This is misleading. His compensation may have been effectively $10M last year, but it's almost certainly based on a stock grant several years in the past. Twitter did not offer him $10M/year, they offered him some probability of $250k/year and a small chance of $10M/year. Now the bet has paid off and he's collecting, but it's incorrect to compare a winning lottery ticket to how many lottery tickets are being offered to current hires.
"This is misleading. His compensation may have been effectively $10M last year, but it's almost certainly based on a stock grant several years in the past."
You're right, or at least close enough to make my comment based on faulty assumptions.
It looks like they hired him without the "senior" title last year. I was basing my assumption on the article's statement that he made $10M "last year".
> At Hotel Tonight, which offers a mobile app for last-minute hotel bookings, CEO Sam Shank described staging the office to appear extra lively for a prospective hire. He roped in two employees for a game of ping-pong and positioned another group right by the bar...It worked: the recruit signed on and built a key piece of the company's software.
I don't know what's more disturbing:
1. That seeing employees playing ping pong and sitting at a bar would mean anything at all to a highly-sought after and ostensibly experienced candidate.
2. That CEOs apparently believe these things can convince the most desirable candidates to join their companies.
3. that these supposed perks are so fake that the CEO has to stage employees using them.
I've worked at companies that looked "hip" by having ping pong tables and playstations/xboxs. In practice almost nobody used them as it would look like they're slacking rather than working. It was nothing but a sham, trying to make these places look less like what they actually are.
You'd be surprised. We humans are highly emotional creatures. Assuming that the top companies are all offering similar compensation packages one place can just 'feel right' based on things like these and make someone decide to choose the place without even consciously realizing it.
3. That the market for engineers in SV is so ludicrously overheated that CEO's feel the need to go to these lengths.
It's nuts. Get people elsewhere. Thousands of engineers across the country (or planet) would jump at the chance to work remotely for half an SV salary.
This is actually quite common for loads of companies. I worked in a startup that made the developers have a pretend meeting so we looked like "we worked together", I've worked in agencies where we spent hours of dev time setting up cable tidies around the office to look "professional" to a corporate client. In fact, I've seen these kind of faked interactions at every company I've ever worked at. I've laughed at them a number of times, and I'm not convinced that they actually work, but I've seen a lot of smart devs and business-savvy owners pull this shit, so it must have worked somewhere, right?
Anecdotally I've seen more well established companies looking for investment move entire floors of people into another floor for 6-7 hours to give the appearance of busy hardworking w/e
I remember that we didn't even plug the phones in.
these people were being paid £55k (a lot) each, to basically look pretty.
seems like a massive waste of man hours to me- but, I suppose I'm a sysadmin not a sales/CEO
a company that looks like it has a good, lively culture is way more attractive than one that does not. this seems obvious, no? clearly there was more to the interview than just pointing to a ping pong game and a bar-- the visible (albeit, staged) culture was just icing on the cake.
Well, not really. I've interviewed at a bunch of places with different cultures; however, what I see on that day is not what I think will happen in the future.
I've worked and interviewed at plenty of companies that put on the best front. Just like that ping-pong thing and similar equivalents. But as soon as I started working at these places, I realized that it's not like that and I've learned to ignore it over the years.
The "lively" culture is most likely a product of the upswing that justified the hiring. Meaning that a week later, everyone will be just as shut off as at any other company.
Most examples given are for VP of engineering and other technical management roles. If you are a plain-vanilla engineer (from the article), no $10 million or $1 million for you. Maybe a time slot for playing ping-pong. Please don't try to break your head trying to figure out how to be 10x or 100x or whatever. Totally different skills.
Agreed. The article poorly draws comparisons with 10x engineers and executives. This VP level compensation in Twitter would be a (junior) director level package in most large corporates. The bonus is slightly more generous (I think most would see $50k), but not out of whack.
As an SVP as SFDC he would have had a much larger base salary, and probably damn good options. His Twitter stock grant is probably worth a lot more, but it was also riskier.
Now $150k + $250k RSUs (probably on a 5+ yr schedule) for a new PhD is a lot. I assume they were working on something that Google figured could save them an order of magnitude more than that a year. (Of course the debate is, couldn't a similarly motivated, if not fiscally so, existing staff developer make the same savings? Probably yes.)
How are engineering and VP of engineering "totally different"? AFAIK, there is no special qualification that makes you VP material from engineering material. An engineer with enough experience can do the job of a VP of engineering just fine.
"An engineer with enough experience can do the job of a VP of engineering just fine."
If you can also manage people.
If you can also manage projects.
If you can also see the broader picture and how your company fits into it.
If you know how to delegate.
If you know how to hire and retain the right kind of talent.
If you can resolve conflicts effectively.
If you can communicate well with both engineers and customers.
Depending on your org structure you may also need to make the correct choices
regarding infrastructure and technical direction as you go consistently and over a long period of time.
I've known a lot of engineers in my career. Most of them were not suitable to become a VP of engineering - including those with many years of experience.
The ability to engineer is often the smallest subset of what a VP of engineering does. It's a starting point.
In reality that's not how it works. No one above senior engineer, and certainly no managers where I work have the ability or desire to design or write software or even cares about software or business. A VP of engineering may be able to talk about technologies and approaches very generally, but technology is changing so fast that even legitimate tech leaders have knowledge that is 10 years old. But these guys are not legit. There is an implied software gangsterism present that says "you better not challenge the abilities or knowledge of someone in power or you know what will happen." These people want their $10 million payday and are willing to enforce whatever reality it takes to make that happen.
Sounds about right. I meet many VPs of engineering of the big companies - they're nice and smart. But they don't know that much about tech. They also don't know that much about management. In fact all you really need to know is appear as a nice guy, make some decisions and delegate 100% of the rest. It's not like if you were recruiting directly whoever you delegate to either.
Most of them spend .. most of their time in the intra political wars to keep their precious salary. I'm pretty sure they'd like to work on their stuff better, but you don't let go your millions that easily... plus you'd be replaced by someone pretty much alike.
For smaller companies, what I wrote above is actually not true. The ones I know are actually passionate, and drive the engine of the company. But then again, they don't make more than the average engineer.
In reality, that generally is how it works... In the companies I've been involved with, the VP of eng typically was a coder who possessed all the qualities the commenter above mentioned. They eventually moved up to that role because that were great as seeing the big picture, making intelligent decisions on how to delegate time and engineers into prioritizing bug fixes, new features, and maintenance/improvements that work the best for the company, and managing those people/decisions. They end up spending more time managing and less time coding, but it's generally for the best.
Tell that to Bill Gates, who was apparently still deep in the weeds (reviewing product specs, challenging design assumptions, etc.) whilst he was CEO of a pretty large company.
(Or maybe that's just part of VP Engineering and above roles - perpetuating the myth that you are still in touch. I often wonder if these mythical sessions weren't coached for by some senior individual contributor.)
Wanna chime in on this and say I spend a fair amount of time with my vps. I am pretty sure I could not do their job. Maybe someday, but not today. And maybe not ever.
You don't believe being a VP of Engineering requires any more qualifications or experience? Seriously? Are you just trying to be obtuse? I can't really imagine that someone really believes this.
There are three big differences. First, to be effective in the role, a VPE must have a much stronger social and communication skills. Most engineers, as a side effect of how they spend their waking hours, are below average in this area. The VPE must be far above average.
Second, the VPE must have a larger focus - seeing what's good for the entire company, not just what's good for engineering, and certainly more than what's good for the current projects. Often a straight up engineer will be (quite properly) focused mainly on whatever their current project is, and may not even have the business knowledge to fully grok how it fits in the big picture.
Lastly, the VPE needs exceptional management and leadership skills. A tech lead will have this too, but it must be much stronger at the veep level.
The main qualification for these jobs is, besides being a software engineer, having experience at project management and political skills to do whatever the company/boss wants...
Not a myth at all. I have seen this in real life many times. The engineer who finishes a task (correctly!) in 2 days instead of 2 weeks. Who fixes the system along the way. Whose code is readable and maintainable. Who doesn't get blocked.
I pondered this for some time and the conclusion I came to is this.
I'm a reasonably good developer (been selling software in one form or another for nearly 2 decades) and I've worked with people who where twice as productive as me bit I've also worked with people who where 1/5 as productive.
So relative to them the x2 developer looks x10 where compared to me he looks x2.
It's all relative, in a company of top-class engineering talent their should be no x10 engineers as if there are then the others by definition aren't top class (though possibly still way above average).
As for been a rockstar who wants to be they die at 27 in a drug fuelled binge or live long enough to become a mockery of themselves.
Nope. The top engineers will be drastically more effective than the average developer, in ANY codebase. They take the time to understand it, and change things when necessary. I have seen this in every place I've worked.
They will still be more effective, but if the codebase has a bunch of fundamental structural flaws that they have to work around, he would be a lot slower in net effectiveness if he didn't have to work with that code base until he gets the 4 months to a year it will take to fix the structural problems. His work ability, along with everyone else's will be divided by 10.
They see the mess, and they see the way out. Any change they make is a refactor with the end goal in mind. Before you realize it the codebase is cleaner, concerns have been separated, interfaces made extensible, concepts more clean.
They use a number of tools, from creating facades of the previous interfaces/implementations. From judicious use of aspects, annotations, functional elements. And just plain old better coding.
Of course, sometimes they are too clever for their own good, and things quickly slide backwards when they move on, because no-one else understood the grand vision, the master plan, and quickly things fall back to hacks-upon-workarounds-of-kludges.
There was a post a while back talking about the myth of the 10x developer. It mentioned that there aren't 10x developers, but there are 10x teams. In these teams you have the developers who are productive and churn out a lot of code. Then you have the developers who can stand back and be more thoughtful about the whole. Together they can be productive while still producing quality code.
In your example, someone has already written the code, possibly shipped it and if it's not a complete disaster, created value. The "10x developer" comes along and is able to take the time to refactor and clean things up (or direct someone to do so.)
As you mentioned, there are pros and cons for each role. The "10x" developer might think too much. The grinder might not create the prettiest code, but he might be great at moving the chains.
I think we can all place ourselves in either role. To get something out the door to meet a deadline sometimes requires the quick and dirty way. And sometimes shipping quick and dirty is far more important. To move from one role to the other is sometimes as difficult as switching between projects, so it's great to be able to have one person who can go in with one mind and another person to go in with a different mind.
As I'm usually the sole developer on my projects, I don't know if this is how things work in practice. I imagine in a cash strapped start-up all developers might be the type to shove out as much code as possible.
Perhaps all other things being equal, a 10x developer in that environment (a cash strapped start-up as opposed to a mature Twitter) might be the person who understands that shipping is more important when resources are short. The "other type" might not realize that things will probably work out in the end as long as the team is shipping. Things are never perfect, the stack will always be a house of cards, but the cash must keep flowing be it from investments, from clients or from customers all of whom are expecting progress.
Personally, I seem to switch back and forth. Sometimes I get on a roll and I'm knocking stuff out at a pace where I surprise myself. Sometimes I get locked up trying to over-think a problem. Sometimes I can go back through my code and see obvious problems and refactor the code with the same momentum as I had when I originally wrote it. I think the tricky part is finding the right balance and knowing what you need to be doing within your particular environment.
You have a bad codebase full of technical debt and bad early decisions. You know there is a way out, but it takes _time_, a good amount of time due to it's size. Time that management won't let you have due to it's ship yesterday culture. You do what you can with your re-factor as you go. People keep on digging shit in faster than you can dig shit out. They will recognize your a better developer, but when you compare yourself to the general market you are NOT a 10x developer in that place. The potential-10x developer will be one of the better ones there, but his multiplier effect is significantly reduced because he is walking in code molasses.
Because of this he will look like a medicore developer inside the that place, and it will hamper his career progression. By having to slog through crap, it doesn't push him in the right way and he doesn't improve the best he can. That is the big difference.
I think how someone else said there are 10x teams is a more accurate way to think about it. People are not islands.
still somewhat an issue of measuring against 'what?'. If most of the people on the team are already good, it's much harder for anyone to be 10x anyone else in terms of productivity. You almost have to have dead weight on the team to be a 10x developer.
Apparently it "is a person so talented that he or she does the work of 10 merely competent engineers."
So, I guess this guy is a 100x engineer, based on his income.
Startup compensation is weird. Pretty much everyone makes about the same amount (currently, $100-150k for engineers and executives) but equity allotments are massively skewed. Equity in the VC-funded world exacerbates inequality monstrously, because management often takes 10-100+ times more per person.
Personally, I don't think it's worth taking equity seriously unless (a) it's public stock, which has a published value, or (b) you know the cap table. If you don't get to see the cap table and term sheets, that employee equity is pretty meaningless-- not worth taking a pay cut or working typical startup hours.
it is basically a matter of getting paid the value you are worth. Unfortunately, its hard to tell sometimes, and even harder to know if you were being tricked =(
