Worth pointing out that Uber is no longer a unicorn. It is a large publicly traded corporation with a market cap of $58B. I suppose you're asking your question about large tech companies generally, not so much unicorns? Most unicorns are still quite small (revenue and employee count-wise) relative to large publicly traded corporations like Uber and the FANGs.
Am at a Unicorn. Engineering is 20-30 engineers total. This person is definitely confusing Unicorn with some generic big engineering heavy company. Many companies scale very differently. Some scale with large engineering efforts - mine doesn't. The change in number of engineers has barely moved in the last 2 years.
That said - to the question about unicorns: You're always expendable. Same as any job - same politics - same nonsense. No matter how important they make you think you are to a products success - they'll fire you regardless. It's amazing how fake management will be about urgency. "This is the most critical business function! We must have people working on it!11!!1!1!" Fires key employee because they didn't like them - "critical business function" gets shoved into the backlog to never be seen again. People are fake and think they need to show urgency to get the most value out of their employees.
I call this "artificial panic". That term came to mind when I joined a FMCG around Y2K, and on my first weeks I noticed people were running around stressed, like headless chicken. When I asked "what's on fire" and the answer was "nothing".
The "Minimalists" say on their podcast that "most emergencies, aren't". When I see panic setting camp in a company's mentality, I make myself scarce for a while until things calm down. If I see that the artificial state of panic is a perpetual feeding machine, I try to dance around it. I've read my share of Dilbert to know to avoid these toxic environments.
Ideally in a company there would be one single order backlog, showing the relative value of each project to everyone. However getting such an ordering would involve huge co-ordination across vastly differing internal companies / cultures and would drag up every buried political hand grenade of the company's lifetime.
So instead you do what someone shouts loudly about. If the shouter is right more than 50/50 they are doing pretty well.
Correcting myself (for the record). The Minimalists say that "most CRISES, aren't" (apologies for the caps). I used the word emergencies, which is inaccurate quote.
,"Critically Important", etc. is the most recent whatever caught the attention of a typical S/E/VP with the attention span of a ferret long enough for him/her to be able to utter it in the words. If you're able to highly visibly jump and demonstrate activity during exact that moment - a great talent leading to advancements/promotions - there is no point to react as the next new "critical" directive/change of course/etc. is coming very soon. Of course if your manager is one of those aspiring "talented jumpers", he/she will try to make you jump with him/her - it is a real PITA to have such a manager who instead of filtering and protecting the team from would amplify all that stuff flowing down.
Gasping in horror at the prospect of that JIRA plug-in coming into being, especially since even I, a casual admin for our Atlassian products, have a good idea what combination of API calls would make that happen.
Anything that can cause your company to lose a lot of money can be truly urgent. For example, your biggest customer needs a new feature, and if they don't get it by the end of the quarter, they'll switch to your competitor.
On the other hand, artificial deadlines that are invented by your company's management are usually not urgent.
A large company would never manage to switch to a competitor in one quarter. And they try any hard, it most likely means their getting a cashback under the table for the new contract, or other perk of the sort, the feature is just an excuse.
When I was working at Stanford, a new colleague came rushing out of a meeting ready to start a big new initiative because our VP said something should get done. I had to explain that patience was important because no single person at the University could make a project happen, but hundreds of people at all levels of the org chart could stop a major initiative in it’s tracks if they felt threatened.
Hmm, sounds like you've got some dyfunctional managers. I've never personally witnessed management faking urgency on a project just to get productivity on it. Management is generally charged with making sure ICs know what the priorities are as set by Product. It's possible that Product changes its mind often, confusing everyone. But if Product, Management, and ICs are confused about what your "critical business functions" are, I think you've got some systemic leadership problems.
Systemic leadership problems are more common than you think. Most larger corporations have orgs within them with very different cultures. It’s not hard to know why: the effective managers listen to their developers and shield them from the shit that comes from above. A healthy tree is nurtured under the protection offered by these managers; their reports never know what kind of shitstorms they were protected from. But these kinds of managers are rare albeit very effective.
I love how you distinguish between "ICs" "Management" and "Product". When you say "Product" do you mean Marketing? Sales? Production? Manufacturing? Do they have "ICs" as well as their own "Management"?
The whole point of "Agile" was supposed to break down these divisions. Management is "generally charged" with getting the greatest productivity they can out of their resources. How that productivity is measured may be by "the priorities as set by Product", but that doesn't take into account ROI, sunk costs, COGS, Cap/Opex etc etc.
Yeah, I was taking artistic license with the term, but "large tech" is probably a better term, though I'd filter it down to those on the lower profitability side. (even those with large IPOs are often just a startup at scale)
Unicorn never meant lower on the profitability side though. It just means a valuable pre-IPO late stage start-up. Plenty of them were or went on to be insanely profitable.
