[drewcrawford]

Personally I think we (engineers) made this bed ourselves. I mean there are a few possibilities: one is that a CEO says their tech team is not so great. And of course behind that door lies Dilbert.

Another is that the CEO says nothing about the engineering team itself at all, and it's all product, product, product. On that path lies Apple, and I have heard many say (myself included) that we would not work somewhere where engineers are rarely seen and never heard. Although, obviously some smart people do.

And when CEOs give praise to the teams, they get flack like this.

So I mean, what do you want them to say? This is hacker culture; don't whine, submit a patch. If you think they are better ideas, go work at DilbertCorp, or for Apple. Or, if you think there is some other path, describe for us what it is. Or better yet, go start a company that behaves that way.

But the way I see it, CEOs like this are just following principles that we ourselves have asked for: we want to be taken seriously, we want to make decisions, we want to sit at the executive table, we want to be perceived as an integral role that uniquely contributes to the success of the venture. Saying "our tech team is really great" is a direct consequence of those principles.

[jtbigwoo]

Good point. On top of that, pretty much every CEO in every industry says some variation of the following:

"Our true strength is our team. They're the best and most talented group of programmers/butchers/bakers/candlestick makers ever assembled by mankind."

There's really no downside for the CEO to saying this. If he doesn't say those things it seems like he's trying to steal all the credit.

[ArekDymalski]

Your interpretation is really nice, but I'm afraid it isn't true for many companies. IMHO "we've got top talent" is nowadays just another form of marketing bullshit that replaced "we are the leader" or "we are number 1" phrases which were mindlessly repeated by everybody for last 30 yrs. And in fact "we've got the smartest people" is even much worse because companies don't (and never will) have any metric to support this claim. It's just like yelling "we are the best". Pointless and kind of pathetic.

[baq]

also, the contrary is also kind of true - they say that no matter what they tell you, it's a people problem.

[tsmith]

I don't think the point is so much around what the CEO says about the engineering team publicly. It's one thing to proclaim that your engineers are the smartest in the world/industry/space; it's a completely different thing to expect them to work miracles.

The toplevel post is a warning to not drink your own kool-aid when making executive decisions about what your team can and should accomplish; e.g. your team may be extremely smart and talented, but so are the teams of everyone else, therefore don't think your team will be able to accomplish miracles.

Pretty sound advice.

[6d0debc071]

I think the OP was less about the team getting praise and more about the team being expected to solve hard problems with silly constraints. Why can't we be experts without the need for mythical estimations or our abilities?

But how about "Our team is competent?" "Our team are subject specialists." "Our team are pretty good." ?

...

And then I find myself wondering, how much domain knowledge do you need to identify a hard problem. Are founders just bad at estimating difficulty?

[l0gicpath]

It doesn't have to be all black and white.

Over praising your tech talents, saying nothing about them or saying something that isn't particularly good in nature are just all extremes.

It's really not a two side of a single coin, either this or that.. No, it's more of a spectrum.

Humility has never demoted a person nor has it affected their odds of succeeding in their endeavor. I think the real issue at hand here is the line of thoughts that "My company just got itself a VC round, I must be the BEST".

Well, maybe they are good, maybe they are even really good. But by all means with 7 billion humans on this planet, I'm pretty sure someone else is better out there.