Hacker News Reader

Comment by lubujackson | 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.

View on HN

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com