On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2
honeycomb.io
honeycomb.io
It finally clicked when I read the section justifying the company's low compensation:
> Industry data shows that Honeycomb is about average in this as a series D startup, not an outlier. I have friends who are line managers at larger companies who take home more than I do in my current role. To be clear, I’m not complaining — I am paid well for what I do, and I’m always, always grateful to be extremely well compensated relative to most American workers, who are well paid relative to the world median
It’s great that the author is satisfied with their own compensation. What bothers me is the contrast between their company’s “about average” compensation and these blog posts espousing excellence at every level the company, mentioning “inhumane” schedules in the past to deliver SOC2 and HIPAA compliance, talk of using off time to do continued industry learning, and the insinuation that the insinuation that the author and their boss are established industry thought leaders.
All of this talk of excellence and high performance at every level with one big exception: Compensation. Reading the section about how they have data showing their compensation is “about average” gave me flashbacks to early in my career when I was underpaid (relative to doing similar work at other companies) and yet charismatic company leaders insisted our compensation was in line with industry averages according to some data they found somewhere. It took me a while to realize the 50th percentile compensation should go along with 50th percentile expectations and 50th percentile performance. The companies who expect 95th percentile performance but give “about average” compensation and use charismatic leaders to convince everyone that it’s okay are, in my experience, not a good deal for the employee.
Is she $200k, $400k, or more? Potentially line managers in big companies could be earning more than any of those numbers.
When a company espouses “about average” compensation as one of their core principles while simultaneously espousing excellence in everything else, there’s a mismatch.
Also, salary bands are transparent both to employees and applicants.
If honeycomb continues to succeed and there's some sort of exit or liquidation (which can happen in series D, E rounds for select individuals like executives) then I am sure the total comp is not "about average" but instead much greater than average.
If leaders are writing blog posts about how everyone needs to accept “average” compensation while cashing out high equity grants for themselves, that actually makes it worse.
Keep in mind that the compensation was described as "about average" relative to other series D startups. They readily admitted that it was significantly lower than big companies.
But there is nothing theoretical about start up equity in companies that have raised money. They have a very clear valuation, and especially Series D, that valuation will already be pretty mature.
AirBNB did a Series D with a valuation at 10.5 billion in 2014. They are currently around 91.66 billion market cap. That is a nice 900% return, but that's not a completely different ballpark than other LargeCo's (Apple had about 800% return, Amazon 700%, Meta 500%) - the question is, do you really think your Series D start up is going to be as successful as AirBNB (which is among the top 100 biggest American companies by market cap).
The point is, there is really nothing "theoretical" about the value of those start up shares - they have a well determined value, and for many start ups, even the appreciation of those shares between Series D and IPO can be less than the appreciation they would have gotten from LargeCo shares with top of market compensation and potentially even bigger dollar value equity stakes.
I was VP Eng at the last one and did receive a 6 figure bonus (everyone got at least 5 figures, minimum of $20k) and everyone also got new offers with the acquiring public company that included ~20% raises and RSU grants.
For me, all of that combined was equal to my first year at a FAANG, even before accounting for stock increases.
I'm now back as VP at a different startup, though one that's got a much better product and actual customers. It was a 65% pay cut (I view options as a lottery ticket).
For me, startups are more about the experience, than about the money. When a C level exec made a comment about some people not working as hard as themselves (they're a 24/7 kind of person), I pointed out that a) we pay decently well at about 75th percentile but b) the 0.025% or less equity those people have will possibly be enough after taxes to buy a vehicle, even in some wild multi-billion dollar exit scenario. Multiple years of slaving at a (real or virtual) office isn't worth that.
But what you wrote seems like a very intricate way of saying "In the end, no matter how much I want other things in my job, I personally am not cool with giving up on the money".
There are people who are willing to work different jobs or for different companies – let's say the Wikimedia foundation – and be okay with the pay not being as high as it could be at Google, doing similar work, because they derive something from it that's not measured in money.
And that's also important because most companies will simply never be able to generate Google money and still need excellent people to work on good and valuable projects.
Figure out what you value. If, in the end, it's mostly the money and you don't see any value in what the company offers you outside of that, just be honest about it and take the money.
That is but one technical piece that is missing here; there are in fact many. Technologists who aspire to leadership: please focus on leadership, not middle management!
My eyes rolled back so hard I'm not sure they'll ever face forward again.
Lotta good stuff in this essay, but that one missed the mark a bit.
1) Is this process working to the satisfaction of the team?
2) Anyone have anything else to discuss about it?
And it should be perfectly fine for it to be less than one minute most weeks.
I'm normally concerned when that seems to be going on, especially in a startup...
For example, in a big company, the problems and coordination and politics are usually hard... so you might "thrive" if all you need to do is sprint tasks, you feel individually unblocked and productive, your individual metrics/reviews look good, and maybe your team looks good as far as anyone can tell.
I'd be careful with that in an early startup, which usually (unless it's more a "growth" scheme) needs to be more effective, efficient, and creative than a large, entrenched company.
(You can have some people be doing such brilliant holistic coordination in a startup, so that others can just go through routines and rituals, with their ducks lined up to plink, and get the right great startup execution out the other end... But I don't know how often or how well that actually happens.)
Which leads me to: great, you are a "VP of Engineering" but there is little to justify why I should believe you are an exemplar of that title/position. The LinkedIn isn't a fraud, but it isn't full of any formal management degrees, IT coursework, IT Management coursework. I don't see companies whose products are on the front lines of foundational technology, scale, or quality.
Frankly, the resume is full of 1 year hopscotches. That... doesn't really tell me they are battletested. I get IT is an industry with zero respect for the neckbeard, and yeah they went to Yale, so they are of a minimum floor of hard work and intellect.
There are people out there with 40 years of experience in IT, and probably 30 years of management, with stories of massive failures, grace under fire, and the usual stories Machiavellian fake smiles to navigate.
And plugging a "Organizational Health" book is hilarious when you are a startup. Yeah, there are lots of unhealthy startups, but the really hard organizational health problems are long standing companies with the "dead pool" effect that chased away the best people, long standing feuds/grudges, sociopathic/paranoid wars over diminishing resource pools and budgets, and deep problems with legacy systems that need to be updated.
A startup? That's peanuts in comparison.
Several dev teams I've been on want retrospectives to help review and make things better. But those places are where devs have a lot of autonomy and ability to change how things operate in the team.
I've seen and been on teams that align more with your reaction but those are at jobs where where the dev teams have very little say in how they do things. Well that or it's filled with a lot of cynical people that don't actually care about what they are doing and don't have much desire for things to improve (they actively fight to keep the status quo).
I don’t just sit around thinking “god I had a schedule I was stressed about keeping. You know what I need right now? A two hour meeting with eight people including my boss and my boss’s boss where I have nothing to say and nothing to hear. If I could pick one thing to change in my life, it would be that I have to go to bed early every single fucking day because I’m worried if I don’t I won’t get enough sleep and it’ll be a struggle to wake up and do work early tomorrow morning.”
Fuck your routine. I thrive on control. Let me have control.
In my experience, places that lack things like them are either small, and don't need them, or large, and in constant chaos.
And thus the VP Eng has to make posts like these to make the work appear more notable and honorable. When the post is so light on substance, it indicates the VP Eng is fundamentally struggling to focus the team. And as a bonus, the VP Eng gets their story out in front of investors.
In my experience it's also not that hard to make ICs care about the business and try to drive it forward even if it's not glamorous. Make their promotions, yearly reviews and raises be partially based on the business impact tied to the projects they were on. There's side effects of that to manage but even if the monetary gains aren't massive the team will care a lot more. Of course, many managers don't actually like it when their team point blank asks them "what's the value of this project, looking at data it's not going to help the business."
It likely gets worse in larger companies in that misalignment between groups can be significant and very expensive given the sheer number of people involved.
It feels like they have adopted processes that are really only needed for much larger orgs
I was wondering how big the company was. 200 employees isn’t a small company any more, but the bureaucracy and alignment challenges described in the post made it feel more like a 2000 person company.
I mean spending a lot of time aligning with other leaders. How many director + leaders can there be? Five?
Similarly how heavyweight can the planning and performance process be when you are that small?
The only way to get a lot of layers in a small org (200 people) is to have very low fan-out, which is inefficient.
For simplicity, imagine a company with 4 C-level executives at the top. Each of them manages 4 reports, and each of their reports manages 4 people, and so on down the layers. In this simplified example you could have 340 people in a company and still only have 4 layers of management (4 + 16 + 64 + 256).
You could even get the 4 C-level executives and their 16 top-level reports into a single room every week if you had to.
The company in this blog post has almost half as many people (according to parent comment) yet the bureaucracy described within sounds like they have layer upon layer of removal to the point that it's a full-time job for many people just to move information around.
The only times I've seen this happen have been when executives get too focused on 1:1 communication and like to fill their calendars up with recurring meetings with fixed sets of participants. The 1:1 communication turns into a slow game of telephone and the recurring meetings consume all of their time with talk that feels like "work" but could have been replaced with a lot of as-needed e-mails and targeted meetings organized on demand.
At 200 people you should probably be still at around 3 levels deep. The VP Eng with 8 line managers could easily run a 70 person engineering team
Maybe throw in a single director to help share the load and for succession planning
But I agree likely what is happening is too many managers with smallish numbers of directs creating a lot of unnecessary layers and then all the extra management work that comes with that
If you're looking for a revolutionary approach, this article does not describe it. It is very very very unlikely any article titled "I am VP of XXX" will describe anything highly divergent from the general managerial consensus on how to run things.
A hierarchy and "salaried emmployees" (which a 7 year / 200 person company will now start to have because there is no tangible ownership % available) are going to involve the usual monetary-extraction / exploitation model of companies: employees take salary and some (actually:none) security and forgo any real economic incentive/reward if they deliver truly valuable/transformative work.
If an employee makes a company a billion dollars, he gets a plaque. If an executive does it, they demand stock options and other "rewards".
Thus, employees cease to care about the company. The next step is the creation of middle management, which ALSO have no aligned incentives except the more abstract "one day will be an exeuctive" but have no real production / creation to point to.
But, orgs and execs know that this hierarchy can be somewhat controlled with "bureaucracy and ceremony" and with sufficient scale, rent seeking, and regulatory capture, will produce an effective profit extraction system.
Some kind of lightweight performance cycle for instance. If it takes more then a day offsite you are probably overkilling it
Similarity for quarterly planning. You better be doing it at 200 people but the people that need to be there for that will fit in a room and you should get it done in a day
This doesn’t sound like toe dipping it reads more like a full on swan dive. Like someone said “hey shit is getting crazy we need some processes” and just whole hog adopted “what google does” or some such. The processes that are evolved for a 20,000 person org are overkill for a 200 person one
> I have friends who are line managers at larger companies who take home more than I do in my current role
I wonder if this is the "liquid" portion of Emily's comp. If it's the "total" comp then that tells me a VP Eng at a Series D startup makes < $400k all in??
A more accurate description is probably "privately held".
A taco truck is not a startup. It’s tiny and private.
Cargill is not a startup. It’s massive and private.
What does this look like in more tangible terms? I think many people understand the various managerial aspects of the role by imagining a scaled up hierarchy, but are quite hazy about the "core" responsibilities. It would be great to see a concrete instance of such work entails and the specifics involved.
Shouldn't that be obvious to anyone who's worked in a corporate environment for more than a minute?
Beware of the "ould"