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Comment by swiftcoder | Hacker News Reader

> and what happens is they start disappearing for longer periods of time... they quit their jobs because they think, “you know what, this is not salvageable.”

I've interviewed several great senior engineer candidates over the last few years, and then had to watch do this and walk themselves right out the door inside of 6 months. I've developed a marked preference for promoting internally, because you get longer to head this sort of thing off.

Incidentally, this sort of thing is why software engineering desperately needs some sort of formal levelling criteria and/or mentorship programs. It's really hard for senior folks to calibrate themselves against their rapidly shrinking peer group.

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I've interviewed for several senior jobs lately. And found that the more pragmatic and honest I was, the quicker I was dropped from the pipeline.

It goes both ways, and I would argue the spiral happens because the other side expects something above an beyond the possible.

I concur - I have repeatedly seen that the only way to pass the interview is to lie and cheat at every step in it. I expect this from someone without experience who is struggling to get a foot in the door, but when a senior with experience does this, they soon begin to become dishonest even with themselves, taking the firm down with them. What I don't understand is why the investors don't step in.

Wow, I have never had to do that. Not to get a job, not to keep one. I mean, I have seen good jobs go bad, but I have never seen one where the truth would get me fired. (Maybe I just didn't stay long enough when I felt things starting to go bad...)

If every senior you hired left in 6 months, there is something wrong with your company. Likely on three levela ends - when evaluating people, when telling them who you are so that they can select themselves out and when they are in.

Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.

I had the same impression. Surely we aren't the ones who are wrong! It couldn't be us!

I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.

> I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years

You've had a somewhat traditional career there by HN standards. Most of Silicon Valley was promo-hopping ever 1-2 years for the whole middle period of your career (somewhat curtailed now by the job market). It was really popular to FAANG -> startup for 6 months -> FAANG-1-level-up for a good chunk of the 2010s

Sure, but I went through startups, too. I just hung on for dear life and the people above me were willing to hear about issues with culture and work on it. Only the last 4 years of my career have been at a FAANG.

Similar for me except that my tenures are usually 4-6 years, except this one job that I lasted 1 month because I fundamentally didn't want to do the work I was assigned to do (and would keep doing for at least a few months, probably longer).

The work was essentially web scraping complex systems, which is not a case of "you don't need someone with my experience to do this" and more like I just didn't want to do it because it did not improve my current skills at all.

It is not like in the interview they told me: you will be doing web scraping for months on end. Or that I even thought to ask.

You aren't necessarily wrong, but the data also isn't there - one engineering hire bouncing per year is not really significant.

I do think that startups are pretty rough when it comes hiring. We don't pay BigTech salaries, we expect engineers to wear a lot of hats, and we don't offer the kind of management chain isolation a big company does. It takes a particular kind of engineer to enjoy/thrive in that environment, and a lot of engineers transitioning from big companies don't realise the extent of that until they've struggled with their first startup role.

Also the engineers that do manage in that environment tend to get screwed anyway when you scale up.

I dunno, I found that kind of environment a lot easier to work with. The really hard environments are when the tech teams are large, to get something done you need to talk to 3 different teams and get them all to agree to do something and _when_ they are going to do it.

And that is just when you can talk to the engineers directly, it gets worse when you need to escalate on the management chain.

Startups are easier because most of the time you usually only need one rubberstamp (and sometimes none!) to do something.

It gets much worse though once the startup scales up and becomes massive. Then it tends to be worse than big corps because there at least they have processes.

I leave because it stops being "fun". The way my father put it is "when you start a job, they hand you 2 buckets. One they fill with money. The other they fill with crap. When the bucket of crap weighs more than the bucket with money, you leave."

It is hard to take almost any mentorship program seriously that is not a formal university education, and even then, at most universities they do not teach skills that are directly applicable at companies given they are not intended to directly be job training programs. Not that I am on any hiring committee currently, but if I was, I would rather see a candidate with a degree and open source project contributions than App Academy dreck, for example.

I guess "senior" just means older, but in the usual sense, the more senior you are, the more your job involves coordinating with other people. So I don't see how you could disappear when promoted. But I think in this case it's just "you do more work".

> I don't see how you could disappear when promoted

A lot of your work at the senior level is harder to track. If a junior engineer stops pulling tickets off the queue, somebody is going to notice. If a senior spends a couple of weeks taking cross-functional meetings and writing docs at the start of a new project, nobody really blinks an eye. Sometimes the manager doesn't catch in time that they aren't coming back out of that phase...

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