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A comment on Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or Employee. Parent comment

Re:Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or ... by sidlls on Thursday September 28, 2017 @03:39PM (#15360080)
It isn't binary: value is created by all parties involved. It's just, in my opinion, that if we normalize the value created to be 1 for the product team, then engineering's value is less than 1, and sales and marketing is (more often) greater than or equal to 1, most of the time. Exceptions exist. But they're not normal, by definition.
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Re:Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or ... by sgift on Thursday September 28, 2017 @05:02PM (#15360680)
> that if we normalize the value created to be 1 for the product team, then engineering's value is less than 1

Well yes, if we make completely baseless "normalizations" than that's true. Obviously, there is no reason to do that, but sure, if we do it that's the result.

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Re:Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or ... by ddustin on Thursday September 28, 2017 @03:55PM (#15360206)
An engineer's value can be exponential and can even go well beyond their own lifespan.

Sales and marketing impact is immediate and falls off over time while engineering's impact is slow and can speed up over time.

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Re:Three Paths in the Tech Industry: Founder, Executive, or ... by rockostrich on Thursday September 28, 2017 @04:34PM (#15360493)
Right, at a start-up the value of product, sales, and marketing is huge compared to that of engineering. Most engineers can create an MVP that will deliver the promises of the other 3.

The problem is trying to scale that product once marketing and sales do their job. I think the value of each of these 4 changes depending on the company size and tend to normalize to 1 as the company scales to the size of Google, Amazon, FB, etc.

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