Twitter pays SVP of Engineering $10 million as Silicon Valley tussles for talent
reuters.com
reuters.com
They hired him this year.
It looks like they hired him without the "senior" title last year. I was basing my assumption on the article's statement that he made $10M "last year".
From the article: "He drew a salary of $145,513 and a bonus of $100,000."
I don't know what's more disturbing:
1. That seeing employees playing ping pong and sitting at a bar would mean anything at all to a highly-sought after and ostensibly experienced candidate.
2. That CEOs apparently believe these things can convince the most desirable candidates to join their companies.
I've worked and interviewed at plenty of companies that put on the best front. Just like that ping-pong thing and similar equivalents. But as soon as I started working at these places, I realized that it's not like that and I've learned to ignore it over the years.
The "lively" culture is most likely a product of the upswing that justified the hiring. Meaning that a week later, everyone will be just as shut off as at any other company.
while I'm working on exciting challenges, of course
It's nuts. Get people elsewhere. Thousands of engineers across the country (or planet) would jump at the chance to work remotely for half an SV salary.
I've worked at companies that looked "hip" by having ping pong tables and playstations/xboxs. In practice almost nobody used them as it would look like they're slacking rather than working. It was nothing but a sham, trying to make these places look less like what they actually are.
I remember that we didn't even plug the phones in.
these people were being paid £55k (a lot) each, to basically look pretty.
seems like a massive waste of man hours to me- but, I suppose I'm a sysadmin not a sales/CEO
>> "An engineer with enough experience can do the job of a VP of engineering"
I think that's the qualification - experience.
If you can also manage people.
If you can also manage projects.
If you can also see the broader picture and how your company fits into it.
If you know how to delegate.
If you know how to hire and retain the right kind of talent.
If you can resolve conflicts effectively.
If you can communicate well with both engineers and customers.
Depending on your org structure you may also need to make the correct choices regarding infrastructure and technical direction as you go consistently and over a long period of time.
I've known a lot of engineers in my career. Most of them were not suitable to become a VP of engineering - including those with many years of experience.
The ability to engineer is often the smallest subset of what a VP of engineering does. It's a starting point.
Most of them spend .. most of their time in the intra political wars to keep their precious salary. I'm pretty sure they'd like to work on their stuff better, but you don't let go your millions that easily... plus you'd be replaced by someone pretty much alike.
For smaller companies, what I wrote above is actually not true. The ones I know are actually passionate, and drive the engine of the company. But then again, they don't make more than the average engineer.
(Or maybe that's just part of VP Engineering and above roles - perpetuating the myth that you are still in touch. I often wonder if these mythical sessions weren't coached for by some senior individual contributor.)
Second, the VPE must have a larger focus - seeing what's good for the entire company, not just what's good for engineering, and certainly more than what's good for the current projects. Often a straight up engineer will be (quite properly) focused mainly on whatever their current project is, and may not even have the business knowledge to fully grok how it fits in the big picture.
Lastly, the VPE needs exceptional management and leadership skills. A tech lead will have this too, but it must be much stronger at the veep level.
Not true.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/11/google-offers-staff-enginee...
As an SVP as SFDC he would have had a much larger base salary, and probably damn good options. His Twitter stock grant is probably worth a lot more, but it was also riskier.
Now $150k + $250k RSUs (probably on a 5+ yr schedule) for a new PhD is a lot. I assume they were working on something that Google figured could save them an order of magnitude more than that a year. (Of course the debate is, couldn't a similarly motivated, if not fiscally so, existing staff developer make the same savings? Probably yes.)
https://medium.com/about-work/6aedba30ecfe
(Hint: 10x what? what is the thing being measured, and how?)
I'm a reasonably good developer (been selling software in one form or another for nearly 2 decades) and I've worked with people who where twice as productive as me bit I've also worked with people who where 1/5 as productive.
So relative to them the x2 developer looks x10 where compared to me he looks x2.
It's all relative, in a company of top-class engineering talent their should be no x10 engineers as if there are then the others by definition aren't top class (though possibly still way above average).
As for been a rockstar who wants to be they die at 27 in a drug fuelled binge or live long enough to become a mockery of themselves.
They see the mess, and they see the way out. Any change they make is a refactor with the end goal in mind. Before you realize it the codebase is cleaner, concerns have been separated, interfaces made extensible, concepts more clean.
They use a number of tools, from creating facades of the previous interfaces/implementations. From judicious use of aspects, annotations, functional elements. And just plain old better coding.
Of course, sometimes they are too clever for their own good, and things quickly slide backwards when they move on, because no-one else understood the grand vision, the master plan, and quickly things fall back to hacks-upon-workarounds-of-kludges.
In your example, someone has already written the code, possibly shipped it and if it's not a complete disaster, created value. The "10x developer" comes along and is able to take the time to refactor and clean things up (or direct someone to do so.)
As you mentioned, there are pros and cons for each role. The "10x" developer might think too much. The grinder might not create the prettiest code, but he might be great at moving the chains.
I think we can all place ourselves in either role. To get something out the door to meet a deadline sometimes requires the quick and dirty way. And sometimes shipping quick and dirty is far more important. To move from one role to the other is sometimes as difficult as switching between projects, so it's great to be able to have one person who can go in with one mind and another person to go in with a different mind.
As I'm usually the sole developer on my projects, I don't know if this is how things work in practice. I imagine in a cash strapped start-up all developers might be the type to shove out as much code as possible.
Perhaps all other things being equal, a 10x developer in that environment (a cash strapped start-up as opposed to a mature Twitter) might be the person who understands that shipping is more important when resources are short. The "other type" might not realize that things will probably work out in the end as long as the team is shipping. Things are never perfect, the stack will always be a house of cards, but the cash must keep flowing be it from investments, from clients or from customers all of whom are expecting progress.
Personally, I seem to switch back and forth. Sometimes I get on a roll and I'm knocking stuff out at a pace where I surprise myself. Sometimes I get locked up trying to over-think a problem. Sometimes I can go back through my code and see obvious problems and refactor the code with the same momentum as I had when I originally wrote it. I think the tricky part is finding the right balance and knowing what you need to be doing within your particular environment.
ETA: Changed things around for clarity.
Also, "bad codebase" is a terrible excuse. There is always a way out.
Because of this he will look like a medicore developer inside the that place, and it will hamper his career progression. By having to slog through crap, it doesn't push him in the right way and he doesn't improve the best he can. That is the big difference.
I think how someone else said there are 10x teams is a more accurate way to think about it. People are not islands.
He may be an engineer but he got the $10 Mil for being "The senior vice president of engineering"
Personally, I don't think it's worth taking equity seriously unless (a) it's public stock, which has a published value, or (b) you know the cap table. If you don't get to see the cap table and term sheets, that employee equity is pretty meaningless-- not worth taking a pay cut or working typical startup hours.