Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
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It becomes a bigger risk/reward scenario for joining companies.
First, IME it suffices to join an organization poised for rapid growth. This can still happen in large tech companies.
Second, while luck matters, there's also stuff you can do to increase your chances of being picked for career growth roles. I'm at a growth company. Recently a relatively new engineer was picked to lead a project over some more tenured, well-liked folks who wanted it. The new guy got it because he has done some really incredible work recently and then marketed it internally well enough that management (and engineering) all agreed he'd be the perfect fit. Politics, making sure that resources are allocated the way you want them, is a skill all its own.
The unfortunate reality of those high growth orgs is precisely that the growth leads to a lot of new managers, and as we all probably know by now, a new manager is a bad manager. Since they have no idea of what they are doing, having the best relationship with them as possible is the only thing that matters.
I've seen the best ICs, and the most effective managers, end up quitting/getting PIPed due to politics. I've seen low performance being rewarded by teams with good bonuses and no deliverable objectives in 2 years, and promotions before ever shipping anything. My evaluation of my performance, and resulting reviews and raises, have minimal correlation: But they absolutely correlate on how much my manager liked me. The more I've focused on this, the better the rewards, the product be damned.
This is extra-true in those rocket ship companies, precisely because things for the company are likely to go well regardless of short term performance: Only major failures, (like what Raylene describes in the article as avoiding being critical) can get you in trouble for actual company impact. In those cases your best bet is to be the firefighter who is also an arsonist, and find ways to sell your solutions to problems you yourself caused... but that involves far too much work.
If your manager is on the precipice of being fired you’re in a bad spot. This is also true of PMs. At mega corps you can and should change teams but in a rocket ship company there probably are no processes for that and even bringing it up is risky.
I don’t really have any advice here other than to be aware of it. My last job I got hired on to work under a guy with a lot of juice but then six months later he got promoted and I ended up with a rookie manager. Maybe I should have made a stink back then
Never even considered that until this moment. But now that I am thinking in retrospect about the previous teams I worked on, it rings 100% true. Even when the manager's manager wasn't super into the manager, as long as the manager was savvy and had "juice", it was always enjoyable work, and things (such as actual progress on deliverables, good decisions, etc.) always happened. I just could never pinpoint until now why those specific times felt the best.
Ironically, the only time I had an absolutely incompetent manager and a pretty savvy and great manager's manager, it was awful. The only saving grace was that the manager's manager eventually moved the manager into a different role in a different part of the org after an explosive argument. But that stretch was probably the most standstill and stagnated period of my career.
I'm afraid this describes the majority of busy work in many industries including so-called software engineering. It's the most impressive Rube Goldberg machine of global proportions, where the major time-consuming problems are often self-inflicted, intricately constructed to seem like a solution but is actually a generator of problems, which conveniently sustain the careers of countless managers, hapless subordinates, and the economy involving the industry.
> The more I've focused on this, the better the rewards, the product be damned.
That's something I'm learning, is that it's not enough or even as important to be technically excellent. What matters is how one adapts and fits into the social dynamics and politics within the organization.
..and sometimes due to sheer shitty luck, even this doesn't work. Like in my most recent job, where me, my manager, and his manager were all laid off (oh sorry, "made redundant") from a profitable company because "business restructuring".
So say that in case A you get hired to maintain an old system that is on the path to deprecation, and in case B you get hired to work in a greenfield initiative that ends up exploding and generating tons of revenue. Even if you do the same good job in both cases, you are almost certainly going to be rewarded and promoted faster in the second case.
The key is that this compounds. If you have a higher job level, you tend to get better opportunities that help you grow further, which in turn means more promotions and/or bigger opportunities.
Usually they jump into the projects that have more visibility or hype, focus their work on the aspects the org considers most valuable for the "next step in the ladder" and jump ship to a different team/project/department as soon as possible.
I've seen that both on engineering and product sides, most of the people I worked with that progressed quickly in their career weren't actually reliable, at least not reliable to the people they worked closely with: they jumped ship to other teams/parts of the org as soon as possible, leaving just a trail of half-done initiatives that were just good enough to tick the boxes needed for a promotion.
Doing a good job is secondary to this, sometimes doing a good job aligns with the box-ticking, sometimes it doesn't really matter. If you are decent at salesmanship and persuasion, and can get some visibility from the upper echelons the actual delivery will only matter in 1-2 years, by then they're already out and up.
There are few small companies where this could work, otherwise dont rely on it, you will end up very sad.
Thanks. Exactly like that. In stable companies that do not grow, promotions are only possible if some dies or leaves. Which, in stable companies, can take FOREVER. I'd argue the majority of companies is like that, the majority of IT positions is like that.
It's easy as to spew clever career advice when you entered a company as senior software engineer at number 40 and became a director 3 years later when the company had 400 employees, but it doesn't mean a whole lot to the majority of people.
The best advice for success is always to get lucky.
The second best advice is to work smart / have good ethic.
The third is to work hard.
Unfortunately, most people think if they just work hard enough, they will succeed. And in many cases, it doesn't matter how hard you work, you're not getting anywhere.
Your general accumulated connections and domain wisdom will probably carry you towards relative success. Bonus points if you’re useful.
Trajectory, not current state, is what matters most.
Not all companies have the resources and/or opportunities like Stripe and Facebook. Coming from the SME/laggard industries those posts sound completely out of touch with the reality of a lot of SWEs that are not in this demographic pool.
One of the biggest disappointments with the SWE was the fact that when I started my career I really enjoyed working with a lot of eager-to-learn young folks at the same time had time to be mentored by a lot of seasoned engineers with 25, 30 years of experience and how those folks liked the technical/development part.
Fast forward a couple decades we're most of the time in my demographic in an environment that has a phobia of age, the craft is not a big deal anymore, a lot of young folks fall short due to lack of mentoring, senior folks do not want to mentor anymore due to cynicism provoked by this same work environment; and everything consists in self-marketing, corporate politics, mimic-big-tech cultures.
why do I even write this? well, I think articles like this will make everybody compare one's life with that of the fortunate lady who wrote it. for some this is more of a technical exercise collecting ideas and strategies. for people like me it just brings home the realization that I can't do this anymore, if I ever could. don't want to do this anymore, if I ever wanted. but sort of have to keep going. so, a little bit of a depressing realization over all.
> I increasingly just seek healing which I certainly won't find in any kind of fast paced company.
Yes please, find healing. Impossible to find in any company i guess. Therapy, self-reflection and letting go of pain from the past come to mind. Best of luck.
This describes really well how I operate today. Changing cultures is just too much effort if the people don't really want to change. I will make suggestions and see how they are received, if the folks are receptive to it, I will do more otherwise withdraw.
The costs of making yourself available to mentor others these days are too high. Workplace politics will only make you a target eventually. It even happens (and probably moreso) in volunteer projects. People are rightfully acting more mercenary and more self-interested.
This industry attracts a lot of socially disaffected people who behave like scorpions (Scorpion and the Frog fable...).
As someone who is white and male, I am not willing to be alone in a room with or 1:1 with anyone except a direct report, in either direction. It's not worth the risk.
I've seen blatantly false allegations completely ruin careers. I've seen people who habitually lie and make repeated false allegations coast on doing no work for years until they get bored and move on -- with full awareness of the company -- because the company doesn't want to risk that kind of lawsuit for firing them. The company would rather that person's whole team be miserable than risk any kind of reputational damage.
This is way more common than you would believe. I have friends who work in HR in other companies who say the same and have the same policy that I do.
It used to be that you could be charitable and by-default assume that everyone's intentions are aligned at work. Same team, etc. However, the people who bring their politics with them to work absolutely do not feel this way and will smoke you if doing so aligns with their cause -- facts don't matter.
And yes I'm aware of the missed opportunities as a result.
I have been mourning / processing the void left by the technical culture I’d fabricated in my mind. It’s like I grew up with a certain notion in my mind and never questioned it: namely that technical excellence was paramount. I also think it is a midlife thing, where you look at all the things you’ve put time into, and ask them, “and for what?”
The way forward for me is bootstrapping so I can buy back that which is most valuable to me: my time and autonomy.
In that regard React is a bit of an anomaly. It's occupied the station for far longer than expected.
Not really convinced either way though. Much of this feels like backwards-facing advice, things that only make sense when you already know what you're doing, and very surface level.
The "tying it all together" section really demonstrates this.
The truth is, all the most valuable skills she's picked up are likely to have been implicit from being in an incredible environment in a company growing really fast around other great people. Very hard to distill that into useful information for other people unless you're very introspective and dedicate a lot of time to reflecting on what actually moved the needle.
Though in fairness, I think that >99% of people cannot articulate their growth path or process and strategy and they would not be believable even if they could, so in that regard, she is par for the course.
I've been on two failed rocket ships and I'm pretty mellow about it. Surviving that is also its own skill. You'll go crazy trying to pick winners and getting rich isn't why I got into this field anyway.
While I would quit and work on passion software, you always owe it to yourself to find time for passion work in your free time.
* climb the ladder - try to be 'in the room' with L+1&2. Get assigned high visibility work, define and deliver some intermediate milestone, declare success, groom perception, etc.
* get hired at a competitor at L+1.
* start a side hustle/lifestyle/real estate business. Subscribe to the FIRE subreddit/podcasts.
* have kids, develop increasingly esoteric personal hobbies, get into fitness/longevity.
This is the route I've taken and my mental health is much better for it. I still wonder what I'm missing out on had I stayed on the treadmill, even now, but I keep telling myself the life balance far outweighs the work balance.
I’m curious what do you expect to happen to your salary over the years if you stay at the same level? Or are you able to be promoted and remain an IC?
I'm also privileged to live in a society where even with half of my salary it'd be entirely possible to live a comfortable and fulfilling life, where my kids won't need my money to be secure in their education and healthcare. The career game was more interesting when I was in my 20s, now it's just a bunch of bullshit that I can choose to care about or not, and not caring about it is absurdly liberating.
To each their own, of course, personally I came to realise that I don't value the career stuff so much, I'm already pretty comfortable (and many times more than any of my ancestors or close family were). There's so much more to life than playing corporate-bullshit, stressing over how to please a business to etch another salary bump. Corporations that deep down don't care about individuals, values, etc., it's just about shareholder value, I prefer to focus my attention on individuals and things that bring joy, love, and interesting experiences in life.
kinda hard to find as most hr ppl seem to be looking for either rock stars or code monkeys, any tipps?
I was, maybe still am, in the last bucket. But I'm starting to realise that security is a quite mythical thing - you can always think of more risks and counter measures, at least at the point I got to. Now I'm thinking the thing I truly need, and want to pass on to my children, is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and stay resilient.
Due to a death in the family, an unfounded health scare and a rather paranoid money scare it's been made quite clear that this utopia of 'secure' does not exist no matter what I do.
It has lead to a reduction in stress in some ways since the pressure to maintain everything and keep it safe is less if 100% confidence can never be reached so chasing it is pointless.
I don't know if you've had a similar experience but I'm currently at the stage of re-evaluating what I value since if some things (like wealth and health) are unavoidably temporary then the sacrifices I'm willing to make to maintain them are less than if they were assured or permanant.
I'd be curious to know how this has effected your outlook on life as I'm just starting with this now and it has certainly left me a bit lost. Although I don't think that's a bad thing.
Sorry for the slight ramble, just been very much on my mind at them moment.
I have a positive outlook. I deal with the problems I encounter and enjoy the little things. This year was pretty good, I pulled off some stuff I didn't know I could do. Now I feel more confident that I can deal with lots of things life'll throw at me (not everything of course).
Happy to chat some more outside a public comment thread :D There's an email address in my profile.
Passive income from $10M would secure access for 99% of food, water, heat, shelter, education, transportation, healthcare, retirement, and legal costs.
$5M will get you most of the way there too.
Or face a medical problem that requires expensive treatment not covered by your insurance or government healthcare?
Or your investments fail, the USSR fell very quickly risking pensions people relied on, the roman empire fell. US investments could too; I mean they kinda did in the early 1900's, recovery from that took time.
I'm not saying any of these things are likely to happen (they really aren't and I'd be supprised if any did in the next 100 years). But they could so any amount of security money offers is limited and not certain.
I suppose it depends if you would equate security and certainty to the same thing? I certainly did but wouldn't now. I wager you don't since you said 99% not 100%.
You will be able to afford lawyers, and the US justice system is not so corrupt that you would lose millions of dollars for no reason. Don’t drive drunk, don’t operate a business, and buy umbrella insurance and you should be fine. Biggest risk would probably be divorce, or accusations of abuse from within the family.
> Or face a medical problem that requires expensive treatment not covered by your insurance or government healthcare?
This also sounds super rare as health insurers are legally required to cover all evidence based healthcare, and there is an appeals process for denied coverage. As long as you can afford the premiums and annual out of pocket maximum, which are legally at most $40k to $50k per year for a family, you should be okay.
Of course, you might have to pony up an additional $10k to $20k to buy concierge care/direct primary care to buy timely access to actual doctors rather than see a Nurse Practitioner or Physician’s Assistant, but your passive income from $10M should suffice.
> Or your investments fail, the USSR fell very quickly risking pensions people relied on, the roman empire fell. US investments could too; I mean they kinda did in the early 1900's, recovery from that took time.
If $10M in the US invested in broad market low cost index funds backstopped by the federal US government is not secure enough for you to relax, then it might be impossible to help you feel sufficiently secure because this world does not offer many better guarantees.
> I suppose it depends if you would equate security and certainty to the same thing? I certainly did but wouldn't now. I wager you don't since you said 99% not 100%.
I do not know what the purpose of distinguishing security and certainty would be in this context, they seem interchangeable. And since nothing in life is 100%, 99% is a way to convey “all the security that is realistically obtainable”.
I also invest in US majority index funds so certainly agree they are the best bet. I do however think security and certainty are different in that one is 99% and one is 100%.
I'd say it depends on your personality and risk tolerance but when talking about life destroying events I'd say 1% is quite significant. For example a 1% chance of a car crash per journey would be unacceptably high.
Thank you for taking the time to write such a detailed reply by the way, I'm thinking around this topic a lot at the moment so debating the details is very valuable to help reach a view I'm content with.
i mean, the most esoteric ppl i know aren't even married
I see a lot of people are going with `climb the ladder' + `have kids'. Others go for `side hustle' + `fitness`
People keep repeating this dangerous advice. The truth is actual value is created by few people: new tech, new features, new markets. It usually starts off as an experiment, a hackathon etc and grows from there. The rest of the people exist to provide fodder but growth comes from surprisingly few people even in large organizations.
Try and see what the business needs and create step improvement features / tech / markets. You will feel happy. Too many people like the author is focused on just managing, being "thought leaders" and other nonsense. This is my problem with AI till the time we get AGI. Someone has to do the work. Someone had to write Redis before Ofer Bengal swooped in. Someone has to create the transformer model, someone has to write the original articles to train these models on.
The whole cottage industry around work is a festering wound at this point.
If you are hacking on whatever future greatness but are unable to say no to one-off requests (whether due to power within the org or personal communication style) then you’ll never complete your project. Various people will put tasks on your plate, there’s always more to do, someone up the chain will inevitably come up with a new flavor of the week. The manager who tells those people you are fully allocated and working on your top priority is the only reason you’ll complete your groundbreaking work (in most companies).
and (we?) the internet natives are most prone to this assessment as growing up in a world of free ideas (foss) wrecks any connection between work and reward.
Definitely "career limiting" but I just like it more.
That said in 2023 you can go a long way into upper middle class and rich without needing to lead people, or kill them in wars, and still do creative and non-repetitive work. So we are very lucky to live in this era!
End of article.
Not saying the financial benefits aren’t worth it by themselves. Asking because I always figured I’d probably top out where you’re at, and I’m wondering what the view is like there.
Somewhat unrelated, I'd love to see some kind of code dividend for folks where you keep earning money from code you wrote (that hasn't been rewritten). I think the IP assignment stuff we all have to sign is ridiculous when it creates so much value. We are signing away our right to future profits.
I actually think it’s overemphasized on the internet, if anything. Staff+ engineers should still edit (I don’t say “write” because “delete” is even better) code. Otherwise what’s all the training for? Getting the senior- engineers up to “mentoring” roles, to train even more senior- engineers, …?
My manager talks about getting me to L8 all the time and it’s exhausting. I’m done! I’ve won the income game! She is very career oriented and cares about climbing the ladder, I do not.
I’ve never actually cared about “career goals” or done “growth” really, I don’t think I’d actually be unhappy if I was stuck at L5 making a mere $400k forever. That’s a really high income, an integer multiple of what my parents ever made.
So my “what’s next” is keep throwing it into VTI and then retire in a few years.
FWIW there were very little politics involved in my L7 promotion, I just wrote a lot of good code and mentored some people to do the same.
Yes I realize I’m saying this and I make a lot more, but if I was “stuck” at $400k I don’t think I would be upset.
The median household income in NYC is something around $75k.
I can’t really do the career or manager interaction stuff well because I don’t care about it personally and I don’t have any problems myself with my manager being incompetent or changing all the times.
I think that’s correlated with my somewhat unintentional success, but “have a better manager” or “don’t get reorged by directors playing game of thrones” isn’t actionable advice.
What I am good at is technical stuff, so if I have a person that is 1. technically competent and with the right attitude (IYKYK) and 2. good and technical manager then I and they do very well. But that’s very situational and also the technical stuff is very company specific.
2. Split completely evenly with partner. This also saves on “per household” things like internet, power, heating.
3. It’s still a big part of the spending, proportionately!
I just don’t spend that much. Don’t drink outside, don’t go out for dinner at fancy places, never order delivery (it doesn’t even taste good! Soggy food sucks!), don’t take Uber ever or even the subway much, ride a fixed gear bike around mostly. Exercise is using said bike rather than paying $300 for a fancy gym. Take vacations, but prefer camping and hiking to resorts or fancy expensive cities. Don’t stay in luxury hotels, have never considers paying for business class. My hobby is playing mostly cheap indie games that I still waited for a Steam sale on, and it’s all stuff like Rimworld that you play for 400 hours. Or watching free YouTube videos.
This is straight out of Mint (obviously rounded) so it’s not a lie!
I'm stuck as a mid-level making below median dev salary at a not great comapny and I will never be anything more. Eventually you come to terms with it... mostly at least
I guess in the US a similar path could be a Staff Engineer role where you could stay more technical I guess.
Most companies worth the weight will have IC tracks all the way to Director or even VP.
Regarding the article, it's very biased, plenty of people don't want this kind of career progression. It's more a matter of personality than culture I'd say.
Just an iteration on the Architect role to be a bit more hands-on.
Secondly, you don't have to explain anything. Smart hiring managers will understand that you focused your career mastering a craft and that you're still working on that craft you mastered. As for the dumb hiring managers, it's best if you can avoid working for them. One thing you'll learn as you get older is that you can't please everyone all the time and if someone is foolish enough to hold stupid things against you, good riddance to bad rubbish. If you look around a bit, you'll find there's far, far more opportunities for intelligent old coders than unintelligent old managers.
Senior engineer is usually where a lot of competent folks stop, the role of Staff/Principal starts to become quite different, some people just want to be good at helping the business to build things. A good senior will be the necessary glue between team and the larger org (including the Staff/Principal layer), facilitating a lot of stuff that isn't immediately visible but is definitely felt when you miss it.
On top of that, there's not even close to enough positions to promote every single senior engineer to a higher level in most companies. Not everyone wants to play the career game.
I'm an EM, and going from an IC to a TL or EM isn't a career progression. It's a career change.
I've known some amazing ICs with terrible managerial skills, they are adept at what they do, but they lack the skills needed to handle people, or to constantly context shift all day, every day.
Now what happens when you suddenly get that IC into a managerial role, and force them to context shift, or manage people's needs, and balance the team dynamics?
They quit, or others under then quit. Perhaps both.
I very much dislike this article for two reasons;
1. She outlines EM as part of a career progression that ICs go on. 2. She was part of two absolute rocketships and didn't realise the reasons she got where she was is at least partially because of that.
Any EM should be aware that not everyone can do their job.. and any EM should be part of a hiring process and keenly know that when you see a FAANG on someone's resume, people tend to have a bias either for or against it. Usually for.
That's a cool sentiment, but it's not what hiring managers and many many other managers think. They'll just flag you as "something wrong with that guy if hes not managing by now" and you're still out of job.
by deleting the old information on your resume and online profiles, and keeping it at just the last 6 years
everyone hiring 8-10+ years is thinking you have a mythical level of capabilities, not just "coding professionally for that many years"
Edit: why disagree?
I see tons of bias in hiring too. What about people that take a break from working due to childcare, medical issues, etc? They struggle. There's a never ending amount of those stories that show up on HN. Maybe some get a second chance, but it might take years if they ever get one.
It seems like many places in Europe have better options for second chances from the legal perspective. Perhaps better from a financial standpoint with the support programs too.
Currently doing a startup but I'm starting to feel like this isn't what I was built to do.
One reason Europe doesn't have startups is that it's so shameful for your company to fail that nobody would ever consider risking it.
Puritanical standards like this seem limited to the east/midwest; the west coast is much more forgiving (IME).
I had a huge bit of luck working for a startup in early 2000s that was acquired by Yahoo (ha ha shut up). They overworked me and even screwed me out of my promised shares but I had that pip on my CV. Went to work at a couple of other places later, mostly chosen for interesting work. Later later had the dubious luck to be bought by Yahoo again, and parleyed that plus contacts to get an invite to Facebook.
I bombed the first round of interviews. Only by the strength of my contacts and unexpected help from people I didn't know but for some reason wanted me there, I got another chance and joined a couple years before the IPO.
TLDR: this story has almost nothing to teach you or replicate. Except! Not having a mainline pedigree is a handicap but not necessarily a career death sentence.
I feel lost because I get the impression from my resume I look like damaged goods. I've had some recruiters give me solid pointers on my resume and things have improved slightly - but right now I feel like I'm spinning my wheels and wasting time trying to "make a living" doing this like I used to. Making less than my initial FAANG offer after college also hurts.
Labor markets are sometimes shit. Sometimes the skills you have are no longer in fashion. I don't know the answer to your situation. But, from experience, I suggest that if things are tight then the thing to do is find work that pays the bills today but also build skills that will pay off tomorrow. Life is long and it's only an always up elevator for the lucky few.
I don't have specific advice, but I've found that it helps to analyze the business your company is in in the same way you would analyze the code on your screen. What are the inputs and outputs? What makes it all work? Etc. if nothing else, that might help understand why the labor market is shit, and what you personally can do about it.
I have a coworker that believes we are paid well considering our benefits and pto compared to the average software developer. His argument is that outside of FAANG, salaries for the average developer aren’t that much higher than ours. And if they are, the working conditions are worst. He also believes FAANG employees are working more than 80 hours work, or they are super better than “public sector employees” so that’s why they command higher pay. I don’t buy the last one.
That’s the east part, but if your entire resume is non tech, then FAANG recruiters don’t reach out. (I’ve only ever had one FAANG recruiter ever reach out to me and that was Amazon when they were participating in the idiotic hiring spree during the pandemic). We know cold apps are worthless, and if you aren’t already in that scene, you probably don’t have close enough connections with someone to get a referral. So how do you even get a chance to do the leetcode interviews.
Long story short like what others above say: If your team is good and your working conditions are good and you make good money in your country...maybe look at the bright side and not be envious of others.
I realized I make good money for here, have no management responsibility. Can work from home and basically as flexibly as I want to. All this ALREADY is a great gift. Don't need to dream of some FANG salary. I'm a big part of my kids' early lives instead of studying leet code questions.