from Hacker News

What Silicon Valley “gets” about software engineers

by ilyash on 9/17/23, 6:56 AM with 66 comments

• by Bukhmanizer on 9/17/23, 7:55 AM

  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.

• by Simon_O_Rourke on 9/17/23, 8:42 AM

  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.

• by DrDroop on 9/17/23, 8:26 AM

  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.

• by simonbarker87 on 9/17/23, 7:35 AM

  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.

• by hef19898 on 9/17/23, 9:56 AM

  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.

• by sentimentscan on 9/17/23, 9:33 AM

  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.

• by channel_t on 9/17/23, 8:34 PM

  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.

• by nologic01 on 9/17/23, 10:07 AM

  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

• by dave333 on 9/17/23, 10:42 PM

  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.

• by uoaei on 9/17/23, 1:02 PM

  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.

• by ilyash on 9/17/23, 6:56 AM

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

• by liampulles on 9/17/23, 10:24 AM

  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.

• by omscs99 on 9/17/23, 9:44 AM

  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