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Companies That Don't Understand Engineers Don't Respect Engineers
An anonymous reader writes Following up on a recent experiment into the status of software engineers versus managers, Jon Evans writes that the easiest way to find out which companies don't respect their engineers is to learn which companies simply don't understand them. "Engineers are treated as less-than-equal because we are often viewed as idiot savants. We may speak the magic language of machines, the thinking goes, but we aren't business people, so we aren't qualified to make the most important decisions. ... Whereas in fact any engineer worth her salt will tell you that she makes business decisions daily–albeit on the micro not macro level–because she has to in order to get the job done. Exactly how long should this database field be? And of what datatype? How and where should it be validated? How do we handle all of the edge cases? These are in fact business decisions, and we make them, because we're at the proverbial coal face, and it would take forever to run every single one of them by the product people and sometimes they wouldn't even understand the technical factors involved. ... It might have made some sense to treat them as separate-but-slightly-inferior when technology was not at the heart of almost every business, but not any more."
The article references Michael O. Church and some other article that he apparently wrote.
I don't really know who Michael O. Church is, but I do know from the few times that I've dared venture over to Hacker News that a lot of people there absolutely hate him for some reason. If I'm not mistaken, I saw comments from people claiming to work for or to have worked for Google, and these comments absolutely demonized him, but without really explaining why.
Can anyone fill me in on who Michael O. Church is, why he's so disliked over at Hacker News, and whatever else we should know about this situation?
Real engineers don't size databases.
Exactly how long should this database field be? And of what datatype? How and where should it be validated? How do we handle all of the edge cases?
That is not a business decision, that is a technical decision where you try to come up with the most universal and correct to spec answer you can. You are not shaping the business with this decision, you are trying to shape your solution to the business.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I think this has a lot more to do with the machismo of business people than anything else. The suits don't have a lick of understanding of what the engineers actually do--sure, they understand the iPhone once it rolls off the lines, but up to that point, what engineers do is basically a bunch of technovoodoo magic to them. Since lots of businessmen are macho, domineering types (especially in large, competitive companies), the concept of having subordinates who are doing things far beyond their understanding is not one they like. In turn, the business people feel the need to assert how hard whatever it is they do--"oh, you wouldn't understand because business is sooo much more complicated than rocket science"--and elevate the complexity and importance of their own job beyond that of the lowly engineers.
I don't think it's lack of "understanding the engineers." I think it's lack of understanding the engineering and feeling uncomfortable about it.
/. may be a software-centric site, but those of us in mechanical, electrical, optical, materials, and other branches of engineering are in the same basic position. But sadly, even in businesses which promote engineers into senior roles end up respecting people primarily on the basis of how many direct reports (that's the term for peons whose salaries they determine) they control. Until you're able to rate people by the quality/quantity of output regardless of altitude in the org chart, this problem will continue.
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
If your company promotes engineers from within into engineering management positions, then you work for a company that respects engineers.
If your company promotes administrators from within (you know, MBAs, project managers, etc) then there's a chance it might respect engineers.
If your company hires management from outside for the bottom rung of management (usually who most engineers report to), then your company probably dislikes engineers very much.
I've been in the computing industry for many, many, many years. I've worked on the hardware side, on the software side, and everywhere in between.
Businesspeople will treat software developers and electrical engineers just fine, but these software developers and electrical engineers need to be adults and need to act like adults. They need to dress professionally, they need to act professionally, and they need to get valuable work done.
Such things conflict with the Hipster lifestyle, however. The influx of Hipsters into the software industry, and the hardware industry to a lesser extent, has brought their alternative view on such matters into conflict with the well established business practices.
No, businesspeople will not take a Hipster seriously when this Hipster insists on wearing a fedora hat, a t-shirt with some stupid smart-ass saying on it, and glasses frames without any lenses in them to meetings with serious clients. Businesspeople will frown on such immaturity.
No, businesspeople will not take a Hipster seriously when this Hipster emails thousands or tens of thousands of other employees, and accidentally includes some customers, begging them to support her social justice cause fight of the day. Businesspeople have real work to get done while at work, rather than wasting time supporting some sort of social deviancy.
No, businesspeople will not take a Hipster seriously when this Hipster insists on using provenly bad technologies like Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and NoSQL absolutely everywhere, especially when the Hipster was told that C++ is being used because the other 10 million lines of code in the system are written in C++. Businesspeople need software that works, not software that's built upon technologies solely chosen because of how much hype they've gotten, or how much they tickle the fancy of some Hipster.
Hipsters go out of their way to conflict with established business practices and professionalism in basically every way they can. Then they wonder why businesspeople don't take them seriously! Come on. Cut the crap, Hipsters. If you're going to act like children, you'll be treated like children. Act like actual adults, and you won't have anywhere near as many issues.
Should I halt work on the next version for a month to do custom work for this important customer?
Should I save time by making the system very inflexible in this regard to get it out the door for a narrow market at the expense of a wider market later?
Should I follow the spec that management and business analysts wrote even though it seems wrong, or go up the chain or to the customer and likely fix or rewrite the spec?
These are the kind of business decisions I used to find myself making. In most cases it turned out that I made the correct decision in hindsight, but I got a lot of fighting from management in the process about that not being my job, even though there was nobody else competent to do it.
The biggest problem I run into is that the management assumes that the engineers are completely unable to talk to customers and look at outside non-technical specifications. I have found that engineers tend to be better at it than managers and all but the best business analysts.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
I think you're getting engineer confused with self-opinionated hipster who wants to pretend they are businessmen and engineer without having the skill or talent to be either.
See "Startup" for more details.
That seems fair (at least at face value), given that engineers tend to hold business weenies in complete contempt.
We do, however, have both a power and a knowledge imbalance in the situation. We have a power imbalance in that those business weenies can fire me, but I can't fire them; and we have a knowledge imbalance in that many engineers do know the business side of things. I can work up a set of financial statements as well as the weenies; I can perform a ratio analysis better than the weenies, because unlike them, I "know" what the numbers mean beyond a cut-and-paste job in Excel; I can analyze the company's capitalization structure and consider the impact on near-term cash flows right up there with the best of the weenies.
Now, you might fairly point out that I've mostly describe accountancy, not "business"... But the knowledge imbalance gets worse when we get into actual strategic planning, market analysis, and consideration of macroeconomic factors - At least many of the weenies have significant exposure to accounting, sometimes even a related undergrad degree. For the harder material, they just can't grasp even the basics of supply/demand curves without a solid math background (in taking my MBA, I found one particular economics class hilarious; we spent more than half of the semester learning a set of related equations for (for example) forecasting optimal production levels, that all just took the derivative of the same damn underlying equation from different perspectives. And that counted as one of the "killer" classes in a goddamned graduate-level degree?
Sadly, though, business weenies do have exactly one trait that engineers lack - Smarm. And in this sick sad world, that will get you further than any level of mastery of any legitimate domain of knowledge.
This is actually a very touchy subject. The Engineers have felt it for years, but this applies to SO much more in business.
How many times haven't you been seen as the "useful idiot" every time someone need something technical fixed? This is something I've lived with and experienced since I was a kid (we're talking 30+ years here), and I wasn't even the geeky one. But it seems like every manager, every company executive and even just everyday people think they're somewhat "superior" because they make money on your kindness and professionalism.
I even had friends like that for years, sure...when something breaks, they'll come to me to get it fixed, and expect not to pay for it. But when I needed something, then they where nowhere to be seen. I made millions for one of my bosses back in the Commodore heydays when I literally was the "driving" motor of his entire store chain, I got people together, computer-clubs, repaired the computers etc. One could always argue that I was the IDIOT for not being business savvy enough to charge more, but they are just better at business than fixing things. When I left, his business went to ruins within 2 years, he thought he did it all by himself because he was such a smart businessman. That's the worst part...these company directors wouldn't know good people, and they always get high on "their" own success. And eventually fail.
How many times haven't you seen bosses walk away with HUGE fat bonuses, and all they basically do is talk. You do all the work anyway. Small minds think small, and only see the carrot dangling in front of their face. Intelligent bosses actually think ahead and invest in great minds. The companies that have the biggest successes - are those who appreciate their workers and the incredible minds behind it all. The best company executive in the world, praises his coworkers where credit is due.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Hey, I could bring up how they had the great idea to release software during a literal blizzard.(Yes, that really happened and yes it really was a blizzard. This did not go well.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
But business managers don't respect anyone who isn't also a business manager.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
How about finding a real article. This is really just fanning the flames of insecurity.
Coincidentally everyone but the managers of a company think that management is overrated, overpaid and in general the reason that things go south when (not if) they do. A bunch of dorks with zero clue what the company is actually doing making decisions about it and the products they have never even seen. Hell, the idiots even claim that it doesn't matter just what kind of product we're producing 'cause they're equally qualified to run a potato chip company as they are running a computer chip company. Actually I'd agree, they're usually qualified for neither.
So you see, the feeling is definitely mutual. The only thing that saves them is that they make the HR decisions, too. Else they'd have been outsourced to the local zoo.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
No, businesspeople will not take a Hipster seriously when this Hipster insists on using provenly bad technologies like Ruby on Rails, JavaScript and NoSQL absolutely everywhere, especially when the Hipster was told that C++ is being used because the other 10 million lines of code in the system are written in C++. Businesspeople need software that works, not software that's built upon technologies solely chosen because of how much hype they've gotten, or how much they tickle the fancy of some Hipster.
They'll also not take seriously self-righteous morons who use the word "proven" as a justification for their technical prejudices, instead of to denote some objective reality. Or actually, they might, but the rest of us won't.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I worked for 13 years at a company that designed and manufactured switch mode power supplies up to 3kW size. The last ten years was in the design lab with a team of about 15 engineers. We made decisions on a daily basis in respect of fire and electric shock safety for our products; things that affect the very lives and properties of the end users of this equipment. One wrong decision or non-comliance with a particular regulation could have caused our company to be sued into oblivion. Despite this responsibility that we shouldered, we were not allowed access to the stationery cupboard - we had to go and ask permission of some junior office member for a simple ball point pen etc.
You wouldn't ever catch me in a fedora (it seems little more than a uniform for them much like a suit is to your so called "businesspeople") but people who judge someone's professional competency based on that attire and equate professionalism with collars and suits are being as stupid and bigoted as the hipsters that you are describing.
Professionalism shouldn't be about clothing choices or buzz words or even about following arbitrary procedures. It should be about getting the job done, efficiently and to a high standard and that's *all* that it should be about! A professional is someone you can trust to meet your specified product (or service) requirements to a high standard.
Yes I know that in trying to win customers a business needs to consider the fact that more often than not a lot of these potential customers will have many of these arbitrary, illogical preconceptions, so I do understand that making compromises to please their sensibilities is important for the success of a business. It doesn't change the fact that these preconceptions are arbitrary and could make life simpler if over time they were phased out. I actually think in some places that's already begun to happen.
Your ad here.
I'm an engineer who runs a business. I know the tradeoff between technology and costs. And figuring out how and where something should be validated is not a "business decision". It might be a business process decision, but unless it affect the bottom line (for example, the validation costs $50 so we only do it when a customer is just about to purchase) it's not a business decision.
There's a real problem with engineers not understanding business just as much as there's a problem with business types not understanding engineering. I had one of my engineers say to me once "I don't understand why we have sales people" (hint for those of you nodding along with him - it's so we get income so the engineers and everyone else can get paid). I've seen companies where engineering gold-plated the systems architecture to the point where the company couldn't make money with the deployed hardware.
Business isn't all that complicated and anyone competent as an engineer should be able to understand it (you may not like it but that's another issue entirely). Figuring out how the costs of a system affect the business, how the features in a product affect its salability, these are things that a good engineer will understand, and will probably wind up explaining to the business people.
See, if you were smarter you would talk more and work less and get paid more (I've been telling myself this for years. I think my line of bullshit is finally getting to corporate grade).
The same goes for JavaScript. It's used for some shitty web sites, but that's about it.
Dude, if you are going to troll, you have to at least try to pretend to be believable. JavaScript may be a shit language, but no one in their right mind is going to deny that there is simply no other option for modern applications on the front-end.
average salary software developer in the US is 98k.
average business manager is 48k.
We might not get the respect we think we deserve, but the stats don't lie about our income.
I once worked for a boss who repeatedly said: "We need to get you into management so I can pay you more." The odd thing was, he said this because he liked me, and really did want to pay me more. Yet since he owned the company, he could have paid me any salary he wanted, regardless of my job title. He just had this fixed idea that no engineer should be paid more than any manager who supervised multiple engineers.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
Its not about preconceptions based on attire. Its about perceptions based on the wisdom of choosing ones attire that puts the business environment ahead of one's personal need to express himself through dress. That is a statement in itself. Some get it, others don't. The accepted dress in most companies today is much more casual and varied than it was even 10 years ago. It will continue to evolve. Having the capacity to know where the standards of the day are, and what may be pushing the limits, is one that you can demonstrate through your choice of dress. Trying to prove something is fine, just don't blame others for the result it brings. Business leaders don't like complainers.
As evidently demonstrated by this summary.
(it has also been my experience, as an engineer turned entrepreneur and now CEO)
Preconceptions about business attire are based on social conventions that are utterly arbitrary!
You wouldn't ever catch me in a fedora (it seems little more than a uniform for them much like a suit is to your so called "businesspeople") but people who judge someone's professional competency based on that attire and equate professionalism with collars and suits are being as stupid and bigoted as the hipsters that you are describing.
True, but they control the purse strings. You can either bang your head against the wall while complaining about the unfairness of it all or adapt, get inside, and begin the make changes. Generational shifts occur, after all hats used to be the norm for men at work, as were suits and ties. However, the reality is those making decisions at the top have a set of norms and you need to adjust to those norms if ou want to be taken seriously. Sure, there is the occasional genius who can do whatever they want because they are so good but there are far more people who think they are that person then there ar etaht person.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Is it really immature to wear a t shirt or is it more immature to let someone tell you how to dress? If someone can't decide what to wear, I certainly don't want them making important decisions about business.
Or at least they do not have them long, as the good engineers will move on pretty soon. Some of them may even successfully found their own company!
I have seen this process several times now (fortunately always from the outside): Engineers start to get disrespected, and the most agile ones leave and find better jobs elsewhere. Then the good remaining ones raise more and more issues as there are not enough good engineers anymore and issues start to accumulate. Then these people get sacked or get strong suggestions to leave as they are "troublemakers". These also find better jobs elsewhere. Sometimes at a bit lower salary, but always with a lot more job-satisfaction. There may still be a few reasonable engineers left, for example some that are overpaid. (Typical gambit in the European banking industry: Overpay them, get them mortgages for houses, and suddenly they cannot easily leave because they would trouble to continue to pay their mortgages...) Then things get worse and worse, and eventually the average engineers figure out a way to leave as well. It is that or burn-out and engineers _are_ problem-solvers. And at that point, only those that are so bad that they really have no change of getting an acceptable job elsewhere remain. And eventually, things collapse.
Don't believe me? How do you think all the current data-breaches come to pass? Or a bit backwards in time: Why do you think Citibank took 6 weeks to analyze why you could switch account numbers in their online-banking and suddenly access accounts of other people? Or how did they miss this in the first place? Or why do many (most?) large IT projects still fail?
The only difference with large organizations or projects is that the process is a slower. Disrespecting engineers is a sure way to failure. Incidentally, in many classical hard engineering projects, you have engineers in charge, assisted by business people, not the other way round.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
On behalf of feminists everywhere I'd like to apologize for offending your male centric worldview.
That would imply that everyone wants to work less. Smart people should do what they love because they can. Many will do it for 60 hours a week because they want to.
So one set of people is concerned with making good products that meet a client's needs while the other is concerned with moving numbers around on paper to pretend they are producing something of value. You can get rid of one of these groups of people and still have a successful profitable company. Guess which one?
Perhaps they are also confusing engineers, a type of highly-trained professional with excellent problem-solving skills, with people who incorrectly call themselves engineers.
Actually, no. Business and tech alternate. The original driver may be tech (something becomes possible) or business (somebody hopes that something will become possible, like Edison that lied about the lightening bulb properties in his patent application), but afterwards it is usually both driving things. Or in some rare cases it is only tech, like for example, in some FOSS projects. It never is only business that drives things.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I hit upon a slight variation of this years ago when a friend of my was partnering up with a sales guy to start a company. I told my engineer friend to make sure that their written agreement was that not a dollar could be spent or a contract of any sort signed without his agreement. This included hiring peopel. Also any employee could be fired by either of them. The great twist that his lawyer threw in was that if one or the other agreed to something without the approval of the other that the cost came out of their share of the profits and has no legal standing with the company.
It wasn't two weeks after their first client wrote them a big check that the salesman leased himself a "company" car. My friend said, nope that comes out of your profits. The salesman went to a lawyer and then managed to return the car.
The other clause that totally screwed the salesman was what is called a "shotgun clause" basically what that states is that one partner can make an offer to buy out the other's share and that offer can not be refused; but it can be matched in which case the first party must sell for the amount they offered.
So the company was taking off and my friend just made an offer on a house. So the salesman made a lowball offer for my friend's half of the company thinking that all his money was tied up. My friend actually had quite a bit of money saved and combined with credit cards and family raised the matching money in about a day. This one ended up in court but didn't go anywhere as my friend was 100% in the right. What came out during the initial discovery was that now that they had hired a handful of engineers was that the salesman was ticked that he was paying 50% of the profits to my friend who he thought could be replaced with interns and local tech school graduates. But as my friend gleefully was able to do was replace the salesman with someone who was much cheaper than the 50% profits going to the salesman.
Needless to say, both of them were fairly replaceable but I would say that my friend had at least as good business skills as the salesman, while also possessing masterful engineering skills. The salesman only had moderate business skills and zero engineering skills.
The reality of the story was that while my friend was willing to let things continue as normal and let the salesman enjoy the fruits of his initial investment, the salesman was pretty much trying to screw my friend once a month. He just could not believe that some techy was his equal. Every new employee that was hired was told by the salesman that the salesman was in charge and that the engineer was basically a hanger on. So my engineering friend would often have to point out to people such as the accountant how things worked(as opposed how the salesman dreamed they worked) and that either one of them could fire anyone so if they tried picking a side they would be gone the next day.
Yet my friend fully agreed that when he turfed the salesman that either one of them were by that point replaceable. As he had brought engineering skills that at first the salesman could not get cheap enough, and that the salesman had brought a rolodex that got the company started before it was exhausted.
Sorry, I only take comments like this seriously when written by someone with an actual user account, instead of an AC. Then they're being "professional" and standing by their words. In all seriousness, I have experienced virtually no hipsterism in engineering culture over the course of 2 decades in the industry. Those that were about style over substance usually didn't even make it through getting their engineering degree. If you look at computer languages through the lens of "C++ is a proven technology" then you're ignoring other advances that make other solutions more appropriate. This comes from a place of not-understanding, rather than something being objectively better for any task. I started as a C++ developer for the first half of my career, and while I still occasionally maintain some older C++ software, most innovative work is done in modern languages now. Also, have you ever heard of a buffer overflow? There are lots of good reasons not to write certain things in C++, one of them being that it's easy to make a mistake and create a security nightmare. You might have heard of this when watching "business news".
The primary reason business attire is much more casual today is that other people began pushing against the same very envelope years ago.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
Pushing the limits and crossing the limits are two different things. Again, its situational sensitivity that is considered a positive trait. Those that don't get it, aren't going to display that trait.
that power, by its very nature, must be kept from the people who perform the actual, useful work.
Mmmm hmmm...don't bitch when the suits take advantage of you then.
And without him you probably would of been doing it as a hobby and losing money, instead of making a salary. Everyone thinks every other person is an idiot, and every other occupation is redundant.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Right -- before the hipsters, software types came to work in suits and ties. I distinctly remember that from the 70's. Oh wait, that was a hallucination. I remember them mostly wearing Birkenstocks, cutoff jeans and Peace symbol tees. I'm in my 60's but I don't have the selective amnesia of the above AC. In fact, I think the software types are mostly young marrieds and pretty serious about their work [anyway, more serious than I was]. When they propose new technology it is backed up with the advantages and not to get under the skin of the old fogies who think VB is just fine.
Some of our "hipsters" brought in some technology written in Erlang. It has been thoroughly tested by several groups and is now being adopted in multiple applications. It will surprise some people to learn that different processes can be written in different languages, and that it is usually better to use the right tool for the job.
Its not about preconceptions based on attire. Its about perceptions based on the wisdom of choosing ones attire that puts the business environment ahead of one's personal need to express himself through dress. That is a statement in itself. Some get it, others don't. The accepted dress in most companies today is much more casual and varied than it was even 10 years ago. It will continue to evolve. Having the capacity to know where the standards of the day are, and what may be pushing the limits, is one that you can demonstrate through your choice of dress. Trying to prove something is fine, just don't blame others for the result it brings. Business leaders don't like complainers.
The point I was trying to make was that the conventions that make up accepted dress in the business environment (to use your words) are arbitrary and based only on social conditioning. I accept that almost everyone has been subjected to that conditioning - not just the managers but also the customers. TFA is about engineers not being respected. The AC points out their clothing can cause them not to be respected.
For respect to be regained someone must make changes. That could be the engineers capitulating and dressing according to the social norms of the traditionalists. The respect could also be regained by the traditionalists waking up and realising that all of these cultural rituals are a waste of time that complicate the process of buying and selling high quality products and services.
Sure, if someone turns up to a series of job interviews today in a t shirt and flip flops they shouldn't be shocked if no-one calls them back and they need to seriously rethink their strategy. The same could be true when trying to clinch that sale - but then how many engineers are sales people?
The AC was attacking the stereotypical "hipster", calling them childish and speaking with much disdain about them. My point was that you can just as justifiably pour disdain on the traditionalist business folk. They are also the ones who are trying to impose their standards on other people. Standards that really should not be relevant, in an ideal world, to doing good business. I accept we do not live in an ideal world, and the hipsters of the AC's comment should know better. It's just that they're not the only ones that would benefit from an improved attitude.
Your ad here.
Sure, but the vast majority of engineers are never seen by anyone but their coworkers. If you feel it impacts your business you set a dress code. Under no circumstance is it productive or profitable to engage in passive aggressive disdain from people jealous of engineers in t shirts.
Why would engineers be any different? Do you think they appriciate the rest of the staff?
You are there because they can not do without you. If they think they can do without you (or without your function) they will fire you. That goes for EVERY job in the company, including the CEO.
The difference is that for some jobs it is very hard to change on short notice. Sales can push a few deals so they will make the new requirements or hold them back so they will have it easier for next years budget.
So they can react to the question of 'increase profit by X percent for the next 3 months'. There is no such thing for e.g. IT without cutting in projects/jobs. (Sure there are some ways to do it)
The real issue is that the majority of companies are in it for the money, so if you want to be understood, you need to speak the language of money. In companies that means budgets. This means when you take a decision in your job like "how should I set up this database" they do not care as long as you can provide the information on cost and profit both short, middle and long term and then they will decide what you should do.
If your datafield for the year still has 2 digits, why should I make it 4? Show me the outcome in $ and then we will see if we do it or not. THAT is taking a business decision, not if it is technically the best solution. Sometimes the technically worst decision is best for business.
I have seen (easy) technicaly solutions overturned time and time again. One time I asked for a soltion and they told me it was 3.000EUR as quoted by Cisco. A while later I told them I had a solution for a problem and would they OK it if I did it for 100 EUR. I never detailed that it was the same problem that had been denied for several years. Without blinking they said yes and looked if I was stoopid because I could spend 250 EUR per month on anything I wanted.
Bought two hubs and solved the issue.
Lesson: They must not talk your language. They must not understand you. You must understand them.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Yes I know that in trying to win customers a business needs to consider the fact that more often than not a lot of these potential customers will have many of these arbitrary, illogical preconceptions, so I do understand that making compromises to please their sensibilities is important for the success of a business. It doesn't change the fact that these preconceptions are arbitrary and could make life simpler if over time they were phased out. I actually think in some places that's already begun to happen.
Arbitrary and prejudicial yes, but still rational. Think about the bowl of M&Ms (with all brown M&Ms removed) that Van Halen required to be backstage for each of their shows. It didn't even rise to the level of indulging a prejudice: it was a completely arbitrary requirement. But if the bowl wasn't there or had the wrong stuff in it the band knew the venue wasn't taking the specs of the contract seriously and so they would be on guard for further deviations. If you, as an engineer, present yourself as a prima donna, disheveled, or otherwise cause yourself to be seen as putting your proclivities above their own, clients will be that much more on guard against you trying to satisfy your own interests as opposed to theirs. It will now be your (or more likely someone else's) job to convince the clients that your professionalism rises above the perceived disrespect or cluelessness. Programmers are already given an incredible amount of latitude compared to most engineers, especially when comparing the elite whose work product easily returns as much revenue per FTE (think billion dollar power plants, refineries, semiconductor FABs, etc).
Trading the graphic tee and shorts for a nicer shirt and jeans right before the meeting isn't a whole lot to ask.
Unlike you I have seen hipsterism, but it's a minority. You can go to downtown Mountain View any day and see people that look like they are homeless talking business on a smart phone or banging away on a MacBook Pro. I assume that whoever employs them lets them work from home (or downtown Mountain View), and probably prefers it that way.
Outside of the "hipster" appearances, and much more common, I have seen people enter shops and try to change the company to use what ever trend they like. It generally ends the same, with the person being canned. On very rare occasions those people start their own businesses with their idea and it works out.
My point is really that you seem to be using a generalization that is no more valid than TFA or GP. GP tries to claim that "Hipsters" are the problem and ignores management, TFA claims it's all management and not an engineers fault, you imply hipsters don't exist or impact businesses.
One good person can surely make or break a company, and they don't have to hold a certain position. A single "bad" employee may not be able to put a massive company like IBM out of business, but that one person can cause huge financial harm or benefit. That fact is what tends to be neglected by certain managers, often to their detriment.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It's immature to be excessively concerned what other people are wearing, more immature to feel the need to tell them what to wear, and just plain stupid to change the outcome of important business decisions because of what they were wearing.
Your ad here.
you posted>> No, businesspeople will not take a Hipster seriously when this Hipster emails thousands or tens of thousands of other employees, and accidentally includes some customers, begging them to support her social justice cause fight of the day. Businesspeople have real work to get done while at work, rather than wasting time supporting some sort of social deviancy.
I don't know if this is a Southern thing, but I as a programmer have been inundated with idiots trying to push religion on me. Some God damn idiot tries to talk religion with me as if he were to make a difference in my understanding. Sometimes I reply with a remark like, "Religion is the opium of the masses", "Jesus Christ was a Political Criminal" or "Religion is a brainwashing of children and a form of unbanned child abuse." which just infuriates the idiots. People with an IQ in the single digit seems to think that they hold the truth.
The other ones are the right wingers who feel the need to spread the latest thought inspired by Rush Limbahl. As business people, they adapted their political belief which helped them get promoted.
In the end it is always the customer that pays the bills. If you are selling things to technical people then the engineers may have a better grasp on what the customer wants. I've been in customer meetings where we were selling a machine to the customer and both management didn't really understand the requirements. When I talked with the manufacturing engineer we both understood each other and were able to agree upon some real requirements that could be verified. In this cage management wasn't helping. Luckily they understood this and allowed the technical people to work together.
In other cases when I worked for a company that sold services to the government I had to learn to relize the business wasn't about doing a great job. They have the contract so the business goal was to milk the government as much as possible. This means doing exactly what you were contracted to do even if it wasn't technically correct.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Attire is a choice, and like *every other choice* it can demonstrate good or poor judgment.
Disrespecting your co-workers (or, if applicable, customers) demonstrates poor judgment. Not anticipating or understanding the consequences is immaturity.
Think about the bowl of M&Ms (with all brown M&Ms removed) that Van Halen required to be backstage for each of their shows. It didn't even rise to the level of indulging a prejudice: it was a completely arbitrary requirement. But if the bowl wasn't there or had the wrong stuff in it the band knew the venue wasn't taking the specs of the contract seriously and so they would be on guard for further deviations.
The bowl of M&Ms was arguably a part of the customer requirements for the service they were buying from the venue. That's exactly what I was saying professionalism should be about - getting the job done - providing the product or service to a high standard. That's what makes the business money. It shouldn't matter what the person who ordered the M&Ms, or even who placed them backstage the night before, was wearing - unless the customer paid for that to be part of the act.
Your ad here.
With the caveat that not all startups are created equal, if you want to be treated like family then you need to find a startup to work for.
Once a group of humans gets above about 150 people, it starts to fracture. The whole point of the modern corporation is to keep warring factions together and get something done despite the constant efforts of its participants to tear itself apart. It's not surprising that the group will tend to fracture along lines of similar people - engineers perhaps being the beta clan in many corporations (that tend to hire beta engineers).
If you think you can get respect as an engineer in a big corporation (that's not explicitly run by engineers) then you need to go talk to an anthropologist. Not that anthropologists know anything that engineers don't already know better...
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Many engineers don't understand that business people are engineers of a sort, too.
What we all should do is realize that we're all part of a team that can't work without the participation of everyone. Mutual respect is key.
Many skills are needed if a firm is to survive.
There is a difference. The person in a suit is judging the social convention, and deciding to be a team player, go with a classic look, and act like an adult. The person in a fedora is more interested in the fashion trend of the second, being noticed, and not being a team player. Yes, you can act like a child and still be a great engineer, but that does not change that fact that you still fail at life. Suitable business attire is completely a social convention, but your choice of how to follow or not follow that convention is completely on you. Just like talking like a urban youth, or saying "like" a lot will justifiably hugly change peoples opinions about you.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Excellent then we can all just bring a bowl of M&Ms with the browns removed to the interview to prove our competency and ditch the ugly overpriced uncomfortable clothing. That'll stop the suite sleeze that don't know how to do their actual job from supposedly appearing more "professional" too.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
Non-sleazy people won't display consummate sleaziness? Wouldn't that be a good thing especially in engineering...
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
Professionalism is the ability to do your job. Costuming isn't most people's job. Pretty fucking sure wearing costumes isn't engineering. You're just mindlessly repeating the Newspeak definition of professionalism writing by the sleaze in power who want to stay in power by redefining their sleaziness as professional to either perform, if you're one of them, or obey, as one of their useful idiots.
"A soft answer turneth away wrath. Once wrath is looking the other way, shoot it in the head."
> Preconceptions about business attire are based on social conventions that are utterly arbitrary!
Of course they are. They cannot be otherwise. But the point doesn't support your conclusion. The language you speak daily is also "based on social conventions that are utterly arbitrary." But try speaking a different language in a business meeting than whichever one is expected, and see what it gets you. Conventions, social and otherwise, are shorthands which enable work to progress more quickly and with less overhead. If you don't understand that, you can scarcely expect to be taken seriously.
Speaking a different language doesn't work as an example to support your conclusion either. That's because verbal communication is vital part of getting the job done. Dressing up in a suit and tie is absolutely not a vital part of getting the job done and being preoccupied with dress codes and the physical appearance of those you deal with can blind you to their true talents. A shorthand? Maybe it works as a shorthand for some people some of the time, but it's not reliable universally as there are plenty of incompetent idiots in suits that aren't good team players and plenty of extremely talented engineers in jeans and a t shirt that are good team players.
Your ad here.
The m&m clause was there to gauge whether or not the contract had been read - if the promoter missed the part about brown m&m's chances were they missed the part about how heavy the stage equipment was and what type-and-strength of flooring or other physical infrastructure - would be needed to safely accommodate the stage-show.
He tends to hold up a mirror to tech and demolishes a lot of the shibboleths that some of the less well socialized techies especially that faux libertarians religiously believe in.
So you're saying that the only engineers worth their salt are females? That's insanely sexist.
Social deviancy man what's with the square as the hipper members of the mad men cast would have said back in the 1950's before going off the some cool dive with Joan to hear Parker or Lester putting down some cool tunes.
The real problem is that the goal of most IT companies is to maximize profit in the short term. As such, engineers, like most employees are just a resource to be consumed. This isn't unique to IT companies, but it is most obvious there because many are started by venture capitalists who want to make their money and run. While engineers focus on quality solutions, the typical VC wants quick results at a low cost. The old adage of fast, quality, and cheap are at play in the IT world and you can't have all three.
Suits are expense, expensive and hard to maintain, and easy to destroy. They are also uncomfortable and restrictive. They represent a degree of overhead that's completely unecessary for the task at hand.
It's little wonder that an engineer might object to being forced into a suit for anything short of a presentation for a client.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I actually read TFS. Not once does it mention the numerically vast majority of Engineers who are male.
The assumptions and conclusions are all based upon a very small minority of Engineers, you cannot extrapolate this across the entire industry.
"all of these cultural rituals are a waste of time "
Get a clue, humans have culture. If you don't follow their cultural norms, no matter who they are, they're not going to accept you. It is already amazing how tolerant Westerners are in 2014, and apparently that's just not good enough. Just imagine showing up to some hipster gathering in a suit and tie and watch yourself be ostracized in the exact same way.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
oh just fuck you.
hipsters are late genx assholes with trust funds. they dont DO work anywhere.
It is easy to tell which companies value their engineers: do they have offices or do they sit in cube farms?
It doesn't sound so bad if you describe it as a power function.
Have gnu, will travel.
Just imagine showing up to some hipster gathering in a suit and tie and watch yourself be ostracized in the exact same way.
That would be wrong too.
The bottom line, in the TFA and other comments, is that some engineers / hipsters / <insert demographic> are behaving according to different social norms than their employers / middle managers / <insert some other demographic> and thus feel misunderstood and disrespected.
I've been trying to point out how stupid the rift is between these two groups of people, when really it has nothing to do with just getting the job done.
I know as well as anyone else that these problems aren't going to go away for the people concerned overnight. Either of the groups must just put up with it, or change their attitude. I just wish that people like you could see these misunderstandings from both sides, instead of siding with the establishment by default.
Your ad here.
be fair. if they *had* given you the key to the supply closet you'd have had a faraday cage made of paperclips setup midafternoon.
This...
Well except for the dressing professionally bit. As long as they aren't client facing and wash on a regular basis.
A lot of developers dont get respect because they dont earn it. They feel they're automatically entitled to respect so managements response to this is to squash them (appeasing a sense of entitlement is about the worst thing you can do). A bit part of this is that these self important developers dont respect anyone else. Managers are useless, everyone else exists just to support them.
The best developers I've worked with never dressed in a button up shirt, let alone a suit. One of them wore a polo to his own wedding. However they always gave the respect to others that they wanted to receive in return. Instead of asking for incredulous specifications for servers, they'd actually ask "I need a test server to do Foo, what kind of server do I need". These guys recognised that they didn't know everything and were very good at their jobs. When it came to a subject they weren't completely familiar with they'd listen to advice, they'd understand that they weren't the only ones competing for resources and were actually grateful when things came through for them. They earned respect and as a result, people wanted to help them out.
This advice really goes for everyone, not just developers. The same problem is in sales, admin (PA's who think they run the company), systems administration (the "department of no" types), managers (PHB), pretty much everyone really.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You just don't have enough project managers.... it's not the engineers that are the problem.
It's actually pretty immature to get into a power struggle with your employer because they think you aren't dressing up to their standards. "Let someone tell you how to dress" (The immaturity in that statement is palpable). Do you have the same mentality about people telling you what the requirements are?
"Their" is about as plural as "you". They have both been used in the singular for approximately the same amount of time. It is only the arbitrary opinion of a few prescriptivists that say "their" cannot be used in the singular.
Suits are the professional dress of, well, suits. If there is such a thing as a professional dress for an engineer, then it would be a lab coat.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Software, hardware, science, technology, scientist, engineers, troubleshooters ... internal employees are seldom respected as experts by insecure managers; Hence, managers will contract external resources to support their decisions. The managers’ expert outsourcing provides the point for blame-storming and career-building credits.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
In other words, you're saying that the people who deal with people, and the people who deal with things, have different expectations and don't get along well - and the fault is not with the people who are supposed to have people skills. Really?
Not to mention you seem to be calling me a hipster, which is ludicrous. When I want to be cool, I turn down the thermostat.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Fundamentally, the business suit is based on the intention of seeming competent. This is at odds with an engineering viewpoint, which is that what matters is that you are competent. As engineer types get more important, their viewpoints become more important.
If you wear a suit and act superior, you've lost the respect of the engineers before you open your mouth.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In my experience in the engineering side, if you show up with a suit and tie, and know your stuff, you'll be considered to have eccentric taste in clothes, but you'll get due respect and will not be referred to as a "suit".
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Also, if you set a dress code, be careful with it. There are very good people who will take a dress code as a sign that the company doesn't respect them for what they do. It may or may not be warranted in a given situation, but we've seen that sort of thing before. Best to have the dress code based on rational principles, such as specifying what you must wear when meeting with customers.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
In other words, you aren't familiar with halfway modern C++. There's no excuse for a buffer overflow with C++98 standard containers and strings.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Really? I don't actually remember meeting engineers like that, and I've been kicking around for a long time.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
To support your point: http://www.theatlantic.com/hea...
"In a touching Medium post a few days ago, the writer and programmer Paul Ford shared what he thinks is the secret to his politeness. In conversations with new acquaintances, Ford asks plenty of questions and lets the other person do the talking. He tries not to ask what they do for a living, but if it comes to that, he responds to their job description--whatever it is--with, "Wow. That sounds hard."
"Nearly everyone in the world believes their job to be difficult," he writes. He describes how this process once worked with a woman whose work is not something most people would consider taxing:..."
Also cited here: https://news.ycombinator.com/i...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That was my whole point. "Their" has as much historical usage as a singular possessive pronoun as "yours". The pronoun "you" is also a plural pronoun- the singular was "thou". So you accept "you" as a singular because of popular usage. Well "they" as singular has popular usage as well and is perfectly understood.
How did the hipster burn his mouth? Drinking coffee before everybody else was drinking it because it had become cool.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
It's just tribalism. People still prefer to be around people like themselves, diversity or not. Might not be skin color, but appearance still has a lot to do with it. And dress makes that plain. Skilled applicants will try to look as much like somebody who already works there as possible. Not just general style of dress alone, but specifics; if they come in with jackets but hang them on the back of the chair and go around in shirt and tie, so do you. If they lean to the casual side, so do you. They're probably not walking around the cubicles with a briefcase, more likely a manila folder; so you put your spare resumes in a manila folder and join the club and leave that snazzy attache case at home. At this percentage of unemployment, if you're already at the interview stage you have the skills for the job; you're getting hired based on whether the manager can picture you there without dissonance.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Next time you get assigned some task on a conference call, change your voice and say "This is Joe, I can do that". Assuming your name isn't Joe. Yes, this was in Dilbert the other day.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
All this talk about engineers, but nobody mentions firemen, brakemen, and conductors.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
This is actually a good illustration of the fact that people making decisions for a corporation rarely put the shareholder's interests first.
If you're hiring and the interviewee looks like they are homeless, but for whatever reason they demonstrate that they are the most competent candidate for the job, then your choice is to either toss them for their appearance and hire a less competent candidate, or hire them. Now, if they absolutely reek of body odor perhaps you'll have to have them work from home or sequester them into an office with self-contained ventillation or else half the rest of the department will quit. All of those concerns are legitimate business concerns if your sole preoccupation is with making your shareholders as much money as possible.
However, a lot of other factors weigh into the decision like what people will think of you as a manager if you hire a "bum" and those tend to take priority over making your shareholders money.
This is just one example, and dress code isn't a particularly strong one. Managers don't make decisions to make companies money - they are motivated primarily by self-interest, and to some extent corporate policies help to align that self-interest with making the company money.
This is part of why start-ups tend to put little emphasis on things like dress code, tend to be much less rigid, etc. The owner knows everybody, and for a company where the decisions are made by the owner, self-interest and making money for the shareholders are almost perfectly aligned. Even if there is a layer of management or two involved, the shareholders aren't some disconnected and abstract force - they're people just down the hall who check in frequently and know everybody's name.
I once had to buy dry ice and bought it from a small business which clearly wasn't retail-oriented. I walked into the office door and asked if they would sell to private individuals. They responded that as long as the money was green that they would take it. I work for a company that employes 50k people. If somebody walked up to the security gate and offered $10M cash for 1 pound of dry ice (which could be obtained from a building 100 yards away easily) nobody would give them the time of day or have any idea how to make that work even if they were inclined to do so. Most likely they would be turned away, or if they had a desperate need they might just be given it free of charge. The idea of actually selling something for outrageous profit is so abstracted away there just isn't any process for doing it. The company certainly sells product, but completing a single sale probably involves 100 people doing 1/100th of the task each across two continents with ERP systems and financial systems and the works. If you walked into a software start-up and told them that you're desperately in need of a laptop so if they could just hand them one (wiped/new/etc) they'd pay $200k cash for it, they'd figure out how to make it work.
While there are limits, the standard suit and tie are often impediments to an engineer. When the business people want to get in close and see what's actually going on, it means going over to accounting and looking at spreadsheets. For an engineer though, it may mean pulling up the floor and going into tight spaces with lots of dirt and possibly grease (especially for devops). It may mean going into environments where a suit doesn't allow the mobility needed and a tie is an actual danger. Ties and lathes do NOT mix!
It's important to make a distinction between casual and disheveled. There are plenty of ways to dress that are not a suit and tie but cannot be called disheveled.
I tend towards business casual when I go in to work. Solid colored v-neck, dark pants w/ no holes, un-scuffed rubber soled shoes.
Fun fact: Java was originally invented as an embedded systems language, before it became the thing for portable web apps.
---dragoness
My personal reaction is "You work for IBM, right?"
---dragoness
I assume that reaction comes with a little sympathy.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Yes. Their traditional dress code was very much suit & tie--they didn't even like their engineers taking off jackets on site.
---dragoness