You have to know how tech companies work

Summary

There are lots of different ways to be a software engineer. You can grind out code for twelve hours a day to make the world a better place. You can focus on glue work: process-based work that makes everyone around you more successful. You can join the conversation with your product manager and designer colleagues to influence what gets built, not just how it gets built. You can climb the ladder to staff engineer and above, or you can take it easy and focus on your hobbies. But whichever of these you choose, you have to know how tech companies work. I want to credit Alex Wennerberg for drawing out this point in our recent discussion. Wennerberg thinks I spend too much time writing about the realpolitik of tech companies, and not enough time writing about value: in his words, the delivery of software “that people want and like”. The whole point of working in tech is to produce value, after all. To me, this is like saying that the point of cars is to help you reach goals you care about: driving to the grocery store to get food, say, or to pick up your partner for a date. That’s true! Some goals you can achieve with cars are better than others. For instance, driving to your job at the Torment Nexus is much worse than driving to your volunteer position at the soup kitchen. But whatever you want to do, you have to know how to drive the car. Let’s walk through some examples. Suppose you’re an ambitious software engineer who wants to climb the ranks in your company. You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success. You should therefore neglect piece-work that isn’t part of projects you’re leading, grind like a demon on those projects to make sure they succeed, and pay a lot of attention to how you’re communicating those projects up to your management chain. S...