I phone screened somebody not so long ago who asked me if it was the "kind of job where you have to write a lot of code", because they "weren't that sort of software engineer". Didn't quite know what to make of that.
I don't love it. Maybe the person you screened should be doing my job.
Have you ever fired anyone? "Nope"
Have you ever shipped a product and supported it for more than a year? "Nope"
Do you have any quality engineers that would come with you? "Nope"
Have you ever managed a manager? "Nope"
I noped his ass out the door.
Fear not, this craziness will pass.
At my last company, my boss was the first technical hire. His title was Director of Software Engineering. He got that title and the responsibilities that came with it solely because he was the first technical hire.
He had no management experience at all. He was a great engineer, but he couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag. He had the double whammy of both not knowing a thing about process and not understanding people. He didn't think having a process was necessary because his own code was amazing, he wrote the initial versions of our software all by himself in what actually is a solid example of a well-engineered project, and he couldn't fathom how anyone's code could be less than amazing. He also couldn't handle stress, and he had a habit of screaming at his subordinates and treating us like children whenever he got stressed.
His management was the biggest reason I quit.
I think engineers/developers/hackers tend to undervalue the skills necessary to manage a project well. Basically considering the work a lot easier than writing code or building something and thinking that anyone can do it (including themselves in your example).
I think the reason for this is because a lot of people can do a shitty job managing a team and it's not as obvious as when people do a shitty job programming (or at least there are more people that can be a bad manager undetected than can be a bad programmer).
It's harder to bullshit technical skills, but a bad manager could have good enough social/political skills to get power and it's probably also more likely to attract people looking for power. Engineering seems to provide a filter to avoid some of this naturally.
That said being a really effective PM, Manager, VP is a skill different from programming and with a similar depth that shouldn't be dismissed easily. This is more obvious to HN probably because startup founders often have to get better at it in order to build a company. Since it tends to rely a decent amount on empathy and social skills in addition to being able to understand the technical pieces/prioritization it's also harder to know how good you'll be at it when starting.
It is something you can get better at though, just takes investment/learning like anything else.
Reminds me of Tom West from Soul of a New Machine.
In my experience, once you are in management it takes a hell of a lot more fuck-ups before you are ousted.
Because they got the job.
Even if you're a bona fide engineer, but not enrolled in the order, calling yourself one opens the floodgates of hell where spaghetti coders do the same and get hired by retarded HR departments to take the lead on some mission-critical software.
I like this. I am a self-learned developer. When my peers call themselves engineers, I spit my coffee.
Ehhhh. If you try to stamp and sign structural engineering documents as an engineer, and then a bridge collapses, you're open to litigation. I don't think anyone has been (successfully?) sued for declaring themeselves as Software Engineers in Canada. There are no damages.
Interestingly, you can call yourself an "SE," and its fine (according the professional engineering associations), but companies in YVR actively recruit "software engineers" (e.g. Electronic Arts)
It seems as though the US prioritizes shit-developers/wannabe-engineers over experienced Canadian developers. Which kind of makes sense, in that you feed your own before feeding your neighbour.
So I really doubt that H1B flooding is a thing. Open to debate though.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/11/us/large-companies-game-h-...
"Many of the visas are given out through a lottery, and a small number of giant global outsourcing companies had flooded the system with applications, significantly increasing their chances of success. While he had one application in last year’s lottery and lost, one of the outsourcing companies applied for at least 14,000."
A quick fix would be to award H1B based on salary instead of lottery.
I do cringe, though, at the extreme overuse of the term in software; I have two parents who are legit PEs in the US and drilled the distinction in with me.
At the very least, it should be reserved for someone with a broad theoretical and practical background who solves more complicated problems ... but you know how title inflation goes.
We do it because it works...
Can you elaborate on why you think it's "blatantly obvious" though? I can't make any of these types of guesses with high confidence.
The reason is because they learned out of innate curiosity and true passion. You always go farther with those.
However, you go even farther with curiosity, passion and a degree.
You've never maintained a production app and you're getting offers as director of engineering?
I completely agree that you may not want your best engineers in this role because interfacing with and leading people is a completely separate skill, but I would still think any competent exec with a technical title will have some technical experience.
What's worse, the people interviewing me know even less than I do. The patchwork of bullshit runs deep in San Francisco.
The only thing that might change this is something like the opening of the final frontier-- space. But in that case I'm not sure if it would... distances between say Earth and Mars are so vast that any Martian economy would effectively be a separate entity. It might experience rapid growth but I'm not sure if that would translate over here. The Homeworld might still be like Japan-- a zero-bound no-growth economy.
I suppose an AI explosion that wasn't destructive might change things too by creating a lot of new non-corporeal economic entities, but we're well off into sci-fi land here.
Edit: I don't necessarily mean that all forms of "growth" are over. We could still have tremendous growth in knowledge, technological capability, standard of living, and some amount of economic growth. But heavily leveraged inflationary credit economics requires crazy exponential growth in an absolute sense. Without crazy growth it breaks, and the only way to keep it nominally running is to pump money into it to prevent cascading default.
In a sense I think the "pop Austrians" are right that the present system is broken, but they've historically had the failure mode exactly wrong. The failure mode is not hyperinflation-- it's hyperdeflation that's permanently held at bay by money printing ("Japan"). That's because pop Austrians don't get the money multiplier. Almost all money in circulation is credit/debt, not M1. You'd have to print absurd amounts of money and make sure it's distributed more widely than banks to cause a non-localized hyperinflation in a credit economy. (Localized hyperinflation is possible due to bubbles but these usually collapse.)
Of course another way of keeping the illusion alive is to pump up localized credit bubbles repeatedly. These give the illusion to certain sectors or regions that the economy is still growing the way it should... for a while. But then they pop and you need another round of money printing to prevent hyperdeflation. Rinse and repeat. Meanwhile these bubbles distort the price structure of the economy, such as by making housing ridiculous or driving certain commodities crazy.
Agreed nominal interest rates will likely drop down again to zero to restimulate the economy, but I doubt that will stick for the next decade, as inflation should creep back in forcing the Fed's hand. However, if you believe that "real interest rates" (ie subtracting inflation) will be zero for a long time, I can concur -- currently they are negative.
Earth is now Japan. Perhaps Mars is the next America.
The banks are a serious drain on the system. They get to extract percentages from the economy year over year, while contributing nothing (except interest obligations).
Then, perhaps, we try to figure out how to engineer solutions that will guarantee certain certain conditions will be met (e.g. Enough food for every person in an area will make it to that area for everyone there to live satisfactorily).
As the dependencies are mapped out and tracked, it will become obvious which tasks are necessary to fulfill the current economic objectives. Then, it's simply a matter of performing the tasks.
The one thing I really agree with though is the funny thing that happens here with the word "engineer". If you can make a website you somehow qualify for the title software engineer. By Bay Area standards, I myself am director level engineering talent—and I get offers for such all the time—and yet I don't even remotely consider myself an engineer. Because I can make a website? Because I know a little python, ruby and node? Come on. I've never written anything that lives in a real production environment and you want to hire me as your director of engineering? Are you mad?