A good PM saves work for the team by shifting work away from from valueless investments. If a team is "slowing down to appease a PM" then that PM is worthless.
620 karma · joined January 22, 2017
1. Scale all salaries to expensive markets
2. Stagnate vs inflation, until salaries track mid-market cities (Denver, Austin) instead of San Francisco / NYC. A bout of high national inflation would make this easier.
3. This works well, but only for a while. To be easily productive remotely you should be a Sr Engineer. Juniors will have a harder time. So will managers. Companies focus (even more!) on only hiring experienced devs. Increased competition drives more work outside of the USA.
4. With lots of remote opportunity, there's even more mobility for individual employees. One company is functionally like any other... all of them take place out of the same room in your house, and only differ by who is on the video chat this week. The "shared culture", both company culture (we're all in this mission together!) and regional culture (east coast / west coast) starts to fade. Fading culture amplifies communication overhead, which slows velocity. A very few companies will overcome this with incredible levels of intentionality, but most will fail to do so.
5. To try to solve the culture problem, companies open smaller landing-zone offices in a couple of hub locations. Remote folks fly in once in a while to get excited and pick up a free tshirt. These smaller hub areas become a good place to onboard Jr employees (making hiring easier), and provide a nice environment for executives to meet with customers.
6. Living physically close to the hub office provides greater executive visibility, and greater promotability for folks who care about that. This reinforces the HCOL compensation premium for leadership only. Jr folks (generally young) are happy to scrape by in the city as always because "dating is the killer app for cities." But they move out as they gain seniority / age / start a family, depressing housing costs for ~10-15 years until population growth catches up again.
7. Startups are primarily founded 2 ways: Senior/stable founders launch distributed companies with their former co-workers around the country. Nobody wants to move. Juniors/new grads launch out of the city of their university, with people they met in school.
8. Weirdly, this means that it becomes somewhat efficient for super-tiny startups to locate just outside of major cities, because if you only have a few people it's probably cheaper to live there than buying tons of plane tickets to visit VCs in those areas. Have to raise that next round! But as soon as the company hits mid-size they are quick to move out to cheaper areas.
9. Given all the above, we'll see an averaging of salaries for all areas, with the exception of executive leadership. Vibrant HCOL downtowns will fade and hollow out, suburban hub offices will be more common. Cities with strong tech universities will do best, as always, since they provide the flow of new-grad startups and academic partnerships.
When I wake up and have that urge to check my phone "real quick" to answer some insane question in the middle of the night, I remember that I have to wait while the thing boots up first, so I grumble, roll over, and go back to sleep.
2. Managers are more effective at the office where they can talk to people and discover information: "manage by walking around".
3. Why are managers / executives necessary and often paid more? Because their contribution affects the work of many other people. Managers' work operates with leverage (for good or ill).
4. If offices make managers more effective, and managers leverage their effectiveness over a large number of people, then the greatest good for the company is likely to be a return to in-person working environments.
It may take a while, but most of us will be going back.
It's very difficult to gain a promotion while also moving to an equivalent-or-better company. The easiest move is to go up in role while trading down in company, or up in company but down in role. True career advancement happens through internal promotion, or happens if you "trade up" to an equivalent role at a better company.
Plus, I splashed out for the model with full-duplex scanning which makes random paperwork archiving a breeze. I set it to scan to a NAS on my local network, and then the NAS backup job uploads to cloud storage overnight. One-step archiving FTW.
This is also why traditional delivery planning fails. "How long is it going to take to build this road?" "Well, we know roughly how long, be we don't yet know the exact route we will take or the obstacles we will encounter, so we'll report on our progress and let you know when we arrive."
But honestly if you're expecting your users to manually sort 1000+ items that's a bad smell. I suggest you don't actually understand the problem you're trying to solve.
In any environment with constrained budget (most environments), Eng managers will not have carte blanche to hire. Each person represents a long-term expense for the business and every team always wants more people.
As you roll up the reporting chain, the first person with both budget responsibility and output responsibility is usually at the VP or C-level. That person is responsible for weighing the requests of Engineering / Product / Sales / Support against each other and aligning these bets with the broader strategic priorities and available resources.
Once the CEO allocates budget, why not just hand it off to the teams? When budget is only determined 1x/yr then team sizes and charters are locked for very long periods of time. A truly agile company holds its budget at a higher level and shifts whenever business needs change, maybe many times per year. Maybe everyone thought that Team A needed to hire 3 more people, but then a major customer arrived which required shifting one of those open positions to Team B. Or maybe the opportunity shrunk, and the company is best served by hiring nobody and shifting that budget to a short-term outside vendor as pay-for-services.
If the company is public, then it's more complicated. Are these operational costs or capitalized costs? You probably don't care, but Wall Street definitely does. Weighing these tradeoffs is the job of the VP / CTO / CEO. Underinvestment in support + operations is either a marker of a short-sighted leader, or it's a leader explicitly making a "bad" decision to focus investment elsewhere with a higher ROI.
1. Identify your target customer first (not the product or the market!)
2. Interview your target customers. Take notes. Find the unfulfilled need.
3. Pitch your solution to those customers and have them sign a Letter Of Intent.
The really powerful piece here is the LOI. It stated "I, Company A, intend to purchase Product Z for $XX,000. This is a non-binding commitment and may be terminated at any time."
Even though the LOI was explicitly non-binding and had no legal weight, they found that the cultural weight of physically signing a piece of paper was enough to scare off non-customers and validate true intent to purchase. Once they had 10 signed LOIs they built the product. All the signed LOIs ultimately converted into paid customers (which is rather amazing).
In contrast, a friend of mine recently hired the teenager next door with cash (for less than the local minimums) to do some manual yard labor. This job simply wasn't worth paying for at a higher cost; my friend would have left the work un-done. But in this case the value proposition at a lower price was acceptable and the neighbor was glad for the extra cash.
The counter-argument is that many workers do not have a choice; they will always accept wages vs nothing, but have no power or ability to negotiate.
With a minimum wage we've made the decision as a society that, in order to prevent worker exploitation, we will also eliminate certain classes of work. Some of this work does vanish entirely, while some of it reappears in the shadow economy through untracked cash payments or self-employment.
As with all policy decisions there's a messy balance here and we're arguing mostly over where the line falls. I do wish there was a cleaner way to protect against monopsony (higher minimum wages) while also providing good opportunities for low-skill workers (those who are very young, very old, have physical or mental impairments, etc).
2. Have a set of pre-defined interview topics or resume rubrics designed to discover and test for these skills.
3. Ask everyone the same questions. Grade everyone the same way.
4. Don't ask "Is this candidate good?", but instead ask "Is this candidate better than the others, based on the scores from my defined rubrics?"
5. If something feels "wrong", walk away. Sometimes your subconscious knows things your conscious mind hasn't discovered yet.
"When you see on the news that Police randomly stopped a car and discovered a huge cache of drugs... you don't actually think that's random, do you?"
TBH I had never thought about it before but now I recognize this pattern everywhere.
* Concise bullet points.
* Easy-to-scan bullet points.
There is a style of resume I sometimes encounter: huge blocks of paragraph text including scattered bold statements about React Native and other Super Buzzwords. There's a whole story crafted about the applicant and their AWS skills.
It's incredibly hard to parse. Don't do that.
If you want to move up you'll need some different skills. "More of the same" won't cut it. Check out "What Got You Here Won't Get You There" -https://www.amazon.com/What-Got-Here-Wont-There/dp/073934223...
If we take the premise that information is valuable (decrease inputs, improve yields) and that equipment is valuable (automation), then there's a very real return to be gained by using these valuable products. What's nuts to me is that we would ever ask the farmers to bear the risk of these products. I mean, sure they could I suppose (better returns overall!), but it concentrates all the risk in the worst places.
I feel like there's a much better opportunity here for a targeted financial product. "Implement our methods with our data, and we'll skim a percentage of your profits." Imagine if the risk of buying a new tractor was gone, because it was provided by the company. The risk of data integration was also gone, because it's guaranteed to work with the provided tractor. And the risk that the data is crap is also gone, because the financing and return risk is borne by a diverse number of institutional investors. Almost like weather / crop insurance, but much much bigger.
For the farmer, the sale is simple: Do our thing, and you don't have to worry about paying for stuff that may not be valuable. You might make slightly less total profit in the good years as the price of offloading that risk.
For the investors, it's also a great story: look at these great startups! Wouldn't you like a piece of that productivity and return?
...and maybe the startups are wrong, and the equipment doesn't work, and everyone learns a lot while they go bankrupt. Everyone except the farmer, who offloaded the risk.
Surely this is a thing that someone is working on?!? I'm sure it's available in bits and pieces, but a unified financing and operational solution seems like it would be a slam dunk.
That said, I think that everyone anticipating a dramatic reduction in orbital cost needs to temper their enthusiasm a bit. UAL was expensive, as many other have previously noted, because it was a political jobs program. The existence of UAL gave the necessary cover for Musk & Co to envision radically more efficient designs.
However, that was then. As SpaceX continues to succeed, it will be harder to justify continued funding of UAL at the previous levels. Costs will be cut. People will cheer. And then, a well-meaning congressperson or two (with their eye on re-election) will introduce a rider onto the next funding bill: "Yes we want these great launch capabilities, but at least $1B must be spent within the state of Alabama" (or whatever).
This will work for a little while, but then more members of congress will jump on the gravy train. In order for SpaceX to maintain their launch contracts they will need to perform more and more work in distributed places. This will result in reduced organizational efficiency and increased launch cost.
The big opportunity here is commercial launch. If SpaceX can grow their civilian and international order book enough, they become less beholden to the US Govt and can push back on make-work contract requirements. But if not... I await their inevitable induction into UAL v2.