I would also recommend Value Based Strategy by felix oberholzer gee. Here’s a link to a video he made summarizing top ideas in the book: https://youtu.be/o7Ik1OB4TaE
hard disagree. this belief that we are not free to choose what we desire is a disease, and it's used to excuse bad behavior. it also takes away agency and hope from those who want to change.
it takes willpower, but it is possible to change. what makes changing difficult is lack of experience. it is difficult to choose what we don't know, and negative experiences push you away from trying something that everyone says is good but that you only had bad experiences with.
like if you had a bad experience making friends growing up then you will shy away from trying to make friends until you either push yourself to try anyways, or you make some friends by chance and realize that it is a good experience after all. the same goes for food, social media, and everything else.
If compensation was offered for an interview process, then it's worth the time spent going through the interviews.
Otherwise, it feels like a gamble of a huge time sink that could have gone towards something actually beneficial/profitable.
Having had too much of my time and energy drained in the past with the run around, I said fuck it the last time when facing the option to interview or go my own way, started my own thing and haven't looked back since.
Even when you do get an offer, it's a gamble on whether or not you're dealing with toxic management or not. Which only reinforces the idea of compensation for interviewing in case someone needs to jump that ship and start interviewing again.
I often see the word “Strategy” thrown around, often referring to meaningless corporate speak or fluff. In fact, it’s a whole field of study, and I feel many engineers will love it if they gave it a chance.
In order to develop a strategy you must have a challenge or hard problem to solve. Then you define a cohesive set of actions or policies backed by an argument to solve the challenge. Strategy should define the “how” to solve the problem by clearly articulating the hard choices you have to make.
“Increase customer value”, or revenue or profits, those are not strategies. Being the best, or “leading”. Those are goals or wishes. Defining how to achieve that, given a whole set of constraints, that’s the heart of strategy. And engineers are generally great at solving those type of complex puzzles.
The solution is not one that may involve code or even engineering in general, but rather, a clear understanding of the problem, its constraints, and the argument for choosing some specific set of trade-offs.
Agreed. But the problem itself may not really be an engineering problem, and therefore a potential solution may exist outside.
I agree though, particularly in tech, the tendency is for great leaders to be deeply knowledgeable on engineering details because that is a requirement for a good strategy.
Nonetheless, in a broader sense, defining success for a business can create a solution space that extends well beyond engineering.
If it is not an engineering problem, then engineers should not be bothered with it, simple as that. Not because we cannot do it, but because we can do things others cannot. And these things take time and focus to do well. And without them, all the talking and planning and strategizing and wearing suits, becomes pointless, because there is no product to sell.
I am a coder. It is not my responsibility to sell our product, convince someone to see a demo, or do "market research" into what features we require.
"division of labour" exists for a reason. If I am supposed to be doing the job of the guys in suits&ties, in addition to be able to write, read and test code, then I have to ask the question why we should pay these guys in the first place.
Thanks for the link. I will check it out. I too see the word "strategy" thrown around without being well defined, and it should be clearly defined, especially for engineers who want to move into decision-making.
Strategy is "the plan to win". An engineer's work is to execute the plan. It's like coaching the team vs playing the game. Engineers are the players, and the job of the player is to score the next goal. Executives (or Managers) are the coaches. The job of coaches is to win the game (and the season). These are not opposing goals, they are complimentary. Unfortunately, in the technology field, players and coaches are oftentimes at odds as though they have opposing goals.
The article makes a case for engineers who want to get into management, but haven't found a way to make that happen. Not every engineer wants to manage, even if that management is of technology rather than managing people. But for those engineers (players) who want to get into management (coaching) the case the article makes is this: players who want to coach must think like coaches.
I believe this is where CQRS plays nice with “event sourcing”. You write all your events in one model, but can read them in multiple ones, that is if you can tolerate some read latency... and most systems are usually ok with that.
CQRS also alleviates a lot of the pain people experience around event sourcing and distributed systems with event evolution and manipulation. There are many cases where it's inappropriate for consuming services to be aware of the internal representation of events. Giving them a 'snapshot-centric' view of the data can be a simplification in both directions.
I never agreed with this mentality. Advertisement is Coke's cost center; it's not what they sell. They sell licensing rights to soft drinks: that's what makes them money.
Advertisement is a cost of having a customer facing brand. Should P&G and Unilever be considered advertisement companies?
> Should P&G and Unilever be considered advertisement companies?
Absolutely. The value of their businesses are entirely based on the brands that they have built, and those brands are built by advertising. Making food to stuff in the boxes is just a cost of building a successful brand.
But the brand itself doesn’t make them money. That doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable or even that it isn’t their biggest asset. What makes them money is people buying their product.
