably never understand, but I won't stop lighting sparks and hoping they kindle in the minds of those with whom I choose to interact. That's what worked for me, at least.

On this specific topic it's not pessimism and it has little to do with rationality. It's largely just spending time in organizations and watching what happens.

Have you ever started a company?

> The company founders suddenly made it to the top at the very beginning without any of that, without "deserving" anything.

When they started, they weren't at the "top" of anything. It's not like someone just handed them the CEO title of a successful firm.

Building a company from scratch is way more work than climbing a corporate hierarchy.

I’m not sure what you’re taking issue with, as that’s his point: If the founder did not require someone else’s “approval” to take the position of CEO, why should, say, a developer believe that they need “approval” from their organization to think that they’re senior-level? It’s giving the hierarchy above way too much control of your career.

This reply was better than my reply, thanks.

You don't need anyone's approval to decide to call yourself a "senior" developer (even if nobody else agrees).

Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate arbiter. If you call yourself a senior developer, but can't perform as one, the market will correct your misconception—just like it knocks down incorrect founders.

OP is the one obsesses with hierarchy.

The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founders of successful companies haven't earned their position. Charity has absolutely demonstrated a lot of merit to get Honeycomb to where it is.

> Just like with founders: the market is the ultimate arbiter.

> The part that's ridiculous is to claim that the founders of successful companies haven't earned their position.

"The market is the ultimate arbiter" is the exact opposite of the idea that you need the perfect résumé and experience to get and do the job.

That's what you seem to be misinterpreting about my comments. A retroactive assessment of someone's tenure in a leadership position is fundamentally different from a promotion to a leadership position, where the assessment necessarily comes before the tenure.

> Building a company from scratch is way more work than climbing a corporate hierarchy.

There's no reason to believe that this is true, other than the meritocratic article of faith that the most money and power always go to the people who work the "hardest", whatever that means. (I think that scrubbing toilets is hard work.)

> There's no reason to believe that this is true, other than the meritocratic article of faith that the most money and power always go to the people who work the "hardest", whatever that means.

And the observations of ~everyone who has done both. I've done both and starting a company is way harder.

Again, I've started a company, contrary to your previous assumption, and I know other people who have started companies. You don't speak for everyone or even most people.

If climbing the corporate hierarchy is so much easier, then how high up the ladder did you get exactly?

I never said you hadn't started a company. I explicitly asked if you had—the opposite of assuming. Nothing in my comment assumed you hadn't.

Since you're unwilling to argue in good faith, we can resolve this.

> I explicitly asked if you had—the opposite of assuming.

It felt like a rhetorical question, because without waiting for my answer, you presumed to explain to me, "Building a company from scratch is way more work than climbing a corporate hierarchy", and then you doubled down, presuming to know "the observations of ~everyone".

What exactly was the purpose of your question, and what is your response to the answer "Yes"?

You didn't read his top-level comment about where he said he started a company, so it's actually you who aren't arguing in good faith.

"I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company" is phrased like a hypothetical, not as a past tense action. I'd expect a founder to say they became CEO.

> Have you ever started a company?

Yes. Care to take back your comment now?

Once attuned to unjust or involuntary hierarchies, one realizes their ubiquity in modern society. Hierarchy and bureaucracy are useful and efficient, but while the imagined ideal is a meritocratic Star Trek bridge crew, they are commonly economically coercive, Kafkaesque, nepotistic, oligarchic power structures that serve those at the top rather than serving the systems’ purported ends.

At least that’s my worldview, which is broadly anarchic. I disagree with the notion of people having to - by force or coercion - submit to another’s power without easy escape. I am happy to follow leaders voluntarily for mutual benefit as long as I am truly free to reclaim my autonomy at any time - the social contract.

But think of the economics snares - particularly tying employment to housing and healthcare, and birth citizenship being involuntary and difficult/expensive to change. I could go further into detail to summarize my beliefs but you probably get my general perspective. I’m fortunate enough that in theory I could escape most of the hierarchies I’m under, but most humans in practice do not have that freedom and that saddens me.

> the imagined ideal is a meritocratic Star Trek bridge crew

Incidentally, this is why The Wrath of Khan was so great, because it showed that Kirk was fallible in a number of ways. He messed up by leaving Khan on Ceti Alpha V, he messed up by ignoring Saavik citing regulations to raise shields, he was embarrassed to appear fallible by putting on glasses to read, he admitted to cheating on the Kobayashi Maru test, and only Spock's sacrifice saved them all from destruction.

What would be your alternative advice?

> What would be your alternative advice?

My alternative advice was basically this: "The best reason to be ambitious is the realization that the people above you are just as flawed as you are."

In other words, don't buy into the myth that your position in the social hierarchy is a natural reflection of your personal worthiness.

> The best reason to be ambitious is the realization that the people above you are just as flawed as you are.

Can I steal this? It's so on-point and I've seen it many, many times throughout the course of my career. There's been a few truly brilliant managers and principal engineers I've had the good fortune to work under, but for the vast majority of upper level leadership this tracks.

> Can I steal this?

Feel free!

I'd second this, if it helps... think of the visionary as the "spiritual leader". This framing echoes many political and civic movements. The execution specialist is often necessarily a very different person to the spiritual/visionary leader. In the company I got my start in many years ago, it quickly became essential that the founding CEO move to spiritual leader, while we found an execution guy from outside to make the machine run smoothly. Couldn't have done it without both of them.

> What’s being described is a classic Visionary - spontaneous, jumps around and can be distracting, yes - but crucially, is also an amazing innovator and motivator of people.

The description reads more like someone who is simply high energy and brings a lot of enthusiasm and positivity. I don't see much suggestion that the person is necessarily very Visionary:

> [company founder] has a more intuitive, spontaneous style, often shines brightest in a crisis, is allergic to checklists

There is a lot of value in having leaders who are positive, high energy, and can motivate teams. I've come across a few leaders who had boundless energy, enthusiasm, and enough charisma to lead teams into any effort. However, the ones without the right amount of execution ability ultimately just led us to slosh around doing a lot of half-useless work in a high-energy manner.

These days I'm more cautious when I meet someone with abnormally high charisma and energy levels. I probe more for knowledge and experience in executing. Many of the highest charisma leaders I've come across haven't had the abilities to back it up, but they've used their charisma and charm to work their way into the right companies and right meeting rooms at the right time to become associated with success.

Of the successful startups I've worked at, I can think of several people who were charismatic, confident, high-energy, but didn't really contribute to execution. Even worse, some of them detracted from progress as they used their charisma to redirect efforts in self-serving ways, or spent their time pushing podcasts, building social media profiles, and attending conferences instead of working for the company.

Totally agreed with this: "I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange"

On the one hand, we are social primates. And primates gonna prime. But I personally have very little interest in hierarchy; it mainly seems irritating and counterproductive to me. Obviously, looking around at the world, I'm a outlier here. But perhaps the strangest thing to me is how often neurotypical people can't even talk about the power dynamics that they are clearly participating in. You see it in big things, of course. But also in the small, as when the stated purpose of a meeting (e.g., "stand-up meeting") is wildly different than the actual purpose (a sit-down meeting where the manager gets to feel important and reestablish dominance over those lower down in the power hierarchy).

I think it was Marc Andreessen who said it that you’d rather be upfront with hierarchy than to pretend it doesn’t exist and have it form chaotically and without control.

I remember reading about some flat team structure at Gore Inc. in the 90’s and it was an epic failure.

Military relies on it more explicitly when you really need to get things done. In abstract sense, the military is more similar to companies than being different.

Yeah, you might enjoy reading "Tyranny of Structurelessness". But there are other options besides "controlling hierarchy", "secret, denied controlling hierarchy", and "chaotic failure".

Just as an example, consider a party. When I host, I am very definitely in charge. It's my space, it's my party. Friends will often help, serving as an intermediate hierarchical layer. But this hierarchy is mostly supportive, not controlling. I may slip into control mode when, say, I have a bad guest who needs to be ejected. But most of the magic happens not because I'm in charge, but because I've created a space for more dynamic interactions to arise without interference.

Do you promote people at your company based on the same principles you declare as universal? Or do you at least try to promote the more efficient/useful people?

You don't "just" become the CEO of a big company. You become the CEO of a small company (typically 1 to 3 people)

Then you make a boatload of money, and the market decides whether you get to become the CEO of a big company.

Everyone knows this. It's unclear why you felt the need to say it.

The parent comment says: "I automatically become CEO, CTO, etc., by starting my own company, and this is true of anyone who started their own companies, including the ones that are now BigCos. Founders don't need any specific qualifications or characteristics to merit their positions."

Yes, I'm aware of what I said. You have copied and pasted the quote without fail. But it's still unclear what your point is supposed to be.

The parent comment seems to believe that BigCo founders have no qualifications. This is wrong because BigCo founders attain that position by winning in the market.

> The parent comment seems to believe that BigCo founders have no qualifications.

This is a misinterpretation. I said, "Founders don't need any specific [emphasis added] qualifications or characteristics to merit their positions." In other words, there's no specific list of "Must have X, Y, and Z in order to become a founder."

That's not the same as saying founders have no merit, which I'm not claiming.

Really disagree with this - a lot of process-oriented checklist-following managers are actually terrible leaders. You don’t need to be particularly skilled to do that. As a CEO you can bring a lot more to the table than that, and delegate it if you need to - it’s not an uncommon skill - to focus on adding value by setting direction, fighting fires, focusing on whatever is currently the most important problem or project.

Obviously you can start your own company to reset the hierarchy according to your wishes. That doesn’t mean this CEO is unqualified though.

> That doesn’t mean this CEO is unqualified though.

I didn't say they were unqualified. I said, "the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position."

> I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking is strange

It is deeply weird: it is perfectly reasonable to lead/be led without believing that the leader is somehow better.

> These are all written by people whose minds have been thoroughly corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with an inner need to justify it.

This sounds very teenage edgelord, but I really think a majority of the population acts as if a primary motivator for them is outsourcing as much risk/hard things as allowable. To do so entails buying into false/constructed realities to justify their own passivity.

Thus, job titles attain a status of Real Enough, because everyone’s play acting that they’re real, and that bootstraps them into actual reality. Collective result of sunk costs by the faithful.

> As far as I've seen, corporate ladder climbing is essentially political.

At a minimum, it's a kind of specialization that measures a different kind of qualification then expected from ICs.

> They choose themselves for leadership, and then they choose their friends as the first employees.

Could probably change that to "choose people they trust as first employees"

I guess that's kind of true. However, once a company involves funding and builds a board of directors full of industry leaders, those same leaders are now on the hook to provide company value in the same way as any other company. In fact, companies have a legal responsibility to not drive it into the ground, or they face potential lawsuits from its investors. Investors do not need to be VCs, and could just be the founders themselves.

However, I do agree with you on another point. At the companies I've worked at, it's the people in the middle of the hierarchy who have impressed me the most. The have incredible hyper fast minds with intimidating levels of reasoning skills. I've always found them to be the true heroes of companies in my mind. They aren't usually there at the beginning and either were hired for their skills, or quickly rose up from the bottom and earned their place.

> These are all written by people whose minds have been thoroughly corporatized, true believers in the hierarchy with an inner need to justify it.

This seems to miss the fact that what’s needed in a startup tends to be very different than what’s needed in a larger, more mature organization.

Hierarchies in larger organizations exist to organize things, and I’ve never encountered an organization other than an early stage startup that has somehow managed to avoid this.

Even in flat organizations (which are invariably fairly small), there are plenty of articles out there about how these tend to involve hidden hierarchies and agendas. A few example links:

https://www.getflow.com/blog/flat-will-kill-you

https://getlighthouse.com/blog/flat-organizational-structure...

https://workforce.com/news/hidden-hierarchies

> This seems to miss the fact that what’s needed in a startup tends to be very different than what’s needed in a larger, more mature organization.

I wasn't talking about how companies should be organized. I was talking about how one should think about hierarchies:

> No matter how much you want to believe [emphasis added] that hierarchy is a "meritocracy", the founding of the hierarchy was undoubtedly chaos.

> I've always felt that hierarchical, subservient thinking [emphasis added] is strange, and I honestly never considered my former bosses to be "better" than me.

As a practical matter, hierarchies are difficult to avoid, as you've said. But they're only a means to an end. The point is to avoid internalizing hierarchical values and making your personal sense of worth depend on your place in them.

The notion of being allergic to checklists seems so bizarre to me, like being allergic to tying your shoes or brushing your teeth. Does anyone actually think that way? Everyone I have worked with or done sports with has been willing to use checklists where appropriate.

> In other words, the founder doesn't have the qualifications or characteristics that the underlings assume they need to be in a leadership position.

I find this to be an odd take, given context in the article. It sounds like the writer is simply contrasting her own leadership style with her boss's, as an example of how they complement each other.

Hierarchies make us uncomfortable because they challenge our egos. I've noticed this particularly in classic programmer personalities: smart, introverted, highly skilled. Many of us spend our entire careers as ICs, as leaves on the corporate tree. It's easy to become cynical.

"The VP sits around chatting people up all day and droning about OKRs while I just shipped a million dollar feature / resolved an expensive outage / built a tool that will dramatically increase engineering efficiency. What value does _he_ bring to the table?"

Unfortunately this is an enormously unproductive attitude that will kneecap your career. No org is a meritocracy -- but what does meritocracy even mean? We sort everyone by IQ? Or "performance", measured by lines of code committed per week?

On a final note I'll add that hierarchies get things done. Imagine working for a company that functioned as a democracy, with all the attendant discourse, campaigning, checks and balances. I would personally find the inefficiency intolerable. Better to work for a single idiot than a committee of a dozen geniuses.

> It sounds like the writer is simply contrasting her own leadership style with her boss's, as an example of how they complement each other.

I agree, that's likely the author's intention.

> Unfortunately this is an enormously unproductive attitude that will kneecap your career.

You're getting to the heart of the matter, but not in the way that you think. To avoid repeating myself, I'll refer to what I wrote in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36724073

> No org is a meritocracy -- but what does meritocracy even mean?

That was actually my point.

> On a final note I'll add that hierarchies get things done. Imagine working for a company that functioned as a democracy

My comment was not about how companies should be organized. That would be a misinterpretation.

> If I went looking for another startup to join at some point in the future, I would specifically look for an exec team or founding team that could cite examples of building up high performers for internal promotions — and swiftly recognizing and rewarding those already having impact outside of their role-defined scope.

Yeah in my experience this seems very rare. The default in most start ups I've seen is that when a new level in the hierarchy becomes necessary and/or available (i.e. the existing person leaves) is to hire externally.

I guess the rationale is that if everyone is doing some necessary job and they are good at it, it's better not to mess with it. But needless to say, I find this very demotivating. Much more so than if I am passed for the promotion but a colleague gets it, because I know that if there is a culture of promotion and progression, I might have a fair chance next time. But if its always external hires, then my whole career at this company is in the same position I started with.

Something I've seen countless times is the initial employees complaining that the company "is not what it used to be" when it grows to a certain level and, in my experience, they refuse to adapt and leave or are fired.

Was the company/leadership simultaneously talking about how it intended to grow but retain its 'culture' or whatever though?

Why you ask? I'm not saying the employees were wrong to think/do whatever they thought/did.

I thought you were implying it's a failing of grouchy employees ('refuse to adapt') - I just think that might be sometimes hypocritical as companies love to talk about their culture etc., if you change what that is (and previously talked about it) then you should expect some negative reaction to it, and if you don't (or talk about how you're keeping it the same) then it seems unfair to criticise someone saying it's changed or not liking that.

(Personally I think I'd rather companies uncultured/not talking about it, but if they do it should make sense and be consistent with actions.)

Sorry, I should have been clearer.

I was replying to the point where OP says companies end up hiring externally when they grow and need new layers/functions.

Most of the time (in my experience), it's not that employees want to take those new jobs but upper management fails to promote them and more that the company is becoming something they don't like (which makes sense, otherwise they wouldn't have joined a startup if they prefer big corps)... and they don't want to adapt.

It's all perfectly fine, IMHO. People move on. Companies move on. Some people will adapt (because they like the new reality, or they need to like it, or..) and others won't. And by adapting I'm not saying become "better" but different only.

I think the worst case is when both parties don't realize it and don't take action. Then you get upper management hiring externally, saying the employees that helped the company grow are bad employees, etc. And the initial employees saying upper management is clueless, sold out, lost their way, betrayed the culture, etc.

I've become that person. In small teams a lot of magic happens and the feeling is somewhat addictive. I don't think it's wrong to long for times when the company had more output, at a higher quality, while using fewer resources. The past will never repeat itself but it seems meek to not attempt to preserve the good parts.

It’s usually not the founders strong suit to grow talent, so they farm that out to other companies and hire the growers. That’s been my experience. Where it misses is that most other companies or managers can’t actually nurture talent.

It is not just startups, no wonder the age old wisdom is always-be-leaving if you want to get a raise/promotion.

I think the rational is more like paying as little as possible for keeping smart people around who could outperform their title. Switching jobs has a very real cost for employees, especially in harder economic times. Some will leave nonetheless, some will quite quit but some will stick around just fine.

I work for a larger start up (or a scale up) that is doing decently. Majority of the top leadership was promoted from within sometimes all the way from IC to VP and I think it shows. The org would definitely benefit from someone that would have seen that level across multiple orgs.

In my experience promoting too much from within just means all the flaws the founders had will never get better since the people who put up with them (or don't see them) got promoted. And if you're one of the few external hires who has the experience to see them you're probably in for a bad time.

Startups scale faster than management skill sets. Being able to manage a team of 10 doesn’t translate to managing an of org of 100, let alone 1000. I’m not saying that’s what’s going on in your case, but it’s a legit reason in some cases: avoiding the Peter Principle.

In my experience, this "avoiding the Peter Principle" is rare for people who are founders/friends-of-founders.

I think that's where the complaint comes from. It's mainly that a lot of competent people get skipped because founders and friends of the founders keep just hiring their external favorites rather than promoting and rewarding people who are getting the company to where it is.

What's your sample size? I mean sure, nepotism happens, this isn't a surprise. But for competent founders, the ability to successfully execute the role at hand is the primary consideration. To be coldly rational about it: whether someone was a high performer at the previous stage or if they were a close personal friend are both irrelevant data points. The only thing that matters is can they be effective in the next stage. Obviously this is a judgement call, and founders can get it wrong (they're only human after all), but the Peter Principle is a real thing and it can be deadly when someone is promoted beyond their capabilities during hypergrowth. This can be a very tough pill to swallow for someone who got the company where it is, but it doesn't make it less true.

> The default in most start ups I've seen is that when a new level in the hierarchy becomes necessary and/or available (i.e. the existing person leaves) is to hire externally.

Count me among the people burned by this.

I joined a startup with promises of being promoted when the department grew. I was required to hit certain performance metrics, which I exceeded. Then it came time to hire and suddenly the position was only open to people with oddly specific qualifications I didn't have (example: required an MBA or experience at company greater than # in size, where the # was chosen to be just barely more than the biggest company I had worked for)

So what did you do?

> While Charity has deep experience in the domains of infrastructure & operations, databases, and backend engineering, I come originally from design, frontend, and product engineering, and I take a particular joy in collaborating with product management and ux design.

I had trouble figuring what they actually did, and what they currently do in their VP role. There's a lot of lip service, but it's not entirely clear what the person now spends most of their days doing.

Even the quote "coming from design, frontend and product engineering" doesn't tell me much (I'm also exactly that; I work on projects from doing sketches to Figma layouts to building front-end/mid-end in Sveltekit, build APIs in FastAPI, etc. etc.) — what did they excel at to get the VP job, and what do they miss the most about being in the trenches to... doing what they do now?

There's a ton of words on here but I don't really know what it says.

There's a few steps removed from the trenches to VPE. Check out "The Manager's Path" book for an overview of the different expectations of a current day smaller-than FAANG-like companies and the path of an engineer going up through management.

I had a similar impression. I also thought as you move into executive leadership things get much more strategic and you're rarely the one executing. But they list out lots of tactical experience and qualities that they say make them a good VP.

Its just HR PR forced on the poor dude. I'm a tech adjacent poor but I've seen many been forced to write something and it's always kind of like this. A bunch of people in the company will write a piece or two like this so something recent comes up in searches during campus recruiting. It serves two purposes, just the right amount of ass kissing and gassing up potential recruits.

>There's a ton of words on here but I don't really know what it says

Welcome to management.

On Becoming a VP of Engineering, Part 2: Doing the Job https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/becoming-vp-of-engineering-pt2

This post is basically an example of a survivorship bias and the rationalization of it. What is missing is the statistical insight into internal moves to the VP positions vs the external ones.

I would say it is extremely hard to get an internal move to a VP position, either it is a startup or a big corp. Startups need to succeed and big corps require you to put in years and develop good political relationships.

The easiest way is to start hitting the top roles early in life and do it constantly instead of thinking to start at the bottom. If you cannot make it into the top in the existing company then build your own. If you start at the bottom then you remain there because your skills are not valuable in the top leadership roles.

Unfortunately true, one should apply this mindset everywhere.

e.g. don't settle for Js roles if you want to excel you have to push yourself into competitive spaces and write cursed code in OCaml to truly be a Good Programmer

I don't think the article touches on internal vs external hiring at all. They tried it but eventually didn't do it. But there's no value judgement -- it just seemed like they couldn't find a great candidate and then the author was eventually promoted.

Fwiw the same thing happened at my last startup. We did a search for a VP eventually promoted from within. I hereby claim, that statistically speaking, it definitely happens sometimes.

I guess the author disagrees with your last statement, > If you start at the bottom then you remain there because your skills are not valuable in the top leadership roles.

She says that she had the space to think more about strategy because the "people at the bottom" were doing an good job of keeping the company's infrastructure stable as they scaled. Maybe it's less about top and bottom and more about what types of problems people are good at solving. My tip: if you like planning and management and strategy, you should try to get roles, in the top, bottom, and middle using those skillsets. Lots of even introductory roles involve "manager", and lots of non-management roles are a great career path for many.

I'm a CTO of a venture-backed startup. My observations:

- Most people in high positions are smart. I put cunning in the same category :) But there are many equally smart people who are not in high positions, because..

- They don't have the chance (either by design or by choice).

- You can have a better chance by starting your own business. Nobody starts a business with the intention of getting a VP job in another company, but it's a good fallback.

- Or know the right people (networking). But this usually go in hand with the previous point.

- Or work at some prestigious company (e.g. Google), and then move to a smaller pond to become a bigger fish.

- Or be known by your boss and their boss. So that when your direct boss resigns, they know who to appoint next :)

> - Most people in high positions are smart. I put cunning in the same category :) But there are many equally smart people who are not in high positions, because..

> - They don't have the chance (either by design or by choice).

This is an important insight.

These are all great points.

One thing I've learned is that when you see companies promoting and hiring executives for a lot of reasons other than merit, it's time to start looking for a new job.

I didn't realize during the interview, but my last company's VP and higher positions were almost exclusively held by people who had connections to the CEO, regardless of their qualifications.

There were a handful of people who were promoted out of merit, or logically as part of acquisitions. They were steadily replaced and or demoted to make room for more of the C-level executives' friends and even family members over time.

One C-level executive I enjoyed working with was demoted to a VP title and the CEO's long time friend took his C-level position. The demoted C-level executive had years of experience at some of the biggest names in the industry. He had also uprooted his family and moved across the country for this position. His replacement had no experience in the industry. The VP was asked to stay around and "allowed" to keep his stock options to help the CEO's old friend learn the position and take over.

Opened my eyes to the realities of nepotism and loyalty in some companies.

I'm sure their CEO thought they were all smart people.

A quote really jumped out at me:

> VPs of Engineering from frontend backgrounds are relatively rare, and it’s partly because the most pressing technical challenges a startup faces are often around scaling, reliability, and backend architecture. If we had been dealing with nonstop incidents, constant struggles with scaling, and major architectural challenges with our query and storage engine, someone with deeper backend and operational experience likely would have been chosen for the job, not me. Because of Ben, Ian, and other incredibly talented ICs on our team, and some of the solid design decisions the founding team made that bought us a lot of technical runway, these concerns were not top of mind for our leaders. Goals like executing well against our product strategy and leveling up our user experience were instead the concerns of the day, and there I could be more helpful.

I’ve worked at companies in the past where frontend is looked down upon because all of our leaders are backend/infra people. What I’ve noticed is that the code quality from those backend devs is quite awful. I wonder if there exists an inverse relationship between leadership representation and engineering talent?

> What I’ve noticed is that the code quality from those backend devs is quite awful

Without knowing which metrics you use to measure the code quality, my hunch says you are focusing on the wrong thing. I am a frontend engineer turned tech lead. I think we developers choose our focuses based on our personal inclinations and what we value, and usually what I would notice is people who choose frontend work have different inclinations from backend developers.

What is awful code? Is it not formatted consistently or prettily? The variables are not named descriptively? The code is not split or structured nicely? I find that frontend developers tend to judge code on superficial values.

In an organization especially an engineering focused one, people get acknowledgements by solving problems. Very often, teams can function well enough without their main frontend guy but would struggle without one let alone a few strong infra or backend engineer. That's just the reality.

I'm a 5 yoe frontend developer and I agree completely with you, backend/infra can be so much more complex than frontend. In my current company I participate on many hiring interviews for our team, and the backend interviews are incredibly savage compared to what's being discussed on a regular frontend interview. Even if I tried I can't bring the frontend interviews to that level of intensity because frontend simply doesn't have enough depth. It's a miracle I get paid a similar salary to them.

There's a few things that stood out to me from that codebase:

1. No unit tests. Integration tests broken weekly when external data source would change.

2. Hand rolled ORM resulting in inconsistent separation of concerns. Some controllers would use the ORM classes directly. Some would add layers of indirection. Some would make database calls directly in the indirection layers.

3. Database data model would "compress" dimensions to be clever. ex: the id field is a concatenation of a user supplied string + timestamp + some hard coded string prefix. In addition, there's multiple columns which represent similar concepts like "tenant", "customer", "team".

4. Several ongoing migrations created necessary but hard to understand backwards compatibility logic. Code breaks in strange ways when trying to add features because you have to remember there's 2^n different code paths.

5. No async code. Everything was a blocking call to the database resulting in unnecessarily slow api responses.

6. No indexes in the database to improve db perf

The managers didn't see this stuff. They just know features can take a while to get out the door so they respond by asking for more head count. Leadership sees that more backend devs are needed and hire more backend focused managers to try and manage the fact that there are scaling and perf issues.

Isn’t it good for tests to fail when things change? Are you saying that the data source is not abstracted properly like with a repository pattern?

Does not seem like typical mistakes backend developers would make. Perhaps it is rather, that they moved on into leadership, since they found that to be their more effective roles, rather than their output as backend developers? Kind of like admitting, that perhaps it was not meant for them? With these kinds of practices, I could imagine that.

> I’ve worked at companies in the past where frontend is looked down upon because all of our leaders are backend/infra people.

I think there's a lot going on here, but one of them is definitely gender. Front-end development is often feminine-coded and seen as lesser. E.g.:

https://thoughtbot.com/blog/tailwind-and-the-femininity-of-c...

I also think in tech-land we tend to associate leadership with male-coded traits. So it's not shocking at all to me that leadership and front-end backgrounds are often seen as somehow incompatible.

And I think that same sort of gender dynamic is relevant to the code, too. For me, part of what makes for good code is that it's good for others, good for collaboration. But if you're going to be a macho big-swinging-dick alpha nerd tech bro, then that can involve performing genius via solo cowboy coding. There the goal isn't to work closely with a team to make something together, it's to be a visibly amazing IC with upper management written all over him.

This article is hilariously bad. The argument goes:

I like CSS more than Tailwind -> Why don't people like CSS more? -> Maybe because 'CSS, which makes things look ‘pretty’, is considered feminine'

You're entitled to like CSS more, and I could even agree making things look pretty is feminine coded, but it obviously doesn't explain people's preference for Tailwind because Tailwind also exists to make things look pretty.

---

I've worked with plenty of female engineering leaders, and most of them have a backend background.

The reason for this imbalance has nothing to do with gender, but entirely to do with criticality. Given that frontends tend to read/write from the backend, the domain model is usually owned by the backend in most apps, meaning that capability design and expansion is gated by the backend.

Not to mention that screwing up your backend architecture is in 95% of cases a much much deeper problem than screwing up your frontend. A data migration is basically always harder than redesigning the UI for some app.

That is not in fact the argument. If that's all you're getting from it, I suggest you try again.

As to your other views, I think you have several errors. The biggest is declaring "it has nothing to do with gender" in a very gendered society, one with a long history of bias, and thinking having one (weak) alternative explanation is sufficient to explain executive hiring patterns.

Obviously it is the argument, that's why it's titled "Tailwind and the Femininity of CSS". Or do you think the 5 paragraphs about how sexism causes people to dislike CSS is a non sequitur from the introduction about how the author prefers Tailwind to CSS. Break it down for me!

"It has nothing to do with gender" is with regard to the ratio of BE to FE people in engineering leadership. I'm not making the argument that gender bias plays no role in promotion anywhere. It is possible for some things in the world to not be explained by gender bias.

Nah, the smirking "change my mind" routine is one I no longer bother with, because it indicates people who are very invested in not changing their minds. There are just an ocean of guys in tech who will argue forever against acknowledging the gender biases in tech. Presumably because they would then have to question what portion of their success was unearned. Hopefully you'll figure this out on your own. But I wouldn't bet on it. It's not just science that progresses one funeral at a time.

At smaller companies, at least, my observation has been that frontend (in fact, design, even if unable to write code) seemed to have a big leg-up on positive visibility among important stakeholders, clients, owners, and managers, and to have an easier time moving up the promotion ladder than backend.

A demo of improved API response times, even if accompanied by pretty graphs (extra work purely for self-promotional purposes) just doesn't get the ooohs and aaaahs and "can we see that again?"s and "can you forward me these slides?" that a design mock-up of a prettier button can. And when back-end supports feature development, it's still the front-end that people are looking at when it's demo'd. Basically the only thing that gets a big reaction from non-tech-folks from the backend is when you manage to make a large opex number a lot smaller, and even then, no guarantee.

Requires backend-experienced folks in the right places to counterbalance this, and a lot more effort on the part of backend folks to make their naturally-hard-to-"read" and relatively-boring (to look at, anyway) work flashier and more prominent.

So based on an opinion of one person or a very small number of them you write

> but one of them is definitely gender

Why is it so easy to blame something on sexism?

> macho big-swinging-dick alpha nerd tech bro, then that can involve performing genius via solo cowboy coding

This is such a small number of people that act like this and write shitty code because of it that it's not worth mentioning.

I base that on my experience of decades in tech. I just included that blog post as a recently read example.

And it's easy to blame something on sexism because sexism is common. Explicit patriarchy was the default mode for our society going back thousands of years. My grandmother was born when women weren't allowed to vote. My mother wasn't allowed to get a credit card, something only outlawed in 1974. Marital rape wasn't fully outlawed until 1993.

And those are just the laws. The culture, as so often, lags behind them. There are a zillion evidences that patriarchy isn't dead. Certainly so in tech.

> What I’ve noticed is that the code quality from those backend devs is quite awful.

In my experience, people that look at areas they don't know and think "I don't know of any problems there, it should be easy" have a very high likelihood of being bad at the things they know too.

VP of Engineering isn't some standard role you can compare across companies. My current company, Directors often have orgs of up to 500, and VPs usually have 1k+, sometimes 3-5k.

To pretend that a VP at a startup, with an org of 50 is the same as a VP at an FAANG with 1k+ is just silly. I'm not saying one is better, but clearly they require very different skills.

In fact, I've seen first hand that people who are given the VP role at small companies sometimes don't understand this, and are then shocked when they apply to a FAANG and are offered a manager or senior manager role.

I used to work at a small 40 person company that had a VP and director for a department of 2 people (not engineering.) Utterly insane. Based on my experience, the VP has the experience of an intern at a larger org, but was there early. Director is worse. The 2 reports are competent.

I wish Honeycomb employees would spend some time on improving their product in a tangible way instead of writing blog posts. I've had the missfortune of using Honeycomb at work and for any systems that interact with more than a couple of services it's simply unusable. I don't get why there's all the hype around the company?

I'm reading this through the lens of the fact that a VP at honeycomb is probably comparable with a senior manager at a big tech company.

This person is learning how to be an effective manager of managers. It’s the equivalent of a director at a big company.

Manager of managers is “senior manager” at places like amazon and meta, not even director (source: was one at both these places, though at meta the official title was just engineering manager, you were labeled as a level as M2).

In my experience ICs make product, managers make people, directors make process and VPs make policy. Everyone over that is an approval step in budget requests.

I like this framing a lot, but it seems to conspicuously miss who makes "strategy"? Assuming policy != strategy

Unless you're making a subtle joke that, nobody makes strategy... Which if so, then kudos for a nice joke

This is really self-fellating...and to post it on your own employer's site is brazen to me.

These corporate blogs are almost 100% purpose for prospective employees. This is a way for prospective employees to become sold the corporate culture is rainbow and unicorns.

It's standard corporate PR.

I could be wrong but I think corporate blogs are also motivated by improving SEO/pagerank. That doesn’t mean the content lacks value though.

In this blog the new VP of engineering lays out why you should be wary of working at Honeycomb.

There is very little public discussion on the topic, because these roles are lucked into, at best (outside of founders, as people mentioned here already).

Here are the Engineering VPs I have personally met / worked with. These are for billion-dollar-revenue companies (Banking and Health Care specifically)

1. 20-something year old Developer (not senior) who followed a non-technical CTO to a new company and got the VP title before.

2. Architect of a small start up that got bought - right time, right place.

3. Scrum master who was a friend of someone at the company who has no technical background.

I don't really understand the point of this post.

This post wreaks of low self esteem. The author feels the need to prove that they are worthy of a great and powerful management position by sharing how much surface knowledge they possess about so many things. Usually, these posts are shared on LinkedIn as people desperately try to market themselves.

yawn

"everyone in this company is very smart, especially my boss, and I'm also very smart"

mostly

It's definitely up there with the classic "Why I left (FAANG)" self-serving visibility posting.

Maybe she's getting ready to leave

best time to leave FAANG was always yesterday

Fortune favors the bold.

consent accident

The cookie banner on this website is not gdpr conform.

I'm in the UE and I get an extra cookie banner (with a design not matching the website's) on top of the "standard" one. This extra banner has a "Reject all cookie" clearly visible and clickable.

It showed me the reject all on top of the accept all. Clicking reject all left me looking at the accept all banner. Only options were "accept all" or bounce.

This doesn't speak highly of their frontend team with the "I am very smart" undertone other comments mentioned.

I didn't get a cookie banner, because my browser blocks all of them.

Yeah I think it was similar for me.

> Nonetheless, I think we were all glad we went through this process. Above a certain level, leadership promotions have to be about what the company needs, not the individual, and it was valuable to imagine together what a great VP of Engineering for Honeycomb might look like.

Of course the author talks about it like he was plucked from the heavens to get the position. I would too.

The reality is none of the "what I did" section actually matters. This person was half decent at their job for long enough, and played the political jockeying game well enough, to get the position. Every corner office position is earned through politics not talent in your field. Most companies have something like a distinguished engineer position for the top 0.05% IC.

Interesting that you (and others in this thread) automatically assume the author is a "he"

Of course this is likely an oversight of fast typing that is getting me downvoted.

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