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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.

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.

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.