Hey, it’s Collin. Welcome to Engineering Echelons, a newsletter full of ideas and insights to help engineers excel at management.

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For professional services firms, there are core roles to the company.

These are roles that:

Everything else—HR, IT, admin, etc.—exists to help people in the core roles do their job better. In other words, all other roles serve the core roles.

That’s not to say the non-core roles aren’t important. They absolutely are. But they’re important precisely because they support the revenue generators of the company.

Conversely, non-core roles are not more important than core roles. Sometimes management within companies can forget this. They may forget that the org chart shows reporting lines, not the firm’s center of mass.

When non-core roles are elevated in importance above the core roles, bureaucracy takes root.

Understanding the core and non-core roles within a company isn’t intended to separate staff into different groups or classes. The point of it is clarity. By sharing the way that the business actually operates can improve the way in which its employees approach their individual roles.

Eileen Gu (professional skier) on pressure:

“Pressure is just energy. It’s something that can be harnessed and used to push you to new heights.”

—

Daniel Ek (co-founder of Spotify) on innovation:

“We build on other people’s ideas. An innovation is actually taking two or more things that were already well known and putting them together in a new way.”

—

Charlie Munger (former Vice-Chair of Berkshire Hathaway) on developing good judgment:

“I sought good judgment mostly by collecting instances of bad judgment, then pondering ways to avoid such outcomes.”

A study from the London School of Economics shared that the amount of hiring devoted to entry-level roles across a handful of countries has fallen more than 14% since 2019.

The study noted that recruiting an entry-level worker is a bet on the employee’s future skills. So a company’s return-on-investment hinges on the rate at which that young employee learns.

Since remote work slows that process, many companies see young talent as a less attractive value proposition, preferring to invest instead in older workers.

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Looking forward to hearing from you. See you next time.

Collin