HN user
You get there by giving back 40-50% to California. The more you give away, the more you earn :)
Joke aside, 5 years of experience get you $300k total compensation per year at a hot company in SF Bay Area.
In which part of the World are you located? A solution to get over your nightmare may be to move somewhere else where competition doesn't exist. Apply where the barriers of entry are lower because of a lack of candidates available around.
This will help you get back to a stable state where you'll be able to slowly work your way back "up". People who do that usually end up way higher that originally planned, when they fight back after a good recovery. You need a change of scenery.
Becoming an engineering manager is not an escape from coding. It’s the opposite. To get there you need to be a top performer, which involves being really good at coding and all the other tasks you’d like to move away from. And then, you get promoted and they take it away from you. The best individual contributors become great managers. You should look into project manager roles instead. This will he a better option for you.
Would you rather die alone in a closed room in front of your computer, or would you rather die in the hands of someone who loves you more than anything else?
Life is all about compromise. If you don't want to compromise on anything, so be it. That means you will spend the rest of your life with yourself. Unless you find the perfect female clone of yourself, which doesn't exist. This is also valid for friends, family, etc. We're all different in this world.
back in the days, I was interviewing over the phone with the hiring manager of a large startup in SF. Basically doing live coding on a shared note pad. The guy started chatting with his colleagues and completely forgot about me. 10 minutes in the exercise I had a bunch of clarifying questions to ask. I kept yelling and calling him over the phone, he did not hear me and kept talking with people around.
15 minutes into the interview I hung up. 15 minutes later he tried to call me back on my phone (apparently he took him 30 minutes total to remember I was interviewing). Got an email from the recruiter mentioning a "connection problem during the interview". Then the day after I got another email from that recruiter saying "I wasn't a great fit for the role:.
I think startups really win the #1 spot when it comes to horrible candidate experiences.
It seems to be a lack of confidence or a miss understanding of the requirements. In other words, no one really understands what has to be done and how to do it properly. If you understand the requirements and have enough knowledge about the domain, you should be able to articulate your thoughts clearly and simply. This goes for code reviews, integrating your work with your peers, splitting the tasks into smaller tasks, convincing someone about a technical choice, etc.
You and the 'ADHD' coworker can't seem to communicate properly about the actual topic (project, tasks, etc.). I'd suggest to sit down together and to go over the requirements. Slowly but surely. If your coworker knows exactly what you're working on and why (and vice versa), then the style shouldn't be the issue. We're all different and we all have different styles. It doesn't really matter.
I burnt out on coding a few years ago because of the painful development process in a professional environment. Dead lines, boring work, bug fixes, politics, micro management, etc. Here is exactly what I did:
1. I quit my full time job (I was working at a FAANG), took a 2 month break in order to travel, work out etc, then I started working on my own projects. I was coding from 7am to 1am from Monday to Sunday, 6 months in a row. This doesn't include coding only, I also worked on UX, marketing, legal, anything involved in building a product from scratch. I enjoyed every minute of it and learned so much...
2. This got me into Product Management. I started focusing on product management only and started bootstrapping the whole thing to iterate on more ideas. It ended up not working so well so I started applying for PM roles. I got some opportunities here and there but they weren't as good as I wanted. Being a Tech lead having to start at the bottom of the PM chain. It felt like I was over qualified for an entry level role and would not get qualified for a Senior PM role because of a lack of "PM" experience.
3. So I went back to coding for a large company as a lead.
4. Quickly transitioned into Management and moved away from coding again.
There you have it. Coding became a second nature but I can't be as productive as I used to be in the past. So why would I try to compete against young and fresh people? I found out I was more valuable in designing systems, optimizing existing infrastructures, asking questions young engineers don't really think about because of a lack of experience. The act of coding per-se isn't for me anymore. That's it. There are many ways to move away from coding without losing all your valuable years of experience.
Since you generally don't mention your salary on your Resume, simply put it as a regular work experience. You may want to specify "full-time" versus "part-time" but it doesn't really help. This is only if someone asks you about this specific experience that you can give more details.
Remember, a Resume is a showcase of things you've done and would like to share with the world. We don't mention everything on a Resume. As long as everything is legit, you're good to go. Avoid going into too many details as it makes it confusing for a recruiter and you may get penalized for that. Show case what you've done during your part time experience under the same employer (when you were full time).
Sure, by real faces I mean pitching your product to people directly. Not necessarily over the Internet but in person. This is a step that is often missed by a lot of tech people wannabe entrepreneurs (including myself). We think the Internet is a magic place where you can launch anything from your bedroom and reach millions of people if you use the right marketing strategy (ads on youtube, cold emails, viral strategy, gamification, etc). I call this the scaling phase. You can't scale nothing. If you have zero user and zero customer, what do you want to scale?
So step zero consist on acquiring your first customer/user. This is usually when having a non-tech co-founder or someone who's good at selling would make a huge difference. We always bypass this step of acquiring the first customers, it's only when you build something and ship it that you hit a wall. You will not rank in google at first, no one will ever mention your name and the only queries you'll get on your SaaS or whatever product you have will come from your own IP. That's what I'm talking about. You just launched, now what?
So you need to go out there and "manually" pitch your product to people. Introduce yourself, tell your story, prove people what you've built is what they want. You would usually fail capturing the needs at first because of a lack of interaction with your targeted users, you will build something that isn't exactly what they want. So you need to quickly adapt to that early feedback, which is why going out there and trying out your MVP or prototype very quickly is a key to success. This is what I mean by "people need to see real faces". You could pitch your product to your mom, friends, potential users, potential partners who could help you move to the next step, etc.
The best way to find out "how to found a company as a single founder" is to give it a shot. You'll basically collect all the answers to your question.
This perk is a dangerous perk :) Some people love it some hate it.
This pretty much sums up everything. I had a similar problem trying to sell my products. If you're a solo founder learn how to sell first. Finding cool marketing strategies is great, but people need to see real faces before buying your products. It is not always true, but in general that is what I've seen so far.
Yes it is. As long as we'll have Websites on the Internet we'll need Web developers. It is a great place to be still. I used to do that then I got burnt out by the stack, which keeps changing every 6 months.
The easiest place to start as a developer in 2019 is Web.
A few weird ones I've seen in Silicon Valley:
- Bring your dog at the office
- $20K credit to freeze your eggs (for women)
- In-house bar with barista training for employees
- Indoor garden where you can grow your own plant at the office
etc.
You can't say "always". This doesn't make sense either because it's on a case by case basis. You could have a simple product used by billions of people, which doesn't require many devs, or you could have a complicated infrastructure no one knows about that gets billions of requests from 10 other products per day. This could be handled by an army of engineers.
Is your hot product in a maintenance mode? If so, just a few devs can handle it.
Then you have companies with groups like retail, legal, hardware, etc. They require tones of software engineers to build internal tools. They definitely don't reach billions of users and you see a lot of these teams. What I found out while working at some of the Faang's is that the hottest teams are usually very lean. You'd be surprised how one single rock star engineer can handle. When you start having +10k engineers in your company, only a minority of folks will end up working on the hot stuff.
Now let's look at the ration billion-user-products versus the total number of products. That'll give you the ration of employees having a huge impact:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_products
And we're not even looking at the number of active users per product versus the total amount of gmail ID's enabled for all google products by default (e.g. Google+)
You can innovate in many different areas. For example code reviews, CI/CD pipelines, sharing knowledge across the organization. It seems that Google as a pretty solid engineering culture but it doesn't really innovate much like a lot of other large tech companies. Standards are meant to be broken.
Reality is that most of the engineers at Google don't work on google search nor google map. They work on "smaller" projects that don't necessarily reach billions of users. It doesn't change the fact that everything has to be engineered in order to work for a large amount of users, true, but do you really get that reach? nope unless you're in a very hot and selective team at G.
Also, your statement is valid for companies like Facebook, Uber, Apple, Amazon, etc. It is not a valid argument anymore in my opinion. But I totally get your point.
Great advice from people here but I'm gonna try to provide as much value as I can on top of that. Read books, listen to others, get a mentor, blablabla. Do that for sure because it is the bare minimum. Unfortunately, this is not enough. Here is how an individual gets into management and becomes a great engineering manager (the "great" part is essential):
1- The individual would grab the most annoying task no one else wants to work on and would close it while staying positive
2- The individual is often used as the go-to person when a decision has to be made, or critical information is missing in a project
3- The individual has a great relationship with most of the people around (known as a friendly and respectful person)
4- The individual is wiling to help others behind the scene and doesn't look for any gratification other than making sure people learned something while being helped
5- The individual has made multiple decisions that appear to be great decision after all (probably the most important point).
If you fall into all this categories, you'll be just fine. It is a constant learning process as opposed to being an engineer. Why? because the process changes constantly, there's actually no process at all. If you learn a pattern, a language or a framework once, you can re-apply the same process for the new upcoming stuff. As a manager, every day is a new day. If you're a shark who produces a lot of output and burns a lot of relationships along the way, chances are, you'll most likely get promoted, but you'll fall into the large pool of bad managers. There are more bad managers than good managers out there. If you don't have the 5 qualities mentioned above, work on that prior to switching to management. That's my best advice.
Other than the 20 percent free time, compensation and offices, the engineering culture at Google doesn’t seem to have anything special based on this well written pdf. It is in fact very similar to other large tech companies. Just in case you were still wondering what really attracts great engineers.
The only way to attract co-founders in SF is to create value. An idea and a Resume alone have no value. Build something and showcase it. You'll create real opportunities and you'll become a magnet.
any question would be eligible for that. What if you don't spit out the exact answer your interviewer is excepting? Well, you're out.
stocktwits.com
I think you forgot Digg, the first one that blew up and made karma voting popular. It was not the first one to use karma though, like google wasn't the 1st search engine. But before google a lot of folks didn't even know about search engines... Most concepts on the Web existed way before the Internet anyway.
Mobile wasn't that hot in 2010, then in 2013 it reached its pick (companies shifting their entire businesses to mobile). Finally, in 2018 it slowed down by a lot. We've noticed a similar trend with AI lately. AI is at its pick right now. Today, companies have dedicated mobile teams that are fairly independent from the rest. They aren't connected directly to the business of a company but they still have a huge impact for sure. You'd be surprised to learn that 80% of the traffic of company X comes from mobile and that mobile team has only 10 folks in it... Very lean, versus 100 folks working on Web and infrastructure.
If you switch today it's fine, you'll get a lot of opportunities as an iOS dev assuming you're really good at it. The bar is higher than Web, usually iOS devs know their stuff pretty well and ask tricky questions. If you've only built little apps, you may have to study a lot more (more advanced topics) before applying to jobs.
If you're looking for freelance jobs only, you'll be fine as long as you're not working with technical people. You can still hack your way around and build apps that aren't really optimized. As long as it does the job.
Steps to reproduce, Screenshots, verions/setup, expected behavior and output, priority (high, low, etc), category (UI, functional, etc).
That’s it.
First of all, congratulations! I've had a similar situation (with less money) but still, I went through the exact same exercise. You have 2 choices basically, you can keep working or you can retire.
When I say keep working I mean working for someone. Let someone dictate your day, week and year. Some people need structure in life to function properly so if you're one of them, I'd highly recommend you to get another job at another company in order to learn new things. Ideally, you'd study a new position in between so you wouldn't get bored too quickly. Switch to Product, design, or dev for example. You're not chasing for high incomes so that allows you to come in as an "entry level". You seem to be humble so that could fit you well. But definitely look for new challenges since you'll be spending most of your time at work. There's also the entrepreneurial route but I'd put that into the second bucket.
Retirement. Unfortunately, unlike you, I could not simply retire from the 9-5 life. When I say retirement I mean not having to work for anyone. What I would do is to work on my own projects and take a year or 2 to explore different domains and ideas until I'd find something promising I'd be deeply passionate about. Needless to say you'd be learning every day.
In terms of what to do with your money? Here is exactly what I'd do personally. I'd put $5 million into government bonds with a 100% guaranteed return of about 2.5-3%. That would bring you about $150k of passive income per year for the rest of your life (based on inflation rate). That's it! I'd move to a not too expensive place and I'd still have $3 million dollars left. I'd actually split it in 3 in your case. $1 million for each of your kids. For each kid I'd split it like this: 50% into a more aggressive portfolio like stocks, then 50% into bonds. I don't know how old your kids are but the idea is to lock these accounts until they get old enough to understand the value of money. With your million dollar left, I'd buy a new house for about $300-400k. Then I'd leave the rest into a savings account to be used for fun, big purchases, etc.
- For someone fresh out of college: Don't change anything, the current process is perfectly designed for college grads. So Leetcode it is and whatever the google's, facebook's, etc, are currently using to hire "the best of the bests".
- For someone with 2 to 5 years of experience: A candidate should have a choice between a full day onsite, working with the hiring team on a mini feature or a bug fix. Or, a 1 week project assignment with a shared/public repo between the hiring team and the candidate. In this case the candidate could work remotely on the evenings/weekend. Code should be reviewed and pushed into the repo at the end of the assignment period. Collaboration along the way is highly recommended for the candidate. The hiring team should be at least available to answer the candidate during the process. The onsite would ONLY be a lunch with the team to get to know each other. If the candidate chose the 1 week assignment, he or she would have to stop by for the last step if everything went well, which would also be a lunch with the team to get to know each other.
- For someone with 5 to 10 years of experience: Same as 2 to 5 years of experience, but would involve more technical choices from the candidate. This could also be a feature or a product optimization task, etc. Requirements have to be very high level and the candidate has to make design choices and define a scope as well as delivering a working prototype. If the candidate is closer to 10 years of experience, he or she should assign a coding task to at least one member of the hiring team and make sure to help and review the work. This process could also work for +10 years of experience as a Dev, or even a "Tech Lead".
- For an engineering manager: No Leetcode please! Stop now! :) The candidate should take over the current sprint from the hiring team, or part of it. This could also be a sprint exclusively designed for the interview process. Stories could be made up or could be real stories from the team backlog. This could be a 1 week project assignment. As a Hiring manager you should be able to keep track of stories and to host standup meetings remotely with the team (5-10 min conference calls all week for example). The team would simulate blocking issues and conflicts between peers and the descriptions of these problems would be sent to the candidate for review. You would have to show up onsite and host 1-1's with the related folks in order to go over these problems to try to fix them. This would also include a team meeting to share the status of the project with everyone. During this day onsite, they might also simulate a mini hiring process for a new Developer. Team members would be the actual candidates and you would be the interviewer (a quick 15 min interview for each candidate). Other hiring managers would be involved in this process as well where you would discuss about the candidates and make a final decision.
That's it. As you can tell, this would require companies to do a lot the work in order to set that up. Unfortunately, not enough energy is allocated to hiring new people. Companies rely on the existing and broken process started by Google in the late 90's... this was the only company asking academic and weird puzzles to candidates. Also, I cut a lot of corners because my post is already way too long, but you get the picture...
Sharing your personal experience on CNBC is much more powerful than IG and FB. What’s the difference though? Having a need to share our opinions and personal life is the reason why social platforms exist in the first place. The real problem is us, not software companies.
The answer is the same as the one 3-5 years ago. The only main difference today is that almost everybody knows about cryptocurrencies now. More adoption, more regulations, more projects, etc.
Really, nothing as changed in terms of the future and potential of crypto, just a lot of positive things happened inbetween.
Oh, prices haves gone up and down too, but who cares.