Come to terms with being “only” an engineer | Hacker News Reader

Come to terms with being “only” an engineer

pandodaily.com

93 pointsprotomyth33 comments

I think the article would have been better served if he just came out and said what he wanted to say, instead of skirting around it.

He really wanted to say, "Respect me, dammit. You have no idea how hard my job is. I just sold my business for $200 Million but some of you still don't take me seriously because I don't know how to program."

Tech cofounders have, rightfully, learned to eschew sketchy/crappy/douchey business co-founders. Sometimes the generality of "business guy" takes the fall with that. The truth is that it's a lot easier to fake having the potential to be a CEO than it is to fake having the potential to be a CTO. If you've ever noticed how ready marketers/business guys are to throw out their credentials, that's because until you have at least a somewhat successful startup under your belt, you can't be taken seriously. You have no tangible skill. You're a liability.

The author wants technical co-founders to know what it's like to be him for a minute.

Except he didn't. In douchey-business-guy fashion he tries to put an entire community of transdisciplinary people in their place by telling them to be happy with handling the technical side of things, while people like him interface with users, design the product, run the numbers, market and sell it.

I'm a programmer/interaction designer. In design school we were told by professors that "programmers think in terms of X, but designers think in terms of Y. You should never code if your a designer, and never let a programmer design" While they are correct that exercising one muscle will benefit at the exclusion of others, they go to far with the assertion that there exists some cognitive boundary between design and development. The same goes for singular-thinking business guys, like the author, who attempt to dress down engineers who want to try their hand at something new.

I've never met a engineer tell an aspiring business guy "just be a business guy, don't try to code". In fact, most engineers I know will heap praise at business people who bootstrap their idea, even if the first attempt is a bit wonky. This just proves how badly the person wants their vision to be realized.

New years resolution for 2013: stop trying to clip other's wings.

"In douchey-business-guy fashion he tries to put an entire community of transdisciplinary people in their place"

I think his point is also that this type of thing is not just accepted, but encouraged within engineering circles when talking about business people.

But yes, it wasn't delivered very well and the confrontational nature of it will mean that a lot of people who would do well to heed its advice will immediately turn defensive and get nothing from it.

"The truth is that it's a lot easier to fake having the potential to be a CEO than it is to fake having the potential to be a CTO."

That's easy to say when you're a developer and understand what makes a good CTO. There are probably a lot of business guys who don't know how to evaluate tech guys any more than tech guys know how to evaluate business guys. It's probably not that hard to bullshit a business guy if you can talk convincingly about scalability, node.js, Clojure, Big Data, "cloud", etc. A lot of solo business guys looking for technical co-founders will end up with sub-optimal technical co-founders because they don't know how to filter them out.

However, you're also right about the difficulties of identifying potential CEOs. Part of the problem is that, due to the hierarchical nature of firms, there's simply a massive shortage of people with CEO experience - most firms employ just one CEO at a time. This means that if you're looking for a CEO, you're probably going to have to take a chance on someone who hasn't done it before, and there's a much bigger experience gap between "business guy with MBA" and "good CEO" than there is between "senior developer" and "technical co-founder". This shortage is (partly) why experienced CEOs get paid so much, and why the jump in compensation from "business guy with MBA" to "CEO" is much bigger than the jump from "senior developer" to "CTO".

This is also a problem for aspiring CEOs, because they can't prove themselves until they get a chance, and chances at CEO level are very rare. The good potential CEOs can't easily differentiate themselves from the bad ones, and this also creates a perverse situation in which simply faking CEO potential doesn't have many disadvantages compared to actually being good. Once you've been hired anywhere as a CEO, so long as you don't calamitously screw up, you're on the right side of the CEO scarcity problem.

Wow, this is extremely negative, and suffers from an assumption that one cannot start a company without necessarily doing the entire Seed + Series Alphabet dance.

Besides, being turned off by bureaucracy is one thing, but some of the biggest success stories in tech history were the result of an engineer taking on the bureaucracy and fixing/obsoleting it.

If your new year's resolution is to stop reading stuff that will not enrich your life, I'd recommend steering clear of this article.

I think pandodaily should be ignored just like techcrunch and other distraction economies.

If some are just engineers, they should know better than to feed the monster with attention :p

... lost me at Microsoft Excel.

Agreed, and just one of many false assumptions.

He assumes an early startup CEO must always have a later stage startup CEO skills ("you must have all 4 magic unicorn skillz"). During the early period, you need product execution first and foremost and not a lot of cash to do it. An engineer-turned-CEO is well equipped to wear the many hats to build a product on a budget. Once the startup starts hitting revenue strides, the startup can tap into advisors to fill the knowledge gap (but more than likely, the VC will try to replace the founder CEO with a "gray hair" anyway).

He ignore the fact there is an engineering scarcity. As the OP stated you can't "fake" being a CTO. You need fulltime engineering/product person focus throughout the startup's lifespan. However, once you are an established startup, even "experienced" CEO are a commodity. Contrast that to the dev landscape (OP already covers all the perks of an engineer's job because of said scarcity).

He assumes engineers who aspire to be founders are naive. The engineer background founders I know (ones who are actually doing stuff) are rarely disillusioned by how hard a startup is. If anything, they are overly risk-adverse being more inclined to make decision based on quantitative data.

What tickles me the most is the notion that engineers have had it so good and and are WAY too spoiled to become CEOs. Break out the violins.

True, being a CEO is very different from being a engineer, and more people should know about the realities of it before they jump in.

But being able to generate more per month doing your own thing than your hot salary at your last job? That's real, and many people are doing it, including myself. Plus, I am still the lead engineer and code as much as I like, and I've learned so much and have grown as a person from it. On top of that we didn't need to raise any money to do it (despite this article suggesting otherwise).

Hiring great engineers is hard, but articles like this come off as trying to keep great people from leaving their jobs to chase their dreams.

i'm an engineer turned ceo. and i know quite a few others.

unfortunately, i think his points are spot on. being a ceo is harder than being an engineer. period.

but if we didn't have engineers turning into ceo's, how many companies can you think of that would never have happened? HP? Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal? Google?

so even though he's right - being a ceo is fucking hard - don't let that stop you, engineer. you CAN be a ceo if you're willing to put in the work.

It's probably an effective warning to the fence-sitters. If you're extremely determined to be CEO, you're probably going to brush off the warnings and go through with your plan regardless. That's how I perceive it, at least.

Agree. And what's harder about it is mostly the emotional and reward aspects. It's easy to close out a bug or a feature and feel some sense of accomplishment. You don't get those micro-rewards anymore, so your own morale is more difficult to manage.

Sorry, but as we've heard, "software is eating the world" and there's no reason the world of running a business is immune.

Think about all the software and startups out there helping automate things like payroll, bookkeeping, data analysis, marketing spend, etc etc

When your best arguments are dealing with bureaucracy and BS, you're not exactly on solid ground.

TL;DR:

Newb geek - you have an equal chance as anybody at becoming a good business person. But it's hard and your life is easy. Don't do it.

Experienced geek - you have ZERO chance at becoming a good business person because you are too used to your cushy life. Don't do it.

Must be proficient at Microsoft Excel! Stopped reading shortly after that.

Hah, spot on. These people are so far down the rabbit hole, that they can't really tell what they are doing that is actually difficult.

I stopped reading RIGHT there...

this is one of the times i feel that hn has a large bubble that i am outside looking in. pretty much everyone i know obsesses about exactly the opposite problem - how long and how successfully we can keep on being pure engineers while still getting promotions, raises, etc.. it's one of the central aspirations of my career not to have to do anything nontechnical for a living.

Basically, the only use of business guy is because of necessary evil BS that one needs to wade through in order to deal with paper work. The same use for a lawyer. It's not actually part of the product.

Necessary evil.

If you're bootstrapping a SaaS then you're probably right. If you're building something big, like a Square, BankSimple, Spotify, etc then your chances of success drop considerably. Especially on the raising money front.

It's a really odd term though. A lot of non-tech founders aren't necessarily business guys (MBA's). They may have a lot of knowledge in a space, eye for design (Jobs), ability to lead a team and build a product & biz that grows.

"A great businessperson must be highly quantitative and analytical. He or she must be attentive to data and proficient in Microsoft Excel. He or she must know how to weave ideas and theories into numbers and benchmarks. A person who is not strong with numbers will be handicapped in running a great business."

I'm guessing there've been a boatload of great companies built by 'businesspersons' who weren't proficient in Excel - what did they do before Excel?

Trite point, I know, but there's more to my critique here, as I think the OP missed a huge point vis-a-vis "technical engineers" vs "business people": a "great business person" can get others to do their work; a great engineer really can't. Yes, the businessperson needs to understand some level of what's going on, but more to the point they can cultivate relationships with trusted advisors who can do deep dives on specific areas of the business and landscape. The 'great businessperson' will have an ability to synthesize that information, at the very least, and to the extent that they can go deeper in some areas, they can augment their advisors' input with their own knowledge and research.

Contrast that with the 'great engineer' - they can't really outsource their work. To the degree that they'd do that, they're now managers, managing others' time and efforts. It's not bad or wrong, but what each party can get away with in terms of using the labor and brains of others and take the credit for the whole is different.

I suppose it depends on your definition of "proficiency." If "proficient" means "able to use," is anyone not proficient in Excel?

Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Henry Ford and George Stephenson were "only" engineers.

So I am happy to be called one.

This essay is pretty accurate in a lot of regards. However, many of the things that he gets on about are things that are massively wrong with the American economy at the moment(not that that doesn't make them any less real). He also completely neglects the fact that given the generally poor quality of technical evaluation skills at most companies, one rarely gets to "just be an engineer", but often has to learn how swim in political waters anyways. There's less bullshit to deal with just working in an office than there is being the quasi-celebrity that one must be as a CEO, but there's still a lot more bullshit than there ought to be. Nobody's out there just building awesome stuff, having people notice that they build awesome stuff and handing them fair amounts of money.

> Engineers are doing great, and are making massive salaries with or without an expensive college degree and all the debt that comes with it.

$20,000 in college loans, Bachelors in CS, 3.4 GPA, and I'm still job hunting 6 months later. Don't wanna hear shit. Engineers with 5+ years experience are immune because they are an extremely valuable asset. Unproven graduates still have to fight uphill to get a leg in to the industry if they don't have career center connections.

That means that actually getting a job is not part of your skill set. Regardless of what the rest of the world tells you, getting a job and being good at negotiating perks is a talent. Sure unemployment is rising and all that BS, but lets be real, getting into the business with a degree is easy as long as you don't expect an awesome job, pay, and perks from the get go.

You have three options: a) apply everywhere and deal with a crappy job for a year or two and then search for something more "fun" b) go build some stuff and hope people start to notice (I wish I had done this... Cest la vie), or c) learn some cobol and go maintain some legacy system while working for a PHB.

I don't want to come off as a grumpy negative person, but if you can't get a crappy underpaying job in the tech industry you should really re-evaluate what's going on... It has probably more to do with bad social skills, a lack of talent, or a big ego than with the actual job market.

Since when is it OK for a news site to tell people with what they can or can't be?

Entrepreneurship is constant self-teaching

New sites frequently tell one what to do with their life, or at least how one ought to act or think in a given situation. People don't write things because they like typing, they write things to impress some concept on their reader and influence them to act in some way. I'd even say that life advice is one of the main themes on HN and in writing in general. I don't know why this article particularly incensed you, but it's indefensible to argue that it is NOT OK for news sites to tell one what to do. People can and do frequently tell one to do. It's not outrageous.

Incidentally, they weren't telling people what they can and can't be, but were recommending that people not become entrepreneurs for reasons that aren't necessarily false.

Certainly, there are plenty of assertions that could be contended in this piece, but the fact that the article is making a statement about how to go about one's life is not one of them.

It was a bit of a loaded question, in all fairness.

Readers unfortunately aren't sophisticated as we should be, to know the difference between journalism and an opinion piece and what the goals of each are.

I agree with a lot of the points this article makes. What worked for me was to have a co-founder who basically handled everything that was not coding.

Dorsey is a fashionable dresser, but what about Zuckerberg.

"For example, engineers are largely insulated from the maddening world of government bureaucracy."

What field? Not my buddies in civil. Not my EE buddies. Absolutely not my MechEng buddies. ChemEng? LOL.

He might, possibly, be talking about "network engineers" but any WAN ones will have all kinds of fun with the hyperregulated telcos and any supporting exotic wireless will have all kinds of fun with the FCC. At a previous employer when the SEC said "jump", the software engineers said "how high?" so they don't count.

Asking anybody to be a triple-A engineer -- without which there is simply nothing to sell -- and in addition to that NOT to do things in terms of sales and finance that could seriously damage the thing, means that there are indeed only that many Sergey Brins or Larry Pages on this planet ...

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