Knowing where your engineer salary comes from

Summary

With the recent flurry of US federal firings, many people are pointing and laughing at the Trump-voting federal employees who are just now finding out that they’ve voted for themselves to be let go. How could you have this poor a mental model of what your job even is? Well. In my opinion, many software engineers are operating under a mental model that’s just as bad, and are often doing the equivalent of voting for the person promising to fire them. I won’t quote the tweets, but I regularly see stories like “I convinced my idiot bosses to finally let me do only tech debt work, and would you believe they fired me after a few months?” Or “I’ve been busting my ass on this underfunded project and I still got a bad performance review”. Or “it’s so unfair that I haven’t been promoted - look at all this amazing accessibility/standards/open-source work I’ve been doing!” The basic structure goes like this: A bright-eyed engineer joins a tech company, excited to go and make the world a better place They throw themselves into various pieces of work that don’t make money (improving FCP performance, better screenreader support, refactoring) Their managers desperately try to redirect them to work that does make money, causing a long frustrating power struggle Eventually the bright-eyed engineer gives up and unhappily focuses on Profitable Product X, or The bright-eyed engineer leaves or is fired, and goes on Twitter to complain about their important work not being valued The complaint in this story is basically equivalent to “I can’t believe Trump is firing me from the IRS when I voted for the guy”. It represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what tech companies are. What are tech companies? So what is the right understanding? Let’s start as simple as possible. Tech companies are run by small groups of people with the goal of making money. Successful tech companies make a lot of money, by definition. They hire software engineers in order to continue doing the things that make ...