What's with all craze for Software Engineers?
Before you start hating on me, let me clarify, I am Senior Software Engineer right now.
From what I am seeing, most top execs in top tech companies companies like Google(Sundar Pichai), Facebook(Peter Thiel), Microsoft(Satya Nadela) etc do not have a strong tech background. Even Reed Hastings(Netflix's Founder) has to move from engineer to business before starting Netflix.
So, why are all the blinders here dying to be on that SWEs? Shouldn't they eventually wanna move to a more businessy position?
From what I hear, even FAANG gives more equities to SWEs(T laddder) than business+tech people(O ladder) [Can anyone confirm?]
I ask because I am considering joining an O ladder(Business + Tech) job(SCE) in Google but I might be missing something?
#tech #google #oladder #tladder #facebook #microsoft #netflix
comments
There's a connection. I don't think you'll ever understand what the answer is to your question until you understand the connection.
Take a look at your assumptions more closely and you'll see the error in reasoning you're making. None of the execs you mentioned were founding execs. The one exec you do mention who is a founding exec actually came from an engineering background, which you mention. If business skills in and of themselves were so important, why would Netflix have existed in the first place? It would've just been invented by Disney or Blockbuster. The silicon valley flavor of disruptive innovation which has built an outsized amount of trillion dollar companies requires a combination of business savvy and technical excellence.
With that said, the best way to answer your question is to take the offer if you get it. Don't listen to a bunch of talking heads on blind. Try out the new role and experiment. Chances are, you'll get a lot better of an answer doing that than by asking leading questions here. There's an old saying -- the default state of every VP is on a PIP. If you don't hit your KPIs, you're out. My guess is you will get a rude awakening and understand that the reality of business roles is not so glamorous -- once you try it out, you may see that perhaps the grass really is greener on the other two side. My two cents. Your mileage may vary.
There's a reason why Amazon didn't emerge out of Walmart or Barnes & Nobles, and there's a reason why Netflix didn't emerge out of Disney/Blockbuster, and it's the pre-existing general management structure. Some GMs at Walmart had ownership over their existing brick & mortar P/Ls. They get rewarded based on how well those P/L lines do, and they get paid a pretty penny. What's the marginal risk/reward for getting into e-commerce? Well, there's a risk that it could fail completely or cannibalize their profits which is very bad. And the reward (in their brains) is rather low considering how much they're already making. Which makes them rather risk averse.
Let's say you work under the mentorship of one of these general managers at Blockbuster to learn business skills. You're learning a bunch of strategic best practices, you're learning how to read a financial statement, you're learning how to negotiate, bargain, strike up partnerships, who's important and who's not. And then one day, Netflix comes along and all of a sudden, your entire business division is made redundant.
Do you think Netflix is going to hire you into a business strategy or operations role? Well, they might. If they did, they'll also tell you that you better expect to unlearn everything you know about business because they do things a completely differently. Much more likely is that they simply wouldn't hire you. They wouldn't tell you this, but internally, they would say that product led growth and sales led growth are very different. The latter is the past, the former is the future. Zero marginal cost of distribution is king. And they don't want someone who is stuck in the old ways of doing thing screwing up their slick engine of tech based revenue growth.
So how do you learn the business of product led growth? It's simple, you start or join a hypergrowth startup. That's where you find the best of best businesspeople, because they're the ones that know how to go from 0-1, and they're willing to take that risk to get reasonably uncapped growth potential. You'd never find them at a big company, because if they can build up a $1B-$10B+ line of revenue from scratch, they're going to want to take as big a slice of the pie as they can. A big company will ultimately never give them a remotely large slice, so why would they go there to do it?
They don't. That's the simple answer. I've seen multiple founders in my extended network take a company from 0 to $1B+ in under 18 months. They are at another level as far as business skills and acumen are concerned. I was reminded of this when I joined Amazon, as I noted that level of business acumen compared to my startup days was significantly more mediocre. It didn't surprise me. The incentives weren't there, so why would the talent be?
Now again, I'm biased. I am heading back to the startup world with a lot of enthusiasm. In large part, that's because I've personally been on the ground floor of multiple companies that have gone from 0 to $1b. And let me tell you: there is absolutely nothing like it. The people and the challenges you see there are the kind you only see when you gather the most ambitious, creative, capable, risk-tolerant people you can find with a ton of money to work on a hard problem, most significantly in a NEW corporate structure -- one unencumbered by old school executives with old fashioned ways of doing things. You need that creative destruction, rebirth, and cutting edge thinking to have any right to be doing business in this day and age. The big incumbents have already perfected how to do all the traditional kinds of business and you don't have any edge otherwise.
I was in a businessy role in tier 2-3 companies for several years. That paid peanuts. Recently switched to DS role at a tier 1 and now I make almost 3x. All it required was few months of online courses and leetcode