Prestige of Engineers

BassDad
Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:31:27 +0000

I have been advocating job mobility at least as long as this thread has been running. There is a difference between that and the intentional dismantling of a useful enterprise for the personal profit of a relative handful of people, which is what I used the term “feeding frenzy” to describe.

It is highly encouraging that there are solar energy startups in a position to offer above-average salaries. Those folks are indeed lucky to be in that position. If you can get someone to pay you an above-average salary as well as offer you potentially valuable stock options, that indeed is the best of both worlds from the employee’s point of view. As you point out by way of answering your own question once again, there are opportunities among startups at very high salaries to attract top talent, and that top talent is frequently following the money. Such offers do not come around very often because that is still a risky business strategy from the point of view of the employer. A few companies that are very easy to pinpoint in hindsight manage to make it work. Far more either do not have the funding to even try that approach, or do try it and fail because they could not continue to generate the needed cash flow long enough to get off the ground. Existing companies that have a lot to lose to a risky strategy are not going to be very anxious to try what you suggest.

I agree that you can no longer trust anyone other than yourself to look after your career. In fact, I have been saying that throughout this thread. To say that someone cares about nothing more than their own career goes far beyond the concept of career maintenance because there is far more to life than just a career. Personally, I don’t think the world would be a better place if the best and brightest were to make decisions about what they want to do with their lives based solely on maximization of their personal net worth.

You can toss Google around all you like, but you are not going to convince very many HR departments to change their pay scales based on comparison with a single firm or even a couple dozen of the most highly successful startups out of tens or hundreds of thousands that failed. A lot of the failed startups hired very talented people on the basis of stock options and a lot of those very talented people are now living above their parents’ garage while working at something steadier to pay off the accumulated college and credit card debt that they racked up. Contrast that with the financial management folks who filed for Chapter 7, leaving the employees and creditors holding the bag even as they are looking for the next set of venture capitalists and recent grads to dupe.

Autonomous work roles and measurement tools are easier to apply in some situations than others. It is usually pretty straightforward to measure the amount of sales that an individual has generated (and not at all unusual for employers to so obfuscate the rules concerning commissions that even the more successful salespeople get cheated.) A lot of engineering tasks are necessarily done as a team and even the parts that can be split up into separate areas of responsibility can have a big effect on one another. One person or one team can look very good at the expense of the rest of the project by shifting costs to other areas that have no hope of bearing those costs. The whole thing fails, but the people most responsible for the failure come out looking good. If you can come up with a measurement scheme that works well across a wide range of engineering projects, you could start the next Microsoft or Google yourself. It really is a difficult problem that cannot be dismissed by saying just find better measurement techniques. Part of the problem is that smart people get very good at subverting whatever measurement is being made to their own ends and we are talking about some very smart people indeed in this discussion.

I do not blame Apple for making the theft of intellectual property the basis of an entire industry, but they have to share some of the blame for capitalizing on it to a greater extent than anyone else. They have indeed come forth with a way to buy media legally and are probably making a profit at that as well (more power to them on that score) but the fact remains that a very large number of people buy their product with the intent to use it to commit theft. Apple knows this. The fact that a large number of people are doing it and getting away with it does not make it right.