[kaidon]

Are you me? I agree and have experienced every single thing here.

> I believe that it is a mistake to believe that merely working harder will earn that respect.

<bingo>

You must be a principal level developer -- it is a role driven with the highest degree of cynicism and empathy, which you comment is gushing with.

[zoogeny]

On the aspect of empathy, I really liked the cofounders of the company. They were the best kind of people. When I say that others wanted control, it actually wasn't the cofounders, they were honestly committed to getting the entire company involved. It's just when there are 25 people at a slow growth company and the challenges aren't technical, there isn't much control to hand out to the engineering leaders. Even if I could have helped them grow their engineering team to 100+ developers and fostered a fantastic culture or whatever dreams we all had ... they just didn't need it at that time. What they actually needed was to find a way to accelerate growth. And the advice they were getting from investors was to lean into sales, marketing and growth.

So they have to go out and recruit the best of the best that they can in those disciplines. I can't fault them for doing what is necessary. They even sent a bunch of the engineering staff (including me) to growth marketing courses. But now you have 1 new VP of Sales with 20+ years of experience, 1 new VP of Growth fresh out of some hot startup and the same dozen engineers. When ideas are being pitched on what to do to increase growth, and when engineering time is being portioned out to implement those ideas, consistently we were spending our time and resources on the ideas of those VPs.

I don't envy the position of the founders in many ways. They have severely limited resources and they somehow have to try to keep everyone happy. And even if I am a technically strong and reliable engineer, they needed to give that control to the areas in their company that were most in need. And those new VP level folks demanded that control. I do wish they had just been a bit more honest about it.

My frustration is that when you bring in people at that VP level, they need to be held to the same accountability as the engineers would be. And even when I saw that they were failing and making bad decisions (and were frankly asleep at the wheel in some cases), I felt shut out of avenues to apply leverage. It became clear that the decisions and opinions of those marketing and sales folks were being held to a different standard than the input from the engineering team.