[didibus]

> Profit at any cost

Yes, but I think you're overlooking a hugely important factor in all this...

You boss is just some average manager that very often could even be below average.

Your boss is under their own pressure to perform and most of them will similarly struggle because they're not that good.

Most workers at any roles are just average by definition. And the higher up you go, the more timing and luck plays a role, and the less good meritocracy is at filtering people. As luck becomes a bigger factor up the management chain, leaders tend even more towards being average at their job.

Even founders, they often have never done this before, leading a fast growing company is all new to them and they learn as they go.

What makes a good founder is the guts to be one, and than having the luck of timing and right idea. Plus being able to sell a narrative.

What I mean by that is, they'll want to optimize profits, that's literally the charter of any company, and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.

Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.

It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

[no_wizard]

>Think about it, it's super easy to, as a manager, do nothing but tell people to work harder, do better, and ask why this isn't done, why this isn't good, etc. This is what being bad at leading a profit maximizing company looks like.

I agree with this 100%. I may add a tidbit here simply because I'm thinking about it. There is a real agency problem in leadership.

I've been a staff engineer[0] for just over half a decade now. I've noticed, particularly in the last few years, there's been more dustups over executive[1] authority of the role. Traditionally, what I've experienced is having latitude to observe, identify, and approach engineering problems that affect multiple teams or systems, for example. I've contributed a great deal to engineering strategy, particularly as it relates to whatever problem domain I am embedded in. Its about helping teams meet their immediate sprint goals, not working on strategy or making sure upcoming work for teams is unblocked by doing platform work etc.

The only thing I can surmise about this shift is that engineering managers (and really managers going up the chain) don't want to feel challenged by a "non manager". They didn't like that we didn't have a usual reporting structure that other ICs do (we all rolled up the same senior director or VP rather than an EM) and previously had similar stature that of a director.

[0]: for a general sense of what this entails, see this excellent website: https://staffeng.com

[1]: As in having the power to put plans and/or actions into effect

[Sohcahtoa82]

> But optimizing for profit often aligns with engineering well being, a robust, productive team, an environment conductive to innovation and quality with high velocity, etc. Those are good both for the employed engineers and profit.

True for a tech company startup, almost absolutely false for a well-established company, especially a non-tech one.

[didibus]

I admit for a non-tech company I do not know, that's a blind spot for me.

I'd want to assume that it would be the same except that they are even less likely to know it's good for their profit and therefore to not properly invest in it.

For well established tech companies, my experience is that still aligns with maximizing profit, but two things happen:

The company has so much buffer to be inneficient, they can also brute force their way into new territories or markets. They can hire more, they can contract out, they can buy up other companies, they have existing leverage from their current customers or other products, etc.

They are more focused on reducing cost than growth. They turn their current tools and products to "maintenance mode", and that requires less excellence to achieve and is more mundane work, sometimes all it takes is just more hands on it or people willing to work off-hours or long hours to get the ticket queue down to 0, which means running it like a sweat shop can meet their needs.

[dominotw]

luck is probabilistic after being selected for sucking up.

[stuffn]

> and as an employee you should also be focused on that as your goal.

Insofar as my paycheck continually rises at a rate substantially greater than inflation. Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business. A company who is not willing to pay premium with substantial raises gets Jiffy Lube service. LLMs have been amazing for this if you're decent at prompt "engineering" and can get it to make code that looks reasonable.

To paraphrase the documentary Office Space, "If I work extra hard and innotech sells 10 more widgets I don't get a dime". Useless RSOs don't count. If I work 60 hours a week to ship $PRODUCT and sales gets a bonus and box seats to a lakers game, and I get to "keep my job" I have lost. Employees are amazing at losing. The entire pay structure, pyramid shaped rank distribution, and taxes are designed to keep you as close to broke as possible. There's no real reason the drooler class should get paid massive salaries (sales, executives) but they do because droolers display traits commensurate to the dark triad.

> Often if you can't get that, it's not so much because of maximizing profit, but that your boss just isn't good.

You'd be wise to read 48 Laws of Power, which perfectly describes the purpose for people becoming bosses. It's a selfish calculus for sociopaths of which you cannot be a "leader" without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this.

> It's much harder to motivate people to work their hardest, to properly prioritize and make the hard trade off to focus the resources on the best ROI, to actually unblock blockers, to mentor and put processes that actually help quality go up and velocity go up. Etc.

Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest". If the relationship between work and pay is linear (or sub-linear in the case of unpaid overtime in which case you should work even less) you should work as little as necessary to fit that curve. In this way, you can maximize the utility of your free time to produce non-linear gain.

[didibus]

> Otherwise, I couldn't honestly give two shits about how well the company is doing. An employee should run themselves as a business.

They pay you to increase their profit. As you see yourself running a business, it's important to understand what your customers actually care to pay for.

If you want your pay to go up, they need to see the impact you can make or are making to their profit.

A lot of engineers think they are paid to work through tasks assigned to them and what not, or to increase code quality, or to add a feature to the app, or backend, etc. As they focus on that, they can find themselves really surprised when they're told they aren't performing or are going to be let go. "I did everything you asked me?" Yes, but none of that was what they were interested in. To them it felt like they had to step in and find things for you to do otherwise you'd be sitting idle while they pay for nothing, which is work they had to do that they'd had rather not have too.

What they actually want you to do, is immediately begin understanding what makes them money, immediately start engaging with ideas to maximize that, and immediately start focusing on how the tasks you pick up should be done in order to maximize the impact to their bottom line, by figuring out if it's the right thing or not, if it's worth doing it well or doing it quickly, etc.

> Under no circumstance should someone who is paid based on hours-in-seat ever "work their hardest".

I'm not fully going to disagree here, but most engineers are not paid for "hours-in-seat" at least in big tech. They're salaried, not hourly wage workers.

And what you say is true if you consider "working hard" to be the same as "pretending to work a lot of hours."

Putting in lots of hours is actually quite easy, if at the sacrifice of your personal time, but anybody can do it.

Actual hard work though is often quite engaging, fun, and rewarding. Many engineers look for opportunities to work on hard problems for example.

It is very difficult to create an environment that makes people work hard. Meaning, having them truly tackle innovation, truly raise efficiency, truly prioritized on what matters, truly in the loop of what they need to solve for, truly assigned to what they are best at, etc.

It is very easy to create an environment that makes people work longer hours or weekends, but on a bunch of easy irrelevant things and with procrastination throughout.

> without having some amount of dark triad traits intrinsic to your personality. The best leaders are, in fact, tyrants. You need only to look at the greatest companies in history and their leaders to realize this

That you must be willing to take risk, believe you are the best, willing to play dirty, willing to stomp on others, and so on, yes for sure to some extent.

But out of all those with some of that, most of them are average or below average leaders even with respect to being a tyrant and everything else required.

Sometimes applying a bit of pressure, dangling a carrot, a bit of a threat, it does motivate people to put on more effort and try harder and it does extract more value out of them (at no added cost).

And a good manager will do that, and you should expect it. But going back to your business analogy, customers do the same. They complain, they want more for less, they threaten to go to your competitor, etc.

But this part is the easiest one to do. And because it's so easy, you'll find it's what most managers do to try and be a "good manager". That makes it average at best.

Beyond that, a really good manager will do everything else I mentioned.

And so, my point remains, if all your manager is doing is just telling you why you're not better and things aren't done and to try harder, they're a bad manager, as that's just going to be what the average or below average manager will do, since it's literally the easiest thing to do as a manager.