How to ditch your top engineers and send your share price through the roof
This year I watched sadly as another powerhouse of tech, which I admire, cut out its own organs to feed its hungry shareholders.
Their market statistics look great! Meanwhile, they’re an empty husk of their former selves. I won’t name this company because don’t wish them any ill will. I don’t personally work for them, but I’m an engine room worker and I rub shoulders with my counterparts and see their journeys. I’ve worked for another company who did this to themselves, and so I know the pain of the brilliant engineers who are fleeing, bleeding, from the scene.
The most frustrating thing to watch each time this unfolds, is the shareholders’ applause and the wider industry patting the leadership on the back, while behind the smokescreen of glory and acclaim is the fallout. I doubt they’ll ever regain their lost potential. If they do, it’ll take years.
I’m writing this in the hope that you, a CEO, CTO, chief product officer or other business-minded leader, will not follow their ‘shining example’.
Let me save you your $5 for buying one of their leaders a coffee, and give you the advice they’ll have if you ask them how your company can achieve what they have:
Give executive decision-making power over allocation of engineering resources into the hands of people who really understand the product and what’s of value to the customer.
Hold engineering team leaders accountable to this authority.
If it will help to accelerate your company’s key targets, shelf unessential R&D projects and re-task engineers to squeeze some extra mileage out of your legacy codebases.
From a market perspective, it checks out. Reaching key milestones gives you an edge over your competition. The users don’t care how something works; they just want it to work. Technical debt is smart debt if there’s a corresponding and greater economic payoff. Refactoring projects and engineering effort should be subject to their ultimate purpose: value generated for the customer.
But there’s a big factor missing from this equation: opportunity cost by way of lost engineering talent and culture.
Why? Because if you compromise the autonomy of your engineering teams, you will certainly trample the things which are of fundamental value to them. You can’t deal in specifics from the outside. To non-engineers, these values may be invisible or intangible. But the better the engineer, the more likely that these things are essential to their job satisfaction.
To be clear: I’m talking about your engineering team with a track record of excellence and high achievement.
Your most passionate and innovative engineers are the ones who care most about the future-looking R&D happening in your company. They’ll mourn most keenly the cumulative effect of deferred refactoring. They’re the ones driving your product forward, and they’ll be the first to leave when they perceive that their career progress is dependent on the perceptions of “product people”, who can’t be expected to discern why a delay has occurred nor appreciate the scope of technical achievements.
Losing these engineers will probably constitute a permanent loss of engineering quality for your company, because only the more complacent and stuck-in-the-mud engineers will stay. Any interviewee worth their salt will query your remaining engineers to gauge the culture and sentiment. Do you think they’ll be encouraged by what they hear?
Your engineers are the people, and theirs is the culture, which has enabled you to be a successful tech company so far. Their team leads are responsible for delivering everything you have up until now. Trust them to appreciate your priorities, and let their deep understanding be the lens though which your will is filtered. Give them the freedom to push back. Otherwise, don’t be surprised when you turn back from the shareholder’s applause to find that the spark has gone. Don’t be surprised when your velocity chart looks like a reverse mirror image of your share price, reflected in a stagnant pond of disenchantment.
Steady as she goes.
