This isn't a guide as much as it is someone promoting themselves
Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
121–130 of 164 posts
Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
The most useless career advice I've received is variations of "do a good job and you'll be rewarded". No one ever told me the outsized role that context and other stuff outside my control can have on your career progress. So say that in case A you get hired to maintain an old system that is on the path to deprecation, and in case B you get hired to work in a greenfield initiative that ends up exploding and generating…
I think it’s not wrong, just incomplete. Doing a good job on an important problem will be rewarded, in time. Once a persons impact and reliability is trusted, opportunities come to them.
That is without a doubt, the funniest thing I've heard all week. Thanks!
Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#123I feel like you have a choose your own adventure at these companies: * climb the ladder - try to be 'in the room' with L+1&2. Get assigned high visibility work, define and deliver some intermediate milestone, declare success, groom perception, etc. * get hired at a competitor at L+1. * start a side hustle/lifestyle/real estate business. Subscribe to the FIRE subreddit/podcasts. * have kids, develop increasingly esote…
Crazy how having kids is lumped in with esoteric personal hobbies.
how so?
i mean, the most esoteric ppl i know aren't even married
Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
> have kids, develop increasingly esoteric personal hobbies, get into fitness/longevity This is the route I've taken and my mental health is much better for it. I still wonder what I'm missing out on had I stayed on the treadmill, even now, but I keep telling myself the life balance far outweighs the work balance.
Nothing worthwhile. I just turned down a L+1 jump to management because I certainly don’t want to stress/deal with any of that business BS when I could do my fairly easy IC job and take the kids to the park or go to the gym at lunch since my calendar is mostly empty
a good paying non-management job with a overseeable workload is what i'm look for as well.
kinda hard to find as most hr ppl seem to be looking for either rock stars or code monkeys, any tipps?
Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#125> The best engineers and managers are great at adding value, getting the most out of the people around them, and helping the team see around corners even when they’re not there. People keep repeating this dangerous advice. The truth is actual value is created by few people: new tech, new features, new markets. It usually starts off as an experiment, a hackathon etc and grows from there. The rest of the people exist t…
> The whole cottage industry around work is a festering wound at this point.
and (we?) the internet natives are most prone to this assessment as growing up in a world of free ideas (foss) wrecks any connection between work and reward.
Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#126How to grow your career: “She joined Facebook fresh out of college when it was a 700 person startup”. End of article.
tbf 700ppl software business in rapid growth is probably not the worst choice
Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#127I really distaste those articles because it most of the time generalize based on exception cases. Not all companies have the resources and/or opportunities like Stripe and Facebook. Coming from the SME/laggard industries those posts sound completely out of touch with the reality of a lot of SWEs that are not in this demographic pool. One of the biggest disappointments with the SWE was the fact that when I started my…
that matches also my experience. then again I have always been a part of the problem. I'm like an amoebae without a functioning membrane. I find myself in a sick (intentionally avoiding the term "toxic". "sick" like in "sick system".) environment, then I will turn sick and act sick as well. I partake for a while until one morning I look into the mirror and don't like the person I see there anymore and I either just q…
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Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> have kids, develop increasingly esoteric personal hobbies, get into fitness/longevity This is the route I've taken and my mental health is much better for it. I still wonder what I'm missing out on had I stayed on the treadmill, even now, but I keep telling myself the life balance far outweighs the work balance.
From what I've seen, amassing riches is either a weird game to people, the means to a lifestyle they truly crave (status, luxury, ...), or an unhealthy obsession with security (both for themselves and their offspring). I was, maybe still am, in the last bucket. But I'm starting to realise that security is a quite mythical thing - you can always think of more risks and counter measures, at least at the point I got to.…
Security is not mythical, at least in the near to short term, enough time for your kids to grow up.
Passive income from $10M would secure access for 99% of food, water, heat, shelter, education, transportation, healthcare, retirement, and legal costs.
$5M will get you most of the way there too.
Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#129Threads like this are not good for my mental health. I’m a public sector software engineer for the US government in the DMV. I have eights years in and I’m barely making 6 six figures. I’m considering getting out but it won’t be easy. It’s a weird feeling that at 31 I feel like I already screwed up career and income wise. Is there any chance I could make 200k plus before 40 ? I have a coworker that believes we are pa…
If this is something that’s really getting to you, you should move to the Bay Area, at least for a few years. Your “luck” will skyrocket. The opportunities in tech just aren’t present in other cities in the way they are in the Bay Area. I say this as someone who moved there from a mid-sized city and now moved back to that mid-sized city, taking my Bay Area job with me. The primary difference I’ve noticed between FANG…
Yup. It's not a fair game. Or at least it benefits young people or people with loose family ties.
I had opportunities there but being from another continent, seeing my family once a year wasn't enough. With kids and a significant other that has even stronger ties to their family, it is impossible.
I think it wouldn't necessarily hurt the kids...but my partner wouldn't find work in the US and it would be a dent in their career.
Long story short like what others above say: If your team is good and your working conditions are good and you make good money in your country...maybe look at the bright side and not be envious of others.
I realized I make good money for here, have no management responsibility. Can work from home and basically as flexibly as I want to. All this ALREADY is a great gift. Don't need to dream of some FANG salary. I'm a big part of my kids' early lives instead of studying leet code questions.
Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook
#130The real lesson is to join a company poised for rapid growth (bonus points if it turns into a mainstream name like Facebook) and getting lucky as they expand. Try that at a mature company and you'll get nowhere. Do it at the small companies that never blow up and you'll get nowhere. Even if you're in the right company at the right time, there's a good chance someone else will be given the opportunity over you.
There's a little more to it: Make sure your manager, and maybe even your manager's manager, likes you. If your manager doesn't like you, change teams. If your manager's manager doesn't like your manager, you should also change teams. The unfortunate reality of those high growth orgs is precisely that the growth leads to a lot of new managers, and as we all probably know by now, a new manager is a bad manager. Since t…
> be the firefighter who is also an arsonist
I'm afraid this describes the majority of busy work in many industries including so-called software engineering. It's the most impressive Rube Goldberg machine of global proportions, where the major time-consuming problems are often self-inflicted, intricately constructed to seem like a solution but is actually a generator of problems, which conveniently sustain the careers of countless managers, hapless subordinates, and the economy involving the industry.
> The more I've focused on this, the better the rewards, the product be damned.
That's something I'm learning, is that it's not enough or even as important to be technically excellent. What matters is how one adapts and fits into the social dynamics and politics within the organization.