Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

This is a statistically horrible idea. The chance that your startup is going to replace even the compensation of entry level grad in any large city in the US doing enterprise development is almost 0.

The “story” that has worked for me is that “no I’m not going to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls riding a unicycle on a tightrope. What we can do is talk like adults and we can discuss your real world business problems and see if I can bring my skills and experience to the table to help you solve those problems in exchange for money”

I’m not going to spend 40 hours a week working and more time on the side working on a side project.

View on HN

Just wondering, what is your TC? My understanding is that story works at Tier 3 companies that lack a structured interview process and are desperate for candidates (e.g. startups).

Seeing that I work at the alphabetically sorted first “A” in FAANG, I don’t think it could be considered a “tier 3” company.

When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position, I wasn’t interested in either relocating, working as a software developer at any large company or doing the prerequisite DS&A monkey dance.

We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a fully remote role consulting (yes it’s a full time position) in AWS Professional Services.

I specialize in “application modernization” which is a fancy term for cloud enterprise application development + “Devops” + the standard type of work architects do at other companies.

But as far as the startup I worked for being “desperate”. I got hired at my previous company because of an informal lunch with the then new CTO who needed someone to lead the effort to make the company more “cloud native” and help them pivot toward a micro service architecture because they wanted to sell the services as backend to large health care companies.

Hint: I did that well enough to go from never opening the AWS console in mid 2018 to working at AWS two years later.

My interview was all behavioral where I talked through some of my previous company changing successes at a startup and a company where I led the integration effort when they were on an acquisition spree.

My “TC” is fine. It would be better if my unvested AMZN RSUs didn’t drop by half since I got hired.

(Yes I knew the gatekeeping was going to start when i wrote the first post above)

That's a long story to hide the fact that by refusing to do LeetCode interviews you were not offered a software engineering position.

You most likely are an SA, which is a position open even to business degree holders and is barely technical, no wonder you didn't have to LeetCode.

You mean not being “offered” a position I didn’t want? I have never had any desire to be a software developer at a large company. I like being able to:

- be on pre-sales calls with customers

- writing the proposals/statements of work

- deal with the decision makers from the customers side

- architect the entire solution from the development side and the infrastructure/“dev ops side”

- do the actual work

- lead the user acceptance testing

- move on to another project

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I care about titles? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. My “TC” allows me to do that very well.

I a not an “SA”. I do hands on billable software development that goes in production at the client site. In the past two years I’ve done hands on keyboard coding in Python, C#, JavaScript, and Go.

BTW, by the time I graduated from college in 1996, I had been a hobbyist programmer in 4 different assembly languages. I’ve maintained proprietary compiler tool chains for Windows CE devices and spent half my career bit twiddling in C and C++ with a little inline assembly.

I doubt that you’re going to “out geek” me.

Just for context, people in scarface’s type of role can “out-TC” many platform/product engineers of the equivalent level, depending on how rewards are structured.

The downside that I’ve noticed is that field roles tend to be cut first in response to market weather/customer focus. But a skilled engineer doing field work is a valued commodity in general.

Yes and No.

If I worked for an outside consulting company that would be true - with the inherent risks you stated.

Working at AWS in ProServe, our compensation structure is the same as SDEs - 4 year initial offer, large prorated signing bonus, 5/15/40/40 RSU vesting schedule. It’s different for sales.

The bright side is that there is always work. Worse case, I can be “hired” by another internal team that needs someone to implement a solution to show off a new service.

I think you’re misrepresenting your story in your original comment. If you want to be an SDE at a Tier 1, you have to leetcode. There is no persuading the interviewer to pass you without testing your leetcode.

If you are comfortable taking a non-SDE role, then there are opportunities at tech companies that don’t require programming skills or leetcode.

I’m happy you have found an alternative career path, but you’re comparing apples and oranges.

There are 2.7 million developers in the US. Most don’t work at a tier 1 tech company.

My original story said nothing about where I work. I was originally referring to my process to get a software development job from 1996-2018.

But it’s not an accident I make “FAANG money” without doing “leetCode”. While I fell into a position at AWS, high level consultants make more with the same skillset than your typical BigTech SDE once they build a base. It’s higher risk and more hustle though.

I only brought up where I work now when someone brought up the r/cscareerquestions type reply of “TC”.

I am very sincere about my lack of desire to ever be a software engineer for a large company. I would give up my current compensation and jump back over to the enterprise dev/architect side of compensation before I ever did that.

Again, I already had the big house in the burbs, retirement savings, etc before AWS ever reached out to me.

If I leave my current job at the time of my choosing, it will probably be a compensation cut and probably for some unknown company.

I know for a fact that I could call up a few former managers who now work at different companies and they would give me a job faster than I could say “I am looking for…”

I don't care that you have software engineering experience, you are answering to a thread talking about leetcode interviews by saying you didn't have to leetcode because you took a non-software engineering job. Good for you, but nobody cares.

I didn’t do leetCode in:

2008: when the director of software was looking for someone with a weird combination of VB6, C#, and low level C and C++

2014: when the new director of software engineering was looking for someone to be on a “tiger team” to go after a new vertical

2016: when the new director of IT was looking for someone who could lead the effort to move from PowerBuilder to C# and JS and to lead the integration efforts as they were acquiring companies

2018: when the new CTO was looking for a developer to lead the effort to make their development and CI/CD processes cloud native

2020: current job.

From 2008-2020 it was mostly developing in C# and JavaScript with a little C++ early on.

In 2018 I started getting into Python.

It’s amazing what you kind of crap you can avoid when you have 12 years of professional experience (in 2008) and a good network.

Yes my career before 2008 was unremarkable and there is a pattern that I gravitated toward positions where I was one of the first technical hires by a new manager.

Each of the jobs I mentioned between 2008-2018 were a recruiter reaching out to me that I knew from network where the director/CxO was looking for someone to help them with some type of strategic initiative. All of them were more interested in my ability to technically lead strategic initiatives than whether I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.

When you can talk to a technical director about how you optimized 65C02 code as a hobby in the 80s and how you wrote inline x86 assembly to speed up a batch processing system, they don’t wonder can you maintain a compiler for Windows CE devices.

If you read his past post history he has had what you would call "technical" jobs before, even if you don't count this one.

You seem to be implying "software engineers" require much more than a business degree, in which case I believe you to be a young person (< 30) and I forgive your naivety and the trolliness of your comment.

SWE is not a profession that requires deep education in math and science, like a physicist or neurologist. Having anything beyond a bachelor's in CS is not worthwhile outside of maybe ML..maybe.

A person with business degree who grinds toy problems on LC will almost always do better on FAANG coding interviews than a CS new grad with no grinding full stop.

The degree is just a stamp for junior engineers to get their foot in the door, which is no longer needed once you have a stamp from a reputable tech company.

Yes, SWE's require Computer Science, if you don't think so you've never done any real SWE work. Business majors do not teach you the problem solving ability required for even basic SWE work.

CS fundamentals can be readily learned without obtaining a degree. If you don't think so, then you've never met a self-taught programmer and are probably (no offense) someone with limited professional experience.

Reversing a binary tree is a reference to a FAANG interview.

Money makes life easier. It isn’t the goal of your life. We aren’t playing a video game where the person who made the most money “wins” at life.

See my other reply for more context.

But given a choice in 2020 of working at any large company as a software developer where I would have had to relocate and staying at smaller companies, I would have definitely chosen smaller companies.

By 2020, I already had the big overvalued house in the burbs, decent retirement savings, a good work life balance, etc.

I fell into a role at BigTech almost by accident doing the type of work I enjoy - seeing a company’s problem, solving the problem, training, and putting myself out of job and moving on.

Heck, my expenses are lower now than they were in 2020. Within the past year, I’ve sold my house, we sold our cars, and now we have a cheaper investment property/winter home where we stay half the year and we fly across the US the other half of the year staying in hotels. We own nothing physically can’t fit in three suitcases - two of which have to stay under 50 pounds.

Your situation seems unique - not many people are game for 50% travel as they hit mid career.

Consulting does offer an alternative path to engineering at big cos - usually the interview focus is on your experience and ability to interface with a customer rather than leetcode, etc.

That’s true. But there was nothing stopping us from staying at home and traveling like normal people.

I’ve worked at small startups and dev shops with low hiring hiring bars and I find way more “princesses” than I have working at Tier 2 companies with leetcode interviews.

“Princess” - people that don’t take feedback, are extremely opinionated about their work, and act irrationally in regards to career or business decisions.

So do you consider a “low hiring bar” the director talking about strategy and finding out from the candidates past history that he can probably solve their real world issues?

If he needs to be at two potential customers sites (large health care companies) does he need someone who can “grind leetcode” or does he need someone that can talk to the CxO, the infrastructure team, the development team, etc without embarrassing himself?

The intent is to learn and produce and be an able to talk about rather than try to make money.

So if you aren’t “learning and producing” at your day job, what are you doing 40 hours a week?

I believe the gp was talking about the year of unemployment referred to in the original post.

I was laid off for about a month earlier this year and it was the most productive I’ve ever been, open source contributions wise. Pragmatically, I should’ve grinded leetcode but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was really enjoying the open source work though, a combination of react and lisp. I did talk about it during the interviews and maybe that came across.

Speaking as someone who has juggled both a full-time job and a part-time startup on the side before, I can answer this: both of them contributed immensely to my professional development, but in different ways, since the business domains were very different (which also meant developing proficiencies with different technologies and tooling).

My perspective is different - not disagreeing with yours.

My goal is to constantly be “putting myself out of a job”. That means I need to be able to recognize a problem or opportunity, understand the business context, do enough of an MVP or POC that the rest of the organization understands, train and move on.

Sometimes the internal organization doesn’t have the desire or capacity to maintain or evolve the solution. In that case it’s my job to find an outside consulting company.

I don’t do staff augmentation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com