Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
2 years ago
> Tim wasn’t delivering software; Tim was delivering a team that was delivering software. The entire team became more effective, more productive, more aligned, more idiomatic, more fun, because Tim was in the team.
This was the money quote.
Teams do big stuff.
Good teams do good big stuff (very good).
Bad teams do bad big stuff (very, very bad).
It seems that the hyper-competitive nature of today's workplace means that engineers consider their own teammates to be "competition," and we never really get a good team. This is especially true, with the mayfly tenures of most engineers, these days.
I'm fairly happy with the fact that I was able to keep a stable team of experienced, high-performing, senior C++ image pipeline engineers together, for decades.
Other managers would bust my chops for being a "Santa Claus" manager, because I refused to burn them out, and often intervened, when other managers were being too hard on them.
It seemed to work. When my team was finally rolled up, in 2017, the engineer with the least tenure had a decade.
In my experience, the best raises are from getting a new job. What were raises like for your engineers that stuck around for 10-20 years?
Not very good. These were highly skilled engineers that could easily have commanded better salaries, elsewhere.
That meant they stayed for other reasons.
I wonder what those reasons could be?
This is brilliant. I'm a mid-level engineer with decent C/C++/Rust background. Have yet to find a team like this. I'm inspired by your story to keep searching!
Will be five years with my current manager. Team has shifted some but money is not the only reason to stay somewhere.
… So you let them enjoy work but fucked them on salary?
FAANG type compensation doesn't come from "raises", it comes from good yearly performance bonuses.
(Although in my experience the raises you get from changing between smaller companies are still worse than just staying at one FAANG.)