Why you should always appreciate your Engineers

Let me tell you some stories...

I’ve been reading so many ridiculous stories about companies, retention, and pay recently that I thought I’d add some of my experiences.

There has been a reoccurring story at the startups I’ve worked at. Invariably, engineering is viewed as a cost center despite all of these company’s software being the exact product sold that generates revenue.

As a former CEO whose time was extremely in demand, I valued employees who didn’t bother me. When I have been a CTO, I frequently have tried to stay out of the CEO’s ways and focus on delivering great product on time and below budget.

Oddly, this tactic has actually led me to being fired several times. Each time, the CEO claimed I wasn’t doing anything. In fact, I was writing their entire back end, designing their product, managing their entire technology team, managing their entire infrastructure and other devops, securing everything, and handling integrations with dozens of other software providers. I just never brought it to their attention because I figured they were as busy as I was and would appreciate someone who did their job without needing to be micromanaged.

I’ve since learned that even if you are good at your job, it will not magically get noticed. You have to be a full on advocate for yourself at all times and basically shove your work in the face of your boss or else they will think you are doing nothing.

Personally this infuriates me.

So the most egregious of these companies had no other backend developers or devops people (and also violated numerous CA labor laws) when they let me go. Their website was down 3 days later. I found out through the grapevine they accidentally deleted their production MySQL database. Of course, there were backups, but none of them had the slightest clue how to restore them. They did not survive long.

Additionally, they had a typo in their RSU agreement when they granted me 20% ownership of the company. Typically, RSUs are repurchased at par value. Theirs said they would repurchase at “fair market value.” That cost them a ton. This is why as a startup you should always hire top tier attorneys.

Then, there was the company that hired a product manager from a Fortune 50 who was used to having unlimited resources and long timetables. We were a startup with 3 engineers and less than a million dollars in the bank.

So we’d have meetings with him, the CEO, and me. He’d explain his ideas and the CEO would love them and turn to me and ask how long it would take to implement them. I’d have to calmly try to rationally explain that given our current team, it would take probably years to implement. It could be done with 25 engineers in six months, but we don’t have the budget for that. This repeated itself over and over.

The CEO did not like that.

So for that and other reasons, he fired me. That one was hilarious. Again, they had no other backend developers or devops person. The CEO called me meekly the next day to ask for instructions on how to deploy backend code. I ended up immediately doing consulting for them for knowledge transfer but they had to replace me with a number of people at a high cost.

Then, there’s the big one. A company had me build out an entire division, including the back end software. I asked dozens of times for development help and was not given any. I asked dozens of times for a senior engineer to work next to me in case something happened to me. They said it was not in the budget, despite them being flush with cash. My job description on my offer letter probably covered 10% of the work I was doing (not to mention to regular 60-80 hour weeks) so I frequently told them I was dramatically underpaid and my requests for raises were repeatedly denied. This despite this entire product being build and managed by me.

So it launched and we acquired around 100,000 customers in a week or so. I’ll generalize and say in the first few weeks they made tens of millions in profit off of all of my hard work. I went to them one last time and asked for a raise. They again said no.

So I set in my resignation that night. Nothing angry. Just a simple, “Wish you luck.”

The vitriol expressed at me over email and phone calls still surprises me to this day. How was I the bad guy here? They demanded I be at the office on Monday or face legal consequences. They threatened to blacklist me. They threatened to ruin my career.

Well, I knew their threats were hollow so I ignored them and got a new job that paid about double within a month.

But they had a problem. No one else knew how this software worked. It occasionally required manual intervention since our partner API would fail and those errors piled up. They had to shut it down and shelve it two weeks later. They started from scratch with a whole new team they had to find and hire. They didn’t relaunch the product for another two years.

Even more, they ended up losing hundreds of millions of dollars in valuation on their next round, and today have lost over 98% of their overall valuation and are very soon to go bankrupt.

Over not giving me a measly raise.

What’s really interesting is apparently this story has spread out from this company and I’ve met several people who have realized who I am and said, “Oh, you’re that engineer! Yeah, they really fucked you over.”

The power to create great things comes with the power to destroy, especially if you don’t follow standard practice like hiring enough engineers so no one person can cause so much damage as I have so frequently pointed out to companies.

So, takeaways:

1. Pay your critical engineers. They are not a cost center. They are your profit center.

2. Always hire great attorneys.

3. Have multiple engineers cover all knowledge. I’m even the one that recommends this to every organization.

Losing a key engineer can literally end your company. And we have very transferrable skills. Work hard to retain people that are necessary.