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Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

matthewgrohman.substack.com

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Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#101

Post by webnrrd2k »

operatingthetan wrote: post #40
SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #30

I travelled to Yellowstone National Park. I wandered into the back country office and spoke with the ranger. She was super friendly and informative. One interesting fact she shared is that Yellowstone is almost 4,000 sq. miles and receives 5 million visitors a year. 99.9% of those visitors never travel more than 50 feet from the main road. This means that most of those visitors experience less than 1/10th of 1% of th…

>That detour involved a team that was following a process I could not understand. Turns out they didn't understand it either. I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. It took me just a couple days. Chances are you swim in a sea of complacency too. Hold on a sec, are you saying you found dead weight and then got leadership to terminate their employment?

It's not clear, and I read it that way at first, too. But the op was looking at cloud computing costs so I'd bet that he just reduced cloud costs.

It seems like a bit of a stretch that he got anyone fired, but much more likely that they just scaled back on cloud services for that particular project.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#102

Post by feanaro »

inanutshellus wrote: post #68
orangepurple wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a visceral reaction when I see people referred to as consumers. It's rude and distasteful beyond belief on par with calling them biomass waste producers, useful drones, useless eaters, or some sort of contagion. How about, in most cases, you know, CUSTOMERS? Or in this case listeners.

I understand but don't agree. 'customer' implies commerce happened, 'listener' implies listening happened. 'consumer' is a higher abstraction than either of those. It's the most abstract word someone could think of to say "X internalized Y". e.g. "X took Y and added it to itself... let's not get distracted with how. the important thing is, X took Y and internalized it." I guess we could, uh, go with "internalizer". I…

But you don't consume content, that's meaningless. When you consume something, it is used up and disappears entirely.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#104

Post by lhorie »

scarface74 wrote: post #93
lhorie wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of us went through circuitous routes. My title is SWE at a big tech company and I interview SWE candidates, so I think I'm relatively close to how the sausage is made in terms of the pipeline through which most engineering candidates go through to get into big tech. Personally I think "grind LC" is a very common meme perpetuated by folks on the candidate side, but it lacks a lot of context in terms of how modern…

I have only been involved in software engineering interviews at BigTech for senior devs in the System Design round (because doing System Design is part of my $DayJob). Just to explain my perspective. When I was in the real world and when I interviewed at my current job, I practiced being able to explain my experience in STAR format based on my “career document”. In the real world, all of my “interviews” were mostly j…

> wouldn’t it behoove you to practice that too

I mean, sure, the more you do the merrier. But that goes back to what I was saying: if "unfair advantage" means extracurriculars in high school to get into an ivy league + the ivy league degree to get spotted by recruiters + internships in STAR format on resumes + grinding leetcode + etc etc to increase your chances as much as possible, is any of that really a clever life hack as the "grind LC" meme implies, or is it merely just going way above and beyond what everyone else is able to/willing to put up with in the traditional career path?

If anything, it sounds more like going through a non-traditional career to build up the "street smarts" is the shortcut to big tech riches, given that the alternative is to try to stand out from a sea of millions of resumes all listing C++ and python internships/roles, potentially never landing big tech at all.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#105

Post by samtho »

nixpulvis wrote: post #38
SassyGrapefruit wrote: post #30

I travelled to Yellowstone National Park. I wandered into the back country office and spoke with the ranger. She was super friendly and informative. One interesting fact she shared is that Yellowstone is almost 4,000 sq. miles and receives 5 million visitors a year. 99.9% of those visitors never travel more than 50 feet from the main road. This means that most of those visitors experience less than 1/10th of 1% of th…

But just like at state parks, tread lightly. I've gotten in trouble before while exploring and then being accused of putting my nose where it shouldn't be. It can look like you're wasting your time looking for distractions, or trying to dig up dirt. Not everyone in all parts of your company is going to like you poking around. You also risk picking up new responsibilities if people catch wind that you might be offerin…

This is a good counterpoint (while not necessarily discouraging cross pollination). I ask parallel teams that I work with how best I can help them, which leads me into learning a lot about the different facets of the business. My experience with approaching this with curiosity and empathy will yield a more welcoming environment to learn more about the things you are not familiar with yet as you are clearly not being threatening and actually looking to build a working relationship that both of you benifit from.

This also goes both ways. I also offer to help people to learn more about my side of the organization, going as far as being a mentor. A former coworker, with whom I am still friends with today, I met at a previous role where she was in marketing but wanted to know more about the development side, having had no prior experience. I was able to get her started in software engineering. Fast forward 6 years, she’s now the lead automations engineer for a marketing company.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#106

Post by idopmstuff »

boilerupnc wrote: post #94
idopmstuff wrote: post #63

This is a great article, and my only issue with it and my only issue with it is that I think it's too limited. This isn't just a tech thing - the world we live in is one where having more context in a professional environment is almost always useful. If you spend time learning about how HR functions, it'll help you understand how things like promotions work. Spend time with marketing, and you'll learn lessons about h…

>the world we live in is one where having more context in a professional environment is almost always useful THIS. My career pivoted in a new direction simply because I asked a question to a co-worker [0]. The core qualities of curiosity and empathy leads to riches of mind, friendship and wallet. Some reminders I try to adhere to: - Believing that seeking opportunities to help others is universally positive since tru…

> With an umbrella of ignorance as my shield, I asked what was her mission.

I really like that line. When I was early in my career, I wanted to sound smarter than I was, so I tried to avoid asking dumb questions to experts. Now that I'm an expert in some things, I realize how ridiculous that was - the experts would've clearly known I was not an expert and weren't going to be impressed by the depth of my knowledge.

When people come and ask me things with humility, I'm almost always happy to explain, and in my experience that's true of most people (especially the smartest/most knowledgable).

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#107

Post by mindcrime »

satvikpendem wrote: post #96
mindcrime wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every company I've worked for, from startups to Fortune 500, it was very clear what products the engineers contributed to, and what that product portfolio revenue stream looked like, and what it meant to the business (right down to the product margins). This sounds quite remarkable to me, and definitely does not match my experience. I've found that most engineers have an incredibly vague notion - at best - of how the…

If you've worked in startups before and then go on to big companies, you will have learned those terms, so it just depends on where your fellow engineers are coming from.

Still doesn't match my experience. Even in the startups I've worked for, engineers did not concern themselves with those kinds of details. Maybe it's a factor of just how early in the lifecycle a startup is when engineers join. Perhaps somebody who is there "day 0", before the first round is even raised, or maybe just a seed round, has a different perspective than somebody who joins after a C round or what-have-you.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#108

Post by doctorwho42 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #57
throwawaysleep wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. And your reward for that was? Were you rewarded? Did they give you 30K as a bonus? Or was it just the weasel words of "this will be considered favourably at performance review time." I am aware of about a 50K a year in cloud waste. But in my org, I know I won't get anything for reporting it as I am not going for a promo (promos pay a lot less than job…

I'm curious, would you say any of your motivation and feeling of reward in your job comes from doing a good job, or helping your organization achieve it's goals? Or does your motivation and reward (what gets you out of bed, what makes your job tolerable or enjoyable) come mostly/only from maximizing your paycheck? Or other things?

In the chain below you are kind of talking past each other.

So let me try to clarify what the other posters are saying to you.

It's not that pay is the only thing that makes a job tolerable or enjoyable. It's the fact that compensation/rewards do not necessarily follow nor reflect the work done.

So in the above cases, you do more work outside your intended role and find some kind of optimization that saves the company 250k/yr. And you make say $80k/yr. You have now provided almost 3x your salary in terms of economic value to your company but if they do not provide an economic reward for this effort, it acts as a demotivator. Though there could be other things that make the job tolerable or enjoyable, you potentially now are dealing with a poisoned pill. Nothing can counter that poison of being rewarded for such improvement than a good job, what else have you done for us today?

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#109

Post by dayvid »

scarface74 wrote: post #9
nickvanw wrote: post #5

I would put it even more simply: just knowing Engineering isn't enough if you want to excel past a certain point, unless you're going to go extremely deep and become a subject matter expert in something (storage, hardware, etc). That is something most people are not going to do, because it requires dedication and to be extremely intelligent. Instead, you can go very far by understanding a job one "hop" from your own…

So how much more is someone “worth” who can understand the different parts than someone who made their career knowing how to play the promotion/leetCode/system design/behavioral interview game at any of the large tech companies and position themselves to show “scope” and “impact” by getting on the prime projects? It’s a much more straightforward path and one I would recommend to anyone starting their career today. I…

Even in those companies at the higher level you need additional skills to figure out impact and opportunities (opportunity sizing, XFN alignment, communication, good writing, etc.). Interviewing mainly gets your foot in the door.

There are some genius ICs who can just code and not be concerned about these things, but more often the higher levels are people who are good at their skill along with business, data analysis, product and communication skills.

Re: Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles

#110

Post by satvikpendem »

mindcrime wrote: post #107
satvikpendem wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've worked in startups before and then go on to big companies, you will have learned those terms, so it just depends on where your fellow engineers are coming from.

Still doesn't match my experience. Even in the startups I've worked for, engineers did not concern themselves with those kinds of details. Maybe it's a factor of just how early in the lifecycle a startup is when engineers join. Perhaps somebody who is there "day 0", before the first round is even raised, or maybe just a seed round, has a different perspective than somebody who joins after a C round or what-have-you.

They didn't, but they should. Every employee should know how the business works, generally at least.
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