<story><title>Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/three-paths-in-the-tech-industry-founder-executive-or-employee/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sidlls</author><text>I have a different (admittedly controversial) take, having been on the &amp;quot;tech ladder&amp;quot; for some time now (as a Senior SWE and Lead Engineer): most individual contributors overestimate how much value they actually provide, especially in the Bay Area. That isn&amp;#x27;t to say we&amp;#x27;re not under-appreciated and under-compensated (we are both). But realistically much of the time work we do is easily done by literally thousands of other people just as well. The same just isn&amp;#x27;t true of product development, sales and marketing. Any one of those three teams, staffed well, will account for well more than the value of the entire engineering organization.&lt;p&gt;Mostly this is a self-inflicted problem. Especially in the Bay Area, where developers tend to value CS ability signaling rather than the ability to work well with product teams and the ability to engage in practical engineering.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s too much focus by developers on shallow things, like fad-following the latest frameworks, on pseudo-intellectualism or technology-purism (e.g. &amp;quot;coding is doing math&amp;quot;, code &amp;quot;elegance&amp;quot;, whether&amp;#x2F;how FP is just so much better than anything else, etc.), and trivia like programming language choice.</text></item><item><author>nichochar</author><text>This is rather true in practice, but I find it tremendously depressing.&lt;p&gt;I have found that the executive path is actually the one that most of the scumbags take, it is the one that attracts the most people, and those people are usually not likable, they&amp;#x27;re salespeople that sell themselves all day.&lt;p&gt;The third group, the one that actually creates value, is accurately represented as not as successful both in terms of money and prestige. I think this is a damn shame, and we should be striving to stop that.
This is a good painting of how bad things are today, but instead of &amp;quot;tricks to game the system&amp;quot; i wish it layed out a path of how to build an industry that doesn&amp;#x27;t attract all those ambitious selfish (executives) people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kartan</author><text>&amp;gt; The same just isn&amp;#x27;t true of product development, sales and marketing. Any one of those three teams, staffed well, will account for well more than the value of the entire engineering organization.&lt;p&gt;Why is it not true for them? Sales are not magic, it is a profession that can be learned. I have seen a lot of companies stating how important is sales, and how unique they are. It can&amp;#x27;t be true for all companies. It is like everyone thinking that they are above average, it is just not possible.&lt;p&gt;If your product is software, literally it is impossible that sales add more value than the engineering organization that builds the product. Without engineering organization, you don&amp;#x27;t have anything to sell. Without sales and marketing, you will also have a hard time. It is collaboration what brings success.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; There&amp;#x27;s too much focus by developers on shallow things, like fad-following the latest frameworks, on pseudo-intellectualism or technology-purism&lt;p&gt;This is usually a problem with recruiting. You get what you pay for. If your interviews are about technical expertise and you ignore basic persona-values evaluation and fit to build valuable features, you get that. And it jeopardizes the viability of a company. You need some really good experts, but you don&amp;#x27;t need everyone to be one.</text></comment>
<story><title>Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/three-paths-in-the-tech-industry-founder-executive-or-employee/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sidlls</author><text>I have a different (admittedly controversial) take, having been on the &amp;quot;tech ladder&amp;quot; for some time now (as a Senior SWE and Lead Engineer): most individual contributors overestimate how much value they actually provide, especially in the Bay Area. That isn&amp;#x27;t to say we&amp;#x27;re not under-appreciated and under-compensated (we are both). But realistically much of the time work we do is easily done by literally thousands of other people just as well. The same just isn&amp;#x27;t true of product development, sales and marketing. Any one of those three teams, staffed well, will account for well more than the value of the entire engineering organization.&lt;p&gt;Mostly this is a self-inflicted problem. Especially in the Bay Area, where developers tend to value CS ability signaling rather than the ability to work well with product teams and the ability to engage in practical engineering.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s too much focus by developers on shallow things, like fad-following the latest frameworks, on pseudo-intellectualism or technology-purism (e.g. &amp;quot;coding is doing math&amp;quot;, code &amp;quot;elegance&amp;quot;, whether&amp;#x2F;how FP is just so much better than anything else, etc.), and trivia like programming language choice.</text></item><item><author>nichochar</author><text>This is rather true in practice, but I find it tremendously depressing.&lt;p&gt;I have found that the executive path is actually the one that most of the scumbags take, it is the one that attracts the most people, and those people are usually not likable, they&amp;#x27;re salespeople that sell themselves all day.&lt;p&gt;The third group, the one that actually creates value, is accurately represented as not as successful both in terms of money and prestige. I think this is a damn shame, and we should be striving to stop that.
This is a good painting of how bad things are today, but instead of &amp;quot;tricks to game the system&amp;quot; i wish it layed out a path of how to build an industry that doesn&amp;#x27;t attract all those ambitious selfish (executives) people.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mo1ok</author><text>I agree and both disagree. I&amp;#x27;m working right now for a client that is a large corporation that didn&amp;#x27;t do any of those &amp;quot;fad&amp;quot; things - and it is _tremendously_ costly.&lt;p&gt;For example, one team has spent several weeks and thousands of dollars to get another team&amp;#x27;s SOAP integration working correctly, when it would have taken five minutes in REST.&lt;p&gt;The codebase did not follow a &amp;quot;elegant&amp;quot; practice and is an absolute spaghetti mess. Things that should take 30 minutes take one week and this add tremendously to personnel cost.&lt;p&gt;I agree though that working together is tremendously undervalued. A decently smart person can be taught anything (which is part of the replacability problem you mentioned), but how to not be an entitled ass is nearly impossible to teach in a workplace environment.</text></comment>