One thing I’ve learned in my 25+ year career is that if you don't own your narrative and your work, someone else will claim it - especially in corporate America.
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.
That's how it works for every organization. Not just corporate America. Want to play on the varsity baseball team? Better be popular with the coaches and other players. Otherwise you're on the bench keeping score. Want to go to Harvard grad school? Better be the right kind of popular. Want to be celebrated in machine learning? Better be popular by doing shallow work on lots of projects. The whole world is a scam, and the scammers always win.
There's an exception though if you're truly good. If you can hit home runs or throw a baseball with laser accuracy and speed you will be on the varsity team even if you're an introverted social misfit. You might not be team captain but bottom line is the coach wants players who can win games, not be prom king.
It’s not a scam. It’s a system that exists for people and made by people. Period. Money, outcomes and so on only have value because people assign them value. If you remove people then what you do has no value or concept of value. Life is not some video game with an omniscient score counter. Other people are the score counter.
In your lens: people are often horrible at keeping score, distracted by values that do no help them win overall.
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.
In my lens the only true score is the collection perception of the score. Not a number, not a formula and not what you think the score is. There is no external absolute counter you can point to because the collective view is the truth.
You are part of the collective, but that does not necessarily mean that your perception matters for the purpose of the score, what this thread is about. Sticking to thread, in terms of perspective on corporate world, are you a decision-maker? or do you have any significant influence on a decision-maker? if no then your perception simply does not matter for the game that is being played.
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
Well sure. That's why we're in this situation. We (perhaps correctly) think no one cares about us in the wider society.
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.
There is no objective score and thus people are perfect at it since the score is by definition what other people think it is. Like the value of money or stocks. Once you realize that a lot of life is significantly less frustrating.
I'd say life becomes more frustrating of you really think this extreme. You realize your values and then realize certain people with contradictoryvalues aren't part of your community, hut obstacles to overcome. Now it's not a team game, it's a battle royale. Not necessarily winner take all, but overall a lot of people will lose more than they win.
A collective sense of "score" is needed to prevent that.
It’s got nothing to do with values but value. Are you doing things that provide value. Once you realize the only measure of that is how other people perceive what you’ve done it’s a lot less frustrating. It makes thing more cooperative as you now need to work with others and communicate with others and you know that versus clinging to a siloed invalid notion of value.
That goes into what my above reply warns about. Of their "value" is something that contradicts yours, you have an obstacle, not a team working towards a goal.
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.
> Of their "value" is something that contradicts yours, you have an obstacle, not a team working towards a goal.
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.
And thars why the social contract is broken. The companies aren't even bothering to reciprocate, so why care about their values if they don't care about you?
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 social contract is broken, but I'm not sure you've correctly identified the cause.
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.
Sometimes achievements speak for themselves and provide the marketing for the actor. But that requires both the achievement to be extremely outsized, so as not to get lost in the noise, and very obviously the result of a singular actor. Only one person can step up to the plate and swing the bat.
Where I went to school the coach distributed chewing tobacco to players he liked and bullied the nerds. The black kid who was extremely athletic got bullied and switched schools. The starting pitcher was an idiot who drove a big truck, and was not especially talented.
Yeah I'm assuming the coach is a normal person who's goal is to build a team and win. If his goal as an adult is to have a lot of teenagers for friends because he himself is still stuck in that mentality, then there's not much you can do but get away.
True, but how many skip managers are going to go scouting in a large tech company for a great developer who is working on the internal performance review system?
The skip manager has a lot to do with promotions in my experience.
Yeah I agree. For sports, that player may end up being a spark for a billion dollar campaign. For a dev, not so much. They want to try and commoditize that role anyway.
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)
Well yea. If you truly look at US history, you'll see the current situation in 2025 is ultimately a huge counter reaction to the idea of colored people and women being able to work alongside Caucasians, and some of the latter just couldn't stand that. "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression"
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.
This might be a reasonable summary of the situation but I suspect it's vastly oversimplified. The trajectory of these businesses depends on more than who's name is at the top of the org chart. TI pivoting away from semiconductors and towards other goods may seem like a stupid move in hindsight, but even in hindsight it's not clearly the case. TI's move is basically them trying to be Apple or NVIDIA instead of Intel or TSMC. Because they failed at that, doesn't necessarily mean that attempting it was wrong.
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.
>TI pivoting away from semiconductors and towards other goods may seem like a stupid move in hindsight, but even in hindsight it's not clearly the case
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.
Depends. Look at the graph of month year of professional hockey player[1]. Player born in first quarter is twice as more likely to be in pro leagues than last quarter. Month of birth's only effect is that it gives 0.5 year extra during junior year to be in spotlight. It shouldn't affect player's performance in any other way. And the effect persists for decades.
If you get supported initially when you aren't the best, the effect of the small support can make you much better player.
In the US, USA Hockey (by far the biggest youth hockey organization) groups players by birth year. So if you are born late in the year, you are among the youngest players on your team. You tend to be smaller, and less experienced, and unless you are exceptional you tend to play less. This impacts you from your first youth teams up until high-school.
I don't think it's a scam, I think all too often people forget that people don't just automatically know things that are going on. It's an important life lesson: telling the story is as important as taking the action. "If you build it, they will come" is bunk
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
FWIW, coming from another unknown internet person, this is 100% the best reply to this whole thread and the most pragmatic way in corporate life. If you think otherwise, you're an idealist and I wish all the best for you in what I suspect you might find a frustrating career. Unless you create your own company.
But calling the whole world a scam feels like letting the worst parts define the whole yet it can feel like the game is rigged in favor of the loudest or most connected
It is a scam, it's objective. If you live in ignorance of this you will eventually be taken advantage of. There is nowhere on the planet you can live where you can take people or systems of people at their word.
Sorry, but this feels like a very American take. There are places in the world that still have high social cohesion and high trust. Not everyone is out to get you everywhere all the time, just in societies which encourage that sort of relating to others.
there are high trust societies where you still cannot take people at their word because it might not be a culture of being direct to others. thinking of japan which is high social cohesion and trust, but still difficult to navigate business contexts due to how problems would be communicated.
Which one would you recommend? because AFAIK most of them are consuming the American products that are constantly scamming you... I've experienced this as a resident of the EU as well.
If it's only an eventuality, then doesn't that imply that you can mostly take people at their word? If you do nine deals, and get scammed on the the tenth, then doesn't that mean those first nine people are honest and could be taken at their word?
lol no the eventuality is because a lot of people are just too poor to even be allowed to engage in deals — they're largely living in faceless systems where they're pre-scammed by faceless corporations
with all due respect, every word you wrote is wrong. michael jordan was and still is biggest a-hole that every teammate hated - the best to ever do it. getting into harvard - nothing to do with popularity. mom&pop alumni perhaps or you can just be a great student, I know several harvard grads who are about as popular as wahington generals. machine learning - most celebrated are ones pulling 7-8-figure salaries no one has ever heard of (I’ve heard of one through a colleague).
"with all due respect, every word you wrote is wrong. michael jordan was and still is biggest a-hole that every teammate hated - the best to ever do it."
Bronnie James is in the NBA... ... .. . Michael Jordan was terrible at baseball and got to sign up for a real chance at the MLB.
"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.
This is one of the main reasons I'm trying to pivot away from a career inside a corporate environment. There is too much politics. I wish it was just do the work and go home, and get rewarded for the work that was completed, but instead there is a huge self-promotion (as in marketing) component. If that's what it takes I might as well do something that I own and control. If I'm going to need to worry about how to market my own work then I might as well try and at least not have a boss. I always thought the point of being an employee and having a limited paycheck meant that you don't worry about this things. That's the fair tradeoff.
There’s too much emphasis on career growth into leadership. I know so many programmers who simply want to solve the trickiest of technical problems, do good work they can feel proud of, and go home to their families. They want stability more than anything.
There are rare software companies where this is exactly what programmers do. The pay is lower than at FAANG & SV/LA/NYC startups, but work-life balance is great, stability is great, and most of all they get to just focus on doing great work. It's not about making quarterly goals, it's about stewarding (or perhaps gardening) a software project for many years. Engineers grow a lot from all the deep, focused feature work and problem solving.
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.
the saddest thing is that it used to be possible to do it at at least some of the megacorps too. "senior engineer" (one level below staff) was widely accepted as an "I have reached as high as I want to in my career, and just want to work on interesting problems now", you would basically never get a raise other than cost-of-living but you could do your work and go home and live your life too. that's still doable to an extent but the recurring layoffs have added a measure of precarity to the whole situation so now you have to care more about all the self promotion and "being seen to be doing something" aspects of the job a lot more than you used to.
Google lets people stay at L4 forever and Meta does at L5 with no expectation of further growth.
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)
Depends on the team — managing can be quite a bit more scope than being a senior IC, depending on expectations for that role. You have broader ownership of technical outcomes over time, even aside from the extra responsibility for growing a team. Managers have all the responsibility of a senior engineer plus more. In that way manager feels to me like a clear promotion to me. Manager vs staff eng, maybe not though.
Management not being a promotion doesn’t mean that managers aren’t (usually—I’ve both been at equal and higher levels than my managers at times) higher levels than their reports. It means that switching to a management role from IC is never a promotion itself (ie always L6 -> M1 in Google/Meta levels) and it never comes with any difference in compensation.
I haven't been a manager, but my understanding is that the higher IC roles assume you're competent enough to do some management-like things if needed ("responsibility without control"), and I also assume that being a manager helps with compensation because they actually teach you how the review process works and let you into the calibration meetings.
Shipping the frontend for features in a core product area on a large team, just like a lot of other devs here :)
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.
I'm pretty sure no one is going to be hunting down NDA infractions on HN unless the poster is silly enough to give specifics about the workplace and time at which they solved the problem. If it takes some kind of investigative work to piece together the most basic details, I think that's within the terms of most NDAs anyway.
Google’s terminal level is one past new grad and it has a full parallel non-management IC track, I don’t think that they’re pushing people that hard into leadership roles.
That's precisely why programmers become programmers. It baffles me that tech careers put most on a leadership track when people study CS for many years for a reason. Why would I want to throw those technical skills away.
And then what happens when you are looking for your next job and you get a behavioral interview question and all you can say is “I pulled Jira tickets off the board for a decade”?
No, when I ask those questions I want to know how you think about your role and whether you take any ownership of anything or whether you just bumble through as the winds take you.
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.
I can see that, but then what's really broken is the education system. If what you say is true that means there is no such thing as being a specialist, at least not anymore, yet almost all universities train people to be specialists. Either industry should stop looking at academic degrees completely or schools should start teaching business first, and technical knowledge second, for most degrees (with exception of academia and research).
My brother is studying economics right now, and he said everyone could use some basic economics knowledge, because getting an intuition for how markets work really helps you as you're looking for jobs and navigating around companies. Maybe business knowledge is better, but I'm personally biased towards the empiricism of economics :) You're onto something though about the need for awareness of how companies think and work.
To be fair, this issue isn’t endemic only to big companies. I’ve seen similar even in academia, some people just know how to “play the game” and play it very well.
It really depends on the culture of where you are, which can even vary team by team in the same org.
Some people seem willfully ignorant of the game. When confronted with the reality of it, they turn away, complain that it exists, and act like a bullied middle schooler.
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.
I so wish every new starter in professional working life is given a 101 on literally this. I've seen so many talented people over the years think they're above taking part in the corporate optics and then subsequently get bogged down by resentment watching lesser people getting pats on the back.
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.
I can think of a couple of times when I wasn’t the best at something, yet still got opportunities simply because someone well-established in that space liked me.
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.
So I'm not sure about this, particularly in the context of this article. I think it definitely applies to the splashy, Spotlight, one-off projects that will make a career with one shot. But a lot of careers aren't made that way, and this article is specifically talking about the ones that aren't.
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.
> 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.
This is only true if average tenure of leadership and management is more than a couple of years.
It's pretty demoralizing to realize that appearances matter more than merit in careers/politics/dating/business/etc. The pragmatic approach is to not give up on merit but not neglect appearances either.
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.
That is because time and energy are limited resources, and measuring merit accurately is very costly. Measuring appearance is far less costly, and might serve as an acceptable proxy. And often times it might not.
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.
Personally, I don't care. Pay me and leave me the hell alone. We get 80 short years on this beautiful blue marble, if we're exceedingly lucky, and I refuse to spend one red second of that playing stupid games to excel in a sclerotic economic system that didn't even exist until very recently.
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.
I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work.
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.
this is the biggest benefit of 1:1's in my opinion.
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.
You can own the narrative while also not being in the spotlight.
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.
This is a really good article. Don't get caught up in the tone of "anti-politics" or "slow is good." It's describing a brand of politics and impact that is just as mercurial as product development if you do it wrong. Infra and DevEx behaves fundamentally differently, and it can be a really great path if it suites your personality.
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.
This is a well articulated article and the OA makes some good observations about the differences in evaluation between a product engineering org and an infra engineering org. It's also clear he's got real technical chops to finish a masters degree and then make L7 at Google in just under 8 years, and clearly that doesn't happen without an ability to navigate some level of large org politics.
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).
I'm very well aware of the privilege afforded to me by my company and the time I'm working in. I tried to emphasize in the post several times that this is not a "universal guide to success" and that in other companies or teams, a different approach and strategy might be needed.
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).
Yeah sorry if my assessment was a bit callous and overly critical, and I hope you don't take it personally. I meant what I said up front that it was very well articulated and made a lot of sense.
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.
> Yeah sorry if my assessment was a bit callous and overly critical, and I hope you don't take it personally
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.
That's the dream at a big company for sure. The last mega tech company I worked for had the familiar trap of not knowing how to rate higher level engineers. Things basically turned into a popularity contest, with grading criteria like your "impact on or leadership in the tech community" and other such nonsense.
Quietly making good things and enabling good people to be better is where it is at.
The thing about your bigco, the OPs and the post he's talking about, is it's all so abstract from money.
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.
Yeah, a couple years ago I built a system that undergirded what was at the time a new product but which now generates significant revenue for the company. That system is shockingly reliable to the extent that few at the company know it exists and those who do take its reliability for granted. It's not involved in any cost or reliability fires, so people never really have to think about how impressive this little piece of software really is--the things they don't need to worry about because this software is chugging along, doing its job, silently recovering from connectivity issues, database maintenance, etc without any real issue or maintenance.
It's a little bit of a tragic irony that the better a job you do, the less likely it is to be noticed. (:
May be you need to have "scheduled downtime" when your undergirding system is down for "maintenance" and they will notice! [Half joking... Probably not possible but better to have scheduled maintenance than have to do firefighting under extreme time pressure]
Unfortunately, in this profession we are being lead by managers that do not longer have deep knowledge of how to build good software systems. They can't evaluate contributions in code, so they resort to evaluate participation, and popularity.
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.
Couldn’t agree more (but frustratingly due to HN’ shitty mobile experience i downvoted this, sorry!)
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.
I had to mention this in an early startup, when I did some firefighting, and the biz people were praising that. I said I wanted to set a culture in which engineering was rewarded for making things just happen and work, not for firefighting.
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.)
> (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 company was founded by an ideas guy (not technical) and the first hire was the (technical) CTO. The CTO set the initial excellent engineering culture. The way I saw it, the founder had no choice but to defer to the engineering team in the beginning because without them there was no future. However, once we started bringing in revenue, the pressure and interference from the CEO started to mount until the CTO essentially got tired of it and moved on. The CEO wasn't even a terrible person, but had trouble dealing with pushback (and I've chatted with him after and he admits he was wrong - he was also in his early 20s during all of this).
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.
As long as quietly making stuff pays off, sure.
If I get a bigger paycheck just from being known by the higher ups I'll go for the popularity contest. People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world. So yeah, popularity contest and doing as little work as possible it is.
> People work to feed themselves and their families after all and considering how unethical big tech is, I dont think anything u work on could do anything to better the world.
A little hyperbolic. Members of my family have found great utility in accessibility improvements, language translation, video calling, navigation assistance, etc.
This article resonated a lot with me - I have a 25+ year career and until my most recent role I'd usually switch companies every 2 years.
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.
As a fellow infrastructure and tooling engineer with a long tenure on one team: this tracks.
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.
I cannot agree more. That’s also why personally I strongly prefer to work on infra rather than product teams. You get so much insulation from random whims of the leadership or PMs and you get simply pursue technical excellence. I don’t want to contribute to “visible ‘wins’ of a product launch” at all. I’m happy that I currently work at a medium-sized company (head count between 1k and 10k) that has been around for 30+ years and my work involves quietly improving the infra used by other teams.
I am not criticizing the author or his opinion in any way. But what he didn’t emphasize enough that yes he might ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer. But he can only do so because he is a staff software engineer.
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.
> But he can only do so because he is a staff software engineer.
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 would say it's worked out pretty well for me at least given my career trajectory! Feel free to draw your own conclusions from my resume (it's on my about page).
I think you are conflating "exec attention" with "important projects": these are very much not the same thing.
Fair point. So if you are saying “get on important projects” is the lever, we are in complete agreement.
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
Can confirm. I've worked on infra teams for decades, at companies from 80-80,000 people, and I don't think I've _ever_ had a PM on a project I worked on.
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.
An observation here that wasn't quite made but in my opinion is supported by the narrative.
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.
There is another risk: you run for 2 years and prevent a major problem that would bite the company in year 3 or 4. However because the problem never happened nobody knows how much you saved everyone and so you don't replace all that capital you used up.
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.
I guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented.
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 guess it takes a visionary management to recognize the value of disasters that were prevented.
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.
Management knows in the abstract. However they also know the value of awards and shipping - both of which can be in conflict. They do not know how to resolve this conflict.
Everyone says the thing they're working on is critically important. Who's right?
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.
Who is right is the wrong question here (not that your point is wrong - it is correct in some situations but not the one I'm talking about). This is a case where the features we need for the release were planned in advance and management signed off on them - by definition getting the feature done is right (even if it turns out customers don't want it, at this point we have committed as a company). However there are always a few bugs that become last minute stop ship issues that should have been prevented long ago.
I forget the exact details, but we had a bug that prevented logging in to the app for a large subset of users.
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.
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.
You are only left alone if your cathedrals generate enough value while being ignored. The post is about a tools team, so long as the tools work and nobody comes selling a "cheaper tool that solves everything" management doesn't care and you get to work. However if you tools start causing problems for the engineers who use them and the complain to management you are in trouble. If someone else comes along with a "cheaper tool that solves everything" you are in trouble (such tool may or may not be cheaper/better, the point is they can sell management on the idea they are - you didn't successfully defend yours)
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)
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.
Google is an unusual environment for internal tools. A lot of companies will build things, and then starve them of funding and engineers, as they aren't part of any of the top company priorities.
This often means building tools comes with a penalty. People will keep reaching out to you for help, because there is no one else.
Priorities only become priorities because people fought for them to become priorities.
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.
> Well, no, the priorities are often whatever the CEO thinks they are right now...
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.
------------
The amount of learned helplessness on HN is counterproductive for anyone hoping to maintain a career over the long term.
Have you ever worked under a CEO that has been arrested?
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.
> Have you ever worked under a CEO that has been arrested
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.
Poor leadership does exist and fairly common, but assuming that poor leadership is the default is a cop-out and a bad mindset to have if you want to keep working in any industry, and is oftentimes used as a crutch.
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.
This completely matches my experience as an infra principal engineer in a coding archetype at another big company. I do impactful and good technical work and always try to defer credit to those “under” me even if it was my idea they are implementing. As long as my manager knows it was my idea everything works out fine.
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.
>> instead of execs telling us “you should do X”, we figure out what we think will have the most impact to our customers and work on building those features and tools
What do you mean? The quoted text is the exact strategy I always use.
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.
I think this is the most efficient approach. Decisions should be made at the lowest possible level of the org chart.
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.
In my experience (I make tools for the network and security guys): that's why you don't propose only one thing. We often have one new project every year, we propose multiple ways to go about it, the leadership ask us to explore 2-3 solutions, we come back with data and propose our preferred solution, the leadership say 'ok' (after a very technical two-hour meeting) and propose minor alterations (or sometimes they want to alter our database design to make it 'closer' to the user experience...)
This can still be okay - but you have to be correct in a way that the company values. This of course needs to be without doing something against the rest of the company - either legally or sabotaging some other product are both out. Values is most commonly money, but there are other things the company values at times..
More often than not, things don't turn out too well if engineers decide what to build without tight steering from customers and/or upper management. This is exactly what it sounds like here. Tech for the purpose of tech. I understand this is HN and we have a pro-engineering bias here, at the same time, engineers don't tend to be the greatest strategists.
Customers and management should always be part of the loop. This is reflected in the original quote and my comment.
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.
I get the sense that Lalit wants to do the work and get paid while avoiding the career meta game. The appeal of that is understandable, but having been in this situation in the past, it's not all its cracked up to be.
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.
It's not that I want to avoid the career metagame (I would argue I haven't so far) but that the career metagame is different depending on your environment.
I know this is off topic but if you ever have the inclination to write about it, I would be really interested in reading about any books, people, experiences, professional lessons learned, etc. that have been helpful to you on progressing along a non-spotlight technical focused engineering path.
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.
> if you ever have the inclination to write about it
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.
This - I've been very honest with my manager that I won't play "the game" in this organisation - I don't really have to, there is plenty for staff engineers to tackle to have a long career without the yoke of management.
> Would a PM be responsible for this sort of broader thinking in a more typical team?
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!
It’s a little snarky and cynical but I’ve found little use for product managers in infra and devx teams because they typically don’t have the technical background to have relevant product vision and anyone that can make L7+ as an engineer on this sort of team should be able to figure out what the product should be.
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.
Great post. Also a reminder that there isn't one career path for everyone.
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.
Meh. Good article but not sure it's globally relevant.
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.
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.
I find this infra perspective so fascinating, as a career-long product platform engineer and solidly staff+. I don't argue that sean's writing (which is amazing) is a little overly mercenary in framing, but I'll pick a few choice sections I don't agree with here too. tldr I think the "product cares about speed; infra cares about leverage" staff engineer archetype is a false dichotomy we shouldn't encourage.
"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!
Firstly, thanks for the thoughtful comments across the post. Really happy you found it insightful!
> 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!
It's easy to write that blogpost when you are in a position of a lot of privilege, in arguably the best software engineering company in the world, and got where you are surely for your competence, but also a high degree of luck.
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.
My goal with this post was not to claim this is a universal template to success for everyone but simply sharing an approach that worked for me.
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.
It is a large amount of luck, obviously. You didn't hard-work your way out of brain damage at birth. You didn't hard-work your way into your geographic location which gave you access to the resources that lead you to where you are, which are unavailable most places in the world. You didn't hard-work your way out of avoiding a draft for a war where you got killed at age 18.
Sure, if a butterfly flew past one of our parents on the day of our conception, causing them to spend a second glancing at it, then they may have had sex slightly differently that night and we wouldn't exist. We're all lottery winners in a billion different ways.
What is the practical application of bringing that to mind when considering what actions to take for career advancement?
> It’s not luck. To assume so, let alone say so, is uninformed and quite rude.
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?
There are staff level jobs like that in every company. However they are hard to get into. You have to prove yourself constantly and for long enough that the executives trust they can leave you alone and you will solve problems. You here means your team, as a staff engineer you likely have a lot of more junior engineers working under you.
My brother had an internship in a medium-sized company, and after 6 months, a new product (that he was hired for basically) and 3 new internal tools (including one for reading data trace, which, after reading this, is quite a propos), he was hired as a staff engineer.
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.
I worked closely with a few during my career in a few companies. It is a retirement plan of people who neither can nor want to perform after they "put in time". These days as someone who gets to give my couple of cents to folks in the upper echelons of promising companies I tell the newly minted CTOs to either not hire them or if they are already hired, fire them.
Staff engineer and above = 45 year old soccer player bench warmer getting the pay 22 year old striker.
> I read it as saying you should fire someone because of their age. Not stupid, malicious.
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.
> So you suggest firing people based on their title alone? Sounds pretty damn stupid.
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.
Correct. To get to the staff engineer level you probably spent at least 10 years in the industry making gobs of money. You did save some, right? Right?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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...
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
"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.
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.
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.
https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
And that's ignoring the inherent inequality of birthright.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
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
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.
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.
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: 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.
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.
People are people.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
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.
"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.