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

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

#81

Post by r2_pilot »

cebert wrote: post #64
r2_pilot wrote: post #25

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.

Oh I know, and usually I'm pretty jaded (I live in a lcol area so even tho I make less than than 75k I live comfortably). But tonight for some reason it really sunk in how cheap human labor in this area can be.

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

#82

Post by cebert »

giantg2 wrote: post #79
cebert wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you think you’re getting stuck?

The biggest factor is probably my disability. It doesn't really matter though.

I can see how that can make things more challenging.

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

#83

Post by coffeebeqn »

cebert wrote: post #70
ditonal wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, moving from an engineering role to a management role is not "career progression", it's a lateral career switch. Secondly, you don't have to explain anything. Smart hiring managers will understand that you focused your career mastering a craft and that you're still working on that craft you mastered. As for the dumb hiring managers, it's best if you can avoid working for them. One thing you'll learn as you get…

You don’t think not even progressing to a senior engineering role or lead engineer role after two decades in the profession would be a red flag? These are still IC roles, just more senior. I would sure have a lot of questions at least.

Sr Engineer is a terminal role for most people. If you can build quality software and are a somewhat pleasant human being then I don’t see anything wrong with it. If everyone’s a director then who’s getting the work done? There aren’t that many leadership roles compared to IC roles.

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

#84

Post by [deleted] »

giantg2 wrote: 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.

[deleted]

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

#85

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

> 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 to provide fodder but growth comes from surprisingly few people even in large organizations.

Try and see what the business needs and create step improvement features / tech / markets. You will feel happy. Too many people like the author is focused on just managing, being "thought leaders" and other nonsense. This is my problem with AI till the time we get AGI. Someone has to do the work. Someone had to write Redis before Ofer Bengal swooped in. Someone has to create the transformer model, someone has to write the original articles to train these models on.

The whole cottage industry around work is a festering wound at this point.

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

#87

Post by quickthrower2 »

h1n99 wrote: post #73
quickthrower2 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The $50k spend is interesting with NYC rents being so high, apparently

1. We own at a low interest rate, so I don’t consider the principal part of payments to be spent. Barring NYC housing market crash, that money will come back. It’d be like counting money invested in index funds as “spent”. 2. Split completely evenly with partner. This also saves on “per household” things like internet, power, heating. 3. It’s still a big part of the spending, proportionately! I just don’t spend that…

Nice, you are on “FIRE” by the looks of things. Impressed with both the income and that frugal setup!

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

#88

Post by itscodingtime »

Threads 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 paid well considering our benefits and pto compared to the average software developer. His argument is that outside of FAANG, salaries for the average developer aren’t that much higher than ours. And if they are, the working conditions are worst. He also believes FAANG employees are working more than 80 hours work, or they are super better than “public sector employees” so that’s why they command higher pay. I don’t buy the last one.

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

#89

Post by Hermitian909 »

giantg2 wrote: post #66
Hermitian909 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with this directionally but think you're a little over-pessimistic. First, IME it suffices to join an organization poised for rapid growth. This can still happen in large tech companies. Second, while luck matters, there's also stuff you can do to increase your chances of being picked for career growth roles. I'm at a growth company. Recently a relatively new engineer was picked to lead a project over some mo…

I guess degree of pessimism is an opinion that depends on how shitty one's experience has been.

Sure, it is entirely possible to get screwed over with no recourse. That said, my lived experience is that most of the time people in high growth orgs think they're being unfairly screwed they're really grappling with their revealed preference to stay in their comfort zone rather than obtain career growth.

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

#90

Post by brg »

angarg12 wrote: post #74
giantg2 wrote: 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.

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.
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