[HN Gopher] What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that tradit... ___________________________________________________________________ What Silicon Valley gets about engineers that traditional companies do not Author : gregdoesit Score : 116 points Date : 2021-01-10 18:01 UTC (4 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.pragmaticengineer.com) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.pragmaticengineer.com) | mettamage wrote: | What European companies are like this? I've been trying to apply | for ages at US companies, for the reasons such as this. Reading | HN for 6 years and being US-centered in general (thanks to tech) | made me want to work like this. I've noticed that at European | organizations people indeed try to pin me in a box, and then I | can't thrive when I'm working there. | flibble wrote: | Flipdish (HQ in Ireland with a distributed tech team) is one. | | Full disclosure - I'm the technical co-founder. | KaiserPro wrote: | The article uses JIRA is a touchstone that seems to equate to no | autonomy. I think this is wrong. | | I have worked at a good number of places, including a FAAMG. | | The freedom that was given to me directly correlates to company | size & seniority. | | When I was younger, I didn't get much autonomy, why? because I | was a naive arrogant prick. I would dream up solutions to | problems that didn't exist. I would make existing problems worse | by trying out new things. | | When a company gets larger, it will bump into problems, missed | features, deadlines or massive bugs. New procedures will get be | implemented to make sure that those don't happen again. Ticketing | is a good thing, so long as its developer lead. It allows | delegation of tasks, and simple tracking of state. Its an artform | that should be taught. | | I was at a start up for two years that was bought out by a FAAMG. | We were working on cutting edge computer vision research. We had | a tight process, tracked with ticketing. We had complete | autonomy. | | We were chucked into SV "culture" only to find that is somehow | managed to make cutting edge research both more chaotic _and_ | boring. Ironically I have much less freedom than I did when I | worked at a large financial newspaper. | throwawaybbqed wrote: | Can you please describe how you had a Jira/ticket system that | you felt gave you autonomy? Very curious how it could be | implemented in a research setting. | lukashrb wrote: | Are there any German companies that work like this? | ju-st wrote: | I'm working in a kind of internal startup of a big German | company and we operate "SV-like" as described in the article. | My job title is Software Developer but most of the time I'm | convincing other developer teams to share code to speed up | development, inventing simple solutions to complicated sounding | wishes of product management, helping project management to | prioritize low effort features and trying to find out what the | customers really need. | | The only problem is that there is no leverage or scale because | the software is coupled to physical goods, which means no big | profits to pay above average salary and no career progression. | | And that is the point where I don't agree with the article. I | don't see the correlation between salary and autonomy. | itronitron wrote: | Interesting, what the author describes has been the norm at every | company I have worked at, and I've never worked for an SV | company. | astura wrote: | Same. | mindtricks wrote: | From personal experience on the product side, if you want to be | more involved with the business, I'd recommend you work on two | things from this article. First, curiosity is an absolutely must | have. Without it, you'll not be able to truly learn what a | customer is looking for. Second, demonstrate you can "talk with | another engineer" without manager facilitation. It's a signal of | ownership that I guarantee people will notice. | courtf wrote: | I've done both of these my entire career and no one ever cared, | mostly because it's not remarkable. | | Do you work somewhere that has a large management apparatus? | These behaviors are sort of bare minimum expectation in smaller | companies. It sounds like you perceived developers as a group | to be mostly anti-social curmudgeons. | Smaug123 wrote: | A nontrivial part of this blog post is essentially saying | "Silicon Valley practices leader-leader management more than most | industries", in the sense of David Marquet's "Turn The Ship | Around!". Points 1, 2, and 5 are precisely aspects of leader- | leader management. | dhenneberger wrote: | SV-like companies try to hire the best of the best so it makes | sense to that they would give them more greater autonomy and more | responsibilities. These observations may not help a 'traditional' | company become better. | bdcravens wrote: | In extremely small companies that are very technology driven (yet | often pretty traditional in terms of the problem they are | solving) you can find much of the same. (I work for such a | company) | opportune wrote: | I have noticed that as SV companies get larger they tend to adopt | the more "old school" approach. Not that it's a binary - it's a | spectrum, and depending on management chain/how an org runs, | people can have different experiences. | | I think it's caused by | | 1. When you have very deep management chains you start to have | lots of people with opinions on what you should do, how you | should do it, who you should do it with. Even if on average most | of them aren't micromanagers, it only takes a few. | | 2. As you grow you start pulling in more people with experience | outside of SV who bring in culture with them. Note that "SV" is | also not monolithic here. Companies like Microsoft (ok, | technically not SV) are farther to the "traditional" side of the | spectrum. | | 3. "Horizontals" | erikerikson wrote: | Perhaps: as size increases, relationships don't scale and | mechanisms of control and coordination become more shallow. | Smaug123 wrote: | Related: the "Moral Maze" of Robert Jackall fame, recently | "popularised" (if Less Wrong can be considered "popular") by | Zvi Mowshowitz (https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/23/mazes- | sequence-summa...). | plorkyeran wrote: | The "SV style" runs into scaling problems. Engineers making | product decisions requires that they have a solid grasp on | everything the business cares about, which gets harder as the | business gets bigger. Direct engineer -> engineer communication | between teams is O(N^2) to organize things between N engineers. | | As you grow I think reducing engineer autonomy is unavoidable, | and the goal is merely to stick to reducing it and not | eliminating it. | closeparen wrote: | 4. Middle managers are going to do _something_ with their days. | Once the growth frenzy stops and they 're longer occupied by | procuring and filling headcount, they go the next thing they | know, implementing systems of surveillance ("accountability") | and control ("alignment"). | jgeada wrote: | That is a brilliant take on middle management! | beastcoast wrote: | This is a big part of Amazon's success. Service oriented | architecture gives teams enough autonomy to define their own | processes. "You build it, you own it" often extends to products | as well as services. | hummel wrote: | Money | libraryofbabel wrote: | I agree with a lot of this article and it reflects the culture at | the kind of places I like to work. | | But - I'm curious what _costs_ folks have seen in making this | switch to giving engineers more autonomy and expecting them to be | problem solvers for the wider business rather than code-factory | workers. My hunch is that it 's usually worth it - but what are | the risks? | | It's easy to mention a couple of anecdotes about some engineer | who made an improvement or feature that represented millions of | dollars for the company bottom line. But what about people going | down strange rabbit holes, engaging in resume-driven development | or following the allure of cool tech that isn't really needed for | the use case (e.g. "let's use Cassandra for this!"), Not Invented | Here syndrome, premature optimization, spinning up unnecessary | microservices because that's the way to get promoted, building a | fancy internal system that internal stakeholders don't actually | need or want, etc. It's really really hard to simultaneously see | the business big picture and also be down in the technical | details, and very easy for engineers to fall victim to the | Dunning-Kruger effect and go off in the wrong direction. Perhaps | the few people who are able to do this well are able to | compensate for all the waste, but I don't think we can assume | that it leads to good results for the business in every case. | coderintherye wrote: | What you noted of engineers going down rabbit holes of cool | tech for cool tech sake is certainly an issue, which is why | management must help keep in mind that the autonomy is given | with a goal of "solve business problems." It requires a bit of | careful management but it usually becomes clear over time who | enjoys playing with new tech for the sake of new tech and who | does it to try to find a solution to a problem. The former | group can be put into a research team if the company is large | enough otherwise they are likely not a good fit. | | As for risks, the biggest problem I've seen from this cultural | change in a company is the disharmony it creates between the | people who enjoy task-driven work and just working their 9-5 | vs. the people who enjoy creative problem solving. It usually | works better to have that culture from the start and also why | it is so hard to change a company's culture to this way of | working because it disrupts a way being that almost everyone in | the company is used to. | [deleted] | peter_d_sherman wrote: | >""SV-like" companies think of software engineers as the people | best suited to solve the problems that the organization has. They | hire not only for technical skills but communication and problem- | solving ability. Their thinking is a bit more like this: | | Software engineers are among the highest-paid people in our | company. | | _This is because they can bring some of the highest leverage | through coding and problem solving._ | | We want to expose them to the business, so while they are doing | their "normal" work, they can also find more impactful | opportunities for the business." | dilyevsky wrote: | Is pay scale on this chart logarithmic? | lawrenceyan wrote: | Good eye. | jedberg wrote: | The best way to tell if a company values engineers is to ask | which cost center they are in. | | Is it IT? Then they will treat you like a cog and consider you | just a cost to the company. Is it Product? Then they will | consider you valuable and critical to the company's success. | mycall wrote: | I'm lucky enough to make products for our company while being | in IT, so it is a hybrid. With data driven decisions becoming | more important to businesses these days, I see IT's | transitional role as the cost side (vs. profit side) starting | to change. | qppo wrote: | A question I like for non-tech businesses is: "do you see this | as a software business or transitioning to become one?" | | Because these days every business has to be investing into | software products, and the ones that don't recognize that the | software is key to all their products are the ones that are | dead folks walking. They're also great targets for SaaS | consultant vultures. | arexxbifs wrote: | I dearly hope my cast iron skillet will never require a | firmware upgrade. | PascLeRasc wrote: | Does anyone have any tips on getting out of this kind of | company? I'm 2 years into my career but I'm one of those cog | engineers working in IT and it's really draining my soul. I | don't know how to talk about my job in interviews without | giving off red flags. | realjohng wrote: | This is probably because Silicon valley companies have tech | cofounders and first early hires are also engineers who become | involved in important decision making beyond engineering, like | product and even strategy. This creates a culture of empowering | engineers. | | On the contrary, companies where tech is an afterthought-- well | why would you empower your engineers to make business critical | decisions if you're running a hospital or a sports team. | quicklime wrote: | I've worked at both SV and traditional companies, and I feel like | this very closely matches my experience. | | One of the things I worry about is that even at companies that | are doing "Agile transformations" and adopting methodologies like | Scrum, _in practice_ have "Product Owners" who are there to give | instructions via Jira tickets. Other roles like "Business | Analysts" are there to ensure that lowly developers never have to | worry about things like understanding the business themselves. | | So I get funny looks when I suggest that engineers should go talk | to people in the business, and write design docs. Silicon Valley | engineering practices can look very non-Agile to a lot people | from traditional companies that are doing Agile. | opportune wrote: | Yes! The proliferation and role of "business people" in | traditional companies is IMO their defining characteristic. It | shows how much or how little a business trusts engineers (and | also engineer's "status" within the company, e.g. are they | respected and valued or treated as a disposable resource) to | run the business as general problem solvers. | | The ironic thing about Agile is that it has a cottage industry | of "scrum consultants", "scrum masters", project owners, etc. | which advocate ostensibly for letting developers self-organize | but which also has a vested interest for career and self- | preservation reasons in inserting itself above software | engineers in the decision making process. | courtf wrote: | I've long imagined a position just above the scrum masters: | the scrum lord. | | I see this position as a critical component of any agile | strategy that seeks to maximize scrum master productivity, | while still allowing scrum masters all the autonomy they need | for their day-to-day duties. | klipt wrote: | Why settle for scrum lord when you could be scrum king? | Scrum emperor? One day even scrum Pope? | optimiz3 wrote: | Pope Scrootus the 1st | courtf wrote: | > scrum Pope | | his holiness will make his presence known in due time | gnusty_gnurc wrote: | Let's just call them all scrumbags | jrott wrote: | not sure you're going far enough there. Obviously we need a | scrum king to guide our scrum lords as they help our scrum | masters transform our organization. | chris11 wrote: | I definitely agree with you, but I don't think that's | sufficient. I think at larger companies it would be helpful | to spend a day or two every quarter having a scrum | increment meeting. The SI would let scrum lords and scrum | masters plan what experiments would occur during the next | quarter. | p_l wrote: | Isn't that just the Scrum of Scrums meeting, only at | higher level perhaps? | loosetypes wrote: | I appreciate your sense of humor | surfingdino wrote: | So true. | walshemj wrote: | Then they don't understand what RAD / SCRUM is for - and I | would bet had crappy outcomes before the switch. | celim307 wrote: | We had a large disconnect between product and engineering. The | directors solution was to have mandatory 8 hours of sprint | ceremonies a week where we would review the definition of "bug" | and "epic", every week. We also were required to sit in on all | team meetings regardless if it was your team. We had two full | time scrum masters for a team of six engineers. | | I suggested instead engineers get looped earlier into the | process with stakeholders. The director said it was a bad idea | as we couldn't possibly hope to understand the business side of | things. | | Very glad I got out | tolbish wrote: | That would give developers too much power and make them non | replaceable/interchangeable. | consp wrote: | They already aren't replaceable in that sense. It it | impossible to open a can of developers and hope to get | results straight away or hope nothing gets lost if someone | leaves. | p_l wrote: | If you drop your expectations low enough, then yes, it's | possible. It involves a steady churn state and the idea | that "it's just how it is". | Animats wrote: | One could have said that about electricians a century ago. "Men | and Volts", a history of the first 50 years of the General | Electric Company, makes that clear. | abalashov wrote: | It all depends on who you're hiring and what you're building. | Definitely applicable to startups and innovators coming up from | the bottom. | | But, there are absolutely companies maintaining low-growth Clunky | Java Accounting Application for Insurance Companies #574 for whom | this approach is contraindicated. Those companies can hire | relatively entry-level, average graduates, at commensurate | salaries, and assign them highly structured JIRA tickets. | | Would they get better talent if their fronds tended more toward | the SV model of compensation and autonomy described in the | article? Absolutely. But in terms of marginal productivity or | ROI, it's far from clear that it makes much of a difference to | the financial performance of Cluky Java Accounting Application | for Insurance Companies #574. That means massively overpaying for | skills, or skill levels, that aren't really needed, or aren't | needed enough to matter. | | No, it's not the kind of software development any of us want to | do, and I think the audience for this post are for the most part | in no danger of having to. But I think it's important to be | honest about the fact that this sort of dimly-lit, cubicle- | dwelling sweatshop software work _is_ a high percentage of | software development occurring on the planet. For that type of | company, following the "SV" philosophy would arguably constitute | a dereliction of fiduciary duty. | | My view may be somewhat coloured by my exposure to medium to | enterprise-sized companies in the telecom world, where a lot of | the work is tedious, unimaginative and formulaic, using | unexciting but established technology stacks, and so forth. But | it still needs to be done, and there are companies who darken the | skies with people to do it. | | Lastly, I incorporate by reference everything that has been said | elsewhere in this thread about the nature of large organisations | and the poor scalability of engineering-led company process. Most | software work, by volume, doesn't consist of skunkworks | innovation or the development of something new. Most software | work is incremental, in many cases strictly maintenance mode, and | caters to many stakeholders. Large organisations and big capital | serve an entirely different purpose that is realised at points | further along the technology and product lifecycle. In this | comment, I merely chose to focus on (1) the problems of | empowering "average" talent this way and (2) the poor prospectus | for doing so. | chmaynard wrote: | I have worked in this field since 1980. The first time I was | given the title "Software Engineer" was at Apple in 2001. Was I | really a trained, licensed engineer in the traditional sense? Of | course not. But it sure made me feel flattered and empowered. | Silicon Valley HR execs use strategies like this to manipulate | their employees, particularly the youngest ones. | shrimp_emoji wrote: | C'mon, you're _too cool_ for higher pay and worker 's rights. | :D | esoterica wrote: | Why do people keep pretending like Silicon Valley engineers | aren't one of the single highest paid demographics in the | entire country? | mlthoughts2018 wrote: | Pay is nowhere remotely close to being proportional to | impact on revenue though. Many engineers are much more | offended by unmeritocratic pay than by absolute value of | pay being low - hence why you can convince amazing | engineers to work for peanuts at start-ups. | | I want the greatest share of the returns of my own labor I | can get. If that results in very high salary, great, it's | earned. If I take a risk at a place where that translates | to much lower salary, that's fine too - as long as it's | very objectively meritocratic. | | If I am making $200k per year as a top, top performer, | while my employer is paying far more mediocre performers | $175k (perhaps based of geolocation), or where both of us | are bringing in ~ millions of revenue, that's super | unacceptable. | | As time goes on, the surplus of my labor productivity that | a big corporate employer can capture beyond my total | compensation should be decreasing heavily - and expert | software labor is one class that has the negotiation power | to actually push that issue. | | So I'd flip your question on its head. Why do we pretend | that rent-seeking executives deserve the surplus revenue | generated by rare talented engineers? Why (with complete | sincerity) aren't many, many, many more software engineers | paid on the order of what Hollywood actors are making, | while executive salaries simply have to come way, way down | in these lines of business? | gamblor956 wrote: | Hollywood executives get paid more than most actors. Only | the absolute elite talent are making above scale let | alone more than what the executives are making, and their | managers (aka recruiters) are negotiating that for them. | dilyevsky wrote: | Depending on your budget the min SAG rate can be anywhere | from ~100-1000/day so many sw engineers in fact make much | more than most actors | courtf wrote: | Exactly. The funny thing is the same people making the | counter to your argument no doubt don't bat an eye at 8 | figure annual salaries for the best sports players. The | argument is the same in either case. | walshemj wrote: | Compared to other professions? maybe SV is just treating | "Engineers" more like other older professions and has less | of the class distinctions you see in the UK for example. | glitchc wrote: | Initially this was true, certainly SV would use higher | salaries to draw developers and engineers to the valley. | But cost of living has exploded since then. A modern | developer living in SV does not command a higher standard | of living as food and housing costs are significantly | higher than most of the rest of the country. A similar | trend plays out on the east coast so it's not just SV. | | It's balanced by the CoL adjustment. In short, SV engineers | are not better off, and haven't been for the past decade. | This is apparent by the observed exodus in the light of | Covid forcing a shift to primarily remote work. Engineers | are trying to reclaim their wage advantage by moving to | cheaper locations, and companies are fighting back by | reducing compensation accordingly. | markalexander wrote: | Sort of. Often a big chunk of your CoL is going into a | massively appreciating asset. People always seem to | ignore this when talking about the top n most expensive | cities in the world. You can literally sell your | apartment and go live in a mansion most other places on | the planet when you feel like it. | codesnik wrote: | hm. do many people in silicon valley buy their apartment | or house there these days? Is it even accessible? | markalexander wrote: | People in general or people in tech? Well what's the | typical mortgage multiple, 6 or 7 times salary? So for | the latter, it seems pretty attainable to get an | apartment at the lower end of the market to start out on. | Correct me if I'm wrong, though. | MattGaiser wrote: | Software developers enjoy great pay, great perks, and have | plenty of job opportunities if anyone abuses them, in North | America at least. | draw_down wrote: | I think the first two are complicated by the eventual (even if | slow) inclusion of layers of process, sign offs, and approvals | required for a given piece of functionality to go live. | | You start off with engineers having autonomy then something bad | happens one day, so you introduce an approval process to make | sure that doesn't happen again. Then one day someone notices | visual/UX inconsistencies between products so a process is | introduced to ensure consistency. Then someone notices the tone | of the copy is not what they think it should be so it is decreed | that all copy should go through the writing team. Etc. Eventually | shipping becomes as much about fighting through these thickets of | bureaucracy as about improving things for users or, you know, | writing code. | | You end up with a situation where someone who has never heard of | you or your stupid project asking you fundamental questions about | its existence which have already been answered at the outset of | the project... but why should they care? You answer to them. | Their job is not to help you make users' lives better. Their job | is to stop peons like you from screwing up. | mlinksva wrote: | These things (1. autonomy for software engineers; 2. curious | problem solvers, not mindless resources; 3. internal data, code, | and documentation transparency; 4. exposure to the business and | to business metrics; 5. engineer-to-engineer comms over triangle- | communication; 6. investing in a less frustrating developer | experience; 7. higher leverage --> higher {autonomy, pay}; the | "biggest" is a repeat of 2) seem like plausible differences | between "SV" and "traditional" companies. | | I wonder if there's data (survey? perhaps correlated with | compensation?) to back up and establish magnitude and | trend/diffusion or refute any or all? | | Also would be interesting to look at those characteristics for | non-employer open source projects and government. There would | surely be lots of variation across projects and | departments/governments, as there would be across companies, | though I'd guess for non-employer open source 1, 2, 3, 5 would be | very high, 4, 6, 7 unclear or lacking, and for government | possibly even lower than traditional companies across the board? | Just speculating, again, curious about data, or more speculation. | :) ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2021-01-10 23:00 UTC)