Lessons from layoff - business knowledge > all
Tags: webdev, softwaredevelopment, career, learning
Published: 2024-05-30 15:08:20

Hello, 2 years back I started a series of stories from my first job while looking for my new job, now that ~~new~~ job laid me off... here it is again :)

For today, the topic I want to focus on is the importance of business knowledge. 

If you are a junior developer or less than 5 years developer, this topic won't be too helpful to you right now. You should ABSOLUTELY focus on learning the tech stack at your job 100%. 

Our company recently went on a red wedding. Our headquarter teams were cut by 65%, which includes marketing, product managers, designers, and engineering. The biggest hit was on engineering with an around 75% cut; thanks Elon for proving the world you can run world class tech company doing that... 

All bitterness aside, the thing that I observed from the people who (luckily?) survived was that they were all business value holders: high level engineering managers, above senior-level developer, directors, and product managers. 

To be fair, all cuts before this blood path, yes we had like 6 layoffs before this, were mostly on engineering managers and product managers. When company are looking to simply adjust cost, they would definitely rather to cut excess managers rather than developers. 

However when the tough decision is to be made: who are TRULY important to the business, it's those who have great understanding of company decisions that survive. The number of product managers that survived was the enlightening to me. I didn't understand it at first, but if you really think about it: 

**who are easier to replace? the coders whose work is completely engrained in the code and can be picked by others reading or the product managers who went through countless hours communicating, understanding the customer base, prioritizing, and have a wealth knowledge on what was tried, what worked, and what failed?**

In this light, it looks like a simple, not easy, decision that you should retain more people who understand each piece of the business deeply than engineers who just receive Jira tickets and executes without knowing the numerous why. 

Of course you can just understand the situation more simply: the more important employees survive longer. However, as a developer, I did have some pride of my own value over product managers (Sorry I have learned better), so this was eye opening for many ways. 

Many senior developers that I worked with seemed to understand this point to some extend, but looking back to our company engineer performance rubric for all levels and this layoff, the worth of business knowledge/understanding REALLY hit me hard. 

Developers are often sidelined to the decision process and are truly just a cog or means to an end. So if you want to stand out among your peers, start doing these:

1.) understand what metrics are important to your team. Of course generating more money is the ultimate end goal. However, your team might be interested in acquiring more new customers. How much is it to do different type of marketing? what's the bottleneck? what are the limits? Why are we keeping channels that don't make sense. What other alternatives do we have? What did we try in the past? What is the current direction for the team and why? There are a million question one could ask about the team and what are the decisions that were made along the way (without actually be in said billion meetings :D).

2.) Understand the tech that help achieve these metrics. This is a high level understanding, not talking about we use a recursion on this function to do xyz leetcode results. This is about how are these metrics moved by tech. For example how do you know which user is new customer, how is that data propagated in the company, and whether this pipeline can be improved. 

3.) Keep a great relationship with your product managers. I'll write a separate post on how. However if you really understood the entire point of this post then this should be a no-brainer why: your product managers are your best proxy to understand the business that your team care about, so really they are your best friends! Okay maybe not best friends... 

Thanks for reading, if you feel this was helpful or I am completely full of shit feel free to comment and let me know :D! 

Also feel free to look back on my past posts. I tend to write these higher level takeaway lessons or about specific leetcode questions. 

Also if you think I'd be a fit for a role PPPPLEASE contact <3