2022 Tech downturn

Tldr; The market is going through a period of downturn as a chain reaction of the world's economy. Lavish startup life is over, lean time is here. Product-market fit will be tested. But tech is here to stay and top engineers are highly sought after.

2022 was not a great year for tech. The industry was plagued with widespread layoffs, weak earning calls, plummeting stock prices, and an investment market that shifted from equity to debt. It was another link in a chain reaction of the world's economy: pandemic aftershocks, the war between Russia and Ukraine, oil prices, energy concerns, and weaker buying power. It just happened that this link hit me the closest.

How exactly did the tech sector get tangled in this whole mess? I think firstly that is what you get from a flat world (not earth), everything is more connected than ever. The very definition of "tech" or "big tech" is ambiguous. It can be anything from social networking companies to EVs and phone makers. Really, the concept of the tech sector is no longer as relevant as it used to be because every company is a tech company to some degree. The whole world economy didn't do well and tech was an integral part of it.

Secondly, the industry has operated with a free flow of cheap money for decades. Since the collapse of the housing bubble in 2008, the FED had kept a low interest rate for almost a decade - an unprecedented event in the 60-year-plus history of the organization. Even the increase in 2015 was described at the time as "a vote of confidence in the American economy". For a long time, the availability of cheap money meant there were strong cases for borrowing money from banks and making profits via investment, including tech ventures. The high ride however ended with the interest rate hike as the FED tried to control the US inflation. I however entered the workforce in 2010, as so did many other startup founders and workers. We thought tech as an infinite source of growth was a norm. We have never experienced a real lean time before. 

The third point, the greater force of macroeconomy throws much of future forecast out of the window. Boardgames such as Agricola or Splendor, or computer games such as Factorio are known to be resembling what it is like to run a business. And in all of them, a common theme is that the move you want to do now must be planned a few turns ago. Much of what a business does today relies on what it is expected to deliver in the future. So when the future prediction is skewed, it drags the businesses into the mud.

And oh boy are we bad at predicting 2022. I mentioned no one was expecting a war between European countries in the 21st century but there were more. Social isolation throughout the pandemic yielded great returns for tech companies in 2020 and 2021. But then the demand dropped as the world reopened. Turned out, it took more than a pandemic to alter behavior. E-commerce and food delivery offered great convenience and indeed enjoyed a higher adoption rate compared to pre-pandemic but they didn't replace traditional means. Working from home didn't become the dominant working mode. And consuming power was limited to necessities as the world braced for economic difficulties.

The combination of cheap money and an over-focus on future delivery means most startups had chosen growth over profit for a long time. It had always been about acquiring the biggest slice of the market pie and only then turning to increase the profit margin. You had to because all your competitors were doing the same. There would only be a little room to grow if you had a tiny slice of the market regardless of how healthy your margin was. The cheap money guaranteed that if slow and steady was your strategy you would end up in a hostile takeover. That also means sometimes companies found themselves running faster than they should have. The widespread layoff we saw was the direct response to a decline in forecast demand and a need to reduce the cash flow till a better time.

It was easy to pick up a sage voice and describe the crazy world that was 2022 with much hindsight clarity. Being on the ground, running a team of 100+ head counts, and experiencing the first lean time sucked monkeys balls though.

Alright, so that was how we got here. Where do we go from here?

The last time tech recessed in the 2000s, it went down in a blast. NASDAQ was tech-heavy and it took 8 years to climb back to where it was previously. Yet there are reasons to believe this downturn wouldn't be as bad. During the dot com bubble, we were in the exploration stage. There was this internet thing that was supposed to be a new era but nobody was quite sure what it could do so everything went. Great ideas mixed with crazy evaluation fueled by FOMO money. Pets.com was arguably the most famous flop. Kozmo and Webvan burned through billions of dollars as their grocery delivery models were not sustainable. Think Tools AG evaluated at CHF 2.5B without having a product. The noise was so bad that after the burst people believed the whole internet thing would just fade away, contributing to the long recovery. 

The time around, other than the crypto scene which is going down the exact same path, the rest of the market is a lot more mature. Companies stay much closer to reality, solve real problems, and have clear plans for monetization (at least I hope so). Tech is here to stay and people are just preparing to weather the storm.

That being said, 2023 is not going to be a great year to raise equity. People who set out for a funding round would be less likely to receive favorable evaluations and terms. The formula used to be that you can plan for a round every 18 - 24 months, one led to another on the basis of momentum, and hope that Tiger or SoftBank will come in with a massive Series C or D and allow you to have some sort of secondary exit and just build the momentum, and maybe a SPAC will you liquidity quickly. Didn't work out quite well for Grab and Sea.

At the same time, the general decline in demand across B2B and B2C remains a threat. The product-market fit (pain killer vs vitamin) is once again brought to the forefront. Startups solving more critical problems are more likely to survive. Long-term strategic product programs might be put on hold to make room for initiatives contributing immediately and directly to the bottom line. Some unfortunately will run out of time before things got better. While others are presented with a unique opportunity if the product-market fit is good in the new reality.

Interestingly for startups to remain competitive, they need to invest in technology. The performance of a tech team grows slowly, depends much on ad-hoc knowledge management, and is the bottleneck of any innovation. Even though layoffs were spreading, the core of tech teams was protected. Ones that do not spend in the near term will undoubtedly fall behind in the medium term and risk not being around in the long run.

The spending pattern might change. Software development in particular has always been one of those fields where the performance gap between top and average performers is tremendous. The term 10x engineer has been saturated to the point now it is more of a meme, but there is a kernel of truth there. In sports, running 1% faster than the next guy results in 10x compensation. But that's it, if a 1% gain costs 10x more, might as well get 10 of the slower ones. Engineering is different. A top performer can provide solutions that bad ones can't come up with, regardless of how many of them, and doesn't cost 10x as much. Then computer automation and scalability come in to multiply this productivity difference many magnitudes more. With cash flow running lower than before, recruitment is no longer a number game. Companies would pay top dollar for a few strategic positions but otherwise not double their team size any time soon.

The startup boom has lasted for a decade. It has also faced so many scares, each time more money and power were poured in. But maybe it really is different this time.

2022 - Could this year have been better? Yes.

It was a lovely afternoon at the beginning of December when I wrote these lines.

Vy was at her class in the uni and I had the entire apartment just for myself.  So it was quiet. Golden sunshine cast on everything, the breeze was pleasing, and the view over the canal was gorgeous. Despite that. I felt uneasy. Felt like there was something I should be doing, that I was losing my time but I couldn't figure out which. And that had been how I felt this whole year - things were dashing by and I was just trying to catch up.

A little reminder for future people what kind of year 2022 was. It was the year when Tuan-Anh got married, Soc was born, and the whole world finally came out of Covid-19 after three years of social isolation and economic stagnation hoping for post-pandemic growth. Things perhaps would finally feel normal again. Except Putin said fuck that and evaded Ukraine with his little special military operation. The oil price was all over the place. No country seemed to agree with one another. In Vietnam, there were widespread layoffs because orders in the West were drying up. And in Saigon just last October you literally could not find gas for your motorbike.

The master's degree.

No, it wasn't me. That was why Vy was at the uni on a lovely Sunday afternoon. She got a scholarship at the same place I got my bachelor's.

I was told that a master's degree is like doping. You use it when your career hits a plateau and you need a little push to go to the next level. And for a really long time, it was one of the most popular pieces of life advice I propelled. Watching Vy though, I learned something new. Once you pass a certain point in your life, you can no longer be schooled. That is, you can no longer entertain someone telling you where to look, what to do, and how to do it. You can no longer fathom the thought of slaving your days and nights away for a thankless assignment solving an imaginary problem just so some old dude can put a no less imaginary score on it. Guess I would not be educatable for a while.

Vy was crushing it though. She worked hard in her day job, got home, and then put on the second shift for her study, be it preparing for the next day's slides, writing assignments, or working out problematic drama queens in her group. You would not believe how childish some of these master's students could be. Perhaps that constituted their educatability. Anyhow, like any good partner, as Vy slaved away at school, I had been pulling my weight in the kitchen. To be clear, I was not setting up a gym in the kitchen. I looked after the place, prepared meals, and might or might not write a programming assignment recently. Felt like that was the least I could do to support her. She was working so hard, I wish she would be successful. Also, my retirement plan depended on that.

I got anxious though, it was hard to watch someone working that hard and not do a round of introspection. Was I growing in my career, that I had been better than who I was last year? Was I prepared to continue this path for another decade? Should I be doing something else other than sitting here writing? To be frank, I was a bit scared, like in those recurring dreams where just as you realized the exam was today, you also realized you haven't studied shit. No? Just me? There was a fear of missing out, a fear that something wrong was brewing and by the time you realized it was too late to rectify. I was sure English had a phobia name for that, or German.

The apartment

During the pandemic, however, I learned to appreciate the importance of a proper home and how rewarding it could be if you got it right. For a long time, all that I did in terms of housing was alternating between piggybacking in one of my previous companies' apartment, sleeping on the floor at offices, and for the most part, shuttling between a cheap tiny rental unit close to my office during the week and my parents' second home at the weekend. While I thoroughly enjoyed the short commute and my parents never collected rent or embossed any restriction on my freedom, neither place gave me the certainty of ownership. I found it hard to put words into this feeling. Say, the sense of ownership at its core is the difference between working on someone else's code and just wanting to get shit done vs working on your own code, something you know intimately, and wanting not only to do the right thing but also to do it right. For my non-developer friends, err... it's a rental.

The criteria for my "repository" were straightforward: close to my office (and hoped that the office was not moving), bare concrete for minimal waste and maximum customization, and a view that didn't constantly remind me I was living in stacked boxes. For the kind of budget I had, that didn't leave a lot of options, I started looking by Oct 2021 and got the paper done by Nov.

Because the place was concrete and nothing else, I went through the whole process of briefing my needs, finding an architect, feedback loops (3 months), and construction (another 3 months). All in all, it was almost a full year from when I bought the place until I moved in. As the nature of construction dictated, the process was waterfall where mistakes in one phase would get really expensive to fix or even unfixable in later phases. With the same attention I used to examine a technical design, I 3D-rendered the apartment in my mind, suggested modifications, and browsed the second page of Google to find the right material. Only desperate people visit the second page of Google. There were plenty of things to think through, like the placement of built-in electrical sockets or the layout of cabinets, as I had neither the budget to redo nor the skills to DIY. 

From start to end, the journey was exciting and fun. Building up a physical space left a tangible spark of joy that was usually missing from my profession - software engineering. But because of how involved it was, for a while it was imprinted in my mind that at any point in time there was something else in the design I have neglected, a modification made, and an article read. I would often find myself on a fine afternoon like today and wonder, should I be doing something else?

It had been 2 months since I moved in and the imprinting was fading away. While it lasted though, I realized that, for me, the fear of either leaving something out or being left out that would lead to cumulative damage was real and primal. I can reason to myself that this too shall pass, that in the grand scheme of things it wouldn't matter, that I have done the best that I could but I can't shake off the feeling. There had been a number of moments this year where I got an acute "tic" that something wrong was happening without me knowing and by the time I knew what it was, it would have been too long.

The tech downturn

2022 was not a great year for tech. The industry was plagued with widespread layoffs, weak earning calls, plummeting stock prices, and an investment market that shifted from equity to debt. It was another link in a chain reaction of the world's economy: pandemic aftershocks, the war between Russia and Ukraine, oil prices, energy concerns, and weaker buying power. It just happened that this link hit me the closest.

I noted down some of my thought on the downturn in another post where I said the greater forces of the macroeconomy were making it really hard to go against where the industry was going. Didn't help with the emotions though, did it? No one working in a startup would be happy with just cruising along the "industry average" path. Startup people are competitive and hold on to exceptionalism. Without those traits, who in his right mind would invest years of hard work charging against bigger corporates with deeper pockets and higher headcounts? So this setback was a blow of defeat.

Here I had my phantom fear materialized. Had I written better code, spent more time with my colleagues, or initiated better technical investment, could I have soared above the average? I hoped so. I wished I could do better because this feeling that I was not enough, that I was asking for more than I could give was the most tangible sense of helplessness I experienced in a really long time.

--

By the time I got to these lines, the sun was on the horizon and I had already moved to the shade of a small dock overseeing a peaceful turn of a canal. I know this canal well, I have traversed countless trips on it and yet its beauty never fell to capture my attention. I always feel attached to bodies of water. The tranquility made me nostalgic. I recalled the time when I was on kayak often, when life was easier, and when the net outcome of action was more direct and calculatable. But life moves on. Tomorrow I would board the first flight to Singapore to discuss how we could best weather the coming storm. 2023 will be challenging but did I say startup people are stupidly competitive?

Stay strong.

Prioritizing development decisions

Great startup stories tend to share the same mold: a great founder dreamed of an equally great vision and followed it fearlessly till the world was conquered. History is written by the victors, of course, but it is relatively common for people to have a rough idea of what they want to build before starting the work. That’s the easy part.

But constructing a concrete step-by-step plan to deliver not even the vision but a mere release is hard work. A good plan needs to take advantage of both business and development expertise without letting one overpowers the other. If the business makes all the calls, the development time might be painfully long and the product crashes when traffic starts to peak. If the development decides, we might have a technical wet dream of solving a non-existent problem. That’s where the planning game comes in.

I can’t decide if a game or a dance is a better metaphor for depicting the collaborative nature of planning. Business and development, each possesses knowledge unavailable to the other and is unable to produce the entire plan. The work can only be done by combining the strength of both sides. In economics, a “game” refers to a situation where players take their own actions but the payoff depends on the actions of all players. Game Theory suddenly sounds less conspiratorially adventurous, doesn’t it? Dance on the other hand isn’t used as much in research literature so I ended up siding with the economists. That’s a sidetrack.

In an Agile team, a planning game looks like this:

1. The Product Owner decides the scope of the plan. Based on the purposes of the projects, the Product Owner prepares a set of use cases and explains why they are valuable problems to solve and why they should be done first.
2. The whole team breaks each use case down into stories. The idea is usually that anything requiring the team to do something other than normal company overhead needs a story.
3. The developers “size” the stories. They estimate the time each would take or its complexity. And then group stories that are too small, split ones too big, and decide what to do with stories they can’t estimate.
4. The Product Owner prioritizes the stories. Some stories won’t be worth adding, either unimportant or too far in the future.

There are many things that can be said about the planning game, from Work In Progress should be minimized, the releases should be small and often, to the best answers for “why does it cost so much?”. Those are stories for another time.

In this piece, I want to discuss specific friction in step 4 of the game where one story is prioritized over another. The stories laid out in step 2 do not necessarily project the same values to different team members. Some are pretty straightforward, implement feature X to earn Y money, the contract was signed. While others are more tricky such as implementing plug-and-play UI components so that future web pages are built faster. The second category usually comes from the development team who is one layer away from the users and so perceives values differently from the Product Owner. That is the breeding ground for misalignment.

Product Owners want to release a solid, usable product. They also have to balance that with the desire to save money and meet market windows. As a result, they sometimes ask developers to skip important technical work. They do so because they aren’t aware of the nuances of development trade-offs in the same way the developers are.

Some developers note down all the development options like a shopping list, “outsource” Product Owners to choose, and then roll in agony at the wrong decisions. If such a strategy didn’t work for the guys at the Pentagon, it wouldn’t work anywhere. Just as Product Owners are the most qualified to decide the product direction, developers are the most qualified to make decisions on development issues. Don’t delegate the decision, take the matter into your own hand. If a development decision isn’t optional then it shouldn’t be prioritized either. Just do it.

Instead of:

Our notifications is crucial at informing customers the health of their business. To make the data pipeline behave transactionally, we have several options. Please let me know how should we prioritize them.

• Experiment with Flink’s TwoPhaseCommit, this is new to us so it would take time and be hard to estimate.
• Get Sentry to cover all the projects, this is a passive measure as we passively wait for exceptions.
• Add a check at the end of the pipeline to make sure no duplicated notifications are generated, the check will have to handle its own state.
• Move the final stage of the pipeline to Django, it is a web framework that supports transactional requests by default and we are familiar with it.

Try this:

Our notifications is crucial at informing customers the health of their business. The data pipeline is long and consists of multiple nodes, each needs to successfully finish its work to produce a notification. To achieve this notion of exactly-once delivery, we need the pipeline to behave transactionally and every exception to surface swiftly. That is done via Flink’s TwoPhaseCommit and Sentry integration. The work will be done at the beginning of the project as it is easier to handle when the code base is still small. TwoPhaseCommit in particular is new to us so we will have a couple of spike stories to understand the technology.

When there is a business choice to be made, don’t ask Product Owners to choose between technical options. Instead, interpret the technology and describe the options in terms of business impact. To continue our notification example, before any notification is sent, there is a need to make sure the data we have is the latest. The conversation can go like this:

We are thinking about adding another Kafka queue to request the latest data. We then need to join the request flow with the future trigger with some sort of sliding window, will also need to thinking about out of bound data. Our other option is to set not one but two future triggers so that one can request data and the other handles notifications. Which would you prefer?

Try this instead:

We have two choices for ensuring a notification always works on the latest data. We can use a deterministic approach or an empirical approach. The deterministic approach would add a new data request flow right before the notification is sent. The notification is processed after the data request flow so we always sure the latest data is used. But because technically data procession and future notifications are asynchronously independent from each other, it would require several more stories for us to join them together. The empirical approach won’t take any extra work. We observe that it usually takes less than 5 minutes for a data request, so we can set two future triggers instead of one, 10 minutes apart from each other. The first one request data, the second notification. But the margin of error is larger because sometime there can be delay in data request. Which would you prefer?

And finally, no software engineering discussion would be completed without a talk about code refactoring. In the context of the planning game, it is mostly about justifying the refactoring effort. While it is tempting to do a “spring cleaning” hoping to refactor the whole thing back into shape, the sad truth is halting the development of working software for refactoring is hardly justifiable. Refactoring effort deals with risk (the old code can implode at any time) and potential (the new code is easier to work on). Those values are intangible compared to the usual subjects of a business decision (new features lead to a new set of customers lead to greater revenue).

What do we do? Boy scout rule “always leave the campground cleaner than you found it.” Whenever you need to implement a new feature or fix a bug you see if that part needs improvement. Refactoring shouldn’t be a separate phase, it is part of everyday development. Once you nurture this culture of quality, there is nothing to justify.

None of the above suggests the easiest way to avoid friction is to keep the business side in the dark while going on waving the engineer's magic wand. Communication remains the key to any successful project. There is more to a project's success than just business decisions, and working out a way to be a (constructive) part of the conversation is more powerful than a baseless delegation.

What makes an internship meaningful?

I got 2 kick-starts in my career, a part-time job in 2009, and an overseas internship in 2010. I dropped a production database on the first day into the former, and was so ill-prepared in the latter I didn’t look up the place’s climate and local language till I was already on the plane. Both were privileges. They catapulted me into worlds I couldn’t fathom and shaped my career in the following decade. In turn, as I have built startups, I have also been on and off in building internship programs. My number one concern is to replicate the magics I got to experience for the next generation. I am writing this for you who are seeking an internship opportunity.

What makes an internship meaningful? I ask this a lot, and the most common answer I receive is “a new experience outside of school”. That’s right. Much of what we do in life is to propel ourselves into new experiences. As a species, we are a bit of an adrenaline junkie (and serotonin, caffeine, and cocaine). But it is not particularly good at answering the question.

A new experience is undoubtedly crucial for an internship, but if it is solely what makes an internship meaningful, wouldn’t picking up something entirely opposite to your education offer the most exposure? I am a software engineer by train, but the course that awed me the most in college was a general elective, macroeconomy. It expanded my horizon, but I wouldn’t have considered an internship in a central bank, it would have ventured too far away from what I wanted to do. An internship should represent a certain level of relevancy to your long-term career.

An internship is only as meaningful as the mentorship it can provide. The transition to the workforce is the transition from theoretical information into practical knowledge. The rigid structure of the curriculum makes it hard to grasp some key concepts of software engineering. At the end of my degree, I was still not sure if my code was clean - there was no need to reopen last semester’s assignments, my architecture was flexible to changes - no assignment lasted for more than a semester, or my software could be released in small, iterative circles - all assignments were fixed time-box. And it took years for me to get comfortable around these concepts. It was frustrating navigating in uncertainties. I wish someone was there telling me what I did wrong. In the language of the Dunning Kruger effect, my descent from the peak of Mt Stupid to the valley of Despair was rough.

A good mentor can ease the journey. Mentorship provides a sense of trusted guidance a personal friend can give with the bonus rule of being the manager. They help you to transit from a student to a professional.

Lastly, an internship implies getting out of the sandbox. At school, you are learning in isolation, a designed system, a less glamorous version of The Matrix. You spend your days solving imaginary problems and gaining imaginary successes. None of which reliably predicts your success at work, otherwise everyone would be boasting their GPAs now. And if you slip here and there, other than some awkward group assignments, there is hardly any difference in the grand scheme of things.

At work, however, there are consequences to your actions. There might be works whose input relies on your delivery. There might be deadlines that are not arbitrary choices dictated by a course’s curriculum but coordinative milestones to align other efforts. And there might be actual end-users of whatever you are delivering. An internship that can’t offer this sense of ownership is nothing but yet another simulation box.

Compared to the previous two elements, giving someone who has zero experience ownership is considerably more complicated. Many internship programs are decided by management or HR.

• Management wants to establish a partnership with a university and an internship is a low effort investment.
• Next year recruitment might get harder if none happens this year. Out of sign, out of mind.
• Doing the dean's office a favor. True story.

While there is nothing wrong with these reasons, too often they are used as excuses to force the internship upon the team adopting you. A forced internship can go wrong in a couple of ways. 

(1) You can be treated as junior developers and go through the same onboarding experience. The thing is, internships are typically short, and by the end of it, you would come back to school to continue your studies, usually, right at the point the onboarding has just been over. The internship is then an overwhelming experience for you and a waste of time for the team.

(2) You might not be ready to work on production code yet so a common solution is to make up an internship project nobody needs. The general lack of coordination between those who want to host an internship and those who are in charge of it results in uncreative half-assed ideas, such as cloning a working piece of software, building an internal tool whose specifications were a few Slack messages, conducting an experiment that the mentor has not made any progress recently, etc. 

A better internship experience can be built with buy-in from the team. An internship fulfilling the needs of the team can be a constructive experience for everyone involved. It could be to give someone new to management a chance to run his own (intern) team before reaching out for a more substantial responsibility. It could be an isolated project with actual stakeholders who have good incentives to invest in its success. And it could also be an experiment, a research topic, but goals, direction, and companionship should come with it. In short, seek out to align the success of the team and the success of the internship.

Too many internship hours were wasted on demo code no one reads and pet projects no one uses. I hope yours would be better.

Everything seemed normal

The air was warm, humid, and dense. I was panting after a badminton loss. I had never been good at this, or any sport for that matter. But I liked flexing the muscles after months of home confinement. Stepping out of the stadium, a rundown building surrounded by brick walls and metal sheets, the air was a lot more pleasant. The location of the court was nice, right next to a river. An adult was sleeping on a hammock under the shade hovering over the river bank. Half a dozen of kids were swimming in the grayish water. I couldn't help but notice, on the other side of the bank, a slump area where the river was, among other things, part of their toilet and sewage. Right at that moment, it was easy to forget Saigon was a cosmopolitan of ten million residents and the engine of Vietnam’s emerging economic prowess. Under that facade, Saigon was still pretty much a part of South Vietnam - a maze of rivers, canals, and delta farmlands - and the fate of the city and the land is anything but one.

Everything seemed normal except that it shouldn’t. We just struggled the whole ordeal of a four-month lockdown. Covid was still reigning across the country. Vaccine coverage was around 30%. In the rural area, agricultural produces was left to be spoiled on the field as it would cost more to ship elsewhere. Waves of laborers retreated to their hometowns without the slightest idea of what their future looked like. Meanwhile, in the city, everything cost more and the labor shortage was high. For the first time since the stats were made available in 2000 Vietnam recorded negative economic growth of 6.17%. Real estate, stock, crypto, and even gold markets were reaching their historical records, not because of the belief of a V-shape bounce back, but because of people hiding their assets for the coming inflation once the stimulus hit.

Everything seemed normal but the substance had changed. The life of the elderly was more fragile. Break-ups and divorces rose. Worst of all, young people, including kids, were robbed of 2 years in the most important period of their lives. Covid was unprecedented. It exposed many of us to our worst enemy, change. Some could brag how embracing change was part of their DNA, but let’s be real, few people turned their life upside down for the kick of it. Changes forced people to face uncertainty, make decisions without a mental model, and live with the consequences. Take an example: kids and schools. Among people my age, the number one reason for self-enforcing isolation at home was the worry that they could bring the virus home to the kids. The local government expressed the same concern, two months after lockdown measures were eased, kindergartens and schools had yet to open. For the entire of 2021, schools had open for around 4 months. While infection risk and its impact on kids were uncertain, it has already been a certainty that the lack of interaction with same-age peers damaged the well-being of kids. Which was more critical, a 0.1% chance of infection, or a 100% chance of development impact? Reports and studies were one thing, but when it came to our lives, the choice was personal, emotional, and far from statistical. Whatever the decision, the scars left on the current generation would be slow to fade.

A few days ago, Charlie Munger stated markets were even crazier than the dot-com bubble. He might be right. Statistically, he had been right more often than he was wrong. But the same statement could be found in 2006, and then in 2015. As the world got better connected, it had been inevitable that we dealt with bigger crises impacting more people. I believe that eventually covid and its crazy variants would be over, that we would treat covid without much discrimination from its influenza cousins, and everything would seem normal again. But make no mistake, the course of the world would never be on the same trajectory had covid not happened, and normalcy is anything but a wet dream.

In the river, the kids, tired of breaststrokes, had changed their game. The older kids were hopping on a floating traffic marker on the water for big jumps, betting on who could make the biggest splash. The younger ones speculating from the safety of their bright-orange life vests. A few years ago, there would have been neither markers nor life vests. Done mourning my loss, I stepped back to the court for the next game.

The case of Project Manager

I have never used a clickbait thumbnail for my post before, not even when I nuked a production database. But admit it, the thumbnail got your interest this time. Let's see if I can deliver.

The role of a project manager (PM) is somewhat controversial in the software development community. Generalization is bad. There are bad PMs and there are bad engineers. But you don’t quite see the same question posed for product and engineer people, the other two pillars of software development. Google even tried to let go of all of its PMs and had all their engineers reporting to a single VP of Engineering. What makes PM different?

The opinions about PM are more subjected to bias than others. A lot of PM work happens behind the scene. When work is running smoothly and on schedule, every day is business as usual. At times, it feels thankless and unappreciated. It’s only when a project is plagued with issues that the PM starts getting attention - usually not in a good way. The strategic values of project management tend to take place before shit hits the fan. After that, primitive instincts kick in, engineers keep their heads down and work harder, the process is out of the window, and a PM seems to only stand in the way. A great PM could still shield the engineers, prioritize work so the worst fire is put out first, communicate the impact to stakeholders, and plan for the next step. But usually, a great PM wouldn’t let the shit hit the fan, to begin with. In other words, PMs are judged after things have gone FUBAR, and everyone can afford to be smart in hindsight. The same hindsight you probably had learned from your angry parents after those end-of-year conferences with school teachers. No mom, I wouldn’t have skipped school that day had I known there was a test. 

Every good PM succeeds in his own way, but bad PMs all fail the same: they didn’t do what they are supposed to do. What are they supposed to do? Sadly there is no universal truth. Granted, each company operates in its own way. At some places, SWEs deploy their own code, while in others, SREs reign supreme power over the production system. Some product owners are supposed to help with GUI design (hopefully based on some standard design system) or help with market research. But by and large, the outcome of members in a tech team is bounded to tangible deliveries and the inter-company differences are within standard deviation.

The PM role? They are supposed to be responsible for the success of the freakin’ project. Now that’s wild, how is that translated into concrete action is anyone’s speculation. That might mean being the link between engineers and customers, making sure both sides get what they want when they want. It could be about being a master of process, fluent in a range of management methodologies, and having an eye on constant improvement. Perhaps it involves understanding the web and mobile architecture, knowing modern technologies, and being quick on the uptake. Or I might have as well just described an Account Manager, Scrum Master, Technical Consultant, and part-time Avenger. PM’s scope of work is ambiguous by design as no two projects are alike and project management is the glue pulling things together, but unclear expectations are the breeding ground of disappointments.

Another thing that gives the PMs bad rap is the disdain for technology of some of them. Software development is not rocket science but it is not exactly a pure exercise of muscles either. That is to say, the field is somewhat technical. And just as any other technical field, it is full of useless jargon, lame inside jokes, and know-hows that take years to pick up. Non-technical PMs, people who experience difficulties explaining how a website works to a 5-year-old, manage to navigate around this quagmire by materializing all units of work into tickets. And they proceed to treat the tickets as little black boxes. The meaning of the work is watered down into start and end dates, and a set of labels for convenient herding. This makes a complicated system simpler. Some’s navigation skills are good enough that they don’t need to know how the finished work would look like. Work to them is parcels to carriers, you are supposed to ship it, not knowing the dead bodies inside. As I work for Parcel Perform, this sounds great!

There is a problem though, most people in software development are not in the business of writing code, they are in the business of building software products - hopefully, great ones. The difference is that one is an isolated piece of work with a predefined outcome, the other is a process of figuring out the intersection of market fit and technical prowess. Building non-trivial software requires plenty of arguments, negotiations, and decisions. Non-technical PM can’t call out bullshit. They lack the skills and tools to affect the outcome and all important decisions were handed to engineers and product owners. Without that decision-making capability, PMs turn into administrative assistants, busy themselves with monitoring project status, sending out updates, and keeping track of who does what. It is nice but it doesn't break or make a project.

Some PMs are shit umbrellas. Some are shit funnels. And the canopy of the said umbrella is technical knowledge. Not the same knowledge that is required for engineers to write code, but the knowledge to see through a project with clarity, know what is important and what is not, and call the shots when needed. It is not unusual for an engineer to pick up a book on Agile to better align his working habits with Scrum’s sprints.  The sight of a PM reading Google’s Site Reliability Engineering to come up with a better fire fighting routine is as common as the sight of a Saola. Isn’t that having the cake and eat it too?

Are PMs useless then? The bad ones are. Bad PMs pose negative net morale and productivity for their team. Don’t believe me? Try rewriting the software for the third time because your PM failed to strong-arm a customer to put his shit together. But the whole thing about Google not needing PMs is as much of an urban myth as it is truth. It happened in July 2001, in computer time that was a century ago. It wasn’t the mighty Google where every practice seems to be deliberated, there were around 130 engineers. The layoff didn’t stick. The engineers themselves opposed it. The whole thing lasted for less than a month and was pretty much Larry Page throwing a tantrum against Eric Schmidt’s adult supervision.

As long as software products are written by humans, the role of project management in coordinating a bunch of professionals toward the common goals is always needed. People who think project management is a good way to get into the tech scene without the background need to get their reality check. PMs are responsible for the success of a project even though they have little control over it - how exactly is that easy? It takes a lot to be a good engineer, and it takes even more to be a good PM. The more people on board with this thought, the better it is for everyone in software development. Don't let a bad apple spoils the bunch, and the best way is to work on being a good one.

The engineer/manager spectrum

When I was younger, I was given many forms of the same advice: at some point, I would be better off to double down on either being an engineer or a manager if I wanted to progress in my career. I was booted from my first job while pretending to be good at everything, naturally, I thought this was a good idea.

Life looked at my choice with as much consideration as my parents when I told them I wanted to join the infantry in kindergarten - which was not at all. I joined a startup, and subsequently another startup. I never got to choose. Working at an early-stage startup is like conducting an old locomotive on a half-done railway. You juggle between keeping the engine running, because just like your code it breaks a lot, and building the railway with whatever you find along the way, you are selling a product before it is fully ready. The game is over when either stops.

Along that journey, I realize that career choices are not complicated, they are complex. Complication is when a system consists of multiple parts with intricate interactions. As overwhelming as the parts and interactions could be, they follow some universal laws that eventually make the system knowable. Complexity is when the parts and interactions are not fully knowable and the best we can do is some reasonable prediction. A car is complicated, the traffic is complex. I think people who gave me advice earlier understood this. But in an attempt to simplify a complex subject, half of the truth was lost.

I think when people talk about the engineer/manager choice, they probably mean that at the point you have to weigh your options as being an engineer or a manager, you have collected all the low-hanging fruits in your career. To proceed, you need a level of focus you haven’t experienced earlier. And as it is hard to focus on two hard things at the same time, you would be better off focusing on only one. Which is also true for my parents’ expectations of me.

While that is true, to perform at the peak level you cannot spread your effort all over the place, there is another half of the truth, that is the choice is neither binary nor permanent. You are probably overthinking if you view the management as a critical, life-changing decision. The move to management is not a promotion, it is a change in scope of work in which you drop existing responsibilities to pick up others. And if you hate the new responsibilities, you can always go back to the engineering track. Most companies have had sufficient understanding on this matter and will be glad to provide some rotation options for their employees.

The higher you advance in your career, the stronger the element of leadership exists in your scope of work. People in the technical track get promoted for working on hard and impactful problems. You wouldn’t get to work on the hard problems unless the easier ones were effectively delegated to someone else. The most impactful problems tend to be ones that once solved provide sustainable advantages for the business. Such problems tend to involve people of different background and function. Someone would need to rally them and align their interests to the shared goal. And yet delegation, communication, and goal alignment aren’t common practices among engineers. Although technical leadership isn’t exactly the same as people leadership, I think you will navigate better if you have an opportunity to learn about how people think, how larger projects are prioritized , and how organizations are run.

From my own experience, alternating between the two roles makes me better at both. In a hard project that challenges my technical prowess, I am more of an engineer. In a more relaxing project, my manager role is stronger so I can oversee things go to the right places. I am a better manager because I understand the morale friction caused by a poorly planned project, and I am a better engineer because I know the red flags of a poor project and when to fire alarms.

The final caveat is that engineer and manager roles exist in a spectrum and it curbs your professional and personal development by forcefully align your options along with the extremes. Not only do most people find themselves somewhere in the middle, but they also move back and forth as their careers progress. People who can turn a technical advantage into a business advantage usually have a blend of engineer/manager in them. You can advance without spending time in management. But if you want to give management a try, you should. Do not let your identity be simply defined by a title.