Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great point. One issue with your last paragraph though, is when trying to select a company to work for from an equity/ownership standpoint, there isn't the option of diversifying a career. You can only work at once place, so you put all your eggs in one basket. In hindsight, sure, you would make better money at coinbase rather than facebook, but it's essentially going long on one stock with your time rather than capi…
There is over time, just not at once. You gain much more information working at a company than you have from the outside. If it sucks, quit and go to a better one. It's that willingness to cut your losers that many people don't have. Lots of folks are miserable in their jobs (you see a number in this thread) but then perform all sorts of rationalizations on why it has to be that way. It doesn't: if you're miserable,…
A career ending mistake
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Re: A career ending mistake
#252Re: A career ending mistake
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like some people fall into this trap if they manage to get into FAANG. I would be scared of that happening to me. It's like, your entire view of the industry was built around hitting the winner's podium, and once you've achieved that, where do you go? There's only so many gold medals to go around on the podium itself, anyways.
Or you get "old" and experienced enough to realize it's all the same things every day, everywhere :-) And I can almost guarantee startups are much more learning-conducive than FAANG in that regard.
A startup probably won't be able to afford the standard of engineering that you can find at places like Google. There are good practices you can learn there that you probably won't see at a startup.
As a company scales up, coordinating effort across teams becomes more important for getting stuff done, even as a senior IC. You no longer know the whole stack (assuming you're an early employee) and have to ask other teams to adapt interfaces and add functionality to get your stuff to work.
However, that's the default at FAANG. Coordination is the name of the game and it's so meeting heavy because it's a lot of work to keep everyone aligned, on the same page.
You can learn interesting technical things either way, but it's easier to find a niche as a specialist at a large company. Startups usually need generalists in the early days.
I spent eight years at a startup (4th engineer, rose to chief architect after CTO left, was most senior engineer of 40 or so in co) and joined Google last March.
I learned a lot when I joined the startup (Rails was new to me) and I added some hard yards of scaling up database utilisation with very little extra hardware over the years, but the pace of learning declined over time and my degree of specialization increased as I focused on the biggest bottleneck the business had, technically - even while the business was of course more interested in fattening up its product line for valuation.
I learned a huge amount when I joined Google too, though a lot of that is due to the parallel universe quality of working at a company that had to solve many scaling problems for the first time and did so with inhouse tech which didn't become industry standard (I blame monorepo - it makes it too easy to have incestuous dependencies). A bigger part of the learning was the mode of getting things done between teams. I haven't learned much in terms of transferrable tech, but I have seen better engineering practices put into action, that we could not afford - and didn't have strong enough singular opinions on - at the startup.
I can say it's not the same things every day, everywhere. There is no end to the code at Google, there is more than you can ever hope to understand and it changes too fast anyway. At a startup, you can understand almost everything. More work is political at largeco, necessarily because the org tree sometimes needs shaking to get things moving, but also simply sociologically - a startup is a small team, largeco is a whole nation with internal rivalries and whole divisions that never need to communicate much.
Re: A career ending mistake
#254Re: A career ending mistake
#255Re: A career ending mistake
#256As it so happens, this resonates with me. All through my professional life, I lived frugally, saved as much as I possibly could, made conservative, yet not "bunker mentality," investments, and avoided personal debt like the plague. Being exactly where I am today, has always been a goal. I also made sure that every job I did, shipped . I sometimes had to " hode by dose ", as it passed by, on its way out the door, but…
Re: A career ending mistake
#257As unobjectionable as this advice is, it also doesn't feel terribly useful. Consider this quote: > As software engineers, we already know that a too-rigid plan rarely survives contact with reality. For me this is understating things quite a bit. As someone pretty much exactly mid-career who has done well, I can't really point to long-term planning as providing any value whatsoever. It certainly doesn't hurt to think…
Re: A career ending mistake
#258As it so happens, this resonates with me. All through my professional life, I lived frugally, saved as much as I possibly could, made conservative, yet not "bunker mentality," investments, and avoided personal debt like the plague. Being exactly where I am today, has always been a goal. I also made sure that every job I did, shipped . I sometimes had to " hode by dose ", as it passed by, on its way out the door, but…
This was a fun read and feels like it deserves a longform blog post.
Re: A career ending mistake
#259I hate my job. I don't know how I got here. Like many I started out in small scale IT just as desktop computers were becoming a thing. I transitioned from mainframe support to desktop support, from there I worked through several desktop support roles, wishing I was server support but never managing to get there... over time I became a desktop architect, and then infrastructure architect, and now well.... I just don't…
I went to university, went to grad school, got a PhD in a hard science, saw that science was a dead end career choice and tried to change career. I have ended up in IT, although I have never written code for my role, or actually done anything technical for my job. It was immediately into the writing documents, architecting infrastructure and systems that I have no fucking clue about. At no point have I gained any exp…
More or less the path I took after finishing my Masters. Thankfully, at the time, I thought "leetcode-style" problems were cool. After a few months I got a remote interview from an online contest and got a "building stuff" position in SV. Can't say I've achieved happiness but financially it was so much better.
Re: A career ending mistake
#260Another oldie but goodie in the career planning vein: https://pmarchive.com/guide_to_career_planning_part0.html This is Marc Andreessen's guide to career planning, and I've found it exceptionally useful. In particular, he backs off from the narrow "decide what track you want to be on" approach to frame the problem as developing a set of skills that will make you more valuable to any enterprise you choose to be a part…
Marc Andreessen who according to wikipedia has had a single employee job in his entire adult life, after which he went on to found a string of companies and then became a VC? Why would I want to take their advice on skills that make me more valuable to an enterprise? I'd 100% take advice from him on founding companies and on investing btw, but advice on how to build your career as an employee seems wildly irrelevant…
The advantage of Andreessen's perspective in that blog series is that he thinks of a career as a portfolio of investments, each of which has their own risks and their own upsides, and each of which may unlock future investments. In my experience this has been a far more effective way to manage your career, simply because everything about present-day America is setup to screw people who take one job and work within its strictures.