Comment by TheMog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheMog | Hacker News Reader

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That's a very good question, and not necessarily something I find easy to explain concisely. Let me try anyway :). Note, some of the bad impressions may come from the usual clued up recruiters who are trolling LinkedIn for keywords and then crank up the spam.

So what I expect from a role that's commensurate with my experience (trying to avoid "senior" as that's usually a pigeonhole):

- You tell me what you need to have built, I'll figure out the how (architecture, design, technology) and when it'll be done, based on the usual cost/velocity/quality constraints.

- I'll work with, guide, mentor and lead a team of developers if the size of the project needs it. However, I'm technical first, so I'm not interested in roles that are management only. This generally seems to be the crux of the matter - not a lot of companies seem to have these roles.

- If you give me the responsibility to deliver X, I also need to have the authority to make it happen. Don't ask me how I figured that out ;)

I can usually find roles that fit two out of three, but I don't seem to be able to find something that matches all three. My current role probably rates as 2 1/4 out of three, and is definitely a good fit, but with very limited growth potential (aka I'm close taking as far as I can take it).

Points 1 and 2 describe the jobs of most Staff Engineers (or higher) at large tech companies like FAANG that I know. Smaller companies rarely have these because, perhaps unsurprisingly, small shops rarely have big enough technical challenges to need more than 1 person like this, and they double as management.

3 is likely to be a sticking point however. Once you have responsibility for large projects you are often in a certain amount of resource contention, the chance of avoiding political battles there is small unless you are a known superstar within the company.

If you're ok with that, I'd prepare for a whiteboard interview at one of the big well-paying tech companies.

That makes sense. I think that I may have consciously been trying to ignore the point you're making that there are only a handful of companies out there that have the sort of problems where they can justify having this level of people on staff, and more than one to boot.

I guess it's a choice between that and consulting, because i suspect there are a whole bunch of smaller companies out there that can use help with problems like that, but they don't have enough of them to justify having someone like me on staff full time.

> That's a very good question, and not necessarily something I find easy to explain concisely.

I've been where you are. One tip I have is to spend a little bit of time (an hour or two) and work out exactly how to explain it concisely. What's your elevator pitch? If you ran into the CTO of your dream tech company at a friend's party, and they asked what kind of work you would like to do, what would you explain in 60 seconds?

For what it's worth, I think what you have above is pretty close. If you can tweak it slightly, you can likely get to a "Here's what I want to be doing and this is why you should hire me" in the same sort of pitch.

I know it's difficult to explain sometimes, but it's worth your time to figure out how to frame it concisely. Good luck!

You should take a look at senior solution architect roles.

Aren't those relatively sales oriented in general? At least they seem to be in those companies that I seem to work with.

In the European companies they are not. From my experience (UK Financial Services primarily), they are equivalent to a US Staff Engineer with authority over Design and Implementation. Typically looking after a team or two of engineers of various levels of experience.

There's also a broad amount of "socialising" the design/system internally to generate "buy-in" across the organisation. Which is the tedious bit for me, but hey, the money is good.

That makes sense - I'm in the US right now, and here a Solutions Architect is mostly a pre-sales engineer.

Pretty much any growth in my work will require me working on the people skills side of things, which is something I'm already working on.

Sometimes they are, but that's not what you want. Other times, it's like what you've described but unfortunately with much less (or even zero) hand-on work, and more meetings and dealing with internal bureucracy.

BTW to me, it looks like what you want is a tech lead role.

Tech Lead with some business involvement. I've run my own small consulting companies in the past, just haven't had the nerve to do that here in the US, mainly due to cost of health insurance.

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