Ask HN: What's left for early startup engineers as the company grows?

There are tough questions to ask yourself, and I applaud your introspection. One of the challenges of a rapidly growing company is keeping up with it. Hiring is about finding the right person for the right time. When a company changes drastically through growth, expectations and functions change. The person who did x may be unqualified to do y. In short, the company grows faster than the individual. Another dynamic is that as the organization grows, the need for generalists gives way to specialized employees.

I think this is a very powerful statement you made: "all the tasks I did were less challenging than some critical parts of the code base I wrote from scratch". This tells me that the problems that interest you the most are coding and architecture problems, and that you are happiest when solving those problems. Employees will have the greatest positive impact when they are focused on tasks that they enjoy. But it seems that you desire something more. What is dissatisfying about the current situation? Are you bored with the coding? Are you jealous of others getting recognition? Are you frustrated with the direction of the organization? Are you frustrated that you are no longer "that guy" whom everyone depends on? All of these circle around the same question: where do you want to be?

Leadership comes in many shapes and sizes. It's not just about how many direct reports you have. Fundamentally, great leaders shape the direction of an organization. Employees look to that person for advice, encouragement, and approval. It sounds like the company decided to hire others for formal leadership roles. A very difficult and powerful question is to ask yourself "what is the VP doing that I wasn't able to do?" There is a tactical reason that the CEO hired the VP, and it isn't because of credentials. Perhaps it's his/her ability to communicate across teams, or gain the confidence of management? Don't let your ego tell you "nothing, I'm better than them"; there is a reason they are VP. Different jobs require different skill sets, and understanding where you are strong and weak is critical your success. Being an engineer who kicks out mission critical code is fundamental to the success of the business, but it is extremely different than developing and managing a team. With a humble attitude that is always looking to improve, there is no stopping your career growth.

Except after 90 days ISO become NSO, so you lose tax benfits. But maybe he 83b'd them and already purchased as employee #2

People have taken you for granted. 1. Be vocal about what you want, be it a raise or promotion! This is America. If you don't ask, you don't get anything. Are you an American? 2. You have other options! Go make your own awesome startup. If you have so many skills like you said, why not? 3. Are you aware of your own weaknesses? Maybe there is major weakness about you that stopped you from getting promoted but you are not aware of it!

I have a similar story in some ways. Employee #1 at a startup, wrote much of the initial codebase, been with the company now for a bit over 7 years. We’re 20 people now, and have dedicated people for support, UX, QA, product management, etc etc all of which I used to have a hand in in the early days. I manage a small team of developers (not all the dev, just the clientside team), I still code a good bit (obviously less than before) and I’m involved in a lot of product discussions to figure out what we’re going to build. We’ve struggled a lot with figuring out the right title for me, and as long as the actual work is the right mix for what I like then I don’t really care all that much. But I’ve been recently brainstorming appropriate titles that better reflect what I do, beyond just being a developer (which has been my title since day 1), and I’ve come to settle on “Technical Director of Product”, which I don’t think is a real job title in any normal world. I make sure that I’m heavily involved in product decisions, because the thing I’ve found the most satisfaction in is defining and building product, and shaping the direction of the company through influencing the product development path. And I’m grounded in the technical side of that, which is an important distinction to me, since too often “product people” have no technical background and just lob things over the fence to engineering without understanding the tech side of the house.

So for me the important thing was trying to understand what parts of the job I really want to prioritize (in my case active coding and product definition) and regardless of title making sure I inject myself appropriately. So that means if there’s a conversation about a new product we’re thinking about building I make sure I’m in those conversations from the beginning.

If you’ve been with the company from essentially day 1 you likely have a decent amount of political sway, even if you don’t know it. I’d start by figuring out which parts of the things that you listed you actually want to stay involved in. As another commenter mentioned, if you really want to wear all those hats then maybe finding another brand new startup is the only real choice. But if there’s one or two areas that are dearer to your heart then I’d try to figure out how to make that your day to day activity. And I’d hope given your history with the team that you can have a dialogue with the founder(s) about how to make that happen. At the end of the day the title doesn’t really mean shit, but if you’re not loving the work then you owe it to yourself (and they owe it to you) to figure out how to make that right.

I'm in a similar situation, but with a much better outcome. In my case, however, as the company grew I made it very clear what I wanted my role to be.

It's best not to assume that the people you work with know what the best role is for you. I started around the same time as another engineer, but our roles diverged. This was, in part, due to both of us being open about where we expect our career to go as the company grew.

So, if you want to be something different, have the discussion with the people who hired you. They clearly have seen your talents and shortcomings. If it doesn't go where you want it to go, then it's probably time to find a new job.