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Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

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131–140 of 164 posts

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#131
post #26

The 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.

Yes. This is the thing. Choose a company that is doing well. Join a part of that company that is doing well. Do a role that is recognized as helping it move forward, not holding it back or maintaining things.

Your general accumulated connections and domain wisdom will probably carry you towards relative success. Bonus points if you’re useful.

Trajectory, not current state, is what matters most.

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#132
post #110

I 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…

I'm glad you wrote this.

> I increasingly just seek healing which I certainly won't find in any kind of fast paced company.

Yes please, find healing. Impossible to find in any company i guess. Therapy, self-reflection and letting go of pain from the past come to mind. Best of luck.

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#133
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not jealous (we've got a great work/life balance and a good mission), and I've heard of those compensation levels before, but something about the way you said "merely 400k" made me realize that those single salaries are more than my entire team(5 sysadmins and a manager)'s compensation.

400k isn’t that outrageous for higher level IC positions, especially in the NYC market.

This makes me curious what the HN consensus is about reasonable salary ranges along the east coast.

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#134
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what if you are sued due to something completely out of your control and lose your wealth?

Or face a medical problem that requires expensive treatment not covered by your insurance or government healthcare?

Or your investments fail, the USSR fell very quickly risking pensions people relied on, the roman empire fell. US investments could too; I mean they kinda did in the early 1900's, recovery from that took time.

I'm not saying any of these things are likely to happen (they really aren't and I'd be supprised if any did in the next 100 years). But they could so any amount of security money offers is limited and not certain.

I suppose it depends if you would equate security and certainty to the same thing? I certainly did but wouldn't now. I wager you don't since you said 99% not 100%.

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#135
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Find a midsize company that isn’t a tech company and needs help maintaining a very old but critical system. There’s very little accountability since management doesn’t understand software and it pays well because it’s boring as shit and no one wants to do it

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But what if you are sued due to something completely out of your control and lose your wealth? Or face a medical problem that requires expensive treatment not covered by your insurance or government healthcare? Or your investments fail, the USSR fell very quickly risking pensions people relied on, the roman empire fell. US investments could too; I mean they kinda did in the early 1900's, recovery from that took time.…

> But what if you are sued due to something completely out of your control and lose your wealth?

You will be able to afford lawyers, and the US justice system is not so corrupt that you would lose millions of dollars for no reason. Don’t drive drunk, don’t operate a business, and buy umbrella insurance and you should be fine. Biggest risk would probably be divorce, or accusations of abuse from within the family.

> Or face a medical problem that requires expensive treatment not covered by your insurance or government healthcare?

This also sounds super rare as health insurers are legally required to cover all evidence based healthcare, and there is an appeals process for denied coverage. As long as you can afford the premiums and annual out of pocket maximum, which are legally at most $40k to $50k per year for a family, you should be okay.

Of course, you might have to pony up an additional $10k to $20k to buy concierge care/direct primary care to buy timely access to actual doctors rather than see a Nurse Practitioner or Physician’s Assistant, but your passive income from $10M should suffice.

> Or your investments fail, the USSR fell very quickly risking pensions people relied on, the roman empire fell. US investments could too; I mean they kinda did in the early 1900's, recovery from that took time.

If $10M in the US invested in broad market low cost index funds backstopped by the federal US government is not secure enough for you to relax, then it might be impossible to help you feel sufficiently secure because this world does not offer many better guarantees.

> I suppose it depends if you would equate security and certainty to the same thing? I certainly did but wouldn't now. I wager you don't since you said 99% not 100%.

I do not know what the purpose of distinguishing security and certainty would be in this context, they seem interchangeable. And since nothing in life is 100%, 99% is a way to convey “all the security that is realistically obtainable”.

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#137
post #60

Why the assumption that everybody should grow? Some people are perfectly fine as SWE and don't want to become manager, tech lead or org leader. In some companies, you can have a very high salary as a SWE and still learn new things every day.

You have to be concerned about age discrimination or assumptions based on your career trajectory at some point if you stay in a lower level IC position. If you’re in your mid forties, still “just” a software engineer, and interviewing for new positions, this will catch up with you. How do you explain having 15-20 years experience as a software developer with no career progression?

The goal is to save and invest so much money that if you have age discrimination against you, it doesn't matter.

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#138
post #90

Earlier 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.

Sure, sometimes, maybe. Or you get fired before that. Or the work that made you visible will dry up. Or people that could reward you will move elsewhere or are fired.

There are few small companies where this could work, otherwise dont rely on it, you will end up very sad.

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#139

Perhaps the key piece of career growth advice is to join Facebook as a new graduate when it was a 700 person company.

And be innately good at both code and human relations. I couldn’t have handled that massive team size increase mentioned even if I was in that position. I would have probably quit to go back to technical stuff!

Also, having managed people, I don't really like it and derive much more joy and satisfaction from being an IC working on technical stuff primarily.

Definitely "career limiting" but I just like it more.

Re: Engineer’s guide to career growth: Advice from my time at Stripe and Facebook

#140
post #110

I 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…

I agree with everything here completely and have the same experience.

The costs of making yourself available to mentor others these days are too high. Workplace politics will only make you a target eventually. It even happens (and probably moreso) in volunteer projects. People are rightfully acting more mercenary and more self-interested.

This industry attracts a lot of socially disaffected people who behave like scorpions (Scorpion and the Frog fable...).

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