Dear CTO: it's not 2015 anymore
blog.godfreyai.com
blog.godfreyai.com
In what world does unlimited PTO spoil engineers? It removes the companies liability for vacation days and shames employees into taking less time off.
This isn't to imply that engineers are universally treated well, but that RELATIVE to other workers, they held far more bargaining power and faced better working conditions across the board. Most companies outside of the tech bubble don't even have the concept of unlimited PTO.
There's probably something broader to be said re: this point on bargaining power of workers in general, but this is above my pay grade.
More than half of anyone working on a tech company is not an engineer. So don't say "engineers get better treatment than other workers", just any employee in tech.
And afaik the data on companies that have unlimited PTO is that their employees actually take LESS time off. So it looks good on paper, but in effect does the opposite.
Still, you're right, tech workers have it easy compared to most other jobs, including a lot of other office workers (mostly due to better pay and benefits)
One might also argue that US residents disagree with you so much that they arent applying to tech jobs in sufficient quanities. The pay and benefits are not worth it when compared to the instability, stress, "benefits", and chaos -- and instead we hire foreigners who are more desperate for the work, and thus willing to work for perks like "Unlimited PTO".
It isnt like there arent smart people in the US who can do these jobs, its more that the smart people go to jobs with real benefits and real perks -- cushy jobs on Wall St or senior management or government jobs where you dont have to do anything.
But the reality is that the jobs with "real perks" are really hard to get and few and far between. They require powerful networks, timing, and luck. Most of the folks I know who were impacted by the recent layoffs just want a place where they can make a good living and feel appreciated.
There are several nurses in my extended family, and they frequently work 3 crazy days and then are off for the next 4 days. There is no way I could routinely take off 4 days in a week as a software dev. The flip side is the 3 days they work are likely even more stressful than my job, since I don't run the risk of accidentally killing someone.
I think you've written an excellent article, and also that you would be well served by ignoring the comments on it.
Some people here feel you've called them entitled. I think you made a useful nuanced point about how engineering looks to others, but the people who feel insulted don't see it that way and some of them are going to be quite harsh about it.
Those who interpret your article as an attack are not going to be swayed, so I'm just here to say you have my respect if you choose to disengage.
The "unlimited" is a anti-benefit. Just like free dry-cleaning at the office. Besides the tax implications others have mentioned, there is the mental loss aversion. People who used to have 4 weeks of vacation that are use it or lose it would always take every single day.
Making it unlimited means that in practice, engineers take less than what they used to get because the portal doesn't list how many days they have left. At my current job, a co-worker was questioned heavily about why he needed to take more than 4 weeks vacation despite the fact we have "unlimited". (2 of the weeks he used were because he moved cross country so not an every year kind of event or abuse).
Is "unlimited PTO" a good thing?
Unlimited PTO means:
- If you are on a visa -- no PTO
- If you are part of the in-crowd friends with the boss -- unlimited PTO (see: @tech.unicorn for the lifestyle)
- No payout liability for the company
Yes, legally. Socially, however, you are just trading real days for however much political capital each individual has.
NO ONE treated workers at scale like Google did in earlier decades. It was literally wild and unprecedented.
Engineers for many decades had unprecedented job mobility and bargaining power. Certainly not a bad thing in and of itself, but it's an outlier experience that's ending.
Unfortunately, companies don't organically and spontaneously decide to treat their workers well. Leaders need to fight for it...and most engineering leaders just aren't positioned to right now.
And then you affirm things such as "unprecedented job mobility", for which citation is sorely needed, and close it with "it's ending", though there is absolutely no evidence for it.
It seems to me that you are trying to ignite some flames, but your points are very thin on data.
While there have been a few developers I have worked with who were total stars, most of them were distinctly average (unsurprisingly) and lacked basic curiosity. Even of the great developers, there are very few I would trust to do anything other than write software.
The other thing I have noted over my career is how developers consistently underrate the skills, experience and intelligence of non developers.
This is an incredible take, and I have no idea where you have seen this, as it's entirely counter to my own personal experience. I have never, in my life, met a finance bro or management bro who had any non-work curiosity about anything beyond sports, cars, and sex.
Most engineers I know are immensely curious about how the world works, how the universe works, etc, and are constantly trying to learn and understand.
I’ve worked with a range of engineers in terms of their curiosity. In my experience, the ones who cared enough to ask or push back on decisions were exceptions, not the rule.
This doesn’t mean they weren’t curious people. It just means they weren’t curious about The BusinessTM or The MarketTM.
I suspect that insofar as this exists, it's because when junior engineers question the utility of the requirements or user stories, they are told specifically to stfu because nerds don't understand business. Over time, the message get received?
That said, I've very rarely seen an engineer like this. In fact, I frequently encounter the opposite: the sterotypical asperger's who doesn't know when they're being rude with their probing.
Otherwise probably not, sadly.
A rational person getting a 300K salary would be better off on average than a small business owner after 5 years.
Sales people are paid a high percentage of the deal they close because they need to produce a consistent result in inconsistent environment. Also businesses can easily measure the output of a sales person, but it's way harder to measure a programmers output in a larger team.
Start calling their job Prompt Engineering.
1. Growth can't last forever. Big tech is moving from an exponential phase to a sigmoidal one. Expect to see less spending and more focus on efficiency. It takes fewer people to keep the profit engine going than it does to build something totally new from the beginning.
2. What goes up must come down. Paradoxically, even though half of the world shut down, COVID led to a giant market boom. Head counts went up dramatically from 2020 to 2022. Tons of cash was thrown at the market.
3. 0% Fed rate is over (for now). It costs money to borrow money, and investors can get actual non-zero returns in a "risk-free" investment. Now companies need to justify their spending, reduce debt, and show returns that are commensurate with their risk in the new environment. Raising interest rates cools the economy precisely by forcing layoffs and cutbacks.
4. "R&D" (which includes a substantial amount of software engineering work) now must be capitalized and amortized over five years (at least in the US). This is a much less tax-advantageous position than existed before 2021, and new guidance in late 2023 made it clear that this applied to much of our industry.
I'd propose a modification of "Big Tech" to "Ad Tech" or "Marketing Tech".
There's still exponential growth available in nascent or underdeployed technologies -- AR/VR, blockchain/crypto applications (beyond just ICO), AI, IoT, Autonomous machines (maybe that's AI to you), are a few that come to mind. I'd wager the next "Google" will be in one of those, OpenAI may already be it.
He was already trying to end transparency, kick off researchers. Hoarding the wealth of ExTwitter rather than allowing free observation & exploration, like the Twitter days (open society being replaced by cloaked secrecy).
But there's been a bunch of absolutely brutal changes in the recent Terms of Service update. Anyone accessing too many tweets is liable for a 1.5 cent per tweet damages fine according to the ToS. And all disputes are court/forum shopped to a Northern Texas district with particularly right wing & Musk friendly judges, who were trying to strike down ACA judicially.
Technically Twitter seems kind of ok (there have definitely been some uptake of bad outages & foot guns), so your point remains. But driving out and kicking out all the governance & moderation teams and banning research & study has taken much of the light out of the universe, has eliminated the pre-requisites to finding out about and speaking about our local newly emerged online part of the universe. For that destruction of free speech and understanding, I am quite mad.
I still don't think that much of the "orgs are really feather-bedded" idea, and if they are, it's usually the org that can't let its people chase interesting stuff & political logjams or too much top down control. There are plenty of conservative engineers too, but a huge number of engineers love building things, love to boldly venture.
Of course those things are going to happen, this is work after all, but the idea is to try to reduce those things as much as possible. Many of those benefits are made with that goal in mind, and employee retention just follows from having a good environment. IT people are happiest when they can get into flow and work on something really cool, and will move to other companies who provide that environment.
The funny bit is the article completely understands the problems, it just makes all the wrong conclusions. Aside from a "workers should be property" vibe, the author very clearly identified that modern business leaders think of engineering as magic, aren't taught anything about it in business school, and can't be bothered to learn about it. It is an absolutely bonkers idea that anyone running a software company doesn't need to know even the basic ideas underpinning their software.
Maybe, as an engineer, I have a very different view of what "leadership" is but this gives me the same feeling as an entitled kid inheriting dads business and being angry about the salary of the senior folks that make it work without even stopping to consider why they might make what they make or if it is a good deal.
Unfortunately there are lots of people who think and act this way. The author is right in some ways because of it - there will always be people who see someone getting paid well but don't understand the value of it and their response will be to try to knock them down a peg instead of trying to understand the why.
More like software is eating software now. I don't think anyone is prepared for the fact that practically all junior/midlevel SWE roles are going to be automated away in the next couple years. We'll look back at the last 20 years as a golden age similar to the 20th century postwar period of manufacturing jobs in the US.
The good treatment you mentioned doesn't organically happen. Your leaders have to fight for it and maintain it. And eng leaders...just aren't in the fight right now.
If good eng leaders actually stepped up and brought the ethos of enabling creativity, autonomy, and well-being to the rest of the org, everyone would be in a better place.
"Other functions would do well to bring the same kind of focus on enabling productivity, happiness, and autonomy to their workers. In fact, CTOs-turned-CEOs I know tend to be some of the most kind, creative, and abundance-minded leaders I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. They have an inherent understanding on the importance of culture and making people feel valued."
OP gave you valuable feedback on how your point is not getting across. Should you edit, or should you lol and snark is a personal choice for you to make. But OP is just trying to help you.
As I originally responded to you, if your goal was to convey that everyone should treat their employees well then that didn't come through for me. Frankly, writing about how spoiled and naive people are and how the time for wasteful fun is at an end is a weird structure if your intended point was that this is a good thing we need more of.
> The structured abuse makes the short blips of "I'm trying to help you" feel hollow and tacked on in response to someone's feedback on an early draft.
The point is that engineering leaders (not ICs, but leadership responsible for communicating their teams' success) need to be actively shaping this narrative. And to do that, they need to be aware of the negative stereotypes and pre-existing perceptions that are there already. You can't just walk in and demand better treatment, you need to understand how you're perceived, read the room, and structure your strategy accordingly. Other CXOs all do this - they know that they are working against stereotypes and norms so they actively structure their narrative to help reflect what's actually happening (ex: marketing execs tend to de-emphasize the creative parts of their job, because they don't want to be seen as profligate spenders who throw money around for vague concepts like "awareness").
As much as it might hurt to confront the fact that some people have the wrong idea about you, it's your literal job as an executive.
And if you're an IC, you should be demanding this of your tech leaders. THEM neglecting this could cost YOU your job.
It's so depressing how much leverage the SW engineering field needed to get treatment like how everyone should have always had it. The default is so skewed to employers being able to grind their employees to dust and getting thanked for it. Companies should be constantly worried about retention across all their positions and have to treat their employees well because of it.
But the ceo and management threw a fit that I was “living like a king” because I wasn’t living in squalor.
I just was renting a decent apartment in a decent neighborhood. My apartment was still not as nice as my place back in the bay if I count all the furniture, amenities, etc
Meanwhile the ceo back in San Francisco was the one living like a king with multiple assistants, private chefs, and chauffeurs.
They were enraged that my life was too good for their standards while paying me the exact same as they had been.
Some large ones went the other way with collusion and undocumented "blacklists".
Even that they act in their self interest for profit.
It is like business owners that rather go out of business than paying market wage for their employees.
The 'boss class' is an actor of their own, capitalists be damned.
1. Communicating your value to other departments is a skill that you can learn
2. Learning how to do this lets you own the narrative within an organization
3. Owning your department's narrative is how "normal" work relationships work
4. That engineering hasn't needed to do this before is an anomaly
5. Now's a good time to learn
At one of the gigs I had, the VP of Engineering was running the engineering department like your good uncle rather than actually managing it so it becomes a well oiled high performing department. And it showed. And not in a good way. It set the company back badly.
Statements that are so vague and so casually made as if they were fact simply sends my alarms ringing and makes me question both the intent and the arguments of the writing.
It is and different market, markets change over time. I think that's a non controversial statement.
The CEO then asks, how can we make this better? The savvy CTO and VP says, we need more engineers and more headcount and retention to merely flatline the increase. Get the headcount and raises.
Do this every year because the nature of software is that it is not a spend == returns. It is a spend to even keep the lights on - it is a bespoke utility that builds your business and gets customers to pay you - thus requiring constant maintenance.
Wish I'd received the memo our "great engineering culture" was based on getting things done.
will no one rid me of these meddlesome engineers?
ever since tech took off in business the C-suite has resented developers: we are overpaid relative to the other peons, we talk back and, above all else, we are physically ugly
first it was outsourcing, now it's AI
and yet, despite it all, the codemonkey abides
Big tech no longer needs to hoard talent.
This trend of spitting on the legacy of those who built it up will quickly reverse the second they get disrupted themselves due to their complacency.
I've seen this at my last company. They treated workers well and built a great product. Soon the employees were hampering "profits" and only got contempt. After everybody quit the situation is perfect from a business POV - zero expenses and a selling product with happy customers. Except there is total stagnation and customers are excitedly waiting for the next "big update". The company does their best to keep the facade up but how sustainable is it really? You can only milk so much until your core product is outdated or no longer fits the market.
...and for what it's worth, presenting refactoring as a part of delivering on new development goals is the absolute truth.
> Their teams are sitting ducks. It’s painful to watch.