211–220 of 337 posts
Sorry this is off topic, and I only found this out because I accidentally clicked on your alias rather than the topic. You've made 4 other exact posts in the last 12 days: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dbsmasher.com Is it common HN practice to report the same thing until it finally gets attention?
Sorry this is off topic, and I only found this out because I accidentally clicked on your alias rather than the topic. You've made 4 other exact posts in the last 12 days: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dbsmasher.com Is it common HN practice to report the same thing until it finally gets attention?
Sorry this is off topic, and I only found this out because I accidentally clicked on your alias rather than the topic. You've made 4 other exact posts in the last 12 days: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dbsmasher.com Is it common HN practice to report the same thing until it finally gets attention?
How is that HN didn't de-duplicate the URL?
Re: companies that claim to have a fully equivalent technical track: What I've found is that is mostly lip service. Yes, they publish salaries and requirements for the highest levels of engineering, and those salaries are equivalent to high levels of management as far as pay goes. But if you look a little deeper you see the problem. At Google and Amazon and Facebook, a Distinguished Engineer is equivalent to a Vice P…
I know a (non tech) VP at a FAANG, his base salary is the same as mine and I am nowhere near SV/West Coast/NYC salary - he will get an extra $70K a year between stock and signing bonus. He asked me would I be interested, I told him that the pay difference wasn’t enough to make up for the cost of living difference. He then told me that most of the software developers make more than the non tech/business VPs.
Sorry this is off topic, and I only found this out because I accidentally clicked on your alias rather than the topic. You've made 4 other exact posts in the last 12 days: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=dbsmasher.com Is it common HN practice to report the same thing until it finally gets attention?
Re: companies that claim to have a fully equivalent technical track: What I've found is that is mostly lip service. Yes, they publish salaries and requirements for the highest levels of engineering, and those salaries are equivalent to high levels of management as far as pay goes. But if you look a little deeper you see the problem. At Google and Amazon and Facebook, a Distinguished Engineer is equivalent to a Vice P…
One of the biggest things I took issue with was that you had to have some sort of "community involvement" but management had to approve your speaking engagements to some degree (be it time off, messaging approval, etc) so it was quite easy to put up a lot of blockers to achieving that. Who knows- they may have dropped that part.
The most striking thing to me, between this article and what happened in my personal experience, is that I was told "your technical skills are senior level" "but you are too emotional" to promote. I don't deny being emotional but as a reason to deny promotion on a tech track? Would they have said that to a woman or is OK since I'm a man it's not an inappropriate comment?
This rings true to my experience. I'm a Staff engineer and of my 40 hour week about 10-15 of those hours are interviews, meetings, and answering questions. Questions about technical feasibility, architectural discussions and planning, long term strategic planning, and lots of one offs from other developers. I enjoy the soft work I do, a lot of emotional labor for other developers, soft sells for tech/feature work aro…
The challenge I have interviewing people for very senior engineering roles is how to tell the difference between somebody who was nearby when some interesting work got done, and somebody who made something interesting happen . What I’m looking for in a principal engineer is someone who turns good teams into great teams; who steers the organization away from disastrous mistakes; who enables the business to accomplish…
When I was a technical recruiter, I could probably have faked my way through some technical interviews without much understanding of how to code. Now as a senior level engineer, I could probably do a pretty good job of sounding like I was the one who did the work that I saw someone else do.
> When telling that story in an interview for a principal engineer role, make sure you clarify your role. > Convince me you are a differentiating factor in successful projects and we’re going to be interested in hiring you. > As an interviewer I try to dig towards these things but it is hard and honestly
I haven't tried to hire a principal engineer, and I don't consider myself to be one, but if I had to guess how to interview one, I'd probably try something like this...
- prior to the interview, prepare specific reasons why we need a principal engineer in the first place, including answers to questions like "what do we expect from a principal engineer that we don't expect from a merely senior engineer?"
- I'd budget enough to time candidly talk with the principal engineer about what we're trying to accomplish, especially getting into details about what sucks & where we're lacking principal level help
- I'd ask the principal engineer for their thoughts on how they might be able to help, including how they'd go about establishing themselves as someone who could be successful in the role, asking them to go into as much detail as possible
- After that, I'd ask them whether they'd even enjoy doing that kind of work, to share some examples about having done similar work previously, and ask what they'd need to be set up for success
- I'd ask them to think about the position I'm in, and whether or not they'd recommend I hire them, and why they feel that way
Basically, I wouldn't try act like I know how to spot a good principal engineer. I'd do the work to communicate my needs for one, and let the principal engineer candidates help me understand what I'm looking for. If I didn't find a principal engineer amongst the people I'd interviewed, I'd have to trust that I'd have a way to feel that.
This rings true to my experience. I'm a Staff engineer and of my 40 hour week about 10-15 of those hours are interviews, meetings, and answering questions. Questions about technical feasibility, architectural discussions and planning, long term strategic planning, and lots of one offs from other developers. I enjoy the soft work I do, a lot of emotional labor for other developers, soft sells for tech/feature work aro…
I absolutely hated my job as the dev lead for a medium size ($1 billion in revenue) non software company where we were a “cost center”. I liked helping smart developers who wanted to learn, I liked having a seat at the table to decide my own destiny and the level of autonomy to decide the “how”. I didn’t like the red tape, the political jockeying, meetings and more meetings etc. I wasn’t really learning anything that…
A company of 20-50 programmers seems ideal to me now, with an overall company size of <300. I feel larger might require too much bueracracy and smaller might lose out on QoL and scale of work that can be accomplished.
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That's the challenge in all engineering interviews - determining weather they did anything useful or were just on the team. I've had to tell people to stop telling me about "we" and tell me what "you" did. Some people are so caught up in trying to be a team player that they hide their contributions. Others use it to hide their lack of contribution. It's not hard to separate these once you're aware of the issue and st…
I personally always talk about what "we" did because it helps me get out of my own way. I worked at a company for like 6 years, and for almost 4 of them i was the sole engineer tasked with designing a database for the data, creating and deploying/maintaining an API server, and creating a handful of react frontend applications. The last 3 years we expanded into a "team" that I led and scaled it up from there. I never…
I will slightly demerit people if I have to resort to asking what they individually did as opposed to the team and a lot if I still don't get a good feel for it. I realize at large companies it can be hard since you might be the guy that maintains a small section of a website but I prefer upfront honesty to having to sort it out with more questions.
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Learn to talk about your accomplishments like an entrepreneur or executive would: impact with quantified customer and company value. Not “I switched our development from Java to Go” but “improved time to deliver new customer functionality from 8 weeks to 4 weeks through new platform choice. Improvements in agility yielded $8 million in revenue growth.” Another thing I don’t see enough in this thread is emphasizing so…
Oh man, I see so many resumes littered with these kinds of statements. I totally gloss over them as they generally read like BS, and are formulaic enough that they just represent another "how to sell yourself" job-hunting checkbox point. Lots of devs would love to have some way to quantify our impact in monetary terms but the reality is that "process/tooling change X -> $Y ARR" is basically always hand-wavy made up m…
Also, yes, don’t have the numbers be BS or fail to include other useful narrative in your resume. But I so often see none of this, and leaving it all out is a sign someone hasn’t had to justify their decisions at that level.