> VPs of Engineering from frontend backgrounds are relatively rare, and it’s partly because the most pressing technical challenges a startup faces are often around scaling, reliability, and backend architecture. If we had been dealing with nonstop incidents, constant struggles with scaling, and major architectural challenges with our query and storage engine, someone with deeper backend and operational experience likely would have been chosen for the job, not me. Because of Ben, Ian, and other incredibly talented ICs on our team, and some of the solid design decisions the founding team made that bought us a lot of technical runway, these concerns were not top of mind for our leaders. Goals like executing well against our product strategy and leveling up our user experience were instead the concerns of the day, and there I could be more helpful.
I’ve worked at companies in the past where frontend is looked down upon because all of our leaders are backend/infra people. What I’ve noticed is that the code quality from those backend devs is quite awful. I wonder if there exists an inverse relationship between leadership representation and engineering talent?