Marketing, publicity, networking, call it what you will. If no one knows a feature is in your app, it doesn't matter how good it is. You see this in politics too. That's why you have those signs on the road saying "your tax dollars at work"
I bet you can think of any number of poorly publicized success stories that didn't get the credit they deserved, or became victims of the invisibility of their success
Someone else will always at some point will steal or deserve the spotlight.
You can’t have a successful show full of prima donnas that all vie for the lead role on stage. You can do your best, and have some way to promote yourself for compensation when the time comes, but if there’s this much of a problem that you feel you have to write a lengthy defense to the public, you’ve lost your way and should go elsewhere/
(I'm also willing to bet that the very same people who pout about not being "appreciated" would be the first to complain about someone "hovering" or "spying" on them, because that's what it would take for someone to know what you're up to in such cases. Like, make up your mind, bruh.)
And if you take a moment to think about it, those who expect others to just know what they've done are displaying the very narcissistic behavior they often claim to be avoiding. After all, why you? Why should anyone know what you, of all people, are doing? Do you know what others are doing? No, you don't. Not until they tell you or someone who has been told knows. You may think you know, but there is plenty that you don't know, and to be fair, perhaps don't need to know. The world does not revolve around you. Like you (I would hope), people have their own lives and tasks and concerns.
Think of something as everyday as a PR. Even if your manager looks at every PR, he doesn't know what you did to get there unless you communicate that to him. Unless you write it down and share it or tell him that you've experimented with three different approaches before settling on the chosen one, or done some kind of detailed analysis based on which you drew up your design, how the hell is he going to know?
And even if a manager should know certain things, it is pointless to make that appeal. So what if he should? Aren't there things you should be doing but aren't, like, say, communicating with clarity and coherence? "Shoulding" doesn't make things so. You have to deal with the world as it is, not as you would like it to be. Every manager is different. If your manager requires a huge banner and a neon sign to get the message, then that's what it takes to make him know things. Behave accordingly.
Not necessarily a bad thing at times. Of course some chance encounter that builds a friendship or even family can be worth not winning that ball game. But actions have consequences and maybe someone else needed to win to get their goals fulfilled.
Am I not part of the collective? When does my perception matter or not? Is it majority rule and I'm just a pariah following my own beat?
Given the "collective view" of my country on 2025, I think I'll opt out of the score, thanks.
But also applies to politics you're alluding too. Every election cycle is strewn with the paper votes of much of the electorate because, although they're part of the collective, it turns out their perception didn't matter. You can pretend you opt out of the score but unless you're planning to live on in a different country/planet you cant really.
Your perception matters to you and your values. It's still important but it's a mistake to assume it has to matter to the rest of society/corporation overall
There's two reactions to this. Accept this and make your own trail in life, perhaps becoming a decision maker in the process. Or find others and collect together to make sure your agreed upon ideas can and must be heard.
A collective sense of "score" is needed to prevent that.
If some manager's value is "I just need to phone it in and retire" and you are misson-driven, you have an obstacle. Now you're going behind the back of the obstacle trying to stand out, and essential work isn't being met. Mamager panics, has to do more work and probably chastises the other person. Each are only trying to follow what their goals "value".
We do need "values", plural. "Values" will help let out singular "value" compromise as needed. So we shift from "I just want to retire" to "okay, I'll male sure the excited one can get on bigger projects while I chill". And let's the "I want to change the world" types occasionally compromise with "okay this person needs help for a moment". It's not crushing dreams but also making sure that other collective goals are met.
The goal is to ensure that for the value someone else can offer you, you have something of equal value to offer to them in kind.
If you are useless blob, that's not an obstacle, it merely means you're not even trying to be a team player. Face life alone if you so wish, but since the dawn of time humans have leaned into social organization for good reason.
You have your own goals and the company considers you a "useless blob", no matter how you align. Becauee the only value they see in you is pushing pencils. . That's how we create a low trust society.
The reality is that a lot of people have truly become useless blobs. Look at Apple's 54 billion dollar cash holdings just sitting there waiting for something of value to cash it in for. That's 54 billion dollars in promises people made to deliver value that they've never made good on. Or, to put it another way, Apple has given away 54 billion dollars in value away for free...
...-ish. Theoretically they can still seek the promises that others made for future value delivery so it isn't technically free is the truest sense of the word, but for all practical purposes it is so. What on earth could you or I ever offer in return to make good on the promise of value we made? I mean, HN tends to be a little more inventive than the general population so maybe you can I can conjure up something at some point. But the average Joe on the street? What are they going to offer to turn that $54 billion promises into actual value? Let's be realistic. At this point, it's never going to happen.
Once upon a time we got this bright idea that if everyone funnelled into university research labs we'd start to all create all kinds of new value to deliver. It was a noble thought, if a bit unrealistic. But somehow that idea got watered down into "go to university so you can get a job pushing paper around", and now the masses don't even understand what value is anymore.
This describes the majority of my career in tech, I think.
Maybe not that exact situation every time, but similar goals of manager or team that are not “accomplish the mission”.
But talent correlates too. It's rare to see someone self taught that can be competitive with years of conditioning. So there's arguments both ways.
The skip manager has a lot to do with promotions in my experience.
The example I am going to point to is TSMC/Morris Chang.
> During his 25-year career (1958–1983) at Texas Instruments, he rose up in the ranks to become the group vice president responsible for TI's worldwide semiconductor business.[19] In the late 1970s, when TI's focus turned to calculators, digital watches and home computers, Chang felt like his career focused on semiconductors was at a dead end at TI.
The guy was literal gold, and Texas Instruments pivoted away from him (I have also read that anti-Asian sentiment in the USA/TI created a glass ceiling where he could never be CEO
His ability to "hit home runs" was ignored in the USA, and only worked in his favour in the ROC/Taiwan. In both cases (positive and negative) it wasn't his ability, but who believed in him that made the difference.
Edit: At the risk of drawing (more) ire for making it political.
Almost all of the "isms" that the left are (in general) working to stop, are actually preventing economies from reaching their full potential - sexism, racism are the really big ones (because of the sheer numbers of people they affect)
And none of this necessarily has anything to do with Morris Chang personally. Many factors need to align for a company like TSMC to be successful. Morris Chang may be one of them, but there are other factors that may or may not have existed at TI. The claim that they didn't exist at TI because TI didn't like Morris Chang is not something we'll ever know for sure.
I think even by the turn of the 90's this could be seen as an extraordinarily stupid move. The PC was on the up and up and they abandon expertise on a resource that will only explode in demand? I'm sure there was some cushy educational deals with school supplies, but they literally left a gold mine for China.
We do, though, have VERY GOOD evidence of what TI could have been had they provided the conditions that TSMC did.
So. Tear down the unions and regulations, let the rich consolidate wealth, and everything else in between for 50 years. They are still moserable, but hey. They feel better than Enrique over there who just wanted his kids to love a better life.
If you get supported initially when you aren't the best, the effect of the small support can make you much better player.
[1]: https://www.lockhartjosh.ca/2017/11/hockey-birth-month-why-i...
"most celebrated are ones pulling 7-8-figure salaries no one has ever heard of"
You've got a direct contradiction in the span of one sentence... I've directly worked with people like the ones you're referring to and most of them were frauds.
"I know several harvard grads who are about as popular as wahington generals"
You didn't understand what I wrote. It's all about the dynamics of the environment. Academia is as much about fitting in just as much as any other place.
No one that played high school sports can possibly believe this.
Everyone knows by day two who the gifted players are, who is average and who sucks. The good players are never bench warmers because everyone wants to win.
The world is made up of a bunch of average people by definition but there is a percentage of those average people that think they are gifted when they are not.
Then they blame the world for not understanding their "genius".
The most brilliant person I know dropped out of medical school and just raced up the corporate ladder. It took her about 2 months in any role for management to see she should move up. Myself on the other hand have had to really grind it out, constantly learning and networking to improve my luck because I am just so very average.
I worked at such a place for 15 years. The downsides for me were lower pay, no equity, and not getting broad industry experience. I ended up leaving, and I now make a lot more money, but I do miss it.
Funny enough, it happened because of the 2022 layoffs. I figured I'd be fine (and was), but it made me go though the math and realized I was close to escape velocity. On one hand, it made getting excited about uninteresting work that much harder, but because I wasn't quite there with enough buffer, the bad job market still gave me anxiety.
In my case it was easy because I didn’t join the company until after I was already independently wealthy, from an IPO (quitting that company was an easy decision too, due to all the magical changes that happen after IPO).
Yes the expectations are probably still higher, but these companies don’t expect everyone to grow past “mostly self-sufficient engineer” as the parent comment suggests, and for people that do want to do that there’s a full non-management path to director-equivalent IC levels. My impression is that small companies are more likely to treat management as a promotion rather than as a lateral move to a different track (whenever I hear “promoted to manager” I kinda shudder)
It would be nice to have that, though. But my industry isn't known for stability to begin with.
To go into specifics of actual problems solved and do so intelligibly, I'd have to provide specific context, which I'm not comfortable doing here.
It's a lot easier to describe "interesting problems solved" using less identifiable (and more generally interesting) details if one is in platform/infra and/or operating at a Staff+ level -- both of which I have been in the past (and loved it), but am not at the moment.
It's not worth the internet points for any of us to post details beyond what we do.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
And that's ignoring the inherent inequality of birthright.
I recently spent 30 months trying to qualify for a promotion, earnestly striving to demonstrate that I could operate at the staff engineer level. I accepted literally every single opportunity, offered by my manager and director of engineering, to take on extra work and show that I'm staff caliber. They were both eventually persuaded that I was ready, so they authored an 18-page "promotion packet" touting my many accomplishments—the marketing component you describe. This document was then presented to an anonymous promotion committee who, after two weeks of consideration, rejected my promotion.
I am now channeling every ounce of my energy toward becoming my own boss. They have unwittingly started an unquenchable fire in me, and I eagerly await the day I can tender my resignation and tell them just how much they didn't deserve me.
It really depends on the culture of where you are, which can even vary team by team in the same org.
You don’t have to enthusiastically endorse the game. You can learn it, just like you learn Go or Rust or whatever. You can refuse to actively play it, but also be aware of it enough to avoid getting hurt by it.
E.g. figure out the minimal effort for convincing game players that your work is important.
The system is crap. It should all be about meritocracy and all that but it's not. It is what it is. People need to stop being naive shooting themselves in the foot
EDIT
The other thing to it is that its so infuriating because people who say they wish the game wasn't the game and genuinely could change things because they have the right sensibilities, and are talented enough to rise up to position where they can make decisions that matter, choose not to engage in the game to make that happen. Wake up, you're letting the "wrong people" (in your view) win.
Not at all, that was a confused expectation.
The problem here, at least I think, is you may be very unaware of the expectations of running ones own business. There are far more politics, more being cutthroat, tons of regulations you must be aware of that come with potential later penalties if you are not, legal threats, and more.
The 'system' needs the following.
People that are unaware of the system, that do the work, think it's a mediocrity, and don't play the game.
Less people that play the game and reap all the rewards for doing the work without actually doing the work.
The problem is once too many people play the game instead of doing the work the entire system falls apart.
I've found that trust is a currency in a corporate environment, possibly the most important one. And trust is built over time. If you work behind the scenes to ensure the success of a project but don't claim it, there's a decent chance somebody else will, and maybe it'll appear in their promo packet. But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance that leadership will notice that the common element is you. And in the process you'll built up a good reputation and network, so even if leadership gets replaced there are lots of other people that want to work with you. Promotions come slower at first, but they eventually catch up since you don't need to suffer the resets of failed projects and new roles.
This is only true if average tenure of leadership and management is more than a couple of years.
Still, the idealist in me hates this. It feels like quality should win out over advertising yet it rarely does in the grand scheme of things.
So I'm going to continue to try to grind it out as best as I can, while spending time on the things that actually matter: music, art, making delicious food for me and my friends, my hobbies, my family, my local community. Corporate America is bereft of joy and meaning anyway. Maybe it makes me some sort of sucker, but I don't care. I'd rather live.
What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem.
There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something.
I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way.
Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.
Hamming, in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, also encourages this.
But the last edition was in 1994 and he was writing from the position of having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career. We don’t really have that these days.
It’s great if you can find a way to be a non-fungible developer. I think part of the strategy is taking the spotlight and managing perceptions of your work. You don’t get to choose what you work on most of the time but you can make sure that it’s visible and useful.
As the author suggests, and I think I aspire to myself, is building good tools and libraries that people appreciate and depend on.
Often, individuals can claim credit simply by being first and loudest. For example, and individual can highlight a problem area that someone is already working on in the team and loudly talk about the flaws in the current approach and how they will solve it. The individual need not actually solve the task if the first person finishes - but now the success is subconsciously attributed to the thought leadership/approach of the new individual.
Good managers/leadership teams have mechanisms to limit this type of strategy, but it requires them to talk to everyone on the team - listen for unsaid feedback and look at hard artifacts. Otherwise you quickly have a team of people who are great at nothing more than talking about problems and dreaming of solutions.
And I can think of the opposite too - situations where I was at a disadvantage because someone higher up just didn’t like me.
For me, it’s more or less balanced at a balance at this point of time. But most people around me, I don’t think they’ve been as lucky.
Keep polishing those soft skills and if you have a face only your mother would love, be a writer… but get your voice out there.
At the end of the day, only a handful of stakeholders matter in any organization. So long as you can promote you and your team's initiatives to your manager, your skip manager, and a couple key members of Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Leadership - your place is secure.
In fact, in most cases I would say a mass spotlight is actually a net negative, because it only increases the risk that someone might view you as a potential competitor for either budget or responsibility.
So long as you remain aligned to the business's stated goals for the year and can communicate that to the relevant subsegment of stakeholders, a massive spotlight is unnecessary.
For context: my last job was PM for the infra team at Slack. I did it for 5 years. I didn't learn about Slack's product launch process until year 4. Everything until that point was internal work, on our k8s/service mesh and DB infrastructure.
The important insight here is about customer success and shadow management. Every successful engineer (and my own success) derived from figuring out what product engineers needed and delivering it. The "Shadow Hierarchy" feedback was make-or-break for those promotions. It's _hard_ to optimize for that, because you need to seek that feedback, understand if addressing it will actually fix the problem, and deliver it quickly enough to matter in the product org.
If you're willing to optimize for that internal success, you'll be rewarded, but in your career and in stability in the organization. I disagree this is only at Big Tech -- companies as small as 100 engineers have real and strong cultures in the right team, under the right manager.
But don't think this is some magical cheat code to ignoring what's important to the business. It's just a different, perhaps more palatable, route to managing the alignment and politics that are a necessary part of growth at any company.
Maybe it's because I've done the spotlight thing, but I don't really care about praise from management anymore. In fact I suspect that most of my direct managers have never really known what I did, but since they've seen the impact for other people, it's not really been an issue in regards to my reviews or pay. I don't get a lot of credit and I don't get a lot of praise. I don't necessarily see someone who's build a great product with the tools I've made as stealing my credit either. That's sort of the point of what I do.
I completely agree with you that this is not just Big Tech, or Enterprise or even in organisations that are focused on Tech. I also agree that it's not about ignoring the business, you're still going to want to build things that are useful. You're still going to do change management from the ground up to make sure people know the tools are useful and how to use them. You're still going to network and be friendly with your co-workers.
What you can skip is a lot of the corporate politics and frankly most of the "financial" information. I don't even think the price is very high, you don't get the publicity, but it's not like spotlight engineers necessarily get better pay or better career paths unless they want to go into management.
I will say though, that there is still a good amount of naivete in the reasoning presented. The bottom line is that these generalizations and rationalizations are based on a single vary large company and implicitly dependent on the viewpoint and priorities of a bunch of VPs and executives whose mental model may or may not align with how you see the world in the infra trenches. Now Google is an engineering-driven culture, so the author is probably not too far off, but it also represents a particular time and place. Google has enjoyed one of the strongest and most profitable market positions that was cemented years before he entered the work force, and so there's a level of comfort and sheltered existence that infra teams at most companies do not enjoy. Make hay during the good times, but always be aware leaderships attitudes and priorities can change very quickly due to market or investor pressure, and at that point you need to be ready to adapt and articulate your value in a new environment of greater scrutiny, or to a new company (in the case of layoffs).
The whole reason I wrote this post at all was, with the success of Sean's work on HN recently, I felt people were leaning too far into the direction of "you need to constantly move around and go where the exec attention is". I just wanted to show that, from my singular experience, it is possible to carve out a different path in some positions while still being ambitious and "successful" (for some definition of success).
The reason I wrote what I wrote is because I came into the industry in the year 2000, and multiple times throughout my career experienced a rug pull of my own mental model of my value as a software engineer. It's very painful and something that I think ICs in deep-thinking professions like software are very vulnerable to.
Not at all. Thanks for reading and taking the time to comment!
> and multiple times throughout my career experienced a rug pull of my own mental model of my value as a software engineer
Sorry to hear you've had that experience. Unfortunately, over the past year we've once again entered the "let's question software engineer's value" space with AI so you're very right to warn on the risks of not overselling your importance as a SWE. It pays to always be watchful and introspective on what changes are happening around you and how to best adapt to them.
Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better is where it is at.
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.
"Oh this thing here looks steady and boring. This sure does not need a team of six."
Next thing you know, the thing falls apart, destabilizing everything that stood on it's stability.
Everything working fine: "What are we paying you for?"
Something broken: "What are we paying you for?"
It's a little bit of a tragic irony that the better a job you do, the less likely it is to be noticed. (:
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.
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.
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.)
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 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.
A little hyperbolic. Members of my family have found great utility in accessibility improvements, language translation, video calling, navigation assistance, etc.
My current company I'm now on year 4, and 3rd year leading a team building an internal platform for the business - for me it is a dream role - management mostly stay out the way, strategy comes from top down but our team make all the decisions, and after a slow start it's now paying off with several teams using us and helping drive through real requirements, and not the imagined ones from a few execs.
This has lead to constant positive feedback from all of our 'customers' who would never have been able to consider running their own content delivery pipelines - we're solving their real problems. Regardless of any politics, this is what gives me the energy to turn up every day.
You do occasionally get to scoop up the rare low-hanging fruit to get a shiny win that all the engineers appreciate; but for the most part it's chill, professional, satisfying work at a pace that leaves you with enough sanity to raise a family.
When I was working at a startup from 2018-2020, I was hired as the second technical hire by then new CTO who was tasked to bring tech leadership into the company from an outside consulting agency where all of the long term developers were in India.
They were constantly seeking the spotlight to insure they kept their jobs. I could afford to not seek the spotlight. I already had the trust of the owners, CTO etc. I had no fear of being made redundant because the right people didn’t know what I contributed.
I wasn’t trying to get a promotion, I was already leading all of the big technical cross functional initiatives as the company grew.
On the other hand, when I got into BigTech in 2020 as an L5 (Professional Services consulting not SDE), I saw for the first time how much politics played in getting ahead. I personally didn’t care. My goal from day 1 was to make money and leave after 4 years. I was already 46 and knew I didn’t want to stay long term.
But I did see how hard it was for a damn good intern I mentored their senior year and when they came back to get noticed. I had to create opportunities for them to get noticed because they were ignored by their manager [1]. They still had to change departments to just get a chance to get on a promotion track.
I see it again on the other side. I would hate to have to play the games and go through the gauntlet to get promoted at the company I work at now and where I was brought in at the staff level.
But I would be chasing after the spotlight with the best of them to get ahead.
I do have the luxury to not chase recognition - everyone who is important already knows me and what I do. My projects automatically give me visibility without my chasing them.
[1] all of the early career people reported to a separate manager and were loaned out to teams.
I don't agree with this at all. This is how I've worked for my entire time at Google, all the way from new grad L3 joining the company till today. Ignoring the spotlight does not mean "don't get attention from other people" but "don't chase the project execs are focusing on".
Whenever I've work on a project, I make a very active effort to make sure engineers are aware of it, especially if I think they would find it useful. But that's different than going to my execs and asking "what's the highest priority at the moment" and working on that.
Would you rather be working on some obscure internal website for employees to track their performance that no one cares about or something related to Google ads? Which would you suggest a new grad work on?
It sounds cynical. But I never personal tried to get ahead at BigTech, it was never my goal, I just saw the struggles that others had navigating the promo process from L4 (entry level) -> L5 and L6->L7. It seemed like L5->L6 was the easiest for some reason.
I think you are conflating "exec attention" with "important projects": these are very much not the same thing.
You can put important projects on your promo doc and if you communicate it well, you are golden. That’s far more important than “executive attention” when it comes to the promotion committee.
Just don’t be the guy who is working on the internal comp tracking system that no one thinks about more than once a year
If you raise enough capital (whether social or financial) to run for 3 years then you can run for 3 years. If your bets are paying off 2 years in you can stick with the plan - no one will care how you used the capital in year 1 and 2 if there is a payoff in year 3.
The risk comes from being wrong.
Every company I've worked for has regular meetings where they honor the people who stayed late to get the release out the door (I work in embedded systems where upgrades often mean flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service - thus bug free releases are important since upgrades are expensive). I can't help thinking every time that if the rewarded person had just done their job 6 months ago they wouldn't have had the bug in the first place.
Who is worth more? The person that quietly removes scrub brush and other fuel on the ground in the years before the forest fire starts, or the person that comes in once the fire starts and using lots of equipment and effort puts the fire out. Often the latter person gets the accolades, the former is a thankless task.
If a company lacks visionary leaders like that, then one must wonder if the company has much of a future anyway.
I think you should change “visionary” with “competent” here.
This industry has been talking about how bad it is to have “hero devs” for decades, maybe since it’s ENIAC beginnings. After a few decades, you’d think this would filter up to management.
If you change your example from brush clearing to garbage removal it becomes pretty clear: who should get more accolades, the guy who takes out the trash or the guy who stays up all night treating the infections? Both. It’s management that fired the custodial staff who should be canned.
More work gets done for less if you wait until the 11th hour and fix the real problems last minute rather than fix everything ahead of time, much of which will turn out to not have needed fixing.
Yeah there's risks involved but at the limit it makes some sense.
The engineer that caused the bug ended up staying late and fixing it. He was treated like an absolute hero by management, even though it was his fault in the first place. (Don't worry, we all fully understood it wasn't just his fault. The whole system failed and he wouldn't have been harshly judged for the problem.)
From then on we joked about adding bugs on purpose so that we could all get similar treatment.
> flying someone with a USB stick to a remote location without cell service
It's definitely a high risk high reward strategy but if you have the context from being the space for years and you've done your due diligence by speaking to your customers before you build things, you reduce the risk significantly.
Of course the risk can never be zero though and luck definitely played a role in past successes.
EDIT: Note, this is not _necessarily_ a complaint, although I think they would have been very helpful in some circumstances. My main misgivings in working with PM orgs is when they treat my projects as a necessary evil input to the success of the projects they care about. So you get all of the hectoring and demands of professional management with none of the help.
Edit: there is one more danger: you do your job well and management thinks you do nothing and so gets rid of you (only to hire a new team in 3 months when everything collapses)
This is not just true of developer tools, but I think all projects and products.
It's a big problem that many parts of our industry are essentially optimized against this happening.
That being said you do kind of end up in the spotlight anyways but it feels very different to do it through reputation of knowledge and technical competence rather than through PR-like selling.
If your team is not critical, at least in the eyes of upper-management, then you'll be first on the chopping block in the next downturn.
But if you are critical--say, running critical but unsexy infrastructure--then it's all downside risk with no upside. If things work, they ignore you, but if they mess up, you get the blame and the spotlight.
As with any business/career advice, there are no silver bullets, only trade-offs.
I understand from a good chunk of my career that the person on the team that promotes themself and/or has the highest charisma and is adequately intelligent will exceed over others on the team that may work harder, have more experience, and/or is doing more important work for the business.
But it doesn’t mean that you have to ladder climb and play the game to get what you deserve. You can, and maybe can make more money and survive longer that way.
More important than that though is to be yourself. Don’t spend all that time promoting yourself just to make the world a shittier place, so that you get the nice house and car with the kids at the best school, etc. It’s ok to be stepped over while you actually do your job, and for you to feel like shit and maybe be jaded a bit because some asshole that doesn’t deserve it is getting the spotlight. Someone needs to be the Woz. (That’s not a slight against Jobs, btw.)
People are people.
What could possibly go wrong here?
I don't want or need to be told top down what to do, it's better to think for myself and propose that upward. Execs appreciate it because it makes their jobs easier; users get the features they actually want; I get to work on what I think is important.
What am I missing that makes this a bad strategy?
However, it has an important assumption: You are sufficiently aware of higher level things. If you have a decent communication culture in your company or if you are around long enough to know someone everywhere, it should be fine though.
I just think that having to be micromanaged from the top down is completely miserable, is worse for the customer, and is time consuming for execs. It’s not a way to live.
You as an engineer should be familiar with users’ needs. I got into this field because I love automating solutions that help users solve their problems. So of course I want to know what they’re doing, and have a good idea of what would improve their lives further.
This often means building tools comes with a penalty. People will keep reaching out to you for help, because there is no one else.
You can fight that battle via significant self promotion, but you can also lobby for yourself by keeping in constant contact with a subset of stakeholders who actually matter (your manager, your skip manager, your PM, your PM's manager, and maybe 1-2 adjacent EMs).
And honestly, the latter is the norm and much easier as well simply because it ensures that other people are fighting your battle.
People have to be open to being convinced. It'd be nice if that was always true, but it's clearly not always the case.
They are not, and I say this as someone who has reported to people who reported to CEOs and now has CEOs "report" to me.
In most cases, Executive Leadership Teams largely depend on upper-mid level management as their primary filters for initiatives (think VPs/SVPs) and those members of management depend on mid-level management (Engineering Directors, Engineering Managers, Principal/Staff Engineers, and IC Product Managers). If you are an IC Engineer and actually want to make something you care about a priority, you need to:
1. Convince your manager (usually an EM) and skip manager (usually an Engineering Director) and your PM to fight for you.
2. Think about how to show that an engineering initiative actually has a positive impact on ARR or COGS.
3. Find a way to craft an argument around how your proposal aligns with an OKR - OKRs are purposely made open-ended in order to act as a soft filter.
> People have to be open to being convinced...
Yes, but you also need to be able to convince them in their language. You have to be able to understand every individual's incentives and then explain how your proposal aligns with their incentives.
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The amount of learned helplessness on HN is counterproductive for anyone hoping to maintain a career over the long term.
You having a different experience just means you've had a different experience. I'm not claiming that's a normal experience, but there are all sorts of leaders. You can't fix the leadership as an employee.
Nope, but neither have most ICs or HN users either.
> You can't fix the leadership as an employee.
Absolutely, but you can still make a good faith attempt in most organizations simply because most people are not working in organizations that are those kinds of edge cases.
If you are not doing anything to better your position (eg. trying to build allies internally or trying to leave a bad employer) I frankly have no respect.
The number of tech companies where you can stay employed for a solid decade without falling victim to layoffs or re-orgs are very rare in my experience, even more so ones that offer competitive pay.
If you find yourself looking for a new job and want to move up in title and pay, doing the same sort of unglamorous work for years can be a detriment to that.
I'm in a different domain (aerospace) but am trying to carve out a similar career path and am always looking for more to learn about just being a good engineer.
I definitely plan on writing a lot more about this in the coming months :) After seeing Sean's own posts and the fact this post resonated, it feels like there are people out there who might be interested in this sort of thing :)
> books, people, experiences, professional lessons learned
Books not so much but one thing i've been very fortunate to have is very good mentors I can learn off. I've had the same manager from when I first joined Google and honestly I've learned so much just from watching him work and interact with people. Also a couple of senior directors/engineers in other teams as well who I always make a habit to catch up with.
If you're interested, stay tuned to the blog :)
Would a PM be responsible for this sort of broader thinking in a more typical team?
This is different in a product team because engineers aren’t the customers, although I’d still argue anyone senior in a product engineering team should still have at least some product sense.
Good PMs do exactly this in product teams yes. But unfortunately PMs are not immune to shifting priorities and moving around either, just like I describe for engineers. So it's very hard to make it work but the best PMs I know somehow manage anyway!
As a person who does consulting work, the best thing I've found I can do is stay visible with my accomplishments.
I did a presentation earlier this year for a client where the CEO was in attendance. I did not know he was going to be there. They were blown away by my presentation.
You make your own luck.
The thing that is most interesting to me as someone who works at a devtool company is how this puts a spotlight on what vendors can offer (and what they can't). Every time you integrate a devtool into your product, you are trusting that they've thought out and gone through the deep process work of stewardship.
Spotlight is about personality. Some people are visible, outspoken, and in the spotlight, and impactful. Others are quiet, subdued, behind the scenes but impactful. Some of the best developers I've known have been on either end of the spectrum.
At the end of the day it's about impact. When the quiet guy gets the job done every time, people still notice. When the loud guy doesn't, people notice even more.
Sure, there are cases where one guy screams from the mountaintops about how much he has done and gets promoted. And there are cases where the quiet guy gets passed over no matter how well he does. But these always wash in the end unless you work for a supremely shitty company. And even then they tend to work themselves out in life eventually. Even if it sucks for the people involved at the time.
Impact is the name of the game. Loud or quiet is irrelevant.
"In the product environments Sean describes, where goals pivot quarterly and features are often experimental, speed is the ultimate currency. You need to ship, iterate, and often move on before the market shifts." -- I disagree that speed is the ultimate currency! A great product org also respects long term leverage, it's just _always_ harder to argue for. But it's best to build a strong portfolio of going fast (where needed), going slow (where high leverage), and if everyone agrees your "going slow" led to huge returns you get the best of all worlds. Frankly it's a sign of a relatively junior product engineer if they are myopically focused on speed at the cost of all else.
"But the more powerful return is systemic innovation. If you rotate teams every year, you are limited to solving acute bugs that are visible right now. Some problems, however, only reveal their shape over long horizons." -- Extremely true, and this is _equally or more true_ in product domains. My most valuable contributions have come from sitting in a product area long enough to generalize 5 micro optimizations into the macro engineering leverage we needed to drive an order of magnitude more value from the same engineering input.
"For some engineers, navigating this [high visibility driven] chaos is a thrill. For those of us who care about system stability, it feels like a trap." -- my protip for prospective staff engineers is to _never_ say you only care about [speed, stability]. In most cases you must care about both, and it's worth advertising yourself as such. If you self select out of companies that only care about [pure stability/pure ship velocity] there should be a valuable balance to strike and staff engineers are in a unique place to enshrine that balance in engineered systems.
"In a product organization, you often need to impress your manager’s manager. In an infrastructure organization, you need to impress your customers’ managers." -- surely we can agree impressing customer stakeholders is even more important in (healthy) product orgs :) But it's a curious claim!
Great article, wonderful to hear more nuanced and deep discussion of the practice of extremely senior IC engineering. Kudos!
> But it's best to build a strong portfolio of going fast (where needed), going slow (where high leverage), and if everyone agrees your "going slow" led to huge returns you get the best of all worlds.
I guess maybe I oversold this a little in the post but I definitely think that product orgs value speed more than infra orgs: there's often an mismatch when I speak to product engineers on how fast they expect us to build things for them vs how fast we can actually go while considering all our other customers and not breaking other usecases.
> my protip for prospective staff engineers is to _never_ say you only care about [speed, stability]
Fully agreed, both are important for engineers to have. As above, I think the relative composition of them varies though depending on the area (just pulling numbers from the top of my head, maybe it's 70/30 in favor of speed in product orgs, 30/70 in favor of stability in infra orgs).
> surely we can agree impressing customer stakeholders is even more important in (healthy) product orgs
You're absolutely right for what I say in the post; reflecting I think I maybe did not go into this topic in enough detail for the nuance it deserves (but the post already felt long enough!).
Let's split the discussion into 3 different areas (as IMO they each work slightly different): infra/devex, B2C and B2B.
* Infra/devex: as I say in the post, it's critical to impress your other team's managers as that's how you prove impact.
* B2C: your customers are consumers so it's all MAUs, revenue etc. There is no "customer stakeholder" who will give you direct feedback for your promo packet
* B2B: here's where it gets interesting. So if your management chain is directly able to talk to customers (and especially senior managers) to solicit feedback without middle layers (parter manager, account managers, PMs) then yes you're absolutely correct. But often this is not the case: the middle layers act as a filtering point so you get only a fuzzy sense of how stakeholders in the other company about a specific technical thing you worked on. So again it's sort of at the whim of how your manager feels the other company's managers feels.
The basic point I was trying to make is that if you're working on external facing product, from my understanding, even if you impress your external stakeholders, it's not like in your promo packet you can attribute concrete quotes to the customers. quotes like "we couldn't have done X in our company without the work of Y engineer in your org who worked on Z". Whereas this sort of quote is extremely common to see in infra promo packets.
Hope this made sense, I'm not sure I communicated this last point well!
Some other people has to grind harder and even be better than you to get half of your success, that doesn't mean that they are wrong, or that the book is wrong.
I believe a lot, if not all advice there in the book is necessary. Other people might not work at Google, but as I've said before, might need to grind different gears in order to be successful, if you don't -- good for you!
A lot of your suggestions would get you fired very quickly on many companies, it's good that it all works for you.
I tried to point out several times that, yes there are places where a "move fast with leadership" approach works better. And yes this only works in the biggest companies capable of sustaining an infra team for a long period of time.
Getting into these roles requires a ton of hard work. Yes, it’s a grind.
If you feel it’s only achievable with luck, I suggest you’re selling yourself short.
What is the practical application of bringing that to mind when considering what actions to take for career advancement?
They did not say that. They said it included a high degree of luck. It's easier to get there when you grow up in a country where you have access to a computer, for instance.
> If you feel it’s only achievable with luck, I suggest you’re selling yourself short.
It most definitely is only achievable with enough luck: given the same "hard work", not everyone on Earth will get to the same point. I find it amazing how people don't understand that.
It doesn't mean that there was no hard work. Just that "I am here because nobody on Earth would deserve it more and luck has nothing to do with it" is... I don't know... narcissistic?
I do not have his proactivity for sure, nor I have his ease with other people, but I managed to land my job in an infra/tool for network and security without much difficulties.
Literally, who?
Staff engineer and above = 45 year old soccer player bench warmer getting the pay 22 year old striker.
One does not get the title of "Staff Engineer" for age.
One also does not get fired for age. One gets fired for sitting on their ass doing virtually nothing. The "Staff Engineers" and above tend to sit on their ass, doing virtually nothing. Any sane company would do well by firing them.
When Google was a young company the idea of someone in engineering with a fat title sitting on his ass doing nothing was not tolerated. That's when Google was doing amazing things, was innovative and actually gave a s!it because every single person in that company wanted to get s!it done. Right now Google is a standard issue sh!t company because its upper echelons are full of people who are just warming their fancy chairs, talk about their amazing work life balance and count the days to their next options package vests so they can take yet another multi-months vacation.
You can look through the threads in this comment section and in other comment sections of threads that touched on Staff Engineers and Senior staff engineers. People perfectly illustrate why the companies would do well firing them - people describe that as their dream "retirement" job.
Yes, I suggest firing every single one of them. They are non-performing group eating enormous compensation packages.
I have lost count of the brilliant engineers who were passed over for credit simply because someone less technically capable, but extremely popular, pulled the strings to steal the spotlight.
You don't necessarily need to be in the spotlight, but you do need to leave a paper trail. Claim your work and inventions both internally and externally. You don't need to be a 'LinkedIn thought leader' to do this, just submit talks to conferences and find peers at other companies who understand the difference between those who build and those who only talk about building.