WEW17 - Cheaper Clouds and Better Engineers

Another massive week and a lot to cover. This issue is all about management and leadership with some very technical blog post recommendations. I also got a new profile pic/professional headshot across my socials. It’s given me a confidence boost I can only assume is parallel to how one feels when one gets a haircut #bald.

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In this week’s Email:

• Leadership - We need to have better conversations about cloud costs

• Management - Finally, a career path for ICs

• Product - Consumer Surplus vs Innovator’s Dilemma

• Further Reading - Books and Articles I recommend this week

Leadership

How to Talk to Business Leaders About Cloud Spend

In my most recent blog post I introduce the concept of “Leveraged Service Savings.” This number is a calculation of how much money you are saving on hosting and infrastructure in the cloud by not duplication login. In a service-oriented architecture, breaking out commonly used pieces of business logic to be shared is a no-brainer for engineers, but it doesn’t matter to business leaders.

By performing some simple calculations, you can get better insights into where your money is going in your cloud bill and even better, find ways to talk about and position that to product owners and CEOs.

It’s a big problem when cloud costs are a mystery and those in charge of the purse strings of your company are left confused about why something is so expensive or why you didn’t just make it cheaper in the first place. If you can talk about the cost per product, relative to its value generation, and how breaking apart services will affect the bottom line per offering, you will be see as a peer, not a cost center.

Management

Shifts In Org Practices Refocus Growth to ICs

Finally, growth for individual contributors!

I’ve been building out career paths for individual contributors for 6 years now inside organizations. There is a reality many don’t like to face, and that is the fact that your best engineer is probably not going to be your best manager. Management is its own skill and like any other skill takes, time, practice, and dedication.

The current market however has a large devaluation placed on managers and it’s truly the IC’s time to shine. This started with the mass layoffs in Twitter and has trickled throughout tech and finance. “If you aren’t making, you are valuable.” has become the mindset. I don’t agree, as there are many ways to affect value, but this is providing an opportunity for organizations with that view to really look at the software developers they have and provide opportunities for growth that don’t move into management.

In one popular slack, I am in for engineering and product leaders, there have been numerous conversations among its 27,000 members about medium to large companies creating working groups and whole new career ladders since the start of the downturn to keep coders coding and growing.

Product

Your Consumers Need a Surplus of Value

I finished reading The Innovator’s Dilemma this week, and wow, it’s dated. I also started reading The New Roaring 20s but will refrain from a review until I am further in. Immediately however the core thesis of these two books provides insightful contrast.

A key argument of The Innovator’s Dilemma is that if you give users more than they need, that means you will need to charge more and they will want your product less. Either that or you charge the same and your company loses money on the extra work it delivered. But what if extra IS the baseline?

Modern consumers most definitely expect what The New Roaring 20s refers to as a “Surplus of Value.” We aren’t happy with our expectations being met, we want them to be exceeded with constant improvement and additions, that’s what we are really paying for.

Further Reading

Weekly Reads

The Innovator’s Dilemma - I referenced it, so I want to talk about it. The Innovator’s Dilemma is a classic, but it’s extremely dated. A majority of the book is spent explaining the history of the disc drive and storage industry to leverage that as an example instead of providing actual insights. The TL;DR is

• Big companies can’t innovate in emerging industries because they won’t get justifiable profit from it

• Customers control what a business does, not biz leaders

• Giving users more than what they want is costly and confusing and the wrong call

Blogposts By William

As a subscriber, these links as paywall free for you! Please don’t share them directly, though, of course, I encourage you to share the posts themselves after reading them.

This week’s blogging has been very technical, but still at the strategy level.

• SBOM: Master Your Software Dependencies & Security

• Mastering Cloud Cost Management

• How Decentralized Identifiers Are The Future Of Online Identity

Poll

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