Builders and Promoters

After working in technology for a year, and interning for a couple more, I have noticed a pattern in the industry. At least it is a pattern borne out by people I follow. There seem to be two kinds of tech workers: the diligent but often overlooked “builders,” and the effusive, nearly sociopathic “promoters.”

The builders far outnumber the promoters, but the promoters are louder, gather more social connections, receive more coverage in mass media, and are compensated better. Nowhere are the promoters more vocal than in Web3, where questions of structural merit are pushed aside by memes and ad-hominem attacks.

Despite this, both groups exist at every level of seniority, and being a builder does not always mean being on the wrong side of labor versus capital.

Different job functions within technology stand out for having atypical ratios of builders to promoters. Most engineers are builders, and the stronger their domain expertise is, the more likely they are to hunker down and study the intricacies of one problem domain, rather than divide their attention between mentorship, community growth, and management of the product lifecycle. This is not to say that no engineers do these activities well, but rather that the more specialized ones have quieter forms of leadership by example rather than proselytizing.

The domain-expert engineer has strict criteria for success, which are typically quantitative and ideally expressed in code. This person believes and practices continuous, measurable improvement of their own work, and coaches their subordinates that way, too.

In contrast, most product managers are promoters, and they spend much of their time writing internal memos, getting “buy-in” from internal and customer-facing teams. Their whole job is essentially to collect and present evidence for why a particular feature, practice, or partnership will benefit whichever side of the business they’re speaking to that day. They build trust, camaraderie, and an elusive sense of “alignment.”

The product manager who embodies the promoter archetype does not just sit on one team and declare that such-and-such a metric must change by this amount week over week. The person with that mentality, one who is more oriented toward housekeeping of one area rather than alignment of the whole, is better described as a project manager. They’re likely to get stuck in local maxima, like the Agile Method, LinkedIn certification courses, and various other complicated, buzzwordy ways of assigning tasks. While reliant on processes and data, the best PMs I’ve worked with have been equally comfortable with their own intuition.

Now, you may wonder why I’ve pulled out two examples of job functions wherein the builders (engineers) make more money on average than the promoters (product managers) at typical SaaS startups. I believe the reason for this discrepancy is that PMs have more fungible skillsets than developers. Because less technical knowledge is required, a good product manager can pretty much pack it up one day and switch from healthcare to crypto, or even into an adjacent “promoter” field like management consulting.

This is wildly different from the kind of experience lock-in that occurs when a distinguished engineer in finance has specialized in, say, Java and a bunch of industry-specific libraries and DSLs, and is subsequently unable to even imagine what the day-to-day is like for the programmer building embedded firmware for automobiles. Isn’t it ironic, then, that developers are often thought of as a commodity?

Breadth, rather than depth, of experience may actually translate to more optionality over the course of one’s career, and this in part explains why the PMs, salespeople, and CEOs of this industry seem to do so much better when it comes to social prestige. Certainly many of the builders must know this, but they also know that demand for certain specialists waxes and wanes, such as when experts in the nearly extinct language COBOL were called upon in 2020 to save New Jersey’s unemployment system.

A different kind of satisfaction, and indeed a modest financial incentive, emerges for builders who get to be The Expert on one thing.