Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

review.firstround.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 164 posts

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

#91

Post by aristus »

71a54xd wrote: post #50
aristus wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also a heavy case of survivor bias, but my career history was also imperfect around the same time as OP when I applied to Facebook. No college degree, born in the wrong city and economic level, etc. I had a huge bit of luck working for a startup in early 2000s that was acquired by Yahoo (ha ha shut up). They overworked me and even screwed me out of my promised shares but I had that pip on my CV. Went to work at a cou…

Thanks for your thoughts. I feel lost because I get the impression from my resume I look like damaged goods. I've had some recruiters give me solid pointers on my resume and things have improved slightly - but right now I feel like I'm spinning my wheels and wasting time trying to "make a living" doing this like I used to. Making less than my initial FAANG offer after college also hurts.

Listen. I don't know you and you don't know me. But I know and you should know that no one is "goods", damaged or otherwise. You are not a broken toy. You are not and never have been a box of clever tricks arranged wrongly or rightly. You are a person, with talents and dreams and all the other things that you should never forget you have that make you a person.

Labor markets are sometimes shit. Sometimes the skills you have are no longer in fashion. I don't know the answer to your situation. But, from experience, I suggest that if things are tight then the thing to do is find work that pays the bills today but also build skills that will pay off tomorrow. Life is long and it's only an always up elevator for the lucky few.

I don't have specific advice, but I've found that it helps to analyze the business your company is in in the same way you would analyze the code on your screen. What are the inputs and outputs? What makes it all work? Etc. if nothing else, that might help understand why the labor market is shit, and what you personally can do about it.

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

#92

Post by idontwantthis »

coffeebeqn wrote: post #77
bojo wrote: post #52

Earlier 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

I’d probably make the same choice, but I haven’t had the offer yet.

I’m curious what do you expect to happen to your salary over the years if you stay at the same level? Or are you able to be promoted and remain an IC?

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

#93

Post by null0pointer »

itscodingtime wrote: post #88

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 pa…

I went to a FAANG at a similar point in my career to where you are now. More than tripled my pay. I firmly believe that any dev can get in if they practice enough leetcode problems. We are not special. I say go for it if you want it.

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

#94

Post by weeblewobble »

throw3823423 wrote: post #59
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.

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…

Very good wisdom here. Especially the part about your manager’s manager liking your manager. I’ve always been happiest working for managers that were politically savvy and had “juice”.

If your manager is on the precipice of being fired you’re in a bad spot. This is also true of PMs. At mega corps you can and should change teams but in a rocket ship company there probably are no processes for that and even bringing it up is risky.

I don’t really have any advice here other than to be aware of it. My last job I got hired on to work under a guy with a lot of juice but then six months later he got promoted and I ended up with a rookie manager. Maybe I should have made a stink back then

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

#95

Post by fhd2 »

bojo wrote: post #52
siliconc0w wrote: post #29

I 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…

> 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. Now I'm thinking the thing I truly need, and want to pass on to my children, is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances and stay resilient.

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

#96

Post by ngc248 »

itscodingtime wrote: post #88

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 pa…

If you join companies like HPE, Dell etc you can probably double your pay and still have good WLB. FAANG are outliers with regards to pay. There are other tech focused companies like the ones I mentioned above which still pay above average and have good WLB.

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

#97

Post by yieldcrv »

cebert wrote: post #60
yodsanklai wrote: post #51

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?

> how do you explain having 15-20 years experience as a software developer with no career progression?

by deleting the old information on your resume and online profiles, and keeping it at just the last 6 years

everyone hiring 8-10+ years is thinking you have a mythical level of capabilities, not just "coding professionally for that many years"

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

#98

Post by filoleg »

weeblewobble wrote: post #94
throw3823423 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Very good wisdom here. Especially the part about your manager’s manager liking your manager. I’ve always been happiest working for managers that were politically savvy and had “juice”. If your manager is on the precipice of being fired you’re in a bad spot. This is also true of PMs. At mega corps you can and should change teams but in a rocket ship company there probably are no processes for that and even bringing it…

> I’ve always been happiest working for managers that were politically savvy and had “juice”.

Never even considered that until this moment. But now that I am thinking in retrospect about the previous teams I worked on, it rings 100% true. Even when the manager's manager wasn't super into the manager, as long as the manager was savvy and had "juice", it was always enjoyable work, and things (such as actual progress on deliverables, good decisions, etc.) always happened. I just could never pinpoint until now why those specific times felt the best.

Ironically, the only time I had an absolutely incompetent manager and a pretty savvy and great manager's manager, it was awful. The only saving grace was that the manager's manager eventually moved the manager into a different role in a different part of the org after an explosive argument. But that stretch was probably the most standstill and stagnated period of my career.

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

#99

Post by piva00 »

brg wrote: post #90
angarg12 wrote: post #74

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.

In my experience that's not really the reality. Career progression is a game, each big org has their set of rules for it, the people I've seen progress fastest are usually the ones who figured out the game, how to tick the right boxes, how to show to the decision-makers that the boxes were ticked, not necessarily by being absolutely reliable or having a big impact.

Usually they jump into the projects that have more visibility or hype, focus their work on the aspects the org considers most valuable for the "next step in the ladder" and jump ship to a different team/project/department as soon as possible.

I've seen that both on engineering and product sides, most of the people I worked with that progressed quickly in their career weren't actually reliable, at least not reliable to the people they worked closely with: they jumped ship to other teams/parts of the org as soon as possible, leaving just a trail of half-done initiatives that were just good enough to tick the boxes needed for a promotion.

Doing a good job is secondary to this, sometimes doing a good job aligns with the box-ticking, sometimes it doesn't really matter. If you are decent at salesmanship and persuasion, and can get some visibility from the upper echelons the actual delivery will only matter in 1-2 years, by then they're already out and up.

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

#100

Post by Traubenfuchs »

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.

> join a company poised for rapid growth ... getting lucky as they expand

Thanks. Exactly like that. In stable companies that do not grow, promotions are only possible if some dies or leaves. Which, in stable companies, can take FOREVER. I'd argue the majority of companies is like that, the majority of IT positions is like that.

It's easy as to spew clever career advice when you entered a company as senior software engineer at number 40 and became a director 3 years later when the company had 400 employees, but it doesn't mean a whole lot to the majority of people.

Post reply on HN