>After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.
That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they're competent.
Hiring the right people is competence when it comes to corporate leadership. That's pretty much the only lever they have. Sure they make a few strategic decisions, but for the most part they are just reviewing and signing off on things that get bubbled up.
I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser. It's also not helped by the fact that management skill has a low floor, since it's so hard to assess, thus everyone has had bad managers and they really make your life miserable. But at the upper end of management skill with large org sizes, the problem of debugging orgs and understanding the outputs of systems of people is way harder than software due to the human element. Even just getting accurate information and assessments is non-trivial given the underlying incentives and politics. In this type of environment, competence looks completely different from how a craftsperson thinks about it.
There are a lot of ways in which companies can succeed simply by their timing, or a couple incredibly lucky early hires, or first mover advantage in a growing space, or the right VCs -- not because of good leadership but in spite of it. Leaders take credit regardless.
Often this is why technical folks deride soft skills. Folks that tout them sound like my friend who's "figured out slot machines." My response: "Dude, that's awesome!" I'm not about to burst his bubble on the random, ambivalent jitter of the universe. We all need our delusions, who am I to take his?
There are also a lot of ways a company could fail due to randomness. In fact, many more failure modes than success modes. Startup success definitely includes some luck, but luck alone does not define success. Clubhouse is a great example of that. Lucky, but never found a retention strategy and wasn’t managed well enough to adapt.
Startup success requires skill and countless hours of hard work, period, and the leaders who are successful rarely look the same. It also requires some luck, but you need both.
I also used to deride soft skills. I learned, over time, that they’re extremely valuable, and deriding them doesn’t take away their power.
I think nearly every engineer would be well served by attending a good conflict resolution and “how to influence people” course. My 21-year-old self would smack me for saying that, but I’ve learned things since then.
I agree: Conflict resolution, public speaking, salesmanship -- they're all valuable. They make for better people in this world.
When it comes to how these traits translate to the success of leaders or companies? I have no idea. I'd guess causation there is noisy. I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.
In a modern secularized world corporate leaders of large companies seem to take on the role of psuedo-religious figureheads that grant absolution and purpose in the face of the unknown and rob workers blind in return. Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense. But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?
It's all just soft skills though -- that's the differentiator, the secret sauce, what makes great leaders. So soft. So skilled. /s
> Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.
Its simple because only few people find it condescending or nonsense. Most people I know either ignore it without judgement or find it valuable at work.
Ignoring soft skills or social graces work fine in some privileged roles where hard skills have some great premium. As one can see in case of top chefs, doctors, movie stars, sports people, high skill engineers etc.
For others listening to corporate leaders sermons is just way of life not some unbearable atrocity.
>For others listening to corporate leaders sermons is just way of life not some unbearable atrocity.
Pretty sorry state of affairs, correct? Implicate in all this talk of soft skills is the fact that it can also a force for manipulation of the holocaust league.
What? Please clarify, because at first glance it sounds like you’re making an extremely racially charged analogy?
And no, it isn’t necessarily a sorry state of affairs; having to sit through a talk you’re uninterested in is hardly a terrible price to pay as compared to most other labor.
>What? Please clarify, because at first glance it sounds like you’re making an extremely racially charged analogy?
in a manner speaking, yes it's a radically charged analogy, I'm making.
>And no, it isn’t necessarily a sorry state of affairs; having to sit through a talk you’re uninterested in is hardly a terrible price to pay as compared to most other labor.
There's a collective price that we all pay when we regard all those sermons to be just a simple nuisance. A familiar quote will put it in a better perspective than I can: "All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." Of course I agree that if you're the only one who opposes the sermon, you risk your livelihood.
> I bet leaders get a lot of mileage out of bullshit like playing surreptitious games for social capital, managing risk in decision making by offloading it and/or shifting blame, carefully crafting turn-of-phrase to manipulate people against their own self-interest -- especially in favor of a compensation structure that has senior leadership making 300:1 versus their lowest paid workers.
That would be a bad bet. There are a few leaders that are like this and build short-term successful companies, and there are fewer yet that are like this and are able to build long-term successful ones. There will always be sociopaths who are master manipulators, but it isn’t limited to leadership. I know plenty of engineers who get hired at multiple roles illegally and outsource their jobs to fiverr, and if they get caught they simply quit before or after a PIP and get a new gig.
The vast majority of leaders really do care, and these stories and assumptions do those leaders a disservice, because good leadership/management takes real effort, time, and hard work. Manipulation quickly loses you the trust of your team and causes them to leave, hurting your cause.
> Like, why in the hell do we need company values? Never understood why workers collectively put up with that patronizing, condescending nonsense.
Retention. If you can find a set of people who share a common set of values, they are easier to retain because everyone is aligned on where we need to get and how we want to get there.
Alignment is extremely important for success. A founder can force alignment for a while, but the whole company is far better off if alignment occurs due to intrinsic belief systems.
> But I guess they're there for some poor shmuck that doesn't know himself otherwise and will warp his identity to them and put in 15 extra hours per week for the privilege. You gotta feel for his wife and kids though, don't you?
That’s not the point of having values. When we came up with them for Tinfoil, they came from the team and we debated and reviewed them annually, and changed them as needed.
The point was to make sure we are on the same page when it comes to hiring, and it also helped in two other ways:
1) Making hiring more objective. No more “I didn’t think she fit our culture” nonsense. Now you had to point to specific examples which were antithetical to our values. If we didn’t get to see a certain one, it told us what to ask next.
2) Making it easier for peers to managers to call out problems. If someone was out of line, or suggesting something that flew in the face of a value we’d agreed upon, anyone was enabled to politely point out that was against our values. The rule in how to respond to that was a polite thank you for pointing it out, and we never really ran into issues with it.
What I found fascinating was that by having this set of values, engineers and others were actually more likely to point out a manager’s or exec’s issue, and did so. When they did, they were almost always right, and things got adjusted.
But what I found exceptionally surprising was how much it helped engineers talk to each other in the office. When you have a common set of beliefs and things you want to do to embody, it’s much easier to maintain alignment.
Also, we were upfront about these before the offer; nobody had to join, and all of our values were argumentative. That is, they were active opinions that could trivially be disagreed with and cogent arguments could be made against them. That was ok! This was what we wanted to do.
An example of a bad value: innovation. Literally nobody wants to not be innovative. Terrible value, gets nothing across.
An example of a good value: use the right tool for the job. We strongly believed in being polyglots and using the right tool for the job, rather than building with what we already knew (unless that was the right tool). Plenty of companies make the argument that we are all Python because then we all speak the same language and things are faster to build. That’s a legitimate argument, neither is right or wrong; but we picked the former. If you preferred the latter, there are plenty of places to work that fit better!
It's a terrible bet. But it's the direction American corporate leadership has overwhelmingly been heading for the past couple decades [1] [2].
I get the sense you've had the good fortune to run and work in smaller startups in The Bay Area that have been unprecedentedly democratic in the scheme of human enterprise. I'm guessing you've also had the good fortune to do that during a 3 decade span of falling interest rates that drove money into VC and startups in a similarly unprecedented fashion. Everyone plays nice when they're eating good.
I studied social sciences / economics and it gave me a lot of perspective when I went to SF for tech work. The history of American labor is one of asymmetrical power and blood. This isn't a notion we've disabused ourselves of and grown beyond. Between the early 1800s and early 1900s the US saw decades of terrorism against workers by corporate leaders. Look into Labor Wars [3], The Pullman Strike [4], The Battle of Blair Mountain [5], The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire [6]. After labor laws cemented and wars settled, corporate leaders moved towards globalization to start the process all over again in other countries and hollowed out middle America to do so.
Historically, the defining traits of American corporate leadership are amorality and self-pursuit. Startups have this silly habit of sitting around to LARP as altruists that might, maybe stumble into billions of dollars. Like if they talk about company values, truisms, and team building enough it changes gravity. Who is getting paid what? That's all that matters. If you're making a half a percent over four years as the 5th hire at a startup, you're getting screwed unless your founder is the second coming of Jesus Christ himself. I think workers and the general public are waking up to this and getting tired of lip service and signaling from leaders that play altruist or cut throat as they see fit.
I'm using the pronoun 'you' in that last paragraph generally, more as in the pronoun 'one.' I'm not specifically berating you. I'm glad you exist and I appreciate you sharing your experience and talking with me! It was a rewarding discussion. All the best.
> If you're an altruist, prove it. Make less than 200k a year, including stock grants (with appreciation factored in).
I did, with the exception of when the sale happened. For the first three years, I paid myself $30k. For the next two, $50k. For the next one, $70k. For the next one, $90k. Only in the last two years did I pay myself $160k.
When we sold, I gave up over half my RSUs and distributed them across the engineering team. I tried to give them all up (because I was well covered by the cash portion of the sale) but the acquirer wouldn't let me, since they wanted me to be incentivized to stay.
My cofounder gave up none of hers, despite being equal partners with me.
I suspect most of my team would work for me again, whereas the same is definitely not true of my cofounder.
Being cutthroat works short-term, and you may win big. But you get one shot at that, usually, with only a few "star-studded" exceptions (Adam Neumann, for example).
Being "altruistic" (which is not the word I'd use; I'd use "a decent human being who understands how negotiation works and what a BATNA is") works long-term.
You sir sound like someone who is in that upper management realm. People ARE hard.
Something that has kind of annoyed me with upper management folks. At the companies I've worked for in the bay area, they all copy each other with the same management theories. They love to re-org and reshuffle to tree-shake out the fluff. They also love to drive towards exceedingly unrealistic goals because they expect pushback and want negotiating room. Now the latest craze seems to be that layoffs are good, even though I haven't heard one positive thing from anyone.
So I'm not sure these upper management folks, with their org debugging skills are actually doing things other than obfuscating the actual output of their orgs. If everyone is always moving around and assigned new goals, all it does is keep their org goal post actually undefined.
On the ground, sure, I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me. However, I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic. There has to be other strategies out there, or at least in our experiment driven culture, room to test out new ideas.
I'm actually middle management at a largish SV company, but I have also been leadership at smaller startups as well as the developer bootstrapping a 2-person SaaS app to 6-figure revenue, in addition to over a decade as a vanilla web developer working as an employee and freelancer.
What this experience has taught me is a visceral understanding of the leadership position (where you are responsible for the life and death of a company) and the IC position (where you are responsible for the nuts and bolts of shipping and operating internet-based software). In a small company it's easy to understand both sides. Once a company gets large the gulf is enormous.
I won't debate all your observations, other than to say that they are reductive and not reflective of the motivations and reasoning of executives I've known and worked with. To take one example:
> I'm always curious to understand why upper management folks are obsessed with keeping things chaotic
Chaos is not a goal (let alone obsession)— it is the merely the result of allowing significant individual agency among the creatives and craftspeople that do the work. The reason SV executives accept this is because reducing chaos requires a stronger command and control structure, but command and control structures don't work for building quality software products. Ultimately there are always minute details in the code and UX that end up being crucial and having outsized impact beyond where they are discovered. Most employees have your attitude of caring only about what is immediately asked of them by their supervisor ("I did what was expected, or more, and got rewarded for it, so doesn't really impact me"), but you actually need a healthy mix of people at the ground level who are intrinsically motivated by the overall quality of the product, and will work to resolve things with the global optimum in mind even if its "not their job". This is incredibly difficult work—often going unrecognized, or even posing a career risk, in some cultures—but absolutely necessary for any company that depends on customer satisfaction. The only way this can work is if the culture allows for good ideas to be floated from anywhere and acted on without being squashed by a rigid official-org-enforcing processes and bureaucracy.
>I think this bothers a lot of engineers who pride themselves on being able to understand complex things, and see "soft skills" as something ancillary and lesser.
IMHO, hiring (and retaining, letting go) is hard skill not a soft one.
Sure, but it's always both in large scale human endeavor. We're not talking about virtuosic performance that is more or less the direct result of talent + obsessive practice. That's why I'm equally uninterested in those who claim it's all luck as those who worship and hang on every word of prominent tech billionaires. I'm more interested in applying human agency than trying to come up with a theory for success—the latter is inevitably biased navel-gazing.
> After a while you merit your position by not running the company into the ground, but instead making it succeed.
Apparently whoever wrote this has not worked at a somewhat stable company. C-levels get a lot of undeserved respect when in fact usually they're protected by a very (understandably) conservative board. The board will choose inaction over action in almost every case unless the failure is so bad it's public. CEO types are not as fungible.
The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers who by-and-large are fungible "human capital" paid as little as the company can possibly get away with in the current market. This is the only industry where CEOs are held with reasonably high esteem. Perhaps it's because engineers think they will become one one day. Or maybe it's because tech CEOs are ascribed some sort of god-engineer status when the reality is most of them couldn't even pass their own 18 phase 5 day interview + colonoscopy their engineers do.
> The actual people who succeed by not running the company in the ground are the engineers
This typically just isn't close to true. If you are in a tech based business, having competent engineering is table stakes, but that's not enough by itself.
If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.
I am an engineer. Some of what I say is hubris about it. But I think its neither controversial nor false that engineers hold all of the power in a tech company. The skill gap is not a bijection. You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan. You cannot teach most executives to write even half competent software. Outside of the scrappiest start ups VPs of engineering I have reported to generally have been out of engineering for a long time. It's strange to ascribe such a title to someone so out of touch with their field.
I'm an engineer in a sales team, and my experience has shown that most engineers are terrible at selling... Not necessarily because they can't be taught to, but because they don't *want* to.
Also if marketing isn't bringing in prospects, sales isn't closing deals, the UI isn't designed right, the documentation sucks, HR hires idiots ... I guarantee you the company will fail, even if it has the best engineering team.
And of course good executives are also incredibly important, how many companies have been run into the ground because of bad management?
So yeah obviously for a tech company engineering has to be good, but so do all the other roles if you want long term success.
As much as I want this to be true, I don't know that a requirement. I think a quick test is asking yourself "Is the engineering good at every successful tech company I've worked at?" and given a sufficiently long career I don't think the answer to this is "yes".
I suspect the definition of "good engineering" changes radically as company size grows.
For early stage startup, ability to iterate rapidly and get changes into production for consumers to see is everything.
With a large existing customer base and lots of hardware and software resources to manage, preventing bugs and outages, scaling, and reliability become more important.
I suppose it depends on your definition of success. For me it's more about medium and long term success, not growing quickly and selling out a couple years later.
Sure you can bang out a ball of mud that ticks all the right buzzwords of the time, but I've not seen this approach last more than a few years.
Having said that it can completely be a winning strategy to bang out an MVP quickly, knowing a major refactor will have to be done later. But I would consider that to be good engineering.
I've much rather bet on a company with a great CEO and mediocre developers than one with a mediocre CEO and great developers. If you're building the wrong product it doesn't matter if Carmack or Linus is writing the code the company will fail. And judging from the code and technical competence I've seen, it's isn't uncommon for a company to succeed with mediocre devs
> You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.
Have you run a large company? I've run a small one so was forced to learn all of these skills, and let me tell you, it was hard, I found it much harder than learning how to code.
Exactly this. I worked at a small startup where we had great engineering talent. It was hard to find in this area. We got a product built, shipped, running with beta B2B customers... then it fell flat on its face.
After the initial release, there was little to no marketing, poor go-to-market strategy, and slow sales. This was all the CEO's realm. Sales and marketing is hard.
> You can teach most engineers to sell, lead, and plan.
No, you can’t. Source: I’ve tried.
Some? Sure, you can teach some of them. Hell, some become exceptional at it. Most could not care less about it, though, and are thus terrible at answering customer questions, doing sales, understanding how to optimize a funnel, negotiating a sales contract, or anything else.
Even doing demos is a taught effort, whereas some folks naturally give great demos.
It’s okay for there to be room for multiple important skillsets in a company. It’s not a zero-sum game.
It's very true that in a e.g. a "pure" software tech company, software engineers have much more power than they do in say an oil exploration company. This isn't surprising, it's the basics of being a profit center or a cost center. In this case engineering definitely has a "crash the company" lever; But this doesn't make the company succeed. In order to do that you need to understand the markets, customers, financing, etc. parameters, not just the tech. Knowing what to build, and what not to build, (and when) is usually more important than the tech, honestly. Hell, a huge swath of the "tech" sector isn't about doing much interesting on the tech side. Which isn't to say you can get away with crap work, just that it's mostly straightforward and you have to care.
> If the CEO walks the company can very reasonably find another stiff in a suit that can run the show. Maybe at a slightly slower or more conservative pace but life moves on. If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground. The greatest case study we've seen is Twitter. Everything above contributor level is some varying degree of spreadsheet monkeying. Anyone with 20 years of running a business can be dropped into this post-MBA corporate world and do great.
I’m not sure Twitter is a good case study of CEOs being interchangable.
> If 80% of the engineering team walks your company catches fire and burns to the ground
Why was that again? That 80% of the engineering team, uhm, “walked”?
The original thesis of YCombinator was that it's easier to teach people with strong technical skills how to business than to teach business people how to code.
So if you really think CEO is an easy job requiring little in the way of specialized skills, start a company, name yourself CEO, and make a fortune. What's stopping you?
Almost all new businesses fail. Calling every one of those failed founders, Eg, of coffee shops, or software companies, or board game stores, a dumpster fire—is an asshole move
I've been mostly in startups for the last 10+ years. Until recently the main thing you needed to be good at is getting more VC money. That is correlated to certain measures of success but having a ton of free money means you can patch a lot of failures over that would bankrupt most companies. Then either sell or IPO before the house of cards came down. It's been interesting watching over the last year as that strategy started to no longer work.
On the one hand, I'm grateful that era is finally coming to an end. Things were so much saner after the dot-com bubble popped.
On the other, I really worry that we now have a generation of entrepreneurs and employees who have only ever known a bubble environment. Many will have a hard time adapting to the actual reality of running functioning businesses.
If your goal is to make a lot of money (not just some money) then using VC money to get there is a very reasonable play. Just siphoning some money from later rounds could give you tens of millions. You don't even need to succeed after that as a business. The goal for many founders isn't to run a long term business but to make money.
> You don't even need to succeed after that as a business. The goal for many founders isn't to run a long term business but to make money.
Getting a big exit is my goal as a founder. Investor capital is spent to get to that exit. People who have the goal of making money off investors make self-enriching, bad for the company decisions.
But the vast majority of companies referred to as "startups" versus "small businesses" fall into that category. We can discuss the other case but the person I replied to explicitly said "startups."
Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded. My point is it's an amazing marketing win by financiers. And here we are now, with what the weird minority do sounding like the expectation for startup business practices vs what most actually do.
"Startup" by definition is companies that need large-scale growth to succeed. Uber, DoorDash, those kinds of businesses are start-ups. It doesn't need to be VC investment necessarily, but it needs a lot of capital to get going and there's a certain amount of network effects. That's not marketing, that's what the word means.
> Most new and growing tech startups are not in fact VC funded.
Then they're probably not startups, but just tech businesses. Nothing wrong with that - they're objectively better in my opinion - but let's not call them something they're not just because we like the word or we want the cachet of being associated with something we're not.
> "Startup" by definition is companies that need large-scale growth to succeed
By your definition. And maybe a bunch of people who read the PG essay that narrowed the word that way. But not by the definition of 99.9% of economic participants.
Investopedia's definition, for example, bears no relationship to the PG definition. Neither does Webster's, dictionary.com's, or any entrepreneurship textbook you might find. Even Steve Blank doesn't define it that way.
I would draw the line slightly differently. Bootstrapped startups are still startups. So for me the definition is more "company exploring a novel technology, product, or business model". Most new businesses are doing something that's well understood. Opening a new restaurant or corner store is hard, but it doesn't have the same need to figure out something fundamentally new.
Numbers-wise, I'd think VC-funded startups merit the distinction. They're (a) relying on financiers to make their strategy work (b) there's significant positive & negative impacts of that decision vs everyone else (c) they're the minority.
Startups using non-VC revenue are the majority and also doing all sorts of great work in invention+innovation in tech, business model, doing with scalable ideas, etc. VC $ buys things like press relationships and "X raised Y" headlines, but thankfully the days of breathless capital raise news on tech crunch are much more zzz now.
This really depends on a definition of success that includes creating massive money burning firepits. Now to be fair some of the chief firepit architects got very rich doing so.
Being good creates the luck. I'm not saying it does not happen the other way around but it's fantastically rare to just "luck out" your way in to success.
Product/market fit doesn't fall out of the sky either. It's created by being good.
Most companies are not startups. There are plenty of bumbling people running million dollar (and thats it forever..) businesses. And they are the boss.
Startups are explicitly disrupting the status quo. Yeah, one needs to be good enough to do that but it’s nothing to downplay. That is hard in a world of established actors.
Leadership matters, Apples history is a prime example of this as shown by first faltering without Steve Jobs and then becoming the most profitable company after he rejoined.
Nonetheless, you're still attributing way too much to the ability of the leadership. After all, that story is so remarkable precisely because it's pretty much the only well known example of this.
That's not merit for the position but not being a five alarm dumpster fire at the position. There is a difference. As long as the company is lucky or there's enough overall competence in leadership or they hired the right employees that incompetence may not be destroy the company. That doesn't mean they're competent.