Anecdote: At the startup (now acquired) that I work for, we simplified the architecture so much that we spend under $3k a month in infra for tens of millions in revenues a year while having 99.9% availability for 5+ years now. I don't have any big name tech to add to my resume. The fact that we ran a e-commerce site with a low budget and few engineers was never recognized by recruiters. They called me based on my experience with "distributed systems" 8 years ago. All recruiters (well, most of them at least) can look for is keywords.
On the other hand, we also had difficulties hiring "good" engineers. People chose either a company with a brand name recognition or one that's working on "exciting" technology.
As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost.
As leaders, we fail to put our companies first.
This is an industry wide problem. If past trends of other major industries are any indicator, the whole "meritocracy" of tech industry will disappear within the next decade.
On the recruiting standpoint, I would aim to attract older applicants.
People established in their career don't need buzzword bingo resumes. Stability is important because you can leave the job at the door. Other things are more important, such as paying the mortgage, taking kids to the park on the weekends and not working all hours with a fragile stack.
Unfortunately, my friends on management positions say that they favor youth. Young devs lack experience and foresight, so ran into a lot of problems, but they cover all of that by working 18/7 and bringing sleeping bags to office.
Not sure where you work - but not anymore... most kids out of college willing to work for places with "management" pay attention to 9 to 5 thing much more these days.
I remember Joel saying something about "smart AND gets things done" back in '06. But I guess the youth of today are too busy working 18/7 and learning the latest, hippest Javascript meta-framework to read such outdated doggerel. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/10/25/the-guerrilla-guid...
I would say that "buzzword bingo" is even more important for older candidates. The younger candidates will be perceived as more current, so the older ones will need to make clear that they are not "dinosaurs" stuck on 20 year old tech.
There has never been a meritocracy in tech, only the illusion of it. 80%+ of any job is about being well-liked, by peers but especially by the upper echelons. 20% is the upper limit of actual job function expected to be performed. If you're faking it well enough to pass the surface inspection and you're well-liked, your job is very secure.
The issue is that, compared to other industries, it's really hard to find people with that 20% in tech, so business people are forced to let political and image ignoramuses (sometimes ignorant to the point of failing to perform basic hygiene) into the club, and forced to try to stuff them in the attic or some other dark corner of the office where they won't ugly things up too much.
Many developers naively interpret this as a ruling meritocracy. The reality is that the business types resent having to do this, and a horrible technology worker with some image consciousness will easily destroy his better-qualified peers.
I'm familiar with a case of a person who can't even code getting himself elevated to a technical directorship with architectural and high-level direction responsibilities through such tactics. He appears to code by merging branches in the GitHub interface, by making vacuous technical-sounding comments in meetings with executives, by occasionally having someone come "pair" with him and committing the changes they make together at his workstation, etc., but if you locked him alone in a room with a blank text editor and said "Write something that does this", he wouldn't be able to do it. And the executives believe in him wholeheartedly and are currently working to install him as the company's sole technical authority. All significant decisions would have to get his approval, despite his being literally the worst technician in the company. All of his decisions up to this point have been politically motivated, aimed at coalescing power within his group and blocking outsiders who may want to contribute.
He was able to get there because he dresses well, he adopted the executive's interests and chitchats with them about these, he walks around the office telling jokes and smiling at people, and generally being what would be considered personable and diplomatic, whereas the other technical people go to their desks, hunker down, and spend their day trying to get some real work done.
I have seen similar guys as "senior architect". They speak well, are nice, sit in a lot of meetings, make nice Visio charts, use words like "integration pattern" but you never get anything real out of them.
There are so many people out there like this, it's maddening. So many people that don't actually DO anything other than create work for others and create an illusion of 'management'...
Meh - there are just as many people making the same accusation you are as to render it useless.
I read countless anecdotes on HN and hear many more in person of people with just the shittiest managers, of people who rarely see "competent" engineering organizations, of people who have "never" seen a competent project manager, that it really is a wonder we have any profitable companies at all.
In reality, if you don't understand the value someone is providing them, you should make an effort to understand what they might be doing before making claims like the ones you're making.
I hear what you are saying. Before declaring someone is useless you definitely should make sure to understand what they are doing.
On the other hand, I am pretty convinced that there is a sizeable number of people in companies who create a lot of busywork "managing" things. The project I am on has 3 developers (as far as I can tell) and probably more than 10 business analysts, project managers, architects and other managers putting their name on it. I have tried to understand what they are all doing but from what I can tell there are two managers who actually help the project and the other ones write reports to each other, call a lot of meetings but don't really contribute. They just regurgitate what the few active people are doing.
I'm 32 and work as a PM at a Big Hip Tech Co. in the bay area.
Once I was on a team with 2 QA analysts, 1 Eng Manager, myself as PM, 3 BA's (that I did not want), and 3 developers, and one platform architect. All this plus 1 director overseeing our tiny team. Not to mention the 1-2 BA's I worked with whenever I worked on something that impacted another team.
During my 1:1 with said director, I once lashed out - I hadn't slept well in 4 days and I simply sounded off. I literally said everything that's been said in this thread: everything from why the fuck do we have so many people, give me 5 engineers and fire everyone else, to all you care about is the headcount that reports to you.
Luckily, I was a top performer, and while this tarnished my reputation with this director, I was able to smooth things over over the course of a few months.
This director explained to me that I was no longer at a start up. That this team should be resilient - that anyone should be able to take 2-3 weeks off at a time without interrupting the work. That they didn't want us working pedal to the metal 100% of the time. That it was ok that it was slow, and that I shouldn't be so self-conscious or hard on myself if I wasn't always working my fingers to the bone.
Now, I still thought we had way too much fat. Some of those BA's had no business being on a technical team, even as BA's and we should have traded in the architect and dev manager for an extra QA and developer.
But what that conversation did was bring me back down to earth. So much of what we view as right and wrong is personal preference. While I still disagreed with the amount of waste, it removed the chip on my shoulder and now I simply make sure to join teams that I like.
That's more of a ramble, but gives you some context as to where I was coming from.
As a dev I would be OK if these superfluous people would stay out of the way but in addition to not contributing they call meetings, ask for reports, filter information, schedule reviews and whatever. So they make my life more difficult without adding value.
Yeah, it's definitely true that a lot of people fail to comprehend the more holistic, bigger picture perspective. There's nothing necessarily wrong with a moderate working pace and building in some redundancy, especially since multiple people with overlapping functions can review one another's work, cover for each other, etc.
This, however, doesn't excuse hiring incompetent people based on appearance and likability with blatant disregard for their competence (I recognize that for many non-technical managers, it is difficult or impossible to discern the quality of one's skillset), nor does it excuse stuffing teams with dead weight just because the hiring manager personally likes the people involved. And those practices are indeed rampant.
> As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost
The company has zero loyalty to you and will screw you over if it makes business sense to do so. There is absolutely no reason to put the company above your career interests.
This only holds if you believe that deliberately making decisions that will cost the company more than they should is in your career interests.
As said in this topic - it's true that in some places, resume-driven development pays off for the developers. It's not the same everywhere and to me it looks more like a symptom of a dysfunctional structure than par for the course in business.
This means it is in your career interests to increase company revenue and/or reduce costs, because this will make you more attractive to many companies (the ones we would likely want to work on) when you move on.
Exactly. It's in my best interest to make sure the business is doing well and I don't do things that jeopardize that. And no, it doesn't have to come at the cost of taking a hit to my career either. This is not a fine line balance I'm talking about - doing things with the main goal of boosting my career will sooner or later ruin it.
I am not sure how much it is in the interest of a developer to help the business to increase revenue or reduce cost. It's certainly good to come from a successful company but if you haven't worked on the latest cool tech you still don't look good. Even if that decision was 100% the right thing to do.
That's just my personal impression but I believe you have better chances coming from an unsuccessful company with all the right buzzwords than from a successful company with old tech. You will quickly be labelled as "dinosaur".
The real winner is to use cool stuff AND come from a successful/known company.
Can't say I'm 100% sure either. Certainly having nice buzzwords in the CV can be beneficial, but I would guess would be more common in certain corporate structures/areas/sizes.
I have no experience in being labelled a 'dinosaur', but I'm sure there are jobs where being practical and generating actual results will matter. In ideal conditions, these are the jobs which are desirable to work at, so I don't like the idea of optimizing for hotness in itself (at least for my own career decisions).
Given that changing jobs every 1-2 years is common now, I don't think actually trying to act in the interest of the company is a good strategy. By the time anyone really notices that you have, you'll probably already have another job. So perhaps the cure for resume driven development is fixing the constant job hopping problem.
The most (only?) reliable way to get a raise in this industry is to change jobs (or make noise about doing so). Most young companies don't provide a path forward for employees, which is somewhat understandable, b/c most young companies don't have a clue what their own path forward is. But without companies making an effort at solving this, they have pretty much guaranteed they will have very poor retention.
Is there a win-win here if we want to strike out on our own as "consultants"? What if we charge exorbitant sums for simple robust solutions, but provide the execs with needlessly technical descriptions of what we've done so they can show it off? Big budget, sounds impressive, works consistently, and we get paid. Or is that plausible?
On the other hand, we also had difficulties hiring "good" engineers. People chose either a company with a brand name recognition or one that's working on "exciting" technology.
As engineers, we fail to appreciate that we are there to serve business first and foremost.
As leaders, we fail to put our companies first.
This is an industry wide problem. If past trends of other major industries are any indicator, the whole "meritocracy" of tech industry will disappear within the next decade.
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