Comment by shalmanese
12 days ago
> Think deeper about why do you need to "sell" your work inside (some) companies
Mainly to prove you can sell, not that they can buy. Selling involves understanding the customer's needs, their tradeoff preferences, your value prop and being able to reflect that back to them. The minimum bar for successful selling requires you to demonstrate a certain degree of competence and due diligence that provides assurance that you're able to operate autonomously with trust.
No, actually. He said it was a part of his job because they did not understand his work? So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?
>> So we are back at square one here, why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?
Because engineers are typically (although not always) terrible at business. Or marketing. Or Sales. Or whatever.
In other words, a successful business needs many skills. One of those skills is management. It's inevitable that top management (who's core skill is hopefully, well, business) needs to people to do the other skills. Marketing, Sales, Engineering, and so on.
Hence those skilled people need to communicate with management in ways in which management can understand. They can then make sure everyone has aligned goals. It's no good if engineers are doing one thing, marketing is doing something else, sales is targeting the wrong demographic, and so on.
It seems to be a unique conceit of software engineers that "management just gets in the way". When, more realistically, management is trying to communicate the business requirements, and we feel we know better.
Most engineers (again, not all) are terrible at the actual business part. The list of failed companies, multi-year solo projects that never sell a single copy, and so on are evidence of this. Joel made his name writing (literally) "The business of software".
So back to your question;
>> why do people not understanding engineering work, end up managing engineering work?
because how else will engineers know what to do?
> It's up to me to "sell" that benefit to upper management. There's no point in assuming they'll figure it out by accident. Part of my job is enumerating the value I add.
Nowhere is that said.
The benefit of them selling is not for the management to understand, it's for the worker to understand and be able to articulate as it will flow downstream to strategy.
Maybe the management doesn't understand but my point is it's irrelevant. I've been in management situations where I've understood perfectly well and ones where I have zero clue, my requirements for you selling to me remain exactly the same which is I'm using it as a gauge of how much you understand.
> Because engineers are typically (although not always) terrible at business. Or marketing. Or Sales. Or whatever.
You do realise that almost all of the unicorns and almost-unicorns of the last two decades were conceived, started and built by engineers, do you? Perhaps beacuse having ones brain primed to very hard problems, does not make it so hard to learn the "hard" business skills on the side after all, all the while coding up the product? But how would former humanities students get their "tech salaries" if we did not somehow convince engineers that they suck at what are honestly said, third-tier competencies.
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That's an excellent summary!