What prevents engineering firms from acting like law firms?
Because the Industry thinks that Management/Marketing/Sales are the important "leaders" and Engineering is just mere "foot soldiers" and hence replaceable/dispensable as needed. The above is justified as "Business needs", "Investor returns", "Profit next quarter" etc.
We need to change the above status-quo.
However; the important point we need to be aware of is that in the current Economic/Financial System many events and their payoffs are no longer linear and that is what companies are trying to optimize for. The best explanation of this is Nassim Taleb's Mediocristan (non-scalable) vs Extremistan (scalable) dichotomy. This video Pareto, Power Laws, and Fat Tails—what they don’t teach you in STAT 101 is a very nice overview of the essential points : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcqt49dXtm8
I wonder if it's harder to associate an employee's skill level with company profit.
If most lawyer companies have established hourly billing rates for each employee, then the owners can more clearly see an employee's true value to the company?
I think it's true that Engineering is just mere "foot soldiers" and hence replaceable/dispensable as needed (as mentioned in another sibling comment here).
But, from the company perspective, your value is based on the 'market rate' for your generically defined skills and experience.
Anecdotally, I have been recently approached by someone who was very eager for me to consult them on the product they were going to build. After a few hours of talking I quickly realized that they don't really need to build anything complex. In fact, my advise was to only focus on the core functions which are very simple and leave the majority of actual work to be done manually by a much cheaper secretary-type role until the product got enough traction to actually benefit from automation.
It’s easier to say “we will lose $X if this person leaves” or “$Y will be at risk if they leave due to personal relationships” than it is to quantify an engineer’s revenue impact to the company.
Hence the common cost center assumption.
i.e they're not cogs in a wheel that can be replaced by 'management'.
in as much engineers here, would like to believe otherwise -- most engineers at most firms are treated as replaceable / disposable resources.
Lawyers typically specialize and they work off the same body of work everywhere (the same set of laws). Having worked for 10 law firms doesn’t mean that they know something current employees don’t.
Tech isn’t like that. Everywhere is different, many of us touch multiple specializations, the body of knowledge we need is always shifting. An engineer that has worked 10 places very likely does know things your current employees don’t, like different tools.
Losing an engineer is bad for the individual business, but engineers moving around is good for businesses in general.
Managers at engineering firms too often think that the money comes from the wisdom of the managers and the hustle of the marketers, not from the work of the engineers.
This may be because partners at law firms are lawyers, but upper managers at engineering firms often are not engineers.
Send out offer letters to companies most indispensable people, just to jack up your competitors labor costs. Arms race. Eventual mutually assured destruction.
Moneyball as in an optimization technique when roles are static. Obviously this is generic because static data of any value inevitably ends up in a spreadsheet. Otherwise, I’m not sure game theory holds together here.
I had and accepted counter-offer myself and know quite a few people who were in such position.
do you have patent quotas at your position? if not they are counting the days to replace you with a machine, someone overseas, a script, AI. depending on the decade.
Not trying to be spiteful or angry, just geniunely curious about the business logic and psychology behind that kind of decision making. Isn't every job replaceable?
1) Power/Politics - This is basically Human Nature at work and institutionalized as Management/Leadership/etc to put themselves at the top. A lot of it is BS (see the books by https://jeffreypfeffer.com/) but unfortunately only the enlightened in the industry have woken up to this. It is also the case that in these domains many of the objectives are intangible/subjective and difficult to measure thus allowing the actors to create an illusion of "Importance".
2) Nature of Engineering - The output of any Engineering activity has a well-defined boundary. This makes it more tangible/manageable/measurable and reason about. All the main costs are paid upfront and once gizmo-x/software-y is done the recurring costs are generally pretty low. This gives the illusion that the Engineer is now not worth his pay compared to his current output and hence replaceable/dispensable based on bean counter calculations. It also doesn't help that Engineers do a pretty good job so that a product/software once released and accepted in the market is generally very stable and not in much need of rework. This is the reason "Planned Obsolescence", "Subscription Model" etc. were invented by the Industry.