Elite Blog series

Investing in People and Technology

February 16th, 2024

As we are now settled into 2024, what investments will you prioritize? What matters most to your engineering organization and how do you keep priorities in balance?

We all want to have ample runway and funds to develop, innovate and grease the squeaky wheels in our infrastructure while keeping our quality and compliance standards in check.

Sometimes it’s tempting (or even necessary) to push the envelope with the latest technology or AI-powered functionality. 

Management gets sold far too often on working with the newest, most-talked-about technology that can be incorporated into whatever vertical you are working on whether it makes sense for the customer or not. 

The question is, is all that necessary to best serve your audience with limited resources? As is usually the case, it depends.

As it happens in many cases when pursuing what's new and hip, what gets left behind are the foundations of security, data protection, compliance and quality sacrificed on the alter of trendy technology or even fast and cheap. As with building a house, it must have a rock-solid foundation.

Does a worth while investment have to be ridiculously expensive? No way. It boils down to efficiency and getting the most for your dollar. Let's look at team investments for a moment. There are engineering organizations that will operate on throwing bodies at a project and logging tons of hours using a larger team but with cheaper rates per employee given they might be  less experienced and skilled. There are others who will charge premium rates with a smaller team, but you will hopefully be paying for experience and efficiency. Larger teams with more bodies doesn't always equal more productivity and many times, it's counterproductive requiring more managerial overhead to push effectiveness and plan. Are smaller teams always better? Not necessarily, but as the old saying goes, I'd rather have 4 quarters than 100 pennies. Give me smaller, more experienced teams in most cases.

If a higher payed and more experienced engineer accomplishes tasks in a fraction of the time as the cheaper and less experienced engineer and using their experience, saves you a compliance or security headache down the road, then you’ve probably struck the better deal with the higher rate engineer. This would apply to full-time or contract Engineers. The skillset needed for leadership is to determine, with limited resources, which of the options will be the better investment and whether the engineers with the higher price tag per hour or salary are actually going to be worth it. Expensive is not always better, but it can be if you know what you're looking for.

An Engineer's ownership is crucial. Would you rather have an Engineer who along with delivering solutions, talks more about security, quality and compliance with an eye to pragmatically applying new technologies or an Engineer who talks about developing cool stuff and new technology but with no practical plans of how it's going to be supported long-term from a compliance and security perspective? This is a line of maturity for Engineers. It's not just about implementing the feature set and doing new stuff. One data leak, one compliance mishap, one risky script can tank your whole organization and erase any industry trust you ever had. Once integrity and trust is lost, it's very hard to get back. 

What we consider to be the tent poles for a rock solid foundation of systems are Security, Compliance, Quality, directly meeting the needs of your clientele on a realistic budget and most importantly, the people behind them. The key ingredients here are the people you trust with your systems. Your people are the most important investments you will make.

Of course, we all have to be good stewards of what we have been given to innovate and run complex systems. Do you want cheap, good, innovative, secure, compliant or all of the above? There will likely be varying degrees of focus on every area. Choose wisely.