Be in the business!

Machiavelli for software engineers #3

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This is the third in a series of articles I am calling "Machiavelli for software engineers". In these I cover topics that are related to power and influence in organizations. The full introduction to the series can be found here.

In the category “Strange But True”: My best friend is a banker.

Some years ago she was tired of moving other people’s money around and she was thinking about switching roles to something a bit more … fun. One of the roles she was eying was in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) department. This is the group in the bank that does fun and socially responsible things such as reducing carbon footprint (bye bye Bitcoin), charitable global giving, and supporting underprivileged students. I had my doubts about this, but one of our friends was a bit more blunt: “Don’t do it”, he advised, “You will no longer be in the business.”

When people feel good they let it rip: They buy unnecessary gadgets, go on expensive trips, and go out to dinner more often than their waist line can comfortably afford. Companies are just like normal people: When they feel affluent, they also start spending on frivolous things. But, as pilots know, whatever goes up, will eventually come down. So when the lean times come round, as they inevitably do, belts are tightened, budgets are lowered, and spending gets reassessed.

We are probably all familiar with how that works for our personal budgets: We do not buy that Mac Studio we don’t need, we limit our intake of expensive wine, we eat out less, and we postpone that luxurious European trip.

Companies do something similar: Travel budgets go down, off-sites are restricted, and frivolous luxuries that do not contribute to the bottom line are abandoned or severely curtailed. That kinda sucks if you are working on one of these frivolous luxuries, because depending on how that works out, you might have to find a new role or you might just get laid off. Both of these outcomes are obviously suboptimal.

That’s what my friend’s friend meant with “not being in the business”; it meant that my friend would be working on a corporate luxury and thereby putting herself at risk of being caught up in a “reduction in force” when that inevitably arrived.

Corporate social responsibility is an obvious luxury.

Cue flames of people who say that CSR is Really Important and an important “brand amplifier”. Unfortunately, most companies I know are run by a bunch of psychopaths who only look out for numbers 1, 2, and maybe 3. CSR is something they might not mind spending some money on when the going is good and they need a flag to wave in the battle for talent. However, when the bottom line starts hurting, these programs unfailingly attract the eye of Sauron.

But, please don’t misunderstand me, CSR is not the only type of frivolous luxury that you might want to steer clear of in your career path. Many tech companies have lots of unnecessary projects for which there really is no good (read: monetary) justification. I have written before about the “developing markets” division of a big tech company that I worked for. This division consisted of groups that were developing tech solutions for bringing the Internet and other nice things to underserved populations in the developing world.

Or, as I cynically put it at the time: Projects for people without credit cards.

Great projects, boatloads of fun, but in a company that is beholden to the almighty quarter, these are investments that are hard to justify monetarily when times get tough.

There are many other projects like that. Sometimes it is obvious: If you work on a product that has a bunch of customers but no clear monetization strategy, it might be a luxury. If your company has three blob stores and you are working on the fourth, that might be a frivolity. If you work on an internal product to support DEI, …. (draw your own conclusion).

During the recent big tech layoffs I heard a rumor that Google gave a spreadsheet with four columns to a consulting company with a request to figure out who to let go. Rumor had it that the four columns were: Employee id, total compensation, performance score, and something called “overall desirability of the project”. There is of course significant chaos in decisions like that, but it seems obvious to me that people working on Google’s core ad auction engine had a higher “project desirability” score than people working on loss making projects that were not well aligned with the overall mission and bottom line of the company.

If you are not “in the business” you run a bigger risk of being in the area where the ax is going to fall when the economy stumbles a bit. Depending on your job this might also mean that you will find it harder to find gainful employment again.

My LinkedIn feed at the time of writing seems to validate this point of view…

Please note that I am not saying that you should only want to work on important but potentially boring or uninteresting things. But what I am saying is that you should pay some attention it. Especially if you have a big mortgage and a family with small kids, or two kids in college, or elderly parents to support, or a huge student debt to pay off, or any other factor that makes you dependent on a regular paycheck, you will want to keep this aspect of team choice in mind.