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Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

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Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#41

Post by j7ake »

Aurornis wrote: post #3

> only advertise positions for people who are comically well-decorated; Principal engineers with 10 years of experience, plus the masters degree, plus a bunch of specific cloud orchestration, scalable systems, or other devops experience that just seems entirely impractical to accumulate without simply advancing at the same company or FAANG for 15 years, which seems itself to be an unachievable tenure in this millenni…

Disagree on the country statement. it requires certain achievements, but by no means extraordinary.

For example, very common to see European PhD graduates move to usa as their first job as staff or principal.

Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#42

Post by angarg12 »

MarkMarine wrote: post #20
angarg12 wrote: post #18

Yes, but the market is particularly bad now. I have 15+ YoE, and currently working at FAANG. I've spent the last few years leading a team of engineers to deliver one of the top priority projects of my org with estimated impact of +$100M ARR, and I have been consistently rated high performer. I also have some niches skills that are particularly on demand these days. I am not actively looking, but I am open to hear fro…

I think this is just the market trying to find a discount. If you actually want to see what the market is, list yourself as looking for work, take the interviews, excel, and negotiate the position you want. Worst case you hear “no” but don’t let that define your worth. After 15 years at a FAANG you must be drowning in money, do what you find intriguing, regardless of title.

A few implicit assumptions in your comment.

> After 15 years at a FAANG you must be drowning in money

I have 15 yoe total, not all in FAANG. And almost all my career is in EU anyway. My net worth is probably an order of magnitude smaller than you think. If you worked an average software dev job in the US for 15 you almost certainly have more money than me. Also, as a 40 years old renting a 2 bedroom with my family, I am still motivated by money.

> list yourself as looking for work, take the interviews

I've been doing this for months. My tally is something like this: about half of the recruiters ghost me, I got one rejection and two downlevels. I can count with one hand the number of companies that I've talked to that can match or beat my current comp. For reference, I receive one contact or more a day from recruiters on average.

Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#43

Post by angarg12 »

alberth wrote: post #21
angarg12 wrote: post #18

Yes, but the market is particularly bad now. I have 15+ YoE, and currently working at FAANG. I've spent the last few years leading a team of engineers to deliver one of the top priority projects of my org with estimated impact of +$100M ARR, and I have been consistently rated high performer. I also have some niches skills that are particularly on demand these days. I am not actively looking, but I am open to hear fro…

> estimated impact of +$100M ARR Revenue impact can be tricky, because more times than not - it’s a function of the size of the company you work for more than anything else. Relative impact (%), along with absolutely impact ($) - is the more meaningful way to quantify impact. Eg Increase revenue by 0.1% (revenue went from $100.0B to $100.1) Increase revenue by 100% (revenue went from $0.1B to $0.2)

You are right that big scale and high margins means that a small effort can have an outsized impact. I use ARR as a proxy for the importance of the project. To give you the details, the relative impact is in the 1-10% range for my org. This was a multi-year, multi-team effort to deliver a significantly complex and ambiguous system (the first of it's kind in my org) and it will have a big impact beyond the monetary value.

Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#44

Post by drewcoo »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #38
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"One issue that a lot of people face is that their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience and more about accumulating 1-2 years of experience 7-10 different times." This could also be worded as: "One issue that a lot of people face is that they did not work at prestigious technical companies. Having a long tenure at such companies gives hiring managers confidence…

I think it's closer to "companies won't hire people to do $THING unless they've done $THING before." That, combined with overinflating requirements, interviews that don't bear a lot of resemblance to the actual job, and interviews that are far more difficult than the actual job, plus perhaps a dose of what you said, seems to explain it. The first of these things is probably related to having people with HR or sales b…

> companies won't hire people to do $THING unless they've done $THING before

For arbitrary magic variable $THING, this is a tautology!

Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#45

Post by SenHeng »

brailsafe wrote: post #27
SenHeng wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once worked as the sole maintainer of an old legacy product while the company spent 2 years trying to create a new product to replace it. Eventually they abandoned all work and most of the team left. During the transition months, I managed to convince upper management that now would be a good time to update the legacy product with all the knowledge gained over the past years. So I spent about a couple of months or…

Thanks for the example. I suppose that's a fairly unique position to be in, but one that you could have chosen not to pursue. On the surface, the only way that's different than my most recent experience is that of being the director of the initiative, or otherwise responsible for the whole project, (also being laid off doesn't help). Do you think things would have gone differently had people not jumped ship?

It's definitely a case of 'right time, right place'. But I also had several factors that helped increase my luck surface [0].

- I had experience with early versions of angular.js (1.2~) and typescript (1.x~)

- I was willing to dive into an unknown codebase in an unknown language (coffeescript 1.x) that no one else wanted to touch

- I had almost a whole year to get familiar with the codebase, the intricacies and weird bugs, and the crazy amounts of OOP in it

- I came from the old definition of full stack (design + dev + database + user facing), making me a generalist among a bunch of technically minded people

Also, everyone was pretty demotivated and mentally checked out. Some had spent 2.5 years working on the project, there was a public launch for the beta release, press releases and a whole PR event to our existing users. Less than a month later, the board/investors cancelled the project. Even the CTO was pretty checked out and let me do whatever I want, which was probably how my crazy proposal got through. Within 2 months, we lost the entire upper senior engineering division, from CTO down to team leads. There was a huge debate about whether or not to even keep the engineering division, if it would be better to sell our current product to our rivals and re-focus on being a design agency. That didn't happen because our rivals came to us first asking if we would buy them...

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425525

Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#46

Post by brailsafe »

alexawarrior23 wrote: post #16

I was never a "Principal Software Engineer" until two years ago. Both hires were from an online job posting, one on the company site itself. Both jobs were government contract companies but salaried roles. And salary is it, no stock or end of year bonus. Both paid about half of what a MAANGA job would pay for the same role, but still far more than other similar remote roles, and a bit better than the senior software…

Thanks for the thorough response, I feel like you and I aren't so dissimilar in terms of background and perspective in various categories. It's somehow reassuring, because although I haven't been through previous downtowns in the broader economy, I have got through dark periods of years where I couldn't land anything, and I have ended up without more than a car roof over my head. This time is just.. uniquely intense. What I anticipate happening is that like you say, I'll land some random interview and it'll work out, or I'll go back to being a barista or general labor if I can land something there. I'm not really seeing contracts working out yet.

Your experience with interviews and rate of response feels very familiar. Roles I'm definitely qualified for and interviewed well with just not turning out at the last step, and every other variation of it being a dice roll.

Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#48

Post by nsagent »

marcinzm wrote: post #32
nsagent wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if this is what happened to me. I'm finishing up my PhD and despite being pretty set on going into academia, I applied to some industry jobs back in July that I was pretty uniquely qualified for based on my background and research topic (which is pretty niche). Never heard back. I have a nice postdoc lined up, so it's fine that I never heard back, but I was pretty surprised. I recently checked and one of tho…

Did the job specify that they were fine with 0 years of full time industry experience in that area?

Please don't be antagonistic. I went back for a PhD after working over a decade in industry, where I had been both a lead overseeing a team of 25 contributors and an engineering manager.

Channeling dang:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#49

Post by t8sr »

Yes, people at staff+ level are routinely hired. But these are typically very senior positions and you are expected to be in some way transformative. Staff engineers are roughly equivalent seniority to a manager of 6-12 people and should bring significant domain expertise. Principal is an end-career role a small fraction of people reach after 30 years in the industry. They’re roughly equivalent to a director, who in the FAANG model leads 50-500 people.

It’s not surprising that the requirements are very high. These roles exist to fill a specific business need.

Caveat: this all applies to FAANG and adjacent. Other industries use different titles, but the use of the word “staff” usually indicates that you’ve adapted the Google career ladder.

Re: Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?

#50

Post by t8sr »

angarg12 wrote: post #18

Yes, but the market is particularly bad now. I have 15+ YoE, and currently working at FAANG. I've spent the last few years leading a team of engineers to deliver one of the top priority projects of my org with estimated impact of +$100M ARR, and I have been consistently rated high performer. I also have some niches skills that are particularly on demand these days. I am not actively looking, but I am open to hear fro…

The EU market is rough right now, as you say. The down-level to senior usually happens on the system design and behavioral interviews. Especially in Europe, I find people often downplay their contributions in these interviews, while the Americans are almost brazen in claiming credit. To an interviewer, that might sound like you were just “around” when good things happened. If I were you, I’d do a mock interview with someone you trust, and see if they can help you spot where you’re selling yourself short, maybe.
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