[byoung2]

I just left my job a few months ago because I wasn't happy. These responses apply to that job.

1. The money was good ($175k as director of engineering in Los Angeles) and the hours were 9-5.

2. I wish I had more autonomy to manage my team. Although I was director, engineering was basically under the control of product and upper management. Unfortunately they knew nothing about how engineering works.

3. A chance to define a new role, possibly R&D or skunk works, so I could contribute but not be bound by the traditional management hierarchy.

4. Ultimately nothing, since he was the problem. He is CEO of a tech company but he can't even plug in a thumb drive. He has said in the past he views engineering as "black magic" because he doesn't understand it.

[highsea]

This sounds really familiar.

In my experience the CEO/Founder can be classified as either of two types:

1) Great sales guy but has no deep concept of the technology his product is based on and other related aspects such as technical debt. Can be really hard to explain why something is more complicated than it looks to him, etc.

2) Great technical guy who can't sell. If you're not doing something conceptually new it can be difficult to acquire customers if your selling is weak.

I wonder if any one has encountered the unicorn CEO/Founder who's great at both of these things?

[byoung2]

Either of those would be preferable to what our company had, which was 3) Poor sales guy with no concept of technology. Even the engineers were were begging for basic marketing concepts like focus groups, A/B testing, user personas, etc. We actually got in trouble for wasting time thinking about marketing instead of doing our jobs.

[meric]

>> Although I was director, engineering was basically under the control of product and upper management.

IMO if you're the lead of the engineering organisation then you have the responsibility to convince your CEO when you feel you're right. As director it comes with a responsibility to do some politicking.

[byoung2]

This company was past the point of no return as far as convincing goes. The founding CTO quit for the same reasons. We built an amazing product that nobody wanted. The tech was impressive, but customers don't see the tech, they see (or don't see) how it helps them solve a problem. When the sales didn't come in, the investors wanted answers, and the CEO blamed tech for building a bad product when really it was lack of product market fit. The founding CTO tried to convince the CEO that it was bad marketing and a flawed product vision that was to blame, to no avail. When he quit, I was promoted to director of engineering, but I didn't have any more success convincing them. Engineering was buried under a boatload of feature requests that sales anecdotally heard customers wanted.

[meric]

Sounds like a difficult job. I'm happy for you to be out of it now.