In the boom time there's an unending appetite for mediocre engineers to inflate headcount, making managers look good (more reports) and companies look good (to investors). In the bust time, I don't think even the smartest people will be safe, and the top of the ladder may well be pruned more aggressively because they're expensive. Having positive reviews may protect you, but being high in the org won't.
No, it rests on the realistic assumption that there are a million engineers you can hire to be "early employees", and only a handful of Josh Porters with the talent to build something great and the risk tolerance to execute on it.
The market doesn't care about your fragile ego or low self-esteem.
You are making a huge mistake assuming that everyone has ability to tell a mediocre from a 10x engineer, which is patently false assumption to begin with.
Market has information asymmetry baked in. Not everyone is informed, that's where you earn your bucks.
I'm sure that some very productive engineers could coast, but they would be eventually promoted and will have higher expectations. These big companies have perfected the art of management and know how to milk their employees.
Engineers also fall victim to hype from time to time, because engineers are human.
It's part of an engineering mindset to trust proven technology, but it's also part of an engineering mindset to make sure you're staying up-to-date with critical changes in your field. Ignoring either for long enough will make you a worse engineer.
I would agree with that, my point of reference is from working the last 3 years at one of those and finding lots of mediocre engineers who bounce from team to team or company to company every 12-18 months. They deliver, leave technical debt and move on. Its a facade of a good engineer and its hard to catch until you are the one cleaning up the mess or replacing the mess.
Or the value of even a mediocre engineer is high enough that these companies don’t fail. They would’ve done BETTER by keeping better engineers around but they’ll never know that. And in our current economy, the ability to get corrupt deals etc matters more to business success than actually producing things anyway, which further hides the effect of productivity on success.
If that's what it takes to get a job as an engineer at the big companies, it's not particularly surprising that the quality of their engineers has declined as they've grown.
The skills of a con artist are not related to the ability to build good systems.
Agreed. Much like the stock market crash has led me to start thinking about bargain hunting, and to move some of my capital into stocks, I'm viewing this advice as a sign that I'll be able to hire great engineers at a good rate in the not too distant future, as competitors without our profitability run into problems and begin to extend their runway by reducing their headcount (and since they've "already got a product", they don't need those pesky engineers any more).
Then again, I believe that a team of three great engineers lightly managed by another engineer (with some management skills) can outproduce a dozen or more mediocre developers managed by an MBA, so I've always planned for our company to produce more code in less time and for less money than our competitors.
I've noticed this pattern in both business and in individual engineers.
You either have a spectacular product that theoretically could sell itself with initial exposure, or you have the best marketing and a product that might as well be vapor.
Usually it's the mediocre product that's somewhere in between that wins.
In engineers I've noticed that some of the brightest I've worked with are unsociable, or have no self esteem, and get stuck in the same place for 20 years, and on the other side of the spectrum are talentless hacks that are great at selling themselves and moving around enough to increase their salary.
Meanwhile I feel like a fraud because I'm not the best, but good enough to recognize my worth and sociable enough to put myself out there.
I leverage the shit out of that and feel somewhat guilty about hoping that the really talented local engineers don't catch on to the idea.
I've worked at a couple of mid level undertakings of the kind. Smart people do it on the down low and milk it for years. The inner circle draws fat engineering salaries, and they keep surfing on the latest tech hype wave.
Flip side: engineers who curry favor without delivering value can't hide it quite as easily. Those who do their jobs without sucking up have a chance for recognition.
Skilled leaders make a big difference in organizations, and they have skills that engineers don't (always) have. A leader that discounts the advice of his engineers is doomed to failure, but an engineer promoted to leadership that doesn't know how to people manage and steer the ship will also fail.
It seems that some of these fluffy C-level people are actually good at their jobs, but we haven't found how to reliably distinguish them from the fluffy C-level people that slash and burn everything and juice the stock price with buybacks and financial engineering, then ride it out until a catastrophe happens.
"Pretend everyone is great" smacks to me of the anti-competition fetishism in engineering hiring. The labor market votes with its feet. Articles like this serve the purpose of informing engineers and making them focus more on functional culture. He's not calling out companies specifically, he's speaking in general terms about things you should avoid, and that's valuable in ensuring that better companies have more success in hiring and worse companies are punished.
More generally, engineers are in an enviable and almost certainly temporary situation where they have strong bargaining power in relation to employers. They should use that opportunity to extract as much value from companies while the situation lasts. When the shoe is on the other foot, that's exactly what the employers will be doing. It's only a matter of time before the bubble ends and the management consultants come in and teach companies how to extract the most value from their engineers while paying as little as possible.
For example in academia, being "scooped" is a very often discussed and a very real threat. In the research community, hard-working people that are excellent at execution are a dime a dozen, and ideas that have not been done before are a really scarce resource. In the industry it might be less obvious, but it's still quite possible for a small company with good ideas AND good execution to be killed by a large competitor that decides to reimplement their product, but with 200 engineers.
it's not just the top tier engineers. It's engineers who are confident enough to take flyers on startups. It also helps they're very confident that if the startup explodes they'll be able to get another job; that requires a density of opportunities and employers who don't mind a previous job that blew up or a short stint or two.
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