

Come to terms with being “only” an engineer - protomyth
http://pandodaily.com/2013/01/01/your-2013-resolution-come-to-terms-with-being-only-an-engineer/

======
austenallred
I think the article would have been better served if he just came out and said
what he wanted to say, instead of skirting around it.

He really wanted to say, "Respect me, dammit. You have no idea how hard my job
is. I just sold my business for $200 Million but some of you still don't take
me seriously because I don't know how to program."

Tech cofounders have, rightfully, learned to eschew sketchy/crappy/douchey
business co-founders. Sometimes the generality of "business guy" takes the
fall with that. The truth is that it's a lot easier to fake having the
potential to be a CEO than it is to fake having the potential to be a CTO. If
you've ever noticed how ready marketers/business guys are to throw out their
credentials, that's because until you have at least a somewhat successful
startup under your belt, you can't be taken seriously. You have no tangible
skill. You're a liability.

The author wants technical co-founders to know what it's like to be him for a
minute.

~~~
drewmck
Except he didn't. In douchey-business-guy fashion he tries to put an entire
community of transdisciplinary people in their place by telling them to be
happy with handling the technical side of things, while people like him
interface with users, design the product, run the numbers, market and sell it.

I'm a programmer/interaction designer. In design school we were told by
professors that "programmers think in terms of X, but designers think in terms
of Y. You should never code if your a designer, and never let a programmer
design" While they are correct that exercising one muscle will benefit at the
exclusion of others, they go to far with the assertion that there exists some
cognitive boundary between design and development. The same goes for singular-
thinking business guys, like the author, who attempt to dress down engineers
who want to try their hand at something new.

I've never met a engineer tell an aspiring business guy "just be a business
guy, don't try to code". In fact, most engineers I know will heap praise at
business people who bootstrap their idea, even if the first attempt is a bit
wonky. This just proves how badly the person wants their vision to be
realized.

New years resolution for 2013: stop trying to clip other's wings.

~~~
ryana
"In douchey-business-guy fashion he tries to put an entire community of
transdisciplinary people in their place"

I think his point is also that this type of thing is not just accepted, but
encouraged within engineering circles when talking about business people.

But yes, it wasn't delivered very well and the confrontational nature of it
will mean that a lot of people who would do well to heed its advice will
immediately turn defensive and get nothing from it.

------
zacharyvoase
Wow, this is extremely negative, and suffers from an assumption that one
_cannot_ start a company without necessarily doing the entire Seed + Series
Alphabet dance.

Besides, being turned off by bureaucracy is one thing, but some of the biggest
success stories in tech history were the result of an engineer taking on the
bureaucracy and fixing/obsoleting it.

If your new year's resolution is to stop reading stuff that will not enrich
your life, I'd recommend steering clear of this article.

~~~
GBond
Agreed, and just one of many false assumptions.

He assumes an early startup CEO must always have a later stage startup CEO
skills ("you must have all 4 magic unicorn skillz"). During the early period,
you need product execution first and foremost and not a lot of cash to do it.
An engineer-turned-CEO is well equipped to wear the many hats to build a
product on a budget. Once the startup starts hitting revenue strides, the
startup can tap into advisors to fill the knowledge gap (but more than likely,
the VC will try to replace the founder CEO with a "gray hair" anyway).

He ignore the fact there is an engineering scarcity. As the OP stated you
can't "fake" being a CTO. You need fulltime engineering/product person focus
throughout the startup's lifespan. However, once you are an established
startup, even "experienced" CEO are a commodity. Contrast that to the dev
landscape (OP already covers all the perks of an engineer's job because of
said scarcity).

He assumes engineers who aspire to be founders are naive. The engineer
background founders I know (ones who are actually doing stuff) are rarely
disillusioned by how hard a startup is. If anything, they are overly risk-
adverse being more inclined to make decision based on quantitative data.

What tickles me the most is the notion that engineers have had it so good and
and are WAY too spoiled to become CEOs. Break out the violins.

------
yesimahuman
True, being a CEO is very different from being a engineer, and more people
should know about the realities of it before they jump in.

But being able to generate more per month doing your own thing than your hot
salary at your last job? That's real, and many people are doing it, including
myself. Plus, I am still the lead engineer and code as much as I like, and
I've learned so much and have grown as a person from it. On top of that we
didn't need to raise any money to do it (despite this article suggesting
otherwise).

Hiring great engineers is hard, but articles like this come off as trying to
keep great people from leaving their jobs to chase their dreams.

------
davmar
i'm an engineer turned ceo. and i know quite a few others.

unfortunately, i think his points are spot on. being a ceo is harder than
being an engineer. period.

but if we didn't have engineers turning into ceo's, how many companies can you
think of that would never have happened? HP? Tesla, SpaceX, PayPal? Google?

so even though he's right - being a ceo is fucking hard - don't let that stop
you, engineer. you CAN be a ceo if you're willing to put in the work.

~~~
RegEx
It's probably an effective warning to the fence-sitters. If you're extremely
determined to be CEO, you're probably going to brush off the warnings and go
through with your plan regardless. That's how I perceive it, at least.

~~~
davmar
Agree. And what's harder about it is mostly the emotional and reward aspects.
It's easy to close out a bug or a feature and feel some sense of
accomplishment. You don't get those micro-rewards anymore, so your own morale
is more difficult to manage.

------
callmeed
Sorry, but as we've heard, "software is eating the world" and there's no
reason the world of _running a business_ is immune.

Think about all the software and startups out there helping automate things
like payroll, bookkeeping, data analysis, marketing spend, etc etc

When your best arguments are dealing with bureaucracy and BS, you're not
exactly on solid ground.

------
GBond
TL;DR:

Newb geek - you have an equal chance as anybody at becoming a good business
person. But it's hard and your life is easy. Don't do it.

Experienced geek - you have ZERO chance at becoming a good business person
because you are too used to your cushy life. Don't do it.

------
jianshi
Must be proficient at Microsoft Excel! Stopped reading shortly after that.

~~~
seivan
Hah, spot on. These people are so far down the rabbit hole, that they can't
really tell what they are doing that is actually difficult.

------
zem
this is one of the times i feel that hn has a large bubble that i am outside
looking in. pretty much everyone i know obsesses about exactly the opposite
problem - how long and how successfully we can keep on being pure engineers
while still getting promotions, raises, etc.. it's one of the central
aspirations of my career not to have to do anything nontechnical for a living.

------
seivan
Basically, the only use of business guy is because of necessary evil BS that
one needs to wade through in order to deal with paper work. The same use for a
lawyer. It's not actually part of the product.

Necessary evil.

~~~
brackin
If you're bootstrapping a SaaS then you're probably right. If you're building
something big, like a Square, BankSimple, Spotify, etc then your chances of
success drop considerably. Especially on the raising money front.

It's a really odd term though. A lot of non-tech founders aren't necessarily
business guys (MBA's). They may have a lot of knowledge in a space, eye for
design (Jobs), ability to lead a team and build a product & biz that grows.

------
mgkimsal
"A great businessperson must be highly quantitative and analytical. He or she
must be attentive to data and proficient in Microsoft Excel. He or she must
know how to weave ideas and theories into numbers and benchmarks. A person who
is not strong with numbers will be handicapped in running a great business."

I'm guessing there've been a boatload of great companies built by
'businesspersons' who weren't proficient in Excel - what did they do before
Excel?

Trite point, I know, but there's more to my critique here, as I think the OP
missed a huge point vis-a-vis "technical engineers" vs "business people": a
"great business person" can get others to do their work; a great engineer
really can't. Yes, the businessperson needs to understand some level of what's
going on, but more to the point they can cultivate relationships with trusted
advisors who can do deep dives on specific areas of the business and
landscape. The 'great businessperson' will have an ability to synthesize that
information, at the very least, and to the extent that they _can_ go deeper in
some areas, they can augment their advisors' input with their own knowledge
and research.

Contrast that with the 'great engineer' - they can't really outsource their
work. To the degree that they'd do that, they're now managers, managing
others' time and efforts. It's not _bad_ or _wrong_ , but what each party can
get away with in terms of using the labor and brains of others and take the
credit for the whole is different.

~~~
austenallred
I suppose it depends on your definition of "proficiency." If "proficient"
means "able to use," is anyone not proficient in Excel?

------
venomsnake
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Henry Ford and George Stephenson were "only"
engineers.

So I am happy to be called one.

------
vegas
This essay is pretty accurate in a lot of regards. However, many of the things
that he gets on about are things that are massively wrong with the American
economy at the moment(not that that doesn't make them any less real). He also
completely neglects the fact that given the generally poor quality of
technical evaluation skills at most companies, one rarely gets to "just be an
engineer", but often has to learn how swim in political waters anyways.
There's less bullshit to deal with just working in an office than there is
being the quasi-celebrity that one must be as a CEO, but there's still a lot
more bullshit than there ought to be. Nobody's out there just building awesome
stuff, having people notice that they build awesome stuff and handing them
fair amounts of money.

------
zanny
> Engineers are doing great, and are making massive salaries with or without
> an expensive college degree and all the debt that comes with it.

$20,000 in college loans, Bachelors in CS, 3.4 GPA, and I'm still job hunting
6 months later. Don't wanna hear shit. Engineers with 5+ years experience are
immune because they are an extremely valuable asset. Unproven graduates still
have to fight uphill to get a leg in to the industry if they don't have career
center connections.

~~~
sp4rki
That means that actually getting a job is not part of your skill set.
Regardless of what the rest of the world tells you, getting a job and being
good at negotiating perks is a talent. Sure unemployment is rising and all
that BS, but lets be real, getting into the business with a degree is easy as
long as you don't expect an awesome job, pay, and perks from the get go.

You have three options: a) apply everywhere and deal with a crappy job for a
year or two and then search for something more "fun" b) go build some stuff
and hope people start to notice (I wish I had done this... Cest la vie), or c)
learn some cobol and go maintain some legacy system while working for a PHB.

I don't want to come off as a grumpy negative person, but if you can't get a
crappy underpaying job in the tech industry you should really re-evaluate
what's going on... It has probably more to do with bad social skills, a lack
of talent, or a big ego than with the actual job market.

------
j45
Since when is it OK for a news site to tell people with what they can or can't
be?

Entrepreneurship is constant self-teaching

~~~
ruswick
New sites frequently tell one what to do with their life, or at least how one
ought to act or think in a given situation. People don't write things because
they like typing, they write things to impress some concept on their reader
and influence them to act in some way. I'd even say that life advice is one of
the main themes on HN and in writing in general. I don't know why this article
particularly incensed you, but it's indefensible to argue that it is NOT OK
for news sites to tell one what to do. People can and do frequently tell one
to do. It's not outrageous.

Incidentally, they weren't telling people what they can and can't be, but were
recommending that people not become entrepreneurs for reasons that aren't
necessarily false.

Certainly, there are plenty of assertions that could be contended in this
piece, but the fact that the article is making a statement about how to go
about one's life is not one of them.

~~~
j45
It was a bit of a loaded question, in all fairness.

Readers unfortunately aren't sophisticated as we should be, to know the
difference between journalism and an opinion piece and what the goals of each
are.

------
jseims
I agree with a lot of the points this article makes. What worked for me was to
have a co-founder who basically handled everything that was not coding.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
Dorsey is a fashionable dresser, but what about Zuckerberg.

------
VLM
"For example, engineers are largely insulated from the maddening world of
government bureaucracy."

What field? Not my buddies in civil. Not my EE buddies. Absolutely not my
MechEng buddies. ChemEng? LOL.

He might, possibly, be talking about "network engineers" but any WAN ones will
have all kinds of fun with the hyperregulated telcos and any supporting exotic
wireless will have all kinds of fun with the FCC. At a previous employer when
the SEC said "jump", the software engineers said "how high?" so they don't
count.

------
eriksank
Asking anybody to be a triple-A engineer -- without which there is simply
nothing to sell -- and in addition to that NOT to do things in terms of sales
and finance that could seriously damage the thing, means that there are indeed
only that many Sergey Brins or Larry Pages on this planet ...

