Companies are not built to hire *one* engineer with lots of autonomy. They're built to hire 8 engineers and a team lead w/ a reporting line.
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It *breaks all sorts of things* to have one engineer as the dangling node on the org chart. Who manages them? CTO? Hah, hah, doesn't work.
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It's very hard to *keep* that engineer because their career options get radically curtailed; they get perfectly shaped for current job.
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Smart engineers don't want to be doing the same thing at the same level forever, but that's what the business actually needs.
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There's also no fallback plan if e.g. the engineer takes a new job, gets married and moves, etc etc. Bus number of 1 is terrifying.
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If you're having difficulty visualizing, the general pattern is "We just need one dev for email. One dev for analytics. One dev for BTC."
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(It would be a terrible idea to employ a non-zero number of engineers for BTC but BTC is a classic example of deep, narrow specialization.)
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So what do companies, which know that ~1 engineer is not realistic, do? They either hire consultancies or buy "solutions", at higher cost.
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You can totally be the person selling those things, if you understand the business context and can provide ~1 engineer of work.
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End of conversation
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Finding 1 engineer to build/own/support something is *literally* where a software company’s leverage is. It better be a high value thing.
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