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Being VP Of Engineering Is Harder Than Being CEO

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The VP of Engineer’s complex role as a translator between the development team and the executive team makes it possibly the most executive role.
Join the DZone community and get the full member experience. A lot has been said about how lonely it gets being a founder/CEO of a startup company; you can probably pick any Ben Horowitz quotes here about the struggle or the cold sweat in the middle of the night and you’d be right. But there is one position that can be even more cruel than being CEO. Being VP of Engineering is harder and lonelier. In fact, your VP of Dev is probably the loneliest person in your company. I remember exactly where it hit me and probably where the seeds of starting LinearB were planted in my head. It was one of those Monday mornings after a tough week before. I was just appointed to the VP of R&D of a great security startup and was walking into a Monday morning CEO staff meeting. One of the latest deployments exploded (and not in a nice way) because of a human error and I was fighting side by side with the team throughout the weekend to restore the situation to the normal state. When I think back to it, I can still feel the wrath of the CEO in that meeting. I did not get a single day of grace in my new role and, if that wasn’t enough, I had to deal with 3 frustrated developers that told me how stuff is broken because all the execs care about is delivering new features and how they will never understand what technical debt is and how if you slow down and build things right you will eventually move faster. The picture was clear in my head then… As VP of Engineering we spend most of our time translating between two groups of people in two parallel universes. We’re citizens of both while not fully belonging to either. I was not really one of the developers. I was once, but not anymore. I constantly had to remind the team of the realities of developing software inside a business with goals that are a lot more around revenue, customers, and deadlines. Some of them got it. But to many, I was now just another executive. If they had assigned me an avatar, he would probably have been wearing a suit, even though I always wear t-shirts. I was not really an executive either. I certainly tried to be. I tried to fit in with my new peers. I spent hours listening to the VP of Marketing and VP of Sales on what would help drive more business. But every time I tried explaining back to them and to my boss (the CEO) how building software at scale is a complex mission that has to maintain a delicate balance between the delivery of new value and the investment in non-functional infrastructures and quality initiatives that will enable the business to keep on moving forward with fast and reasonable pace, I felt that they nodded their head with (fake) understanding and went back to ask about feature delivery dates the next week. Even in good companies with good culture, there is not a strong desire from either side to understand the other. So this big gap exists. And that gap is where we (VPs of Software Development) live. To close the gap, you need to build a bridge. Speaking both languages is not enough to build the bridge. You also need to understand both cultures. When you have both, you have a chance to earn the respect you need from both sides to close the gap. A great translator brings two worlds together that would otherwise never know each other. The 2020 Academy Awards showed us a beautiful example of this. A Korean film called Parasite cleaned up several of the major awards including Best Motion Picture.

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