If you consistently deliver what the business needs most, and you do it well, it’s impossible not to get promoted. People tell me this isn’t true, that it’s all about the people you know and about “visibility.” I have no idea how to consistently deliver impactful business results without becoming visible as a side effect. I hate it when developers ask me how to become “more visible.” They hate it when I tell them to “do great work.” They think I’m mocking them.
You can think this way if your idea of "what the business needs most" is "what currently has the sales guys in a tizzy." Forget about everything else. Oh, and if your code only works for current customers, and has to have a bunch of tweaks and fixes applied for each new customer, then people will think your code is what allows them to sell to new customers. No kidding. If you write code that doesn't handle cases A, B, and C, then later you get credit for adding "support" for A, B, and C and making it possible to sell to customers X, Y, and Z. That's "visibility," because people from sales and marketing will mention your name appreciatively at high levels.
And for God's sake don't do any work on scaling or reliability, because a salesman never calls up your boss's boss and says, "It's been a long time since the scalability of your systems scotched a deal. I just want to say that's awesome and thank you." Wait until it breaks, make everyone thinks it's impossible, and then fix it.
EDIT: In a healthy organization, none of this will affect who gets promoted, but in an organization where people worry about "visibility," this is what they're talking about.
Unless you're at a non-profit, revenue/sales/profit are what drives the company. If you can duct tape a product that gets me $1B of yearly recurring revenue then I will take that over the cleanest architected product that no one wants to pay for.
In one of my other comments from a different thread I made the point that a lot of developers don't realize that they should understand the business. When you do understand it and the salesperson is in a tizzy about the "wrong thing", you can point out, "actually, that's not the real revenue driver. XYZ is. Why does the customer think ABC is? I'll tell you why, it's because DEF. But by doing XYZ we can deliver ABC in six months time."
I think you'll find when you can talk at the level of business a lot of things become clearer for you and the sales team.
The sales guys would agree that reliability and scalability affect
1) The ability to take on new business (a big problem if you're kicking ass and growing fast.)
2) The cost of delivering service to those customers.
3) The ability to deliver new features because developers aren't spending their time fixing existing ones or helping operations fight fires caused by the existing ones.
Sales will agree about all of that. However, when it comes time to argue over priorities, they'll fight tooth and nail to get resources devoted to new development instead of scalability and reliability -- until stuff is broken, customers are angry, and their reputation is going into the toilet. At that point they'll rightly pin the blame on you, though. They want you to be responsible and do your job. They just won't reward you for it with "visibility."
Actually, the best way to get sales guys on the side of reliability and scalability is when they're told to stop selling a product because your systems or operations staff can barely support currently provisioned customers, but good luck making that happen without having a report of SLA penalties already paid and a convincing projection of large penalties in the future. Also, at that point, you'll already have signed or nearly-signed deals that haven't been deployed yet.
So if you just go along with the sales guys, they'll drive you into a freakin' ditch. The sales guys do not have a balanced view of the business any more than the developers do. Everybody has to contribute their piece of the picture and fight for the priorities that they understand.
When the engineers stop sticking up for what they understand better than anybody else, things get out of balance, your technical assets start to crumble, and eventually you're technically bankrupt. But throwing engineering priorities under the boat and doing anything necessary to please the sales guys in the short term can make you very popular. "Visibility" means making people who drive revenue happy, and abdicating your responsibility to deliver bad news is the easiest way to achieve it.
But the worst aspect of "visibility" is that from outside engineering, the applications that are chronically broken are perceived as the vital core of ongoing feature development, and the developers who work on those applications get the most visibility. If you asked a sales guy to write a list of the most valuable developers in the company, that's who they would name. Can you imagine a more perverse incentive?
Actually, in my experience, developers understand the business quite well. It's the other business functions which doesn't understand development.
You WILL drive out (and keep out) good developers if you fail to treat developers as professionals whose inputs of how to develop software should be respected.
Yes, often businesses don't understand development... but...
Us dev's have it drilled into us time and time again that we are so special and can't possibly be expected to participate in the company as a whole (our time is too valuable! we can't stick to a schedule! they don't understand software!).
That's a load of bullshit, developers don't get to wall off their private kingdom of code, same as no one else gets to wall off their section of responsibility and dictate outwards from within. Please stop furthering the (on that note) false dichotomy that programmers are either:
1) mismanaged by egregiously incompetent tyrants
2) given free reign to dictate to the business
Software developers don't deserve any inherent respect. Their value added to the business does.
I've heard developers tell me, in all seriousness, MS should dump Windows and start shipping a real OS like Linux. False dichotomy? I don't know, but I think you'd find the business would probably lose a fair bit of money doing that.
For those of you who think and operate this way, I'm sorry, but this WILL catch up with you eventually. At my last job our sales pitch was "Yes". I won't use the word "literally" here as it would be an outright lie, but it was pretty close. Our sales guys went into meetings with the assumption that we could pull off whatever the clients wanted in nearly any time frame they wanted. This was all decided on at sales time without any consultation of the actual development team on capabilities, cost or how long it would take to actually implement. Management would tell the IT/IS department (yes, we had to do both) that it was a show of faith in the abilities of our team and that we should be proud of the fact that sales and management were so confident in us. You know what that is? BS. That is sales "selling" IT. It's complete and utter BS.
Sure, we met those deadlines, we implemented those features and we made small fortunes for the company. But at what cost? The infrastructure starts to resemble Jenga more and more, your spaghetti code becomes harder to maintain, you end up with magic strings, magic numbers, client specific cases and conditions and your start eating into your IT budget by having to hire more programmers to support all of your crappy implementations and more hardware to handle the un-optimized pile of crap you're running.
What's worse is the very people you rely on to keep this tower from falling over, your programmers who have become so familiar with all the undocumented edge cases of your system, are also the very people you're basically forcing out. You're forcing them out because they become tired of not innovating, not refactoring and not progressing the technology OR the business, but instead spending all their time stressing over not "crossing the wires" of this delicate catastrophe. And when you finally lose them as a developer, and you will, it costs you severely in down-time and loses in productivity while you get your other developers and new hires up to speed. But not only do they have to learn the business, they also have to learn all the edge cases that were only known to your senior employee who was finally fed up and quit. And guaranteed, something, somewhere will be forgotten, that wire will get crossed and you'll pay dearly.
And while I do agree that making money and growing the business is the end goal of the business, don't assume that your IT guy isn't concerned with that and just wants to write "pretty code". Often times your IT guys understand the business more than sales, middle management and sometimes upper management because they deal with the logic, the clients, the sales team, and everyone in between day in and day out. When they're pleading with you to say "no" to a customer or ask for an extension to implement feature "x" properly, maybe you should take heed a little more often. Because the duct taped feature "x" that won over client "A" today, could be the same feature that loses you client "b" and "c" tomorrow because the only developer that new their system well enough to keep them running walked out after being forced to write yet another band-aid.
Of course when he quits and everything falls apart, everyone will just assume he was an overpaid, crappy programmer and his buggy code is what was the ultimate cause.
It's amazing that you get so defensive over "learn the business". I never said to be a meek dev. In fact I clearly state that you should attempt to change minds with principled arguments that have the business in mind.
But based on my experience, that's not what I've seen. I've seen devs fight to do a completely rewrite that management won't fund because everyone wants to continue to use the old LOB solution. The devs argue about how the old system is a rats nest and uses archaic technology. But the business says that its doing the job, why do you want us to switch to something that lacks the features we need, just because it uses REST rather than SOAP (whatever that means).
And I've been brought in to consult on many of these disputes and probably 8 out of 10 times the "ugly" code is perfectly serviceable. What I've often done is shown how one can incrementally improve and rearchitect the existing code with no downtime... and probably more than half the time this ticks off the architect. His big dream was to do this monster rewrite that I've just shown is completely unnecessary.
At the end of the day maybe I've hurt morale of the dev team, but janitors don't get paid to not clean bathrooms (not that we're janitors, nor is there anything wrong with being a janitor, but you get the point).
I apologize for being overly defensive, but I've unfortunately lived through all of what I was saying. I do agree with your Janitor analogy in that at the end of the day you're paid to do a job. However the problem often lies in situations where developers are hired for their expertise, but they aren't allowed to utilize it to do the job properly and instead are just asked to get it done.
I guess if I hired engineers who were capable of doing a complete re-architecture of a system, but forced them to put in "ugly" code that is perfectly serviceable - I wouldn't expect them to be around very long. I don't speak for everyone, but I do strongly believe that those that do this for a job and paycheck will be fine, if not happy, working on ugly code to keep things going. Those that do this for the love it, whom in my opinion are often better programmers, won't. At least, not for very long.
Still, there is definitely merit to your statements, especially when it comes to devs dreaming of re-architecture and instead having to settle for a small change. I appreciate the follow up.
Thank you for your follow up. Clearly your experience is far outside my world. I've never heard of an outside consultant being brought in to second guess the company's "architect".
It seems like you mostly move among bad developers. I don't think your experience is relevant to most of the developers reading HN.
Obviously, a full rewrite not a good idea in most cases as Spolsky eloquently argued.
PS: I didn't detect any "defensiveness" (you know, the catchall passive-aggressive term that is used to use to imply that the other side has a weak hand without backing it up) in the post you were responding to. It rang true to me.
I don't think I move among bad developers, per se, but when I consulted I generally worked at places that weren't software companies. HN is filled with developers who plan to build companies (or work for companies) whose core business is to build software and either sell or have that software be the key part of a service. A lot of the places I did consulting for, if all of their in-house software stopped working, they could probably still do business, but a lot less efficiently. Most companies are not "about" the software just like they're not about the desks in the office.
And actually... quite often I wasn't brought in to second guess the architect. Many times I was brought in at the request of the architect. But yes, most of the time you're brought in because they lose faith in the architect or team. If you see me stop by to do a simple audit of your code, you should probably get your resume ready -- well not really, as I don't do any consulting any more.
Right. The time to worry about IT quality is after the duct-taped fraud of a product has collapsed and exposed millions of credit card numbers and personal information. Lawsuits, legal penalties, and potentially criminal charges are generally not good for the business.
Or maybe the gradual weight of technical debt simply slows you down so much that smarter, tech-focused competitors steal all your business.
That's just scare-mongering from IT guys, until it actually happens to your company (and you can always just blame them anyway).
> If you can duct tape a product that gets me $1B of yearly recurring revenue then I will take that over the cleanest architected product that no one wants to pay for.
And that's an excellent reason not to tie a given salesman's compensation directly to sales value, but to time-averaged client profitability.
If you skin your client and sell them more than they need or something impossible to pull off, then retire and leave a mess for legal to sort out, you are not exactly a good salesman.
You can think this way if your idea of "what the business needs most" is "what currently has the sales guys in a tizzy." Forget about everything else. Oh, and if your code only works for current customers, and has to have a bunch of tweaks and fixes applied for each new customer, then people will think your code is what allows them to sell to new customers. No kidding. If you write code that doesn't handle cases A, B, and C, then later you get credit for adding "support" for A, B, and C and making it possible to sell to customers X, Y, and Z. That's "visibility," because people from sales and marketing will mention your name appreciatively at high levels.
And for God's sake don't do any work on scaling or reliability, because a salesman never calls up your boss's boss and says, "It's been a long time since the scalability of your systems scotched a deal. I just want to say that's awesome and thank you." Wait until it breaks, make everyone thinks it's impossible, and then fix it.
EDIT: In a healthy organization, none of this will affect who gets promoted, but in an organization where people worry about "visibility," this is what they're talking about.