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You Need to Pay Your Engineers

innovationnation.blog

46 pointsgsibble33 comments

Look if the company decides not to hire more engineers. That doesn't mean you go and spend 80+ hours to finish everything!!! If they don't hire more engineers, they're telling you that the work you're doing is of limited value and you should act accordingly. and if that means a project takes 3 times or 4 times longer then so be it. That's their decision. You have to set limits according to your job description and your work/life balance and make enough time in your work week for mental sanity (maybe some meditation or walk in the park time). that's all part of the job.

Not when they give you a deadline and tell you your job depends on making it.

Then you give notice and look for a sane work environment.

If you’re the only engineer who can deliver it, they need you more than you need them.

how do you use that, though?

Say no. I mean what are they going to do exactly? Fire the person they need to deliver the product?

Quit and let them go the way of 99% of companies.

That's when you tell them they need to scale back the scope to make the deadline.

First, try to negotiate on what's being delivered. there's lots of ways to cut corners and cut down the amount of work that's being done. don't be afraid to take on technical debt, if that's the company's attitude. Look for ways to reduce scope and cut things down.

and if that doesn't work, you just go on working at your own pace. they may or may not fire you. It's not the end of the world if you do. You'll always be able to get another job, that's how capitalism works. it's all part of the regular life cycle of getting a job.

If you’re a 10x engineer, work at 33% capacity and then advertise like you’re trying very hard. That way when you are in a crunch it looks like you’re putting in superhuman levels of effort but really you’re just working 80%. If you don’t do this then people who don’t understand your work will underrate you.

This is a very insightful way of saying "underpromise and overdeliver". Not a bad thing though I like this method.

I've found this is the only way to get things done.

I sometimes make a 2 hour task look like it took me all week, and my boss is still impressed.

I've been doing this for years. I'm not a 10x-er, more like 2 or 3x. The problem is coasting gets boring.

So fired from 3 startups, was a CTO in each, but doing senior developer and devops work with a common theme that the author didn't document the infrastructure and built it on unstable foundations that required rework by the new teams.

Did I summarise that correctly?

To be fair, if he was really by himself doing all of that and as overworked as he says, then of course he didn't have time for documentation.

If I saw a lack of documentation that severe from the person architecting a critical-to-the buisness project, I would take the time out to sit with them and find out what's going on and how to help.

I've definitely had times back when I was doing work on one or two man teams where documentation was essentially impossible.

Now, it sounds like he was a cofounder of sorts. That makes you a business partner and so he should have found out they weren't going to hire help much sooner than launch. The project should never have gotten anywhere close to launch really. Now that's a year or two of his life's work flushed down the toilet in a sense. With the experience I have now, I would not allow myself to end up in a similar situation, but when I was younger I was much more naive and would buy into a lot of junk from early stage startups that were obvious red flags looking back.

When working for abusive idiots, there is no time to document nor to do proper design and evaluation. Basically what passes for a proof-of-concept or MVP or prototype ends up being put into production. Gotta start minting money fast.

No. You just took the parts that fit your narrative.

The guy was effectively doing multiple jobs, which is borderline acceptable when you’re an early stage startup, but as soon as you get either vc money or profits you should start scaling stuff, beginning with your team.

The guy could just have been hit by a bus, and those companies would have crumbled anyway.

While I can empathize with being underappreciated as an engineer, I struggle to understand how you attracted all these bad experiences? Is this more common when working at startups? Is it more common when working in US? Are you leaving out parts of the story that gets you in these situations?

I'm legitimately curious, I've been working in tech for close to 17 years and have had my share of bad experiences but have mostly managed to avoid these crazy stories and have always had a good recommendation from the previous job as I tried not to burn bridges.

Good question. In the US, greed is pathological. CEOs (and management for that matter) think that their entire job is only to hire people. Once they hire people, they expect work to be done automatically.

It's so weird that they will set targets for 3 months and expect it to happen magically. If it doesn't happen, it looks bad for their image and they start firing people.

Weird culture! But that's why nobody respects corporate hierarchy.

No, this is not really a normal work culture in the US. It is definitely something that is prevalent in the startup space, but really that has a lot more to do with the low barrier to entry rather than the country they are located in. There are companies that will let you work yourself to death all over the world.

At a normal established company, these sorts of expectations would lead to these same sorts of failures, in which case you actually don't typically fail upwards. Management this bad doesn't typically stay management for that long at profitable companies because they introduce an enormous amount of risk.

>>> I’ve since learned that even if you are good at your job, it will not magically get noticed. You have to be a full on advocate for yourself at all times and basically shove your work in the face of your boss or else they will think you are doing nothing.

Absolutely! You need to make a big deal out of every little accomplishment and every tiny bit of work you do. And make sure to do it frequently, like every meeting, every week, every one on one. You never stop selling yourself. Otherwise, they're just going to assume your sitting around twiddling your thumbs.

Personally I find it infuriating.

> Personally this infuriates me.

The last bit (omitted from grandparent quote) is the important bit.

Incessant self-promoters really are terrible to work with. I have no interest in becoming one.

Me too. It seems to be a trait of big-tech culture/politics, and something vaguely similar to what's emerging within my immediate work group. The company has grown 30x since I joined, and hired a lot of big-tech people, so the cultural shift seems inevitable. I've been an erratic employee the last half year due to non-work stuff, and I've been feeling undervalued by my immediate coworkers and getting burnt out. I have a new manager that I generally like, but they're new to the company and they don't seem to understand me or know how to energize me. I don't care about personal metrics, trajectory or career development, or salary or job security at all really, and those are the carrots and sticks of big-tech culture. I started vocalizing my discontent last week, though, and I've since gotten an overwhelming amount of affirmation and validation from everyone up the management chain. I feel a lot better now, and I'm feeling optimistic rather than pessimistic.

Personally, I find that if management needs reports to sell their work at all times, that management is incompetent and lazy.

Tell me what exactly are they getting paid to do?

To control the purse strings, which is why reminding them of your value is worthwhile to you.

It is perhaps not fair, just, or efficient for them to be in that position - but they _are_, and acting holier-than-thou because _you_ can see that the Emperor has no clothes will not be beneficial to you.

> To control the purse strings, which is why reminding them of your value is worthwhile to you.

If purse strings are the only reason for engineers to listen to management, is it any surprise that people don't respect managers?

Imagine you were a soldier at a war. Who do you feel inspired to listen to? A man on a mission who will share the treasure equitably or the man controlling the purse alone but is uninspiring?

I don't think this conversation is going to go anywhere productive. You're responding to practical advice ("because the world is in one particular configuration, you can accrue benefit to yourself by acting in a particular way") by idealism ("but the world _shouldn't_ be that particular way").

I don't have any particular disagreement with anything you're saying (well, except perhaps the claim that personal inspiration is necessary, or even reasonable to expect, in the workplace - which is not a battlefield, and should not resemble one), but it's also not a useful response to the point being made.

Managers are often like Vorta (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine). The Jem’hadar obey and grind literally to death, and in exchange the Vorta give them a little bit of a drug to keep them from feeling like shit.

Man that’s probably a metaphor for capitalism. We grind and grind for money so that we can immediately spend the money so that we can grind and grind (eg need a car to go to work and now I need to go to work to pay for the car I need to go to work).

Does anyone have actual examples of organisations not treating engineering as a cost centre? Saying 'don't treat engineering as a cost centre' makes sense on paper, and I agree with the sentiment, but do companies actually ever list engineering as a profit centre?

I have heard vague stories of AWS paying the key engineers of S3 and other foundational services a big amount (and I hate Amazon, so it pains me to say that).

But engineers are employees, and management views them as a cost center unless they have compensation that very clearly is dependent on their output.

Executives can demand compensation after the fact for "created value". Employees get a piece of paper that says "Thanks" in gold lettering.

If taken at face value, the TLDR of this blog post is: don't work with abusive idiots, and a collection of random anecdotes from this person's life when they chose to work with abusive idiots and it didn't end well.

What was the company from the last story?

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