On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/becoming-vp-of-engineering-pt2

by Spectar • 3 years ago

165 61 3 years ago

Nice article. As a software engineer who also specialized primarily in frontend before becoming a technical founder, I also feel like there are few people growing into these positions that have a more frontend background as well.

lizthegrey2• 3 years ago

Part 1 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36721080

unholyguy0014• 3 years ago

This section describes a tremendous amount of bureaucratic overhead for a company that appears to only have 200 employees.

It feels like they have adopted processes that are really only needed for much larger orgs

Aurornis6• 3 years ago

for a company that appears to only have 200 employees

I was wondering how big the company was. 200 employees isn’t a small company any more, but the bureaucracy and alignment challenges described in the post made it feel more like a 2000 person company.

unholyguy0014• 3 years ago

Yeah exactly. 200 is still a level where everyone knows everyone in their team and all the leaders know each other personally.

I mean spending a lot of time aligning with other leaders. How many director + leaders can there be? Five?

Similarly how heavyweight can the planning and performance process be when you are that small?

AtlasBarfed3• 3 years ago

In defense of the dudeperson, 7 years and 200 people is precisely when toe-dipping into a maturing/stratified/annoyingly process centric IT org probably should begin. It is really annoying to ICs, but the stuff exists for a reason, in every substantial company, for the last 50+ years.

If you're looking for a revolutionary approach, this article does not describe it. It is very very very unlikely any article titled "I am VP of XXX" will describe anything highly divergent from the general managerial consensus on how to run things.

A hierarchy and "salaried emmployees" (which a 7 year / 200 person company will now start to have because there is no tangible ownership % available) are going to involve the usual monetary-extraction / exploitation model of companies: employees take salary and some (actually:none) security and forgo any real economic incentive/reward if they deliver truly valuable/transformative work.

If an employee makes a company a billion dollars, he gets a plaque. If an executive does it, they demand stock options and other "rewards".

Thus, employees cease to care about the company. The next step is the creation of middle management, which ALSO have no aligned incentives except the more abstract "one day will be an exeuctive" but have no real production / creation to point to.

But, orgs and execs know that this hierarchy can be somewhat controlled with "bureaucracy and ceremony" and with sufficient scale, rent seeking, and regulatory capture, will produce an effective profit extraction system.

unholyguy0014• 3 years ago

Sure toe dipping. At 200 people you’ve hit a Dunbar number and you need some process.

Some kind of lightweight performance cycle for instance. If it takes more then a day offsite you are probably overkilling it

Similarity for quarterly planning. You better be doing it at 200 people but the people that need to be there for that will fit in a room and you should get it done in a day

This doesn’t sound like toe dipping it reads more like a full on swan dive. Like someone said “hey shit is getting crazy we need some processes” and just whole hog adopted “what google does” or some such. The processes that are evolved for a 20,000 person org are overkill for a 200 person one

fizwhiz• 3 years ago

Lots of haters on the part1 segment of this article wondering "wtf does this VP even do?!"

I have friends who are line managers at larger companies who take home more than I do in my current role

I wonder if this is the "liquid" portion of Emily's comp. If it's the "total" comp then that tells me a VP Eng at a Series D startup makes < $400k all in??

slt2021• 3 years ago

startup equity is nothing more than a lottery ticket, unless there is robust secondary market for vested options (probably mostly applicable to unicorns)

afro88• 3 years ago

I was one if them. This post is what I was looking for in part 1.

hunterhod• 3 years ago

This reads like one big case study on why small teams outmaneuver companies that are big enough to have management hierarchies.

codampa013143• 3 years ago

That's a good point.

It likely gets worse in larger companies in that misalignment between groups can be significant and very expensive given the sheer number of people involved.

Aurornis6• 3 years ago

This series of blog posts have had some really great insights. However, they’ve also left me feeling uneasy for reasons I couldn’t really put my finger on.

It finally clicked when I read the section justifying the company's low compensation:

Industry data shows that Honeycomb is about average in this as a series D startup, not an outlier. I have friends who are line managers at larger companies who take home more than I do in my current role. To be clear, I’m not complaining — I am paid well for what I do, and I’m always, always grateful to be extremely well compensated relative to most American workers, who are well paid relative to the world median

It’s great that the author is satisfied with their own compensation. What bothers me is the contrast between their company’s “about average” compensation and these blog posts espousing excellence at every level the company, mentioning “inhumane” schedules in the past to deliver SOC2 and HIPAA compliance, talk of using off time to do continued industry learning, and the insinuation that the insinuation that the author and their boss are established industry thought leaders.

All of this talk of excellence and high performance at every level with one big exception: Compensation. Reading the section about how they have data showing their compensation is “about average” gave me flashbacks to early in my career when I was underpaid (relative to doing similar work at other companies) and yet charismatic company leaders insisted our compensation was in line with industry averages according to some data they found somewhere. It took me a while to realize the 50th percentile compensation should go along with 50th percentile expectations and 50th percentile performance. The companies who expect 95th percentile performance but give “about average” compensation and use charismatic leaders to convince everyone that it’s okay are, in my experience, not a good deal for the employee.

hayd• 3 years ago

They should definitely renegotiate ("complain") if they're not being paid a fair market rate... Comparing "relative to the world median" is just absurd, the comparison can only be to others in similar roles/locations.

Is she $200k, $400k, or more? Potentially line managers in big companies could be earning more than any of those numbers.

Aurornis6• 3 years ago

I was thinking more about all of the employees at the company who aren’t VP level and are paid significantly less than this.

When a company espouses “about average” compensation as one of their core principles while simultaneously espousing excellence in everything else, there’s a mismatch.

nickstinemates• 3 years ago

What is left unsaid: working at a startup at an executive level typically involves whole percentages of equity in the company.

If honeycomb continues to succeed and there's some sort of exit or liquidation (which can happen in series D, E rounds for select individuals like executives) then I am sure the total comp is not "about average" but instead much greater than average.

Aurornis6• 3 years ago

Exit liquidity for executives is great for those executives, but it doesn’t help the rest of the employees.

If leaders are writing blog posts about how everyone needs to accept “average” compensation while cashing out high equity grants for themselves, that actually makes it worse.

dalyons• 3 years ago

Yeah for executive positions like VP the vast majority of the comp is in stock. At a bigco that will be liquid, at a startup it won’t, hence the difference in “market rate”. But the startup equity is theoretically worth much more, it’s a huge risk but you have to on some level believe the valuation, or you wouldn’t take the job.

dclowd99012• 3 years ago

Might explain previous allusions to not being able to find a good external VP to fit the role.

kylequest• 3 years ago

You are oversimplifying it picking comp as a single/only dimension. There's so much more to being in a startup. That's ok. For some people maximizing current comp is the most important thing. Others have a more long term game where working at a startup with lower comp opens up new opportunities later on (even if the startup equity doesn't work out). For other people it's about feeling alive... What's the point of higher comp at a big company if you hate your life (or, in a less extreme case, where you just don't feel fulfilled or satisfied)...

jstummbillig• 3 years ago

I don't see a conflict. Obviously, the blog post in question is a biased opinion piece. The author is working there. The company allowed the publication. Take it with a grain of salt, will you.

But what you wrote seems like a very intricate way of saying "In the end, no matter how much I want other things in my job, I personally am not cool with giving up on the money".

There are people who are willing to work different jobs or for different companies – let's say the Wikimedia foundation – and be okay with the pay not being as high as it could be at Google, doing similar work, because they derive something from it that's not measured in money.

And that's also important because most companies will simply never be able to generate Google money and still need excellent people to work on good and valuable projects.

Figure out what you value. If, in the end, it's mostly the money and you don't see any value in what the company offers you outside of that, just be honest about it and take the money.

tjpnz2• 3 years ago

That uneasy feeling is consistent with many of the recent Glassdoor reviews. Sounds like a miserable place to work.

mylons• 3 years ago

how is honeycomb a startup? why are 7+ year old companies with hundreds of employees considered a startup?

compiler-guy• 3 years ago

They aren't public, so they get lumped in with the startups.

A more accurate description is probably "privately held".

kortilla• 3 years ago

Nah, the distinction is different. Startup usually means, not profitable or barely profitable and focused on growth.

A taco truck is not a startup. It’s tiny and private.

Cargill is not a startup. It’s massive and private.

jackblemming• 3 years ago

Say no to things, have meetings, play telephone between layers of management. Got it. I think I'll stick to being a lowly producer.

codampa013143• 3 years ago

Yes that's a good chunk of the day to day. But there's also laying out strategic vision for where products and the company goes, what sorts of people get hired, doing the culture curation/setting. It's not for everyone that's for certain. I've met many many people that would struggle with this role (and vice versa).

rfrey• 3 years ago

While engineering teams often thrive on routine and ritual (sprint planning, on-call rotations, recurring retros, etc.)

My eyes rolled back so hard I'm not sure they'll ever face forward again.

Lotta good stuff in this essay, but that one missed the mark a bit.

icedchai4• 3 years ago

Yep. In my experience, the only people who like sprint planning and retros are the PMs.

dclowd99012• 3 years ago

If we have to have a manager, I like retros as they’re a way to give feedback to our manager on things we don’t like about our operational process.

AtlasBarfed3• 3 years ago

Seriously, the retro each week should be two questions:

1) Is this process working to the satisfaction of the team?

2) Anyone have anything else to discuss about it?

And it should be perfectly fine for it to be less than one minute most weeks.

benjiweber• 3 years ago

If the team habits you have aren't joyful or even useful, why don't you change them?

neilv• 3 years ago

There absolutely are engineering teams that like the routine and rituals of sprints, their version of "Agile", etc. And thrive, in a sense. (But I've not heard of anyone liking anything about on-call, except for extra pay.)

I'm normally concerned when that seems to be going on, especially in a startup...

For example, in a big company, the problems and coordination and politics are usually hard... so you might "thrive" if all you need to do is sprint tasks, you feel individually unblocked and productive, your individual metrics/reviews look good, and maybe your team looks good as far as anyone can tell.

I'd be careful with that in an early startup, which usually (unless it's more a "growth" scheme) needs to be more effective, efficient, and creative than a large, entrenched company.

(You can have some people be doing such brilliant holistic coordination in a startup, so that others can just go through routines and rituals, with their ducks lined up to plink, and get the right great startup execution out the other end... But I don't know how often or how well that actually happens.)

marcinzm3• 3 years ago

A lot of the essay is along the same lines to me. Top down product strategy that teams then simply execute on versus being co-creators of. In that environment you want rituals/routine since it avoids the team thinking about things that are seen as the purvey of others.

AtlasBarfed3• 3 years ago

I skimmed this article, and it is basically IMO garden variety IT management perspective that could be dropped into an org from the 70s/80s/90s/00s/etc, aside from the agile namedropping.

Which leads me to: great, you are a "VP of Engineering" but there is little to justify why I should believe you are an exemplar of that title/position. The LinkedIn isn't a fraud, but it isn't full of any formal management degrees, IT coursework, IT Management coursework. I don't see companies whose products are on the front lines of foundational technology, scale, or quality.

Frankly, the resume is full of 1 year hopscotches. That... doesn't really tell me they are battletested. I get IT is an industry with zero respect for the neckbeard, and yeah they went to Yale, so they are of a minimum floor of hard work and intellect.

There are people out there with 40 years of experience in IT, and probably 30 years of management, with stories of massive failures, grace under fire, and the usual stories Machiavellian fake smiles to navigate.

And plugging a "Organizational Health" book is hilarious when you are a startup. Yeah, there are lots of unhealthy startups, but the really hard organizational health problems are long standing companies with the "dead pool" effect that chased away the best people, long standing feuds/grudges, sociopathic/paranoid wars over diminishing resource pools and budgets, and deep problems with legacy systems that need to be updated.

A startup? That's peanuts in comparison.

codampa013143• 3 years ago

I've had the opposite experience.

Several dev teams I've been on want retrospectives to help review and make things better. But those places are where devs have a lot of autonomy and ability to change how things operate in the team.

I've seen and been on teams that align more with your reaction but those are at jobs where where the dev teams have very little say in how they do things. Well that or it's filled with a lot of cynical people that don't actually care about what they are doing and don't have much desire for things to improve (they actively fight to keep the status quo).

switch007• 3 years ago

Skirting close to a veiled “all engineers are on the spectrum” remark

mock-possum• 3 years ago

Yeah I don’t thrive on that stuff, I barely tolerate it because I am being paid to do so

I don’t just sit around thinking “god I had a schedule I was stressed about keeping. You know what I need right now? A two hour meeting with eight people including my boss and my boss’s boss where I have nothing to say and nothing to hear. If I could pick one thing to change in my life, it would be that I have to go to bed early every single fucking day because I’m worried if I don’t I won’t get enough sleep and it’ll be a struggle to wake up and do work early tomorrow morning.”

Fuck your routine. I thrive on control. Let me have control.

spicyusername• 3 years ago

What's wrong with those things?

In my experience, places that lack things like them are either small, and don't need them, or large, and in constant chaos.

marcinzm3• 3 years ago

Other have noted how bureaucratic this seems to be for a 200 person company but to me it also seems so top down/hierarchical. Strategy that flows top down with little visibility, input or involvement from ICs except when forced to avoid the ICs getting too annoyed (why aren't the ICs trusted to help more directly contribute to the strategy?). A VP being involved in helping teams say no versus the teams (or their EMs) being empowered to do so (do the other teams/execs have such fragile egos?).

choppaface2• 3 years ago

Sometimes decision making ends up primarily in the hands of the VP Eng and Directors because none of the ICs really care too much about the underlying product or customer. That’s not to say the ICs aren’t smart but rather the management has found an unglamorous yet profitable (or potentially profitable) problem. Unglamorous can also mean the company is struggling for traction and so it’s not even clear what there is to be glamorous about.

And thus the VP Eng has to make posts like these to make the work appear more notable and honorable. When the post is so light on substance, it indicates the VP Eng is fundamentally struggling to focus the team. And as a bonus, the VP Eng gets their story out in front of investors.

marcinzm3• 3 years ago

That's true but in my experience it's more often that the management chain tries to implicitly not have the ICs care about the product or customer. They may not even realize consciously that they're doing twenty little things to cause this. The reasons are many but often it's once you dig into it because management (both eng and product) then needs to do all the boring and risky work around those ideas but won't get most of the credit. There may also be perception that the ICs lack enough context so these thoughts aren't worth the time to think about. Sometimes the business domain really is unglamorous but more often I've found that the it isn't as unglamorous to ICs as management thinks.

In my experience it's also not that hard to make ICs care about the business and try to drive it forward even if it's not glamorous. Make their promotions, yearly reviews and raises be partially based on the business impact tied to the projects they were on. There's side effects of that to manage but even if the monetary gains aren't massive the team will care a lot more. Of course, many managers don't actually like it when their team point blank asks them "what's the value of this project, looking at data it's not going to help the business."

anacrolix• 3 years ago

Honeycomb had some great ideas and lots of momentum around 2020-21. They seem to have stopped innovating and are quickly falling behind.

choppaface2• 3 years ago

Looking at their website, seems they’re cloning a few other well-known products. Great time for the VP Eng to advertise their own story to investors on the company letterhead.

bcantrill• 3 years ago

Aside from what others have observed about this being extraordinarily bureaucratic for such a small company, there are big chunks that are missing. This is a VP of Engineering; where is the engineering in here?! As a technical leader, one might not necessarily have line code responsibilities, but you absolutely have technical responsibilities to the team and to the company. For example, there is always a tension between rigor and urgency in engineering ; it is the responsibility of engineering leadership to navigate that tension! e.g.: An engineer insists on stopping ship because of a critical bug, but there is an important customer at the other end to make a contractual deadline; what is to be done? It falls on the CEO to bear responsibility for that decision -- and for engineering leadership to make or inform that decision. Either way, it is the VP of Engineering who is in the hot seat -- not for OKRs or performance management or other FAANG middle management cosplay, but for making tough, technically informed decisions.

That is but one technical piece that is missing here; there are in fact many. Technologists who aspire to leadership: please focus on leadership, not middle management!

calderwoodra• 3 years ago

From part 1 they mentioned that "Directors run the company", meaning VP is where the engineering stops, and that strategy of the engineering org and alignment with other orgs is their job.

tjpnz2• 3 years ago

Charity once said an off-hand sentence that became a mantra for my transition into the VP of Engineering role: “Directors run the company.”

Shouldn't that be obvious to anyone who's worked in a corporate environment for more than a minute?

di4na• 3 years ago

Evidence of how many people keep having to rediscover the fact show that even if it "should", it is not.

Beware of the "ould"

say_it_as_it_is• 3 years ago

It should be said that Charity Majors is a self proclaimed thought leader. Majors wrote an entire book on observability without considering metrics. The company they founded positioned itself as different, progressive, but it's not. It's just missing foundational aspects of analyzing systems.

potamic• 3 years ago

Writing, reading, updating, or providing feedback on strategy, at a variety of levels

What does this look like in more tangible terms? I think many people understand the various managerial aspects of the role by imagining a scaled up hierarchy, but are quite hazy about the "core" responsibilities. It would be great to see a concrete instance of such work entails and the specifics involved.

On Becoming a VP of Engineering pt. 2

Related Stories