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 `profit = revenue - expenses` equation from the article covers that. Basically, these positions save expenses which contribute to the profit equation. The disclaimers from the article still apply: it's hard to calculate an exact value, but if you cannot defend your position easily by attributing savings and reason about the dollar value, you can be in a vulnerable position. Especially if your version of truth isn't known by the decision makers who decide layoff, hiring, and promotion, for example.
The value of the risk mitigation positions particularly hard to quantify. Do you remember how the recent pandemic highlighted the essential workers? The nurses, the food delivery, the cleaners, the teachers, etc.? Those jobs typically don't pay as much as some exclusive office jobs, but they are very critical. It's hard to justify the value of a job that prevents a risk without that risk first materializing and delivering full damage.
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?
The `profit = revenue - expenses` equation from the article covers that. Basically, these positions save expenses which contribute to the profit equation. The disclaimers from the article still apply: it's hard to calculate an exact value, but if you cannot defend your position easily by attributing savings and reason about the dollar value, you can be in a vulnerable position. Especially if your version of truth isn't known by the decision makers who decide layoff, hiring, and promotion, for example.
The value of the risk mitigation positions particularly hard to quantify. Do you remember how the recent pandemic highlighted the essential workers? The nurses, the food delivery, the cleaners, the teachers, etc.? Those jobs typically don't pay as much as some exclusive office jobs, but they are very critical. It's hard to justify the value of a job that prevents a risk without that risk first materializing and delivering full damage.