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How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

ycombinator.com

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Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#31

Post by stuff4ben »

lakomen wrote: post #17
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

How to get rich in tech as a mediocre programmer: 1. Transfer to a TPM/QA Manager role at somewhere like Amazon or Microsoft. Bar is much lower to get into this role. 2. Get hired into a higher level than you could in a SWE role. 3. Transfer within the company to being an SDM 4. Now you are one level higher, in a management role, that would have taken you 5+ years of grinding and some luck to get into. 5. Spend a few…

Explain acronyms please?

TPM: Technical Project/Product Manager

SWE: Software Engineer

SDM: Software Development Manager

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#32

Post by dauertewigkeit »

dogman144 wrote: post #14
dauertewigkeit wrote: post #11

Industry wide, not even in startups, the people who get screwed the most are the ones working under the hood. I am not even talking about the disparity between SWEs and C-suites. I'm talking within the engineering domain. The closer you are to the application side the more credit you get for the effort, even if it might have only been possible through the hard work of recent under the hood technological advances. A p…

I think this depends on what you view as “getting screwed.” If the under the hood line engineers aren’t getting wild compensation for products they built generating wild compensation for the engineers/researchers working on the end product, yes that is a fair point. If it’s these engineers not getting the recognition of Chief AI scientist and so on, that’s misguided I think. There is nothing worse than working under…

I don't think a CUDA engineer, or a researcher working on optimization or distributed computing should get the same recognition as a Chief of anything. But dare I say that writing optimized code to run on clusters is just as hard as coming up with a new deep learning architecture? Actually having done both, it is harder, at least for me.

The authors of "Attention is all you need" got all the recognition. The people who worked on scaling deep learning models to huge clusters got no recognition. But both were just as instrumental to the ultimate success of LLMs.

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#33

Post by ravenstine »

onion2k wrote: post #16
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

How to get rich in tech as a mediocre programmer: 1. Transfer to a TPM/QA Manager role at somewhere like Amazon or Microsoft. Bar is much lower to get into this role. 2. Get hired into a higher level than you could in a SWE role. 3. Transfer within the company to being an SDM 4. Now you are one level higher, in a management role, that would have taken you 5+ years of grinding and some luck to get into. 5. Spend a few…

while bossing around engineers much smarter than you How much smarter than you are they if you've taken an effective shortcut to getting paid significantly more while doing a lot less work? Working harder, taking all the stress, and earning less doesn't sound that smart.

Not all smart people have a desire to be parasites that are paid several times more than they're worth by a dysfunctional system.

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#34

Post by KRAKRISMOTT »

mushufasa wrote: post #27
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

How to get rich in tech as a mediocre programmer: 1. Transfer to a TPM/QA Manager role at somewhere like Amazon or Microsoft. Bar is much lower to get into this role. 2. Get hired into a higher level than you could in a SWE role. 3. Transfer within the company to being an SDM 4. Now you are one level higher, in a management role, that would have taken you 5+ years of grinding and some luck to get into. 5. Spend a few…

> So the CEO can sit on his hands the whole time the product is developed, but then does reap huge gains. This sounds off to me. Even if the CEO isn't a technical engineer literally working on the code, they are ultimately accountable for getting engineers and designers to build the right product. Building the right product is massively hard. Usually, it takes several wrong takes to get it right. 90% of startups fail…

The CEO is the sales guy. If you have worked in B2B places before, very often the CEO is completely non-technical.

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#35

Post by dauertewigkeit »

smokel wrote: post #25
dauertewigkeit wrote: post #11

Industry wide, not even in startups, the people who get screwed the most are the ones working under the hood. I am not even talking about the disparity between SWEs and C-suites. I'm talking within the engineering domain. The closer you are to the application side the more credit you get for the effort, even if it might have only been possible through the hard work of recent under the hood technological advances. A p…

Only a few people who were in the right place at the right time and struck AI gold got lucky. Many PhDs have been slaving away and metaphorically died in several harsh AI winters. Nothing to be jealous of. There are several examples of people who got lucky with infrastructure or more technical engineering, but it is not because of their perceived role or something superficial.

That is part of the hero narrative that I am also lamenting.

If there are 100 possible research directions and only 1 proves successful. The people who travel along the other 99 get no recognition, despite expending the same effort and despite their contribution being just as important.

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#36

Post by TacticalCoder »

onion2k wrote: post #16
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

How to get rich in tech as a mediocre programmer: 1. Transfer to a TPM/QA Manager role at somewhere like Amazon or Microsoft. Bar is much lower to get into this role. 2. Get hired into a higher level than you could in a SWE role. 3. Transfer within the company to being an SDM 4. Now you are one level higher, in a management role, that would have taken you 5+ years of grinding and some luck to get into. 5. Spend a few…

while bossing around engineers much smarter than you How much smarter than you are they if you've taken an effective shortcut to getting paid significantly more while doing a lot less work? Working harder, taking all the stress, and earning less doesn't sound that smart.

> How much smarter than you are they if you've taken an effective shortcut to getting paid significantly more while doing a lot less work?

Being smart and how much you make aren't related. There are researchers working at universities in Europe being paid miserable salaries and yet making incredible discoveries (like medical ones) and these are incredibly smart people.

Meanwhile there are people with only a few neurons connecting raking in millions on "only fans".

And, no, the later aren't smarter than the former.

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#37

Post by Berone »

satvikpendem wrote: post #9

One of the top comments on the YouTube video attached to the article talks about how someone wasted their 20s working as the founding engineer (employee #6 of a 6-person startup) and when the company exited for $100 MM, they only got 100k and are still working at 40 years of age while the other 5, presumably having cofounder-level equity, are retired. This is the true risk of startups, and, if you're looking to maxim…

The path to getting into these founder / c-suite roles is those founding engineer roles in which you can learn how to scale and operate these ventures.

The founding engineer role at 0.5% is not meant to be a role to retire on, but a stepping stone to those bigger roles.

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#38

Post by VirusNewbie »

ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #3

How to get rich in tech as a mediocre programmer: 1. Transfer to a TPM/QA Manager role at somewhere like Amazon or Microsoft. Bar is much lower to get into this role. 2. Get hired into a higher level than you could in a SWE role. 3. Transfer within the company to being an SDM 4. Now you are one level higher, in a management role, that would have taken you 5+ years of grinding and some luck to get into. 5. Spend a few…

TPM at Amazon is a very high bar, and usually requires a technical background. I have one old coworker who got it, and didn't make it very long, saying it was too challenging.

I've never seen someone on the TPM ladder directly manage SWEs at google. Microsoft is different, the whole place is a shit show.

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#39

Post by Apocryphon »

KRAKRISMOTT wrote: post #34
mushufasa wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So the CEO can sit on his hands the whole time the product is developed, but then does reap huge gains. This sounds off to me. Even if the CEO isn't a technical engineer literally working on the code, they are ultimately accountable for getting engineers and designers to build the right product. Building the right product is massively hard. Usually, it takes several wrong takes to get it right. 90% of startups fail…

The CEO is the sales guy. If you have worked in B2B places before, very often the CEO is completely non-technical.

Can't the CEO be the product guy?

Re: How to Not Get Screwed over as a Software Engineer [video]

#40

Post by freeopinion »

andy99 wrote: post #26
onion2k wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

while bossing around engineers much smarter than you How much smarter than you are they if you've taken an effective shortcut to getting paid significantly more while doing a lot less work? Working harder, taking all the stress, and earning less doesn't sound that smart.

There's an old saying If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

Better?:

  If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?
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