Hacker News Reader

Referring to the "small startup experience" not mattering - I would say it is almost like an alternate track as an engineer.

I have trouble landing interviews at FAANGs with 15+ years as an eng. and successful acquisitions as a founder - but those don't mean anything if you don't have direct knowledge of certain tools to handle scale or experience guiding projects across departments, etc. Which makes sense for any role past junior, since part of the value you bring is experience and only some of your experience is directly applicable. Vaguely being competent doesn't really move the needle.

On the other hand, I've heard stories of people getting hired from a FAANG going to a startup and not able to shift their mindset to a "make it work" approach, so the challenge goes both ways.

> On the other hand, I've heard stories of people getting hired from a FAANG going to a startup and not able to shift their mindset to a "make it work" approach, so the challenge goes both ways.

But at least they get the job, so they can try to learn. Hence it doesn't go both ways.

It's probably like a lot of other transitions to related but different careers. In my experience, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't--which probably says that as a prospective employer (and employee) there is an additional risk factor.

I've also had the experience of failing FAANG interviews after being very successful at smaller scale. Since then I've made the leap, and I can tell you that experience in the 10-100 developer range is extremely valuable and can make you very upwardly mobile once you get a foot in the door. People that have spent their entire career in big corporations often have a lot of assumed constraints based on groupthink and the vagaries of whatever specific org leaf nodes they've been exposed to. Often they will have worked for years under bosses with no real clue about the actual decision making process and strategy behind their work. It's extremely hard to develop an end-to-end understanding and strategic viewpoint in these environments. Startups offer much more opportunity to learn the big picture and the strategic considerations behind different functions. Obviously anyone can claim to be doing a startup—there's a lot of the blind leading the blind, and people playing house—but if you find one with an interesting vision, a bit of traction, and good colleagues you can learn lessons that will translate well to leadership at big tech.

Coming in the front door will be hard though, because recruiters and the first layer of technical interviewers will likely not have context to judge your 15+ years of experience. Look for referrals and directly talking to hiring managers. Also, read some writing from notable SV management writers like Will Larson and Camille Fournier, this will help you learn some of the shibboleths and how hiring managers think. Finally, if you don't have legit scale-up experience, look for that first. There's a range of companies with engineering teams of all sizes which can provide good stepping stones for learning as well as hireability optics.

> Referring to the "small startup experience" not mattering - I would say it is almost like an alternate track as an engineer.

It can be but doesn't have to be. A lot of people prefer to hire folks with some small startup experience because such people almost always better at thinking about businesses holistically. Many people who spend their entire careers at big companies can only reason about their little slice (lots of bad takes on businesses here).

A common way to make VP of engineering at big tech is the following 5 job hops:

1. Manager at big tech

2. Manager at startup -> promotion to director

3. Director at big tech

4. Director at startup -> promotion to VP

5. VP at big tech

The problem comes when someone gets too senior with relevant experience at scale. I (generally) can't hire someone with 15 years of experience who's never worked at scale. They're going to be bored out of their mind with mid-level work but simultaneously I can't actually trust them to not screw up something in senior+ roles, either technically or socially.

Titles in startups really don't map meaningfully to titles in BigTech. You can be called a VP in a startup with 20 people under you in the org chart. That empire size is equivalent to "second level manager" in a FAANG, and FAANGs know this. When FAANG acquires a startup with 20 people, MAYBE the CEO gets a nice title, but most of the startup's acquired employees get Senior Worker Bee titles.

I'd hoped the pre-requisite that titles matched duties was implicitly understood in the message, sorry!

But you can absolutely come into an engineering role at a company with 40 engineers (40 person org charts to director at BigTech), grow into leadership of a 200+ person engineering (charts to vp) and then go back to BigTech for bigger bucks.

Probably an unpopular, "grass is always greener" opinion, but this is why leetcode-style interviews can be a good thing at FAANG. Anyone with time and an internet connection can gain experience with data structures and algorithms via leetcode, whereas it's much harder to get hands-on experience with scaling real transactions-per-second on your own. And, as contrived as leetcode is, it does measure something about your ability to grok how code and infra scale against time and space.

How reasonable is for a non-us based developer to even try?

FAANG positions in Europe are OK-ish but not such a deal breaker to me to dedicate so much time to -useless- stuff, I'd rather build cool shit

The people I know (US-based developers) hired by FAANG were all very recently out of college, graduate school, or academia. Everyone else is focusing their time on diving deep into the technical issues they are faced with...

>> as contrived as leetcode is, it does measure something about your ability to grok how code and infra scale against time and space

While that is certainly possible, I don't think that is typically the case in leetcode style interviews...

that and most FOSS projects are also not large-scale, or as a contributor you are only working on small patches that hardly qualify as large-scale experience.

Or they don’t see the scale, which leads to friction with users. You don’t see how your tool gets used, leading to DevEx issues with the project, people asking with varying levels of politeness why you built things that way.

But at the end of the day the feedback is only so valuable, even when it comes with PRs.

> If you haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale projects, you might lack impressive accomplishments or credentials to showcase.

Whats a large scale project and why should they be viewed as an accomplishment?

I myself have pioneered the use of some tech for use in situations where it was not thought possible, I've worked on big projects that have included the largest in the world, for employers that include being listed in the stock market.

>I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without CS degrees

Does that make me worth a $718,000 Google Software Engineer or a $100,000 junior coder?

What price do you place on exploiting the vagaries of law that results in new legislation being created to curtail your activities?

The founders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft & Apple all started with no university degree, but they did all end up with stock market listings and some legislation to curtail their activities.

So do University degrees limit your earning potential whilst making it easier to find a job, whilst having no university degree seems to increase your chances of getting a stock market listing and some legislation to curtail your activities.

What a topsy turvy world we live in!

The founders of google were Stanford phd can students. I don’t know if they go their phds or not.

The founder of Microsoft was a Harvard math major that probably could have gotten into an r1 phd program if the stuck it out for what 1 more year?

The founder of Facebook was a Harvard cs major that could graduate if the stuck it out.

Dropping out early to start your business is very different than someone who never went to school or flunked out of their freshman year.

Well... I recognise that these companies have made a lot of money, but how? I remember the day of BeOS, it was technically 15 years ahead and Microsoft killed it (just as an example), the same company that years later tried to kill Linux and killed Nokia. Google with their motto "Don't be evil" ... sure, just collect personal data in every possible way and sell it against your will. Yes, they have also done many positive things like Golang or Android for example, but when they see that they are losing the grip (and monopoly) on the project, they switch to something else (Flutter ... Fuchsia). The real revolution (apart from the Internet) of the last decades has been open source, without it we wouldn't have *BSD, Mariadb, PostgresQL, Linux, Android, dozens of languages, databases, knowledge sharing. and with it freedom : freedom to choose, freedom to learn, to collaborate with other people around the globe for the benifits if not all, at least many. In my opinion, the open source philosophy has done more for human evolution than all the big companies put together (and their money stacked in foreing countries to not pay taxes).

My understanding, but maybe its fake news over here in the UK, is that Jobs dropped out, Zuckerberg dropped out, Gates dropped out, Brin and Page both dropped out. Cant comment on the other two MS blokes, or the other bloke who co founded Apple.

But getting a decent education here in the UK, where you dont get beaten up by teachers, in my experience is quite difficult. I even dropped out of one schools six form to enroll in another six form, perhaps demonstrating my willingness to learn, but even one of those courses was sabotaged.

To be honest I think the mentality of the british empire was and might still be pervasive with state school education, viewed more as an institution to contain people of a certain age than a place of learning.

Perhaps that is why law is not taught to everyone at school even in a TL;DR fashion?

My larger point is there is a very big difference between dropping out of an elite institution just before the finish line because you think you have a billion dollar company on your hands, and just dropping out. Even if MS, Facebook and Google all failed Brinn, Zuckerberg, and Gates would still have been able to walk get a job probably. They didn't drop out because they failed out, they willingly left to pursue their ideas, and were otherwise top notch students.

The founder of Microsoft, has wealthy connected parents and grandparents.

The founder of Facebook too

The founder of Google grew up in Academic family.

--

All of them received financial support, reducing risks loosing living expenses. Risk of loosing livelyhood, significanly changes how a founder or an enegineer spends their time.

Connecting young people to networks of rich, influencial and generally experienced & smart people -- is a huge deal as well.

It improves their verbal skills, perception management, broadness their knowlege.

All of the above, can probably be easily found in many Stanford, Harvard, MIT graduates...

None of the are 'competitively obtained skills' due to 'hard work'.

--

Additionally moral choices that favor lying, fudging facts and intentions -- may also be a characterstics of graduates from those types of schools... This an opinion.

---

All of the above contributes to successfull financial outcomes.

None are particularly representative of person's merits compared to others...

Not just that. Engineers get pigeonholed into tech stacks as well. It's almost as if companies (recruiters, really) think a senior engineer can't learn another programming language or something. They come at you with "we're looking for someone with strong golang experience," when there's no way to get "strong golang experience" without working someplace that uses it.

Learning takes time

And? There's a learning curve any time one starts a new job with a new code base. Do you think a senior engineer can't become productive in a new codebase with a new language in a couple of months? If so, I'm going to guess you've never worked with a good senior engineer.

The time it takes to learn a new language, especially a typical one like Go, is insignificant on a project lasting more than a couple weeks.

I can resonate with that. I regret not pushing harder to get into the bigger companies earlier. The scope increase in invaluable. You are not going to get it by urself unless u r extremely lucky and be able to scale ur own business to the comparable degree

Finance is full of people with MBAs and two left hands that cannot do anything on their own.