That's the dream at a big company for sure. The last mega tech company I worked for had the familiar trap of not knowing how to rate higher level engineers. Things basically turned into a popularity contest, with grading criteria like your "impact on or leadership in the tech community" and other such nonsense.
Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better is where it is at.
The thing about your bigco, the OPs and the post he's talking about, is it's all so abstract from money.
You have two poles here.
1. The VC route, strikes gold, and never really needs to live with the reality of asking what an ROI is, it's all talk about spotlight, impact and value, without any articulation about cash money.
2. The MBA route where you effectively can't brush your teeth without a cost/benefit analysis that itself often cost multiple times your initiative, resulting in nothing getting done until you're in some tech debt armageddon.
The reality is if you're still making bank on the abstract without being able to articulate revenue or costs, you're probably still in the good times.
Yeah, a couple years ago I built a system that undergirded what was at the time a new product but which now generates significant revenue for the company. That system is shockingly reliable to the extent that few at the company know it exists and those who do take its reliability for granted. It's not involved in any cost or reliability fires, so people never really have to think about how impressive this little piece of software really is--the things they don't need to worry about because this software is chugging along, doing its job, silently recovering from connectivity issues, database maintenance, etc without any real issue or maintenance.
It's a little bit of a tragic irony that the better a job you do, the less likely it is to be noticed. (:
May be you need to have "scheduled downtime" when your undergirding system is down for "maintenance" and they will notice! [Half joking... Probably not possible but better to have scheduled maintenance than have to do firefighting under extreme time pressure]
Unfortunately, in this profession we are being lead by managers that do not longer have deep knowledge of how to build good software systems. They can't evaluate contributions in code, so they resort to evaluate participation, and popularity.
As an engineer you are left with a dilema. Either you focus on writing solid code and making your projects move forward or you focus on selling your self to the leadership class.
As long as quietly making stuff pays off, sure.
If I get a bigger paycheck just from being known by the higher ups I'll go for the popularity contest. People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. So yeah, popularity contest and doing as little work as possible it is.
> People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world.
A little hyperbolic. Members of my family have found great utility in accessibility improvements, language translation, video calling, navigation assistance, etc.
Couldn’t agree more (but frustratingly due to HN’ shitty mobile experience i downvoted this, sorry!)
In a past life i used to complain that people only praised my work after i fucked up and subsequently fixed it. I’d go month on month of great execution and all I’d hear would be complaints, but as soon as i “fixed” a major issue, i was a hero.
I’ve learn that setting appropriate incentives is the hardest part of building an effective organization.
I had to mention this in an early startup, when I did some firefighting, and the biz people were praising that. I said I wanted to set a culture in which engineering was rewarded for making things just happen and work, not for firefighting.
A nice thing about early startups is that it's the easiest time to try to set engineering culture like this on a good track. Once you start hiring people, they will either cement elements of whatever culture you're setting, or they'll bring a poor culture with them.
(My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)
> (My current understanding, if you find your culture has been corrupted with a clique/wolfpack of mercenary ex-FAANG people, or a bunch of performative sprint theatre seatwarmers, is that you either have to excise/amputate everywhere the cancer has spread, or accept that you're stuck with a shit culture forever.)
You just described my last job. It went from one of the most productive (and I mean we fucking SHIPPED - quality work, usually the first time around), engaging, and fun places I've ever worked to a place where a new VP would sit in every single group's sprint planing, retros, and standups and interject if we deviated one iota from a very orthodox scrum framework. The engineering turnover was pretty much 95% within a year, with only the most junior people remaining because they didn't really know better to move on. Work slowed, tech debt ballooned, but OMFG were the product managers happy because they were also allowed in every step of the way.
Work slowed to a crawl, too. Eventually a private equity firm swooped in and made things even worse...
That sounds like there was some top-down, or mid-down, culture changing (which can easily happen as a company tries to build a hierarchy, drawing from outside).
Another risk is bottom-up culture. You could have your existing leadership the same, but you start hiring ICs who bring their culture with them, and you fail to nurture the desired culture.
I think one of the concerns with early startups is if the early engineering leadership hasn't gotten respect and buy-in from the CEO, as the company grows. If the early engineering leadership was doing unusually solid work and culture, but the CEO thinks they are just random fungible commodities, and that now it's time for a different mode, then CEO will probably urinate away all that corporate strength very quickly.
The company was founded by an ideas guy (not technical) and the first hire was the (technical) CTO. The CTO set the initial excellent engineering culture. The way I saw it, the founder had no choice but to defer to the engineering team in the beginning because without them there was no future. However, once we started bringing in revenue, the pressure and interference from the CEO started to mount until the CTO essentially got tired of it and moved on. The CEO wasn't even a terrible person, but had trouble dealing with pushback (and I've chatted with him after and he admits he was wrong - he was also in his early 20s during all of this).
The CTO position was never replaced and, I'm not making this up, the head of product was made VP of engineering. An external director of engineering was brought in to implement business metrics, tracking, process etc that all answered to this VP of product. Any sense of balance was removed and the highest ranking advocates for tech were team leads. The VP of Eng wasn't necessarily evil, but couldn't or wouldn't do anything that got in the way of business and couldn't convey how important it was to sometimes take a step back.
We did alright financially, though. We had an exit (not enough for me to retire, but at 45 I essentially don't have to save for it anymore if that makes sense) and moved on, but the slowed down development meant that some other new ideas were only finally gaining traction when the PE firm gobbled us up. I personally think had things remained as they were, or changed (as companies do need to as they grow) more positively, we'd have been much more successful.
Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better is where it is at.