The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Es are an inevitability of the ZIRP era and VC oriented marketing. People whose titles grew faster than them, hiding behind the immaturity of the industry and cash fuelled growth, companies that **had** to have specific roles filled to be more attractive in raising capital.
And I will double down on the immaturity of the industry. Especially for the segment I am coming from (AI, MLOps) the conditions are wild. People hold executive power and pretend to be on the driver’s seat, because a decade ago they trained a convolutional network or used sklearn. Not to diminish anyone’s skill but thats miles away from putting AI in peoples hands. And those are more often than not people with significant mandate, but no responsibility or knowledge.
So if you take a minute to stop and reflect on the sheer amount of lost capital, people’s deteriorated mental and or physical health, and even lost companies as a result, you get vertigo.
Does time always positively impact the value an employee provides? I know cases where people worked at a company for too long, significantly slowing it down.
Alex, I'm curious to read your take on supporting functions, which usually don't work on revenue-generating features. Often, these come in the form of Opex instead of Capex. Reliability engineering is frequently categorized in this way. These are costs of running the business, and people in these roles might not get the chance to work on new revenue streams. Would the formula change in this case to where your value needs to be a set percentage of the company's revenue? Is there any industry benchmark that would help understand what a good percentage should be in this case?
The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that Es are an inevitability of the ZIRP era and VC oriented marketing. People whose titles grew faster than them, hiding behind the immaturity of the industry and cash fuelled growth, companies that **had** to have specific roles filled to be more attractive in raising capital.
And I will double down on the immaturity of the industry. Especially for the segment I am coming from (AI, MLOps) the conditions are wild. People hold executive power and pretend to be on the driver’s seat, because a decade ago they trained a convolutional network or used sklearn. Not to diminish anyone’s skill but thats miles away from putting AI in peoples hands. And those are more often than not people with significant mandate, but no responsibility or knowledge.
So if you take a minute to stop and reflect on the sheer amount of lost capital, people’s deteriorated mental and or physical health, and even lost companies as a result, you get vertigo.
Does time always positively impact the value an employee provides? I know cases where people worked at a company for too long, significantly slowing it down.
This aspect comes up in the part 2 article.
I liked that it also touched the politics element as well. Also reading this reminded me about this study:
https://www.clearerthinking.org/post/is-the-dunning-kruger-effect-real-or-are-unskilled-people-more-rational-than-it-seems
Alex, I'm curious to read your take on supporting functions, which usually don't work on revenue-generating features. Often, these come in the form of Opex instead of Capex. Reliability engineering is frequently categorized in this way. These are costs of running the business, and people in these roles might not get the chance to work on new revenue streams. Would the formula change in this case to where your value needs to be a set percentage of the company's revenue? Is there any industry benchmark that would help understand what a good percentage should be in this case?