7 ms·

What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

71 points by ilyash 3y ago

ilyash 3y ago
Full title: What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not
simonbarker87 3y ago
Of the three places I’ve been a full time employed dev I only enjoyed working at the first. This was a UK retailer, the other two were “tech” companies. The retailer operated in the way the article describes, direct contact with the business, ability to unearth a problem and run with it, understanding that dev work isn’t just fingers on keyboard and sharing of full business context. The other two had strict comms lines, not allowed to stray from the Jira board, rarely any contact with the business or users and no sharing of business context because “we don’t want to distract you” - completely missing the point that without the contact you rarely understand what the point of the work is.
- jddj 3y ago
  I think, though I'm not sure, that some people prefer the latter environment. Having worked with teams which have preferred to work in as pure a technology environment as could be constructed while still providing value, I think this might be the "product focussed" (or not) distinction that people make about themselves on their CVs.
  - simonbarker87 3y ago
    To me “product focussed” is the situation the article describes, everyone thinks about the product (and therefore the business by extension) Those who don’t like that work environment (so would prefer the latter two of my three dev jobs) would be tech focussed in my book. It’s all semantics though
    - jddj 3y ago
      Yeah, that was the conclusion I reached as well. I might not have made it clear
- tetris11 3y ago
  I've been in the first type of work my whole academic career. I'm definitely more of an informatician/sysadmin than a scientist, and despite being entrenched in the science for almost a decade I can tell you that I never developed a 'feel' for it - it was too specialised, and I lacked the ground knowledge to bridge the gap. A smarter man would have found the time, but in my defense even in a single field has too many subfields to delve into, and you simply cannot master them all. The best projects, and when I'm most efficient at work, is when someone explains the input and describes the desired output in as most abstract way possible.
  - whatshisface 3y ago
    Well, science is more specialized than business, for example there is only one "MBA" but at least a hundred masters in science.
Bukhmanizer 3y ago
It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs. IMO there’s probably a good reason for it, namely some institutional memory of when engineers would just defect en-masse and literally destroy your company if you pissed then off enough. But it also makes me a little sad that other white collar jobs don’t have the same benefits. There are probably a ton of jobs where people work just as hard as engineers but are treated as little interchangeable boxes by the money people.
- l33t7332273 3y ago
  One of the realities of capitalism is that people are not paid proportionally to how hard they work.
  - beebmam 3y ago
    That's good, in fact. People should be compensated for the value they generate. Why should a fast food worker be compensated equivalently to a doctor or engineer? I do not want to live in a world where that could exist.
    - rwmj 3y ago
      They're not paid for the value they generate either. They're paid proportional to the leverage they have to extract money from the business.
      - candiodari 3y ago
        In other words, can you run the business into the ground? If yes => $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, if no => $. The CEO can tank a company (in fact they frequently do) An engineer certainly has more power than average to sink a company (isn't half the star wars story pretty much this?) Cleaning personnel does not
    - foldr 3y ago
      You are in a world where that can exist if you make international comparisons. There are some fast food workers earning more than some developers.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DrDroop 3y ago
This is the reason why I am trying to move away from being a software engineer. I don't like to complain but it is honestly degrading how SE are treated in some places. I've been on teams with 4 project managers/analysts and 3 developers. They will expect you to do all the real hard work while they sit in meetings all day making UI mockups and architecture diagrams. There is just no way in winning this.
- bazoom42 3y ago
  What is degrading about that? Would you rather sit in meetings than develop?
  - DrDroop 3y ago
    I would like to work in a place where communication is a two way thing.
    - Danjoe4 3y ago
      It's a culture issue. Some PMs get the impression that they're higher up in the hierarchy; they start delegating instead of negotiating with the devs. Really they're just around because upper management prefers talking to them instead of the pseudo autistic engineers.
- threeseed 3y ago
  > They will expect you to do all the real hard work while they sit in meetings all day making UI mockups and architecture diagrams You could also look at this the other way. They are the ones doing the real hard work i.e. making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements whilst you just get to build what's written down on a page. Everyone plays their role in companies and assume they are the indispensable ones.
  - DrDroop 3y ago
    I think the point of the article was that to be valuable as an engineer you have to do things like "making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements". My problem is that a lot of people have your attitude and pretend that they are doing me a favour by having this being written down all the while limiting the actual design space for a problem, and in the same breath patronise me on what teamwork is really like.
Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago
You can always rely on Gergely to cut to the heart of the matter with his articles. What he's written largely chimes with the (many) diverse engineering environments I've collected a paycheck from. Some, usually the worst ones, have that "just stick to shipping PRs code monkey" mentality based off zero wiggle room in terms of defining the problem scope. At these kinds of companies and teams, the seeping lethargy and disillusion has otherwise talented folks building out code they know has limited impact on the business. The best places, in fact my current role in an SV-adjacent tech company, encourages a kind of consulting approach to help define and solve business problems, not just JIRA tickets. This results in much better engagement with engineering overall, and getting better things built quickly.
- gedy 3y ago
  > The best places, in fact my current role in an SV-adjacent tech company Would love to find a company like this again, past two roles were JIRA micromanagement shops and actively discouraged talking about anything.
sentimentscan 3y ago
At (traditional) this is causing me to develop feature and then throw it again and then implement it again slightly differently because someone said something in the chain without thinking and sometimes to fight with management teams for doing something insane. And in one case why throwed out 3,5 months of development work, because some exec was mistaken. But at (SV startup company) this caused at least for my team complete chaos, what should we do, who should be doing the integration, talking to customers, why are we doing this. Usually at SV startup company I was like 2-4 times more productive, but often output of my work wasn't really significant, as in traditional company so small dumb feature was raking in money and really improved large customer base.
omscs99 3y ago
Imo all of this talk about being “well treated” in SE is an utter load of shit Regular office jobs don’t have oncall. They don’t get randomly pinged outside of business hours. They aren’t as rat racey. There’s less ageism. They don’t force you to live in areas where a shitbox sfh costs more than 2mil Seriously, I wish I could go back to undergrad and tell myself to go into a regular engineering field. And my experience isn’t even the worst I’ve heard, just ask anyone from AWS and they’ll tell you
- tomduncalf 3y ago
  A lot of tech jobs don’t have on call/out of hours expectations (in the UK at least). They’re probably not the top paying jobs at the prestigious companies, but that’s the trade off. I’m sure there are similar trade offs with the “best” jobs in other fields.
- Muromec 3y ago
  Don’t work at big tech. If possible, don’t work with people buying into Protestant work culture.
hef19898 3y ago
Like everything from pragmatic engineer so far, that is an insightful article. As someone with a more traditional, read half mechanical, engineering background who is working for quite sometime now at the interface between mechanical, electrical (hardware basically) engineering, commercial and software (because no modern piece of machinery works without that), I'd like to add some things. At the core of the difference between "traditional" and SV type companies is a fundamental difference on how they view software developers (and I am firmly in the non-SV camp myself): are they engineers or not? In SV, yes. For almost everyone else definitely not. And there lies the problem traditional, engineering heavy companies have integrating software. that does cut both ways so, most of the SV-software engineering practices are simply as incompatible with hardware engineering as hardware engineering practices are with software development. And for most non-SV-pure-software companies, any piece of software is just another part number in the final product configuration, in that environment, software developers are nothing special. And it takes a special kind of software developer and company culture to properly manage that. That being said, I agree with the articles conclusion. And I'd add that hardware engineering could benefit a lot from treating their engineers the way SV does their software devs. I do have a question so, where does all that significant horsepower of SV companies go nowadays? From the outside, it seems to go into ad tech, social media (with the aim to sell more ads), crypto (nothing to show for besides bitcoin and ethernum as new stuff to speculate with when gold isn't fun enough anymore) and "AI" (the latest hype which still has to show some real world benefits). The true innovation to come needs a combination of software and hardware, each bit for itself got as far they could. There isn't much world left software can eat without some allies, at least until the next cycle repeats.
nologic01 3y ago
There is only one central difference of "Silicon Valley" type companies with "the Rest of the World". It is the recognition (or not) that we are in an accelerated information processing age where the wiring of information flows in society is upgraded dramatically. While this realization is not new (from Negroponte's Being Digital [1] to the perennial VC cry "software will eat the world") the disruption story is for at least two decades broadcast to deafening volumes. But it is by no means universally adopted. For most organizations "IT" is just a utility. While information flow and processing is vital for most businesses, the control of these particular "means of production" is not deemed central to the business model. Like the provision of electricity, water etc, it is a stylized something that happens in the basement or outsourced. The C-Suite is clueless of digital tech and will at best include some tech consultant types rotating in and out. In fact the very strange period of tech we are going through is a testament to how the alien forces of this new landscape have turned everything upside down. Google, Amazon, Meta are not "tech" companies. They are advertisers, retailers, publishers that have made information flow and processing central to their business model (and for now at least, have cornered the market). What is mildly interesting though is that there are many major sectors where information processing is 100% what they do (finance and insurance the easiest example). A universe where the information market is cornered by, e.g. banks is actually less absurd than one cornered by advertisers. With the above framing, the role of developers in decision making etc. is in reality just an epiphenomenon and circumstantial. Form follows function and it is the functional difference (what the company does) that is the driving force in organizational matters, remuneration etc. This also gives you some hints as to when things might change: When senior industry personalities are equally comfortable both in digital technology and the details of the particular sector they are in. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital
- nojvek 3y ago
  I don’t think your analogy would not be true for Tesla. My underlying theory is that software is how we map what is happening in the real world and represent a model of it in computer(s). Great Software engineers have this amazing ability to represent this and write computations that can reason on top of it for effective decisions. Whether it’s dashboards, social network, extracting patterns from data, advanced electric cars with autonomy, mobile phones etc. If you can use the power of computers to do more of what is happening in the human brains to create economic value, then that is a highly leveraged engineer.
liampulles 3y ago
It sounds to me like successful software companies are Agile in nature. Most significantly, that autonomy and people in the business are the priority, and that the processes support them - not the other way round.
uoaei 3y ago
I think autonomy is ultimately a red herring -- what people want, crave, to feel dignified is agency. This comes in various forms but sometimes it can be as a part of a collaborative team that values their input, not just as a free-floating agent that can sweat hard and steamroll things into production.
channel_t 3y ago
This article was somewhat revelatory to me in that I can now see that the source of my frustration with the direction my career has gone in recent years is that I spent much of it cutting my teeth at a SV-style company during the 2010s before it was bought out by traditionalists, and that subsequent companies ended up being more solidly traditional, even if they initially appeared SV-like on the surface. I think I had naively assumed that SV-style was the norm, and the experience of discovering this to not be the case has been a little alienating.
dave333 3y ago
The last startup I worked for as a UI dev the marketing manager wanted me to make a purely cosmetic change to the UI that at the time was quite difficult to do and half jokingly I told her if she insisted, I would quit. She immediately relayed this to the CEO, her husband, sitting across the table "Did you hear what he said?" I was not fired on the spot, but quit shortly afterwards anyway.

71 points by ilyash 3y ago

Full title: What Silicon Valley "Gets" about Software Engineers that Traditional Companies Do Not

Of the three places I’ve been a full time employed dev I only enjoyed working at the first. This was a UK retailer, the other two were “tech” companies. The retailer operated in the way the article describes, direct contact with the business, ability to unearth a problem and run with it, understanding that dev work isn’t just fingers on keyboard and sharing of full business context. The other two had strict comms lines, not allowed to stray from the Jira board, rarely any contact with the business or users and no sharing of business context because “we don’t want to distract you” - completely missing the point that without the contact you rarely understand what the point of the work is.

jddj 3y ago
I think, though I'm not sure, that some people prefer the latter environment. Having worked with teams which have preferred to work in as pure a technology environment as could be constructed while still providing value, I think this might be the "product focussed" (or not) distinction that people make about themselves on their CVs.
- simonbarker87 3y ago
  To me “product focussed” is the situation the article describes, everyone thinks about the product (and therefore the business by extension) Those who don’t like that work environment (so would prefer the latter two of my three dev jobs) would be tech focussed in my book. It’s all semantics though
  - jddj 3y ago
    Yeah, that was the conclusion I reached as well. I might not have made it clear
tetris11 3y ago
I've been in the first type of work my whole academic career. I'm definitely more of an informatician/sysadmin than a scientist, and despite being entrenched in the science for almost a decade I can tell you that I never developed a 'feel' for it - it was too specialised, and I lacked the ground knowledge to bridge the gap. A smarter man would have found the time, but in my defense even in a single field has too many subfields to delve into, and you simply cannot master them all. The best projects, and when I'm most efficient at work, is when someone explains the input and describes the desired output in as most abstract way possible.
- whatshisface 3y ago
  Well, science is more specialized than business, for example there is only one "MBA" but at least a hundred masters in science.

Bukhmanizer 3y ago

It’s kind of a miracle engineers are treated as well as we are compared to most traditional office jobs. IMO there’s probably a good reason for it, namely some institutional memory of when engineers would just defect en-masse and literally destroy your company if you pissed then off enough. But it also makes me a little sad that other white collar jobs don’t have the same benefits. There are probably a ton of jobs where people work just as hard as engineers but are treated as little interchangeable boxes by the money people.

l33t7332273 3y ago
One of the realities of capitalism is that people are not paid proportionally to how hard they work.
- beebmam 3y ago
  That's good, in fact. People should be compensated for the value they generate. Why should a fast food worker be compensated equivalently to a doctor or engineer? I do not want to live in a world where that could exist.
  - rwmj 3y ago
    They're not paid for the value they generate either. They're paid proportional to the leverage they have to extract money from the business.
    - candiodari 3y ago
      In other words, can you run the business into the ground? If yes => $$$$$$$$$$$$$$, if no => $. The CEO can tank a company (in fact they frequently do) An engineer certainly has more power than average to sink a company (isn't half the star wars story pretty much this?) Cleaning personnel does not
  - foldr 3y ago
    You are in a world where that can exist if you make international comparisons. There are some fast food workers earning more than some developers.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

DrDroop 3y ago

This is the reason why I am trying to move away from being a software engineer. I don't like to complain but it is honestly degrading how SE are treated in some places. I've been on teams with 4 project managers/analysts and 3 developers. They will expect you to do all the real hard work while they sit in meetings all day making UI mockups and architecture diagrams. There is just no way in winning this.

bazoom42 3y ago
What is degrading about that? Would you rather sit in meetings than develop?
- DrDroop 3y ago
  I would like to work in a place where communication is a two way thing.
  - Danjoe4 3y ago
    It's a culture issue. Some PMs get the impression that they're higher up in the hierarchy; they start delegating instead of negotiating with the devs. Really they're just around because upper management prefers talking to them instead of the pseudo autistic engineers.
threeseed 3y ago
> They will expect you to do all the real hard work while they sit in meetings all day making UI mockups and architecture diagrams You could also look at this the other way. They are the ones doing the real hard work i.e. making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements whilst you just get to build what's written down on a page. Everyone plays their role in companies and assume they are the indispensable ones.
- DrDroop 3y ago
  I think the point of the article was that to be valuable as an engineer you have to do things like "making tough decisions, dealing with stakeholders, incomplete and poorly conceived requirements". My problem is that a lot of people have your attitude and pretend that they are doing me a favour by having this being written down all the while limiting the actual design space for a problem, and in the same breath patronise me on what teamwork is really like.

Simon_O_Rourke 3y ago

You can always rely on Gergely to cut to the heart of the matter with his articles. What he's written largely chimes with the (many) diverse engineering environments I've collected a paycheck from. Some, usually the worst ones, have that "just stick to shipping PRs code monkey" mentality based off zero wiggle room in terms of defining the problem scope. At these kinds of companies and teams, the seeping lethargy and disillusion has otherwise talented folks building out code they know has limited impact on the business. The best places, in fact my current role in an SV-adjacent tech company, encourages a kind of consulting approach to help define and solve business problems, not just JIRA tickets. This results in much better engagement with engineering overall, and getting better things built quickly.

gedy 3y ago
> The best places, in fact my current role in an SV-adjacent tech company Would love to find a company like this again, past two roles were JIRA micromanagement shops and actively discouraged talking about anything.

sentimentscan 3y ago

At (traditional) this is causing me to develop feature and then throw it again and then implement it again slightly differently because someone said something in the chain without thinking and sometimes to fight with management teams for doing something insane. And in one case why throwed out 3,5 months of development work, because some exec was mistaken. But at (SV startup company) this caused at least for my team complete chaos, what should we do, who should be doing the integration, talking to customers, why are we doing this. Usually at SV startup company I was like 2-4 times more productive, but often output of my work wasn't really significant, as in traditional company so small dumb feature was raking in money and really improved large customer base.

omscs99 3y ago

Imo all of this talk about being “well treated” in SE is an utter load of shit Regular office jobs don’t have oncall. They don’t get randomly pinged outside of business hours. They aren’t as rat racey. There’s less ageism. They don’t force you to live in areas where a shitbox sfh costs more than 2mil Seriously, I wish I could go back to undergrad and tell myself to go into a regular engineering field. And my experience isn’t even the worst I’ve heard, just ask anyone from AWS and they’ll tell you

tomduncalf 3y ago
A lot of tech jobs don’t have on call/out of hours expectations (in the UK at least). They’re probably not the top paying jobs at the prestigious companies, but that’s the trade off. I’m sure there are similar trade offs with the “best” jobs in other fields.
Muromec 3y ago
Don’t work at big tech. If possible, don’t work with people buying into Protestant work culture.

hef19898 3y ago

Like everything from pragmatic engineer so far, that is an insightful article. As someone with a more traditional, read half mechanical, engineering background who is working for quite sometime now at the interface between mechanical, electrical (hardware basically) engineering, commercial and software (because no modern piece of machinery works without that), I'd like to add some things. At the core of the difference between "traditional" and SV type companies is a fundamental difference on how they view software developers (and I am firmly in the non-SV camp myself): are they engineers or not? In SV, yes. For almost everyone else definitely not. And there lies the problem traditional, engineering heavy companies have integrating software. that does cut both ways so, most of the SV-software engineering practices are simply as incompatible with hardware engineering as hardware engineering practices are with software development. And for most non-SV-pure-software companies, any piece of software is just another part number in the final product configuration, in that environment, software developers are nothing special. And it takes a special kind of software developer and company culture to properly manage that. That being said, I agree with the articles conclusion. And I'd add that hardware engineering could benefit a lot from treating their engineers the way SV does their software devs. I do have a question so, where does all that significant horsepower of SV companies go nowadays? From the outside, it seems to go into ad tech, social media (with the aim to sell more ads), crypto (nothing to show for besides bitcoin and ethernum as new stuff to speculate with when gold isn't fun enough anymore) and "AI" (the latest hype which still has to show some real world benefits). The true innovation to come needs a combination of software and hardware, each bit for itself got as far they could. There isn't much world left software can eat without some allies, at least until the next cycle repeats.

nologic01 3y ago

There is only one central difference of "Silicon Valley" type companies with "the Rest of the World". It is the recognition (or not) that we are in an accelerated information processing age where the wiring of information flows in society is upgraded dramatically. While this realization is not new (from Negroponte's Being Digital [1] to the perennial VC cry "software will eat the world") the disruption story is for at least two decades broadcast to deafening volumes. But it is by no means universally adopted. For most organizations "IT" is just a utility. While information flow and processing is vital for most businesses, the control of these particular "means of production" is not deemed central to the business model. Like the provision of electricity, water etc, it is a stylized something that happens in the basement or outsourced. The C-Suite is clueless of digital tech and will at best include some tech consultant types rotating in and out. In fact the very strange period of tech we are going through is a testament to how the alien forces of this new landscape have turned everything upside down. Google, Amazon, Meta are not "tech" companies. They are advertisers, retailers, publishers that have made information flow and processing central to their business model (and for now at least, have cornered the market). What is mildly interesting though is that there are many major sectors where information processing is 100% what they do (finance and insurance the easiest example). A universe where the information market is cornered by, e.g. banks is actually less absurd than one cornered by advertisers. With the above framing, the role of developers in decision making etc. is in reality just an epiphenomenon and circumstantial. Form follows function and it is the functional difference (what the company does) that is the driving force in organizational matters, remuneration etc. This also gives you some hints as to when things might change: When senior industry personalities are equally comfortable both in digital technology and the details of the particular sector they are in. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_Digital

nojvek 3y ago
I don’t think your analogy would not be true for Tesla. My underlying theory is that software is how we map what is happening in the real world and represent a model of it in computer(s). Great Software engineers have this amazing ability to represent this and write computations that can reason on top of it for effective decisions. Whether it’s dashboards, social network, extracting patterns from data, advanced electric cars with autonomy, mobile phones etc. If you can use the power of computers to do more of what is happening in the human brains to create economic value, then that is a highly leveraged engineer.

liampulles 3y ago

It sounds to me like successful software companies are Agile in nature. Most significantly, that autonomy and people in the business are the priority, and that the processes support them - not the other way round.

uoaei 3y ago

I think autonomy is ultimately a red herring -- what people want, crave, to feel dignified is agency. This comes in various forms but sometimes it can be as a part of a collaborative team that values their input, not just as a free-floating agent that can sweat hard and steamroll things into production.

channel_t 3y ago

This article was somewhat revelatory to me in that I can now see that the source of my frustration with the direction my career has gone in recent years is that I spent much of it cutting my teeth at a SV-style company during the 2010s before it was bought out by traditionalists, and that subsequent companies ended up being more solidly traditional, even if they initially appeared SV-like on the surface. I think I had naively assumed that SV-style was the norm, and the experience of discovering this to not be the case has been a little alienating.

dave333 3y ago

The last startup I worked for as a UI dev the marketing manager wanted me to make a purely cosmetic change to the UI that at the time was quite difficult to do and half jokingly I told her if she insisted, I would quit. She immediately relayed this to the CEO, her husband, sitting across the table "Did you hear what he said?" I was not fired on the spot, but quit shortly afterwards anyway.