Comment by trefoiled
4 days ago
There's an exception to this I've seen since a relative started working in the game industry. There are executives in that industry who have a retinue of loyal followers. The studios the executive works for may change regularly, but his followers come with him each time. These workers will spend their entire career serving one man, and in exchange he always has a job lined up for them and seems to trust them the same way they trust him. It's very different from my experience in the rest of the tech industry, but I'm sure it happens to a limited extent there too.
That's interesting. I wonder what other industries are like that, where a single person keeps bringing his (mutually) trusted cadre of employees with them?
I've heard in the past that the skill of a surgeon is actually more a reflection of the surgeon's team than the actual surgeon. So "great surgeons" are actually people who have "great teams". Sounds similar to me.
It is not so dissimilar in Finance. Senior manager comes, understands the lay of the land for a little while to form a picture of what changes they need/want and pushes out people to get his own people in. There is a lot of politics in banks etc and it becomes very important to them that they get rid of threats or those who won't unquestionably carry out their wishes. It is usually justified as shaking things up. Predictably such things are not great for quality of work but then again, that is secondary in a politically active space that a lot of Finance places are.
Finance can have this at times; software engineering can have this at times as well (especially at the senior levels and in specialized fields OR at the startup level - people like working together and will often work together again).
I've seen this in software in various roles. Usually a CTO will be hired, and will draw from his previous lieutenants to build a leadership team and key IC roles such as architect or staff engineer. I think it's a very smart way to quickly build out a trusted team by simply hiring people who have delivered successfully for you in the past. I've worked with a cadre of brilliant former-Zappos people in one job brought over this way, and in another, a CTO was hired away from a Hollywood talent agency and he brought over some stellar people from there to lead some teams.
This happens in sports too. GMs of teams will always make room for players that delivered or were loyal to them in the past, even on lesser contracts.
That happens in the tech industry too.
This is true in mid-sized startups. I actually witnessed it three times during my _short_ period of experience (7 years of different startup contracts) with different startups.
Firstly, it does not have to be immediate or deliberate. The cycle happens approximately through period of 6-months. The followers per-se does not have to actually _follow_ or loyal to the main person. The said main person is generally the CTO or an engineering manager.
Essentially, one way or another, the company needs to hire a CTO to fill their technical gaps and propel their growth. The company looks for an experienced and preferably startup experience in a certain field. There are already very limited number of folks satisfying these conditions. In which, mostly will already be working somewhere.
From the available ones, company hires 1 person, the CTO. CTO identifies several gaps in tech stack and hires couple of _senior_ folks, with of course, recommendations/references. (now called staff engineers mostly, as the seniority sort of lowered at the 5-6 years mark).
After couple of months later, the senior folks hire couple of mid-level folks because there are too much work to do. Since the senior engineers were busy both with design _and_ the implementation, they need to focus more on the design and make big-picture decisions, cannot be bothered with bug-fixes anymore. Therefore, they need some mid-level engineers to cleanup things and keep the lights on...
After 6 to 9 months period, the newly hired folks become 7 or greater in the numbers. As now they are the majority in the organization's technical hierarchy, they can easily push-out _older_ members which are not part of their circle and let more folks from their circle in.
As you guessed, this is a pyramid scheme in employment, as the lower level folks look up to people who hired them (created a position/opening).
Even if the actual scheme is not intended initially, usually this is what happens. It doesn't even have to be a grand plan to take-over, the unconscious biases and past relationships always prevail, causing the same cycle to repeat.
Also another perspective is the people whose boss (CTO) has just left. These folks also leave over time not just they blindly follow their CTO or loyal to them, but because the _new_ CTO changes how things work, maybe a new tech stack people are not familiar with. In turn, it stagnates peoples' carreers, causes confusion and even takes them one step back. (i.e. An engineer on a promotion path now has to re-prove their skills to a new manager/CTO)
I think for all the cases, I did not find this approach useful in the business sense. Because in all cases, it took the startup at least a year to adapt into a new CTO and the tech stack. As the new CTO always assures X is better than Y, all the problems are there because Y is older, and X is the new paradigm. Just to be replaced by Z when the next CTO arrives after several years...
So the moral of the story is, people don't need to be loyal, the incentives make them so.