I generally enjoy Dan Luu’s advice, but IMO it’s best approached with the understanding that his professional and social network is somewhat of a bubble that doesn’t reflect the average person.
Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with significant programming/math or other such experience.
I do a lot of mentoring of college grads. If anyone shows an interest in Big Tech I always encourage them to apply and help them get the process started. However, it is not my experience that 50% of your average (or even above average as mentoring programs tend to select for the more ambitious) CS grads are walking into something like a Big Tech ML job with no relevant experience.
Always apply if you’re curious. If nothing else, you will learn the interview process and see where you need to improve for next time. However, don’t feel bad if you don’t get the dream job right away. Most people really do have to pivot up through some more average jobs first before landing the Big Tech jobs with huge paychecks.
> Most people really do have to pivot up through some more average jobs first before landing the Big Tech jobs with huge paychecks.
But the assertion here is that too many “pivoting up” jobs are a negative indicator. (An “upper class” programmer wouldn’t spend time in the “lower” classes.)
Not saying I agree or disagree with this, but the existence of a class system in tech jobs is the OP’s central point.
Edit: The OP says it clearly:
> In many ways, having no experience is better than having the wrong experience because people don't unfairly prejudge you for having the wrong experience.
As advice for hiring managers this twitter thread is very actionable: stop judging people harshly for working their way up.
As advice for candidates who want to work at TrendyCo outside of what's itself a very elite "class" of people he anecdotally knows, it's not very useful: "try for that exciting job you want, and if you can't get it then, sure, take any job." Here's the problem with that advice: the class system is already in play before even your first job.
What colleges do you think fancy tech employers hang out at and recruit at? What internships do you think are going to get your resume past their initial screen? Things like "Microsoft stack, not relevant" and "low profile school" are already a problem for many.
(The broader problem with wanting to work at TrendyCo is that by definition so does everyone else so they're going to be drowning in applications and have to resort to some stupid/arbitrary process to filter things down.)
Colleges are less impactful for trendy tech companies than they are for finance or whatever. I went to a no-name state school and could get into these things. If you really did an internship programming at Walgreens, it's easy enough to omit it from your resume.
Is the "state degree" vs. "Ivy League degree" thing that common in US society?
I ask because I've just joined an American company, and a person mentioned that they'd been hired and given a chance to excel "despite only having a state degree, much to my Mom's disgust", which surprised me.
In my country, there's not much difference between the respective universities in terms of 'prestige'.
Anecdotal, but as a hiring manager, I've interacted with only one person from Harvard, he was very impressed with himself and knew how to talk but when we asked him to do a small test project (we paid him for), the work he did was really not great. He took a long time to deliver something that barely worked, didn't follow best practices/common idioms of the framework he was using (framework that he selected by himself and supposedly had 2 years of experience in). He was also extremely aggressive in salary negotiations which is fine if you can deliver (and I know people who made a lot of money by being good at salary negotiation) but less so when you can't.
I've worked with quite a few MIT graduates and overall they've all been very good at what they do. So, sample size of one in the case of Harvard but I think Ivy leagues are not all created equal for a given major.
People sometimes get the impression that Ivies are about admitting only the best and brightest. But there are exceptions. Legacy admission, donor influence diversity picks. Also, I say diversity but I don't just mean race based picks. They are trying to build a student body that isn't made of people who all like the same sport for example. They need to fill out the various clubs.
I think the engineering based elite schools like MIT, Caltech or Stanford are probably a safer bet.
I also think being great in the academic world way different from the "real world" and there can be an adjustment period. I know there was for me!
> Is the "state degree" vs. "Ivy League degree" thing that common in US society?
In certain circles, yes.
Usually these circles have many people who have gone to Ivy League schools — lawyers, financiers, and consultants are professional communities in which a sub-group of these folks can commonly be found (esp. in the Northeast Corridor).
Note that some of the perceived discrepancy is misplaced. Most/all top students at pretty much any flagship state school would fit in quite naturally at Ivy League schools (probably top half at least, tbh). They probably just didn’t want to go to an Ivy or didn’t want to jump through the right hoops to get into one. Most people either find themselves accidentally doing things that Ivies like (winning something or doing something of note at a regional, national, or international level), or they make a concerted effort to do so.
If anyone has been in that system and taken a look around, it’s not hard to see the patterns that are needed to drastically increase the likelihood of getting admitted. Great grades and high SATs alone just doesn’t cut it.
The doors that elite schools (esp. the top ivies and Stanford) open to its members is impressive, imho. Is this fair? No. Is it the present reality. Yes. I expect it will remain this way for decades to come.
In terms of prestige, I will add that there are quite a lot of Ivy League students/grads who don’t come across as being very smart (they are smart enough, but definitely won’t blow you away or win any awards for intellect), but their “prestige” probably comes from something else (sports is very, very common, and demonstrated strong leadership is a huge winner).
As a side note, I will add that the American system is the opposite of Japan, Korea, and China, where the most prestigious universities are all national public universities.
To most people, there really isn't much of a distinction - what you accomplish is far more important than where you went to school.
To others, it is everything. I know someone whose mother constantly tells her that she is a dumb failure because she didn't go to Harvard (she went to Stanford).
I mean, maybe somewhere? I’ve interacted with precisely one Harvard graduate and he was the brother in law of my CEO boss who had gone to a state school. Even the best “Ivy League Feeder” private school in my city of 2 million has maybe 2 students a year go to an Ivy League. A guy I went to school with got a 1600 on his SAT (max score nationwide college entrance test) and wasn’t accepted to Harvard in 2004.
My wife grew up in New York on Long Island in a relatively good public school system with doctors engineers and lawyers children, and I don’t think any of her peers went to an Ivy League school.
I’m sure somewhere there’s groups of people who expect their children to go to Ivy League but man, I’ve never met them. They don’t hang out with us normal riff raff.
I went to UCSD (a public university) for undergrad and then Stanford for grad school (PhD). Both programs were CS.
In my opinion, the average CS undergrad at UCSD is honestly not that different from Stanford. At Stanford, there are a few truly, truly brilliant undergrad students; and possibly more than a school like UCSD. But you'll still find more than zero of those at UCSD, and it's not as if you're swimming in them at Stanford.
Having said that, there is definitely a difference in perception. People (especially people who haven't actually gone to Stanford) seem to expect everyone to be extraordinary at Stanford, even if most of the students are "just" modestly smart.
At Stanford, I had a startup founder walk into my office and just start pitching. I'm not sure what they expected to accomplish, but I thanked them and sent them on their way.
I've also met starry-eyed VCs who seemed to be of the impression that everyone in CS is starting a startup, and that I would (as a CS grad student) just be connected to all these people.
Anyway, overall my impression is that the difference in skill isn't that dramatic, but perception doesn't always match reality.
It's easy to get caught up in the game of college admissions as a parent. It's actually kind of a problem where kids get encouraged to shoulder a bunch of debt instead of just going to the also great state school that would be a fraction of the cost.
"Wrong kind of experience is worse than no experience" is an interesting concept.
It implies that the people thinking like this think that people aren't mutable. With no experience, you're a tabula rasa, but once you've been carved, that's it, fixed in stone.
Which may be true for some people, but I'm fairly certain that humans are known for their adaptability, their willingness to learn.
At least that's why they get more skill points per level in D&D.
> With no experience, you're a tabula rasa, but once you've been carved, that's it, fixed in stone.
I mean, if you work in a company/team with bad practices, then that's likely to rub off onto you and affect your further employment prospects, because it will be hard to unlearn being okay with untestable code, no documentation and even the code itself not being self-documenting where possible, the code being not scalable, having N+1 problems and so on.
It can also happen that the person learns "this doesn't work well, this also doesn't, this too -- I wish we were doing everything differently!"
And later, when joining a better company, s/he more deeply understands the reasons behind their good practices -- because s/he has seen the mess, without.
Having seen and lived in mistakes, is life experience, can be useful. Depends on the person
> And later, when joining a better company, s/he more deeply understands the reasons behind their good practices -- because s/he has seen the mess, without.
There are two assumptions here:
1. that the person will be accepted into that better company, even with these pre-existing sub-optimal practices which may manifest in a coding interview or a take-home task
2. that the person will be open to learning these better practices, instead of being set in their ways, after having had their first experiences shape their views without the desire to challenge them
I agree that there is definitely potential for growth, but in some respects, for certain individuals such pre-existing views might be a liability. Though that also speaks of one's quality as an engineer, of course.
No, you're kidding?! Thanks for clarifying that, that explains why when I was rolling my D20 for persuasion checks in stores, they kept asking me to leave.
FAANG isn't looking for experience at all. They want smart fresh college grads - better schools first. They have a large army of middle management ready to grind them until they either quit or promote up to middle management. They put a lot of time and money into this well oiled machine. Taking on senior devs is a waste of their time, they don't have the processes or culture to integrate them - and seniors have an ability to say "no". This could be toxic. Fresh grads just take orders and start doing what the culture wants. Sure, there is a few spots for extremely specific niches - eg. you wrote podman, and they need to convert to podman yesterday. The only real hope, if you aren't a fresh faced grad is to get acquired - for some reason you get a pass from all interview hazing and drama [tons of friends in this group]. FAANGSs will also take in anyone from another FAANG at any stage in the career (nothing gives them sweeter pleasure than harming another FAANG).
Stats? The average age at google is 29 years old. Which means half of their company is YOUNGER than that - and by 29 you better be a middle manager bobble head.
I think it's useful to distinguish the behavior of FAANG [0] as a collective vs. any individual FAANG company. FAANG as a collective almost exclusively hires recent college grads, who work there until retirement [1]. Any individual FAANG company is constantly hiring senior devs, who work there for ~2 years before going to a different individual FAANG company for a pay raise (or for various other reasons). Some FAANGs (or at least some teams) are meat grinders, but my impression is that that's pretty far from the norm.
[0] Meaning those 5 specific companies + other large tech companies that compete with them for talent + startups comprised of people from those companies.
[1] Leaving in your thirties to become a carpenter or open a restaurant or whatever still counts as retirement if you have enough in the bank to never have to work again.
FANGS hire plenty of senior talent especially on the infrastructure side, but there is a core challenge of what ever senior means.
I've seen many senior people get managed out due to performance as the game is much harder. Perhaps, it is needlessly hard. However Price's Law applies and is soul crushing.
"FANGS hire plenty of senior talent" Following this logic the median/mean age would not be 29. But we know it is - since that number is from lawsuits which did their due diligence with court ordered discovery. The other way to follow this logic is that age and experience is not correlated. EG. A 23 year old developer could be senior. Maybe this is the case?
There's a fat pipe of people in the E3-E5 range, but it starts to drop at E6 and even more so at E7, and E8/E9 are unicorns. The median is going to be in the E3-E4 range as there is a tremendous amount of churn there for performance reasons.
This is why the question of "what is a senior engineer?" is so important. FANGs are thirsty for E6+ and they hire plenty of them, but there are not enough of them in the world as it's hard to become one without credentials from another FANG.
Part of the reason for this is that there are not many big tech companies that marshal similar forces. For instance, a E6 may be responsible for designing a $50,000,000 system which is definitely a rare skill.
Unfortunately, the senior title is basically useless across the industry. Does it mean time spent doing stuff? Well, time spent doing what? With what kind of budget? What kind of responsibility? What kind of operational burden?
The cruelty of reality is Price's Law comes in for a double whammy. First, for humanity, there are only so many big tech endeavors that investors/customers support so the scope is limited in the number of companies that have big challenges. Second, within a company, there are only so many big-tech problems.
The hardest part of my job was creating scope that was relevant for the business, and I left as an E8 where my great pride was helping two people achieve E7 and a swath of people achieve E6. I was not creative enough to create the scope for another E8.
I tried, failed, and bounced to create room for someone else.
Doesn’t Netflix only hire people senior engineers though? Perhaps you’d disagree about the definition of senior.
It probably is true that new grads are preferred and are more malleable into the company culture.
It feels to me that hiring from competitors is less about harming other companies and more about the signal that people know how to deal with the various ways big companies may work.
If the median(?) age at Google is 29, isn’t that a combination of (a) growing a lot and (b) hiring a lot of new grads? Then it’s mostly a function of the average % of the size of the company you hire each year at 22 years old.
The ML thing would not surprise me at all. ML is so hot that if you know the buzzwords and have done some hello world project, someone will give you a job. It is very much like "html coding" in 1999 and will probably have the same outcome.
Are those positions real? It feels like once the model didn't work if you did not have the background to know why it wasn't working then you'd be in trouble real quick.
I mean the gap between understanding how to use different models effectively and developing new ones is massive. One is like sophomore year undergrad engineering, the other is like masters/PHD.
And "understanding how to use the models effectively" is being generous for what gets a lot of these people in the door.
I have no idea how these folks find their jobs when many top talents are struggling, but beyond getting in the door as a hire I've seen it get back out the door as a product (ML footgun as a service?).
I don't have any hard numbers on this, but it's not rare.
My company gets an absolute a glut of applicants who did a Boot Camp or even Masters program into science, and rejects most before interviewing. We’re not Google either, in pay or prestige. So I’ll strongly object to your characterization based on extensive anecdotal evidence.
Why? I did an engineering undergrad and MSCS part time so I could take some fun classes I wished to take in undergrad. What’s the negative signal in general?
The enormous majority of Master’s degrees awarded in most fields are for taught Master’s that bear far more resemblance to undergraduate study than Ph.D. preparation. Unless you know someone has a degree that is only possible to get if you were admitted to a Ph.D. programme the assumption should be that it’s a cat cow. There are exceptions, like GA Tech’s OMSCS, but unless you have excellent reason to believe otherwise an MA or MS can be assumed to be a university’s cash grab.
> The enormous majority of Master’s degrees awarded in most fields are for taught Master’s that bear far more resemblance to undergraduate study than Ph.D. preparation.
That's a very US-centric assumption that's wrong for Europe, Russia, the better universities in China, India etc. Some masters are 100% research, some 100% taught, some are a mix, some are highly specialized, some are all-round, some are interdisciplinary, some have internships. You're aware of that, right? Not all countries' university systems balance their books by farming foreign MS students in short 100% taught courses. Some of them actually do legit research.
You bring us to a related point: most US recruiters and sourcers, and many programmers, don't know how to evaluate credentials of applicants or institutions from the rest of world, especially the parts that don't speak English as first language. If the applicant is from (say) a 2nd/3rd-tier part of China and did their MS(/BS) there, and unless their parents were rich, raw English fluency is not a very good proxy for subject-matter knowledge, only for their parents' wealth level. I've worked with some brilliant people who didn't come across sounding that competent in interviews, but were great programmers. Many candidates don't sit the GRE/GSAT. (Beware of builtin cultural assumptions and biases in assessing applicants. It took me years to figure out which ones.)
Are you speculating that orzig meant to say "a Master's degree in CS" instead of "even Masters program into science"? Are they somebody you know personally?
> In my experience, an MS degree has been one of the strongest indicators of poor technical interview performance.
> Whereas MS degrees used to be a means for departments to begin vetting future PhD students, I believe that the purpose has, in some ways, shifted to be a cash cow for the university in question.
> Part of the problem is that CS fundamentals instruction tends to happen in undergrad computer science courses.
> One tempting option is to try to get an MS from a top computer science school to legitimize yourself on paper. If you actually are passionate about programming, I would urge you not to do that
Perhaps you posted this comment on the wrong thread? I'm pretty sure orzig isn't Aline Lerner, because she's the CEO of a recruiting company who used to work in engineering, and orzig says in a recent comment that they are an American engineer. So what could Lerner's viewpoint on MS degrees possibly have to do with unpacking what orzig meant to write when they said "even Masters program into science"?
I notice you haven't answered either of the questions I asked you in my comment, which seems like a pretty hostile attitude to me.
Yes, that’s kind of the point. Recruiting is hilariously broken in every industry. Tech is unusually open, transparent and meritocratic. If you can somehow internalise Cracking the Coding Interview or otherwise grind leetcode hard and get an interview you have a good chance at a very well paying job. But there are many, many people chasing those jobs so people use coarse heuristics to winnow down the piles of cvs, among them ranking Bachelors degrees in CS above Masters degrees from the same institutions.
My experience working in big tech is that the bar for actually getting an interview for the junior positions is actually relatively low, and your standardized interview performance matters 10x more than the content of your resume. Some people apply for L3 out of college, some people after many years of experience. I’ve never seen someone turned down for “too much of the wrong experience”, what more often happens is that the ruts they got into from their previous job start to show and it affects their interview performance.
What I see happen though is people get downleveled. It’s hard to get senior at FAANG without big tech experience, let alone staff+. So if you spend your career somewhere else and try to switch to FAANG after, say, 10 years, you’ll end up getting down leveled. Now, you’re probably making more money, so maybe this doesn’t matter.
Yeah, similar story for me. "Senior engineer" at failed startup into Founder/CTO at other failed startup. Then L3 at Snap into L4 at G. No hard feelings whatsoever. We're all moving pixels and pushing buttons for money, I try not to get too caught up in the promo game; much more interesting stuff in life outside the screen.
Honestly, with no experience how would you even know what your dream job was? I had some clue how good I had it, but that was at a philosophical level ("I'm very fortunate to be here blah blah blah.") Once "it" was taken away, I started to understand at a more visceral level. And yet there are aspects that I only managed to unpack last year, which makes me wonder what I'll notice next year.
Eh, even if it’s an anecdote, it comes off as actionable advice: “make sure you apply to Google/Amazon/Facebook as your safety jobs, since you’ve got a 50% chance of getting in there anyway.”
Transitioning out of a career in HS education and seeking a path in PM. Looking for useful prep references and remote referrals if anyone is willing to extend a hand.
This website [0] might be helpful. Guy says he went from being a kindergarten teacher to a marketer at Apple. The website is meant to sell his courses. I bet there is some useful info, and at the least it should be a confidence boost that it's possible.
Every PM I have met pivoted from a technical or front line role. External hires for PMs without direct prior experience are probably lottery-esque happenings.
Well, given my anecdotal, and oddly specific, experience with educators seeking to enter tech-adjacent roles I assumed that PM meant Project Manager.
Either way, entering tech industry right now is a tough proposition and I would personally advise anyone looking at doing so to case as wide a net as possible, as moving between roles in-industry tends to be much easier.
Former teacher of mine sought their PMP to become a project manager, ran into issues getting the certification, I think they got their CAPM eventually and ended up getting an unrelated role at an accounting firm.
Their reasoning for going after a project manager role however was basically that the job was identical to their current responsibilites as department 'lead' creating curriculum, lesson plans, etc.
I have then gone on to see their comparisons between project management and teaching echoed in various forms online by various educators seeking to find something more financially rewarding.
I came to look into the role based on the advice of a current PM I know at a mid-size tech company. I've also been talking to others in UX/UXR and Customer Success.
Those conversations did support the transferable skills argument for education>PM though I'm currently in the interview pipeline for a position as a Solutions Architect (which, in actual responsibilities, is somewhere between PM and Customer Success and not at all in line with job postings for SA at other companies). Thanks.
I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev.
I have been able to interview with fortune 500 companies and get offers.
I have been getting contacted by recruiters from hot startups, Microsoft, Google, AWS, Amazon and Meta.
I am not sure if I'm stupid but I really don't know how "no experience" can be better than wrong experience. There is always things you learn, better negotiation tactics, your value to a business, and all the mistakes you have made.
This sounds like, "if you don't work for these tech companies, you are doing programming wrong". There are many ways to be successful and this POV is toxic imo.
Edit: I would love to hear what the wrong experience is.
People who agree with the post also say things like "i don't hire people with certs" in IT. Which is a load of bull of course. They want to teach you their own way and disregard industry practices because they are the best.
What I have learned is this also means they don't want someone who will disrupt or question the status quo.
In infosec for example, I work or worked at a place with a lot of really smart people but they have been at the same company long and the idea of doing things in a layered defense strategy (not perimeter/firewall/ids centric) way is "the wrong way" to them even though that is best practice now. On the other end I keep running into people that have worked at startups like uber for a long time and their answer to threats is "use only macs" or "get everyone a yubikey". No shit? Lol
You can't be experienced and not have some bad experience but managers and people in power disregarding experienced people's opinion's without applying critical thinking is laziness and incompetence.
You need experienced people as well as people with little experience but who are motivated to learn on any good team. It's like a sports team lineup, you don't want everyone having the same skill and experience you want them to have what is right for the position they are playing.
As I read that thread, an engineer--possibly just out of a good school--who does well on interviews is perhaps assumed to be a good hire even though they don't have much experience. (Though maybe they did an interesting project or two.)
On the other hand an engineer who took a job out of school in the IT department of some (perceived) boring stodgy company even if they really aren't (Walmart was mentioned) obviously has something wrong with them in the eyes of some even if it's not obvious what exactly. Better to pass and go for the right new grad who is probably a bit cheaper as well.
The engineer who already has a job at a random company has a known skill level and growth trajectory. The engineer out of a good school has an unknown growth trajectory. Conditioned on the accomplishments of alumni at the school and the (subjective) acceptance bar of the school, the new grad engineer could have a much steeper growth trajectory than the established one.
Silicon Valley got this right on the money ironically [1]. If you have nothing to show, people assume a potential future ability level rather than basing their decisions on your actual ability.
Really? Purely from an outsiders perspective, the last I had heard was they used a healthy mix of java, clojure and nodejs- definitely not stuffy or stodgy at the time.
No ideas what they've been up to the past 5 or so years though.
Edit: granted, I have no idea if they'd any ML type services running, and doubted they were blazing any trails with K8s or the like at the time. Still, it didn't seem all that bad.
Just a side note: FAANG recruiters/startups spam pretty much any developer with buzzwords on their socials (LinkedIn/GH/etc). That’s not necessarily a signal you’re hirable at those companies.
Aren't the technical interviews the primary component at these companies at lower levels though?
Hard to imagine someone with a few years of "the wrong experience" who is well versed technically and can handle the coding interview will consistently fail interviews just because the interviewer doesn't recognize their company.
I'm not speaking to whether one with "the wrong experience" can or cannot pass FAANG-level interviews, I'm just commenting on the recruiter outreach from FAANG or startups (particularly AMZ) don't necessarily know or care about your skill, they only care about the buzzwords listed on your social profile(s) and maintaining a "hot" pipeline; aka getting bodies through the pipeline and hoping not to piss off engineering because of the amount of low quality candidates.
Recruiters are (usually) not technical and/or have never been engineers, so the barrier to the first round (if you've been reached out to) is super low and not necessarily indicative as to whether you have what it takes to make it through the whole loop/offer stage.
I don't disagree, it just seems to me the main barrier of entry is getting the interview in the first place since interviews focus on the technical component, not your resume. So if getting an interview is easy, then it follows that worrying about getting "the wrong experience" is not worthwhile.
I'm mostly responding to the article's claims - not saying you made these claims.
Have never worked for FAANG/MAGMA, but the theory is that if you have `n` years of, say, MUMPS experience at an insurance company, the next candidate with `y` years of Python experience will have a better chance of getting hired---even if `y=0`.
More realistically, you (arguably) have a better chance of getting hired with 3 years of Python exp at a ML startup or whatever, than with 10 years of exp with $unsexy_lang at $unsexy_corp.
> I work for a non-tech company as a solo full stack dev.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you come across this sort of a job? I don't suppose there's a job board for non-tech companies looking to hire a solo full stack dev? :)
I met an older guy in a CS class. We did a project together and became school buddies. Before graduating I wanted to intern somewhere where I would get a lot of freedom. He was high up in a business and decided to offer me an internship.
I did a couple small projects to solve problems they were having. They were successful. I'm now pretty important to the business. I know databases of the ERP system, I have a lot of trust and basically am above the HR and have complete freedom.
When I interview no company is willing to offer the flexibility they do. So, honestly I'm not even sure how one would go about finding a gig like this.
As a hiring manager, I've found entry level roles to be the hardest to fill well. No metric is a guarantee of a quality candidate. I loathe whiteboard programming, but for entry level jobs it's at least a signal that they're putting in the work to figure out how to be successful within a structure.
Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.
I can see how this might equate to having the "wrong experience." I hope candidates who wait to apply for that big dream job (or don't get it) at least are taking jobs that prepare them for it. Barring that, I hope they're finding other ways to gain experience. We can't always choose the jobs we want, but I hope everyone is figuring out how to build towards it.
How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level? They haven't seen what the future paths are really like. This leads to a mentality of "the only safe entry-level candidate is one with five years' experience doing exactly what we do," and I saw that in how one of the places I worked did their hiring. It led to much lower-quality entry-level candidates than if the company had accepted some risk and taken the plunge, recognizing that some of the time it wouldn't work out.
> How should they know where they want to go if they're entry-level?
I think it’s totally reasonable to expect people to have a plan. It’s also totally reasonable, and expected really, for that plan to change over time. But working without a plan, which implies working without goals, is rarely a recipe for success.
This doesn't really match my experience for my own career or as a manager. Plenty of great engineers don't have a plan beyond "learn and get better," including those that have traditionally-successful careers (e.g. director+ at top tech company).
I'd expect that to matter more if you're, say, trying to be a founder - I can see that benefitting from intentional planning. But for careers at big companies, "learn and get better" seems good enough (and if that qualifies as a plan, I don't think I've worked with anyone that doesn't have a plan).
There’s also a difference between not having a plan and not being able to articulate your plan. Articulation is a skill that needs training and people who rarely need it are rarely good at it. I can take people who have strong plans and train them to articulate it in a few weekend sessions but someone who doesn’t have a plan requires multiple years of work to develop a plan.
"Learn and get better" is absolutely a plan and a great basis to build on, though it's nice to know if there's something in particular they'd like to learn. I've never encountered a candidate who will say they want to learn but not have an idea of what they want to learn...just candidates who have an idea what they want to learn but are afraid of saying the wrong thing in the interview.
Then if you're hiring entry-level employees, you need to be prepared to accept a naive and unrealistic plan. If they have a plan that sounds like an experienced person's plan, maybe they did their homework and got lucky, maybe they know somebody and got interview coaching, but it's unlikely that their destiny from birth was exactly your job opening.
I think hiring managers tend to be pretty realistic about this (can't speak for recruiters). All we want to hear is that the candidate has a sense of how they want to develop themselves. The best entry level candidate story I've ever heard was from an intern who expressed a desire to learn how to biuld movie animation pipelines. We were an app dev team, but I was able to offer enough insight and experience that we helped him get his next job at WETA.
A candidate's intrinsic development goals become the basis of how managers can best motivate and retain employees. Without this, employees quickly stagnate and fall back to doing the bare minimum of their role. This is true of all levels and not just entry level.
Ok, you've said what you did in the beginning of your career and what you now do when it comes to career goals. Did this work? Do you consider yourself successful? If so, do you consider yourself successful in spite of or because of your lack of career goals?
I don't know you, so it's hard to draw much from what you're saying.
There is a difference between (A) a skilled expert who takes pride in their craft, and understandably goes with whichever employer appreciates their skills and compensates accordingly, vs (B) a middle-of-the-pack journeyman who just DGAF about their work and treats all jobs as equally disposable and replaceable (these are also the types of people who are likely to try out /r/overemployed, cuz why not).
We may all pretend to be more like type (A) employees, but in reality not everyone can be above average and there's a lot of (B) out there. As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s or pretending like enough money will buy you better engagement or more motivation from them.
You can’t have all A’s. I’d rather have B’s than a hypothetical C who is just trying to hold down a job and not get fired, or a D who DGAF but isn’t middle of the pack and takes your lower-paying job because it’s the best they could do (sure, the B is basically the same, but at least there is some theoretically higher quality on average).
You simply won’t get (A) in some industries. People love making things like games, not boring CRUD apps driven by people outside of development who also resemble (B).
> As an employer, it makes total sense to invest in and pay more for (A)'s, but you're throwing money away to try and woo (B)'s
By that same logic most managers also fall into B just like ICs. So that statement is incorrect - Bs are perfect material for empire building and As are usually not
I’d love to have a candidate who tells me “I love creating products”. I’ve hired a 100% junior, no school (formerly teacher), he kicks ass, I’ve increased his salary by 10% every 2 months since 8 months. He just loves the art of creating a product, maintaining it in prod, interviewing customers…
Entry level management positions are the hardest to fill in my experience, which is why I've ended up almost always transferring people to management from within rather than seeking out external candidates.
> Beyond that, I want a narrative for the candidate's career...both where they've been and where they want to go. It helps me figure out if their development goals will be a good fit and what their experience will bring to the team. I've run into a lot of candidates whose careers seem to be guided simply by "I work for the highest bidder" and they don't end up being the best on the team...nor the most enduring.
I can tell you this is 110% true in my case. I graduated and landed a very shitty testing job at a big consulting firm. I worked hard like a mule( more like a donkey ) for 11 months.
Then one day I woke up in the middle of the night and screamed into the pillow that I rather kill myself then do my job.
I resigned the next month.
Fucked around for a few months, got interested in making backend apps and started applying again but this time in development roles( instead of QA ).
Lo and behold, did not get a single response from even a small scale startup. Removed my QA experience and just put my Node,Express projects at the top.
Guess what, finally recruiters started to call me.
I realised how I fucked up big time by jumping on the first job offer that I got and my experience for almost an year was just a shit stain on my resume, which completely stalled my career if I hadn't removed it.
That same experience will be a boon later. You can show your progression from QA > Dev > Whatever you want. It's no longer an anchor weighing you down, it's a Rocky Balboa underdog story.
Although it may be true of the specific person you're replying to (though I'm not sure that it is), this presumes something, so ends up missing the point. To see the point made here about luck, castes, et cetera requires grappling with the existence of folks who were developers before taking the "shitty testing job". There is no QA-to-dev progression there—just someone without the good fortune to be able to say "no" to the first job they were offered.
A recent guest on Tyler Cowen's podcast made this point wrt to law school graduates:
> The bigger thing I would change is the calendar for professional hiring in law. This is a little bit esoteric, but it matters a lot to our students. If you want to go into a job at a major law firm, and you go to a good law school, those jobs get offered to you at a time when you have no other alternatives. And so, regardless of one’s individual preferences, it makes no sense to turn down those jobs when you actually have no alternative.¶ I think that creates a lot of distortions, where you end up with people who are at these firms who don’t want to be there. And it biases the market so that people who want to go into public interest, for example, are the ones who are able to take that risk on, which is not a very good match between who’s genuinely interested in alternative avenues and who just can’t afford to take certain kinds of risks.
Honestly, I have always felt really bad about hiring someone into a QA role. It is almost always a trap and I try to discourage people from going down that path for exactly the reasons you describe.
I am glad you've gotten past it. Excellent. Good luck to you.
I've been involved in screening candidates where we basically did just put aside applications from people whose commercial experience was not exactly what the JD was asking for, and indeed some were those with a background in testing/QA when we specifically needed a developer. But that's because we had a ton of resumes sent through by recruiters where it seemed like they'd done very little to ensure they were sending us relevant candidates.
To be fair we would have put your resume aside if you'd removed your QA experience too if you didn't also have significant commercial experience as a developer.
But in general if I was responsible for the final call on a junior hire I'd definitely prefer someone with industry experience even in a different role over someone with none at all.
> When I tried to get my first programming job, I got zero responses from major software companies.
> I accidentally did the right thing when I took a hardware job I was referred into at Google, because having a prestigious company on my resume was the right programmer class marker.
In my experience, very high-performing teams are not rare outside of prestige employers, but the distribution is longer-tailed.
Employees at prestige employers don’t want to consider that they might not be the best, or might not have to put up with all the corporate bureaucracy, so they erect barriers.
For recruiters, recommending prestige resumes is just the equivalent of “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”.
Nobody on tech teams is putting in 20 hour weeks and watercoolering to get by in those small teams at small companies. Everything they do counts.
Cue a random example: 2-people company bought for millions by Atlassian or 18-people company bought for billions by Facebook (Wasn’t Whatsapp 18 people?).
I think it's also about the "culture fit" that these high prestige tech companies look for. Young people fresh out of school will not have been "tainted" by the workplace culture of other companies. Moreover, young people in general, but especially those still in the highly social school mindset, tend to be influenced by peers more easily than adults, especially jaded adults. This all makes young people fresh out of school much more easily molded to the company culture.
My current employer is investing heavily into - I wouldn't say hordes, but they are many - juniors because "culture" sculpting Devs for our specific needs.
Or at least that's the official story. While these reasons may be real, I think it boils down to money and loyalty. Can't blame them but yeah, makes me feel a bit uneasy
Yes, naivete is the the other issue besides culture. People without work experience, especially tech work experience, won't push back as hard or negotiate as effectively with their management, which translates to lower salary and a willingness to go along with what the company wants. I don't want to paint young folks with too broad a brush though, I've met some young coworkers that were pretty savvy, it's just in general what I have seen.
At basic training, our drill instructors often said that recruits with no experience shooting weapons were easier to train than other recruits who had experience because it was much easier to teach best practices to someone who was a "blank slate" than it was to retrain best practices to someone who learned improper methods.
I haven't exactly seen this idea like-for-like in the "corporate" world, but I believe the general premise is accurate.
This is a good analogy but inadequate. What Dan is saying goes beyond that. In the scenario you're describing, it is rational to prefer those recruits—for exactly those reasons. The behavior that Dan describes involves a heap of irrationality.
Dan's piece that he linked (about "Mike") really is important to understand the thing that he's referring to.
(Kudos on being able to yes-and the post, though. Huge swaths of HN's user base somehow lacks this ability and shows the proof any time some of Dan's writing shows up here.)
> Huge swaths of HN's user base somehow lacks this ability and shows the proof any time some of Dan's writing shows up here.
I've found this comment section to be a bit shocking, to be honest. I thought a message like "Trendy hiring managers will discriminate against you if you work for Walgreens or a bank or use a Microsoft stack, compared to if you have no professional experience" would be simple enough to be successfully transmitted to readers.
This is how Disney tends to or used to operate its theme parks. If you're coming from another theme park chances are you have been trained incorrectly meaning a person with no experience has the advantage. Not saying I agree or disagree, but I can understand why someone could think otherwise.
I can see this happening, having worked with former Disney people (back office finance type stuff). Almost every day, "well at Disney we did it this way..." even years removed from there. Granted, sometimes the Disney Way was better! But other times I'd have to say, "that's not a bad idea, but unfortunately we don't yet have the resources or reputation of Disney to make a similar tactic work for this project."
I'm experiencing this now and it's taking some energy to not become disillusioned with the industry.
Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot less valuable than specialists. For any given technology or stack right now, some company out there is doing something cool with it, and they only want to hire people who are already familiar with their particular configuration. The couple of tech interviews I've had so far have really obviously been looking for me to keyword or namedrop some experience with whatever it is that they're using already. There have even been positions where I had like 95% of the desired experience, but that missing 5% was enough to bin me, despite having a pile of unrelated experience.
To be clear, you can make a living as a dev in the guts of a BigCo or for a consultancy or web firm, and these days it's not even a bad living (for now). But if you want to work on something closer to the cutting edge, or more stimulating, you have to make big decisions early on about what you're most interested in and then pursue a deep specialization in it.
This doesn’t match my experience at all. A lot of companies at the cutting edge know that nobody is ramped up on their area and aren’t trying to limit themselves to only poaching from competitors. In particular at big tech your previous scope and projects (like launching features, leading a feature or infrastructure team, shipping an entire product) are so much more important than eg your background in advertising - a background in advertising may be a plus for an advertising team, especially if you’re getting hired at a very high level (8+), but not a requirement or even target for recruiting purposes.
I know HN loves to hate on big tech but a lot of the cutting edge is there. IME startups and “less selective” companies are more focused on getting people with very specific experience because they can’t afford to train someone up or risk them being a bad fit - and while startups almost by definition are doing something different than incumbents, that doesn’t mean they’re the whole cutting edge. Or, they are old-school and bin everyone as a “Java spring boot dev” either because HR doesn’t understand what things are easy to learn and what are hard, or engineering buckets themselves into these fixed categories and has a kind of “my turf”/static mindset with no expectation to learn or work on new things.
> Generalists, or people with a "wide T", are also a lot less valuable than specialists
I actually disagree with this. Speaking anecdotally but also someone who works at a FAANG-esque co, full stack or “wide stack” (front, back, infra, sre) are the most desirable due to their versatility and knowledge of the interworkings of various parts of the stack.
I work at a big tech co. IMO the market has been somewhat poisoned by the disconnect is that in big tech usually has a higher than usual bar to be senior in a specialized role (e.g. frontend) and hiring managers wants full stack engineers to be senior in all of those roles. I've had a lot of conversations with managers from these companies that they'd love a full stack dev but every time they hire one they find the developer can only really cut it in 1 layer.
I'm pretty sure that current valley hiring practices filter out the mischiefs needed to take things from sustaining to innovative. It's why tech is coasting and deteriorating.
I look for passionate adults who respectfully disagree with me. Most firms apparently want eager children who aim to please.
> you have to make big decisions early on about what you're most interested in and then pursue a deep specialization in it
I am seeing similar trends to you wrt Generalists, and this is annoying but good advice.
Even when hired, generalists tend to get stuck with all the most tedious work from every department that simply no one wants to do. You end up being a one-stop shop for all intern and junior related work, with the added bonus of being invited to a lot of meetings and not getting credit (appropriate $ compensation) for your influence in those meetings.
I've settled on the belief that general knowledge is something you do for yourself, and to help set you apart from other specialists. It doesn't pay you directly. I've got almost a decade of general business and analytics knowledge, and always seems to stall out on the climb in ways you describe (not dropping the right software name brand). Time to make a bet
> i don't understand this part. you already have your salary, as negotiated
In FAANG your salary is only a small part of your compensation.
At end of year, based on your perceived performance, you get:
- a bonus (10 to 20+% of base salary)
- a stock refresh (80 to 120k over 4 years for instance for entry level/mid-level)
- a merit increase of your base salary
All these 3 influence your compensation significantly.
You can do the math, someone starting at let's say 140k base with 4 years of 15% bonus, 80k refresh, 2% merit raise, will have a different compensation than someone who's also starting at 140k but with 4 years of 20% bonus, 110k refresh, 4% merit raise
> i don't understand this part. you already have your salary, as negotiated. are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid?
Generalism is more difficult than specialism to leverage in that initial notification. And if you end up doing work that's spread across multiple departments then it's generally harder to advance within that organisation.
IME from doing general work at 3 companies in different industries (which might not be fully representative): Also sorry, turns out i ended up venting
>someone has to do it, and if the pay is adequate, it's a matter of attitude.
the pay is adequate for the value of the work (which is low), and it eats up your time which actually lowers the average value of your work to the company. it isnt anything other people cant do, it's just the stuff that piles up because it isnt really critical to get done but should still get done. think about what you would have a coworker help you with at your job if you had a lot to do and they asked you if you needed help with anything.
>are you saying that such a positions are always underpaid?
Yes they are underpaid because the job responsibilities are usually pretty fuzzy. you are typically given some basic responsibilities but then expected to find more work to do yourself via talking to people. so its on you to both find valuable work to perform using your general knowledge (kind of fun / interesting tbh) and also somehow be convincing that your contributions are better than what they would have gotten from an average generalist (nigh impossible). It becomes very hard to get people to recognize you going above and beyond, which is necessary for raises. So you are very dependent on having an incredibly observant manager who applies above average attention to detail when reviewing you.
how you get this work as a generalist, btw, is you ask people what they need help with. It isnt an issue with attitude, it is just one of relevance. An average generalist can be fine with this, but if you are above average at multiple roles then it becomes a point of opportunity cost. you will never work on the high-value things that someone else more specialized at the company is capable of working on. you will work on the things that were preventing that person from spending more time on the high-value things. they might talk to you about it and you might give them thoughts on the work, but it will be so casual as to be awkward for them to give you any credit for it.
>if such a position really has influence, it actually sounds appealing to me
It can be a very enjoyable position BUT you stall out - it will typically fall under some sort of generic business analyst job title at a small to mid-size company (ie not at a company with an analytics department for you to advance in). youll be encouraged to "build" that department by yourself, in your downtime, without any approved budget for it, without adding anything to anyone elses processes (ie requiring them to stick to a data entry format). So people at the company will typically like you, but you'll hit a lot of resistance trying to get past like $70k (near NYC). It makes me think that 1 good generalist is valued close to but beneath 2 junior employees with a bit of different specialization each.
the only way I can recommend a generalist position is if you are buying significant amount of stock in the company, fully believe in the product/service, and understand that sometimes in order for a team to do its best there needs to be a thankless support player somewhere in there.
you dont have noticeable influence, btw, you just know what you did and feel personally good about it. you get to sit in on meetings, typically as a note-taker (because you offered to and it makes sense because you have a bunch of misc responsibilities anyway), which means you get to make sure the most important things from a meeting are emphasized, questionable things are highlighted, and you can speak up in the meeting itself to help address misalignment's before they happen. the meetings themselves tend to get credit for your contribution rather than you, albeit sometimes you can make pretty direct call-outs that will get you credit for.
the general vibe was kind of like, you are an alert system and garbage collector. a lot of the time the alerts are received as helpful reminders of issues that would have been caught somehow anyway. but that's kind of a catch-22 for proving your value. you feel fairly confident they wouldnt have caught the issue based on the nature of the due diligence you applied to the situation and your intimate knowledge of the related business operations. you cant exactly point why you think the issue would have gone unnoticed without throwing someone under the bus, which isnt fair to do before the issue actually arises. the catch-22 is that the issue isnt going to arise because you pointed it out, but you cant prove it was necessary for you to point it out unless you dont point it out.
So you need an observant, reasonably skeptical manager on the same page as you to notice the shitstorms you prevent. But even then there's typically no direct means of compensating you for it. you get labelled a good employee, quickly jump to that 70k area pay cap into yearly inflation adjustments, then you end up just getting more soft benefits like openness to alternative work hours, no resistance to taking time off, and such. With the caveat that you have to correctly read the room on these things and assert them yourself because you wont be getting an email detailing such perks. that is all well and good, but it seems better fit for someone near retirement then someone with goals of trying to buy a house and raise a family.
it seems the primary problem is the mismatch of pay is adequate for the value of the work (which is low) and it seems better fit for someone near retirement then someone with goals of trying to buy a house and raise a family because the latter tend to expect a higher salary due to their accumulated experience.
>the latter tend to expect a higher salary due to their accumulated experience.
i was thinking people who are probably capable of retiring, but still want to work a job with more soft perks than pay. but yeah, maybe the work doesnt really suit anyone. Just a temporary type of work until you figure out what kind of specialization you want to do, or to build up experience for consulting maybe
As a counterpoint, having a broad range of skills and experiences has been hugely important for me and my employer, and hasn't limited my career or compensation. I fill in the gaps where I'm needed, and it's up to me to create visibility and take on projects that look good on my resume. Naturally I tend to go deep wherever I end up at a startup (so I have specialized experienced that helps my career), and my breadth allows me understand the entirety of the stack and design systems better than someone who only knows one part of the stack.
At startups you really want someone who can jump into any part of the technical work and ship quickly.
My experience has been that it's the big crufty old school enterprise companies that insist on specialists. They obsess over your resume having certain keywords or "N years of X". The Silicon Valley tech companies mostly don't seem to care about this.
Actually, the SV tech companies do want a particular kind of specialist - Leetcode Masters.
As long as you can regurgitate algorithms while putting on a show as if you discovered the solution serendipitously at the whiteboard, you're golden regardless of whether you have 20 years of experience in Rust or whether your previous job was serving tables as a waiter.
In fact, going along with the theme of this original article, some tech companies have a pipeline for "nontraditional applicants", so I feel in some sense, it can actually be advantageous to be a former waiter whose spent time mastering leetcode vs. an industry veteran with many years of experience at the "wrong companies".
Hmm this has not been my personal experience (as a highly generalist dev), but maybe I’m just lucky. If anything, my extremely broad lens has led to some really great systems design rounds, and I always crush the behavioral.
How do you come to this conclusion? Sincere question. I'm not posting personal anecdotes to support or disprove your argument, I have an opinion, and it may or may not overlap with yours.
As a non-degreed individual, I didn't hear anything from places I would apply. Eventually, I applied for a non-development job at a company that also claimed it developed software. With the hopes I'd be able to kind of prove my chops while in the other role to get moved over.
Luckily, the company I applied for had no fucking clue what they were doing and hired me for a software development position because their entire technology team had just quit like a week ago or something. And while that job essentially started me on my path to where I am now, and I don't consider myself incompetent. They honestly had absolutely no clue on how to evaluate technology credentials.
My resume was my incomplete education, my work in retail, and a bit of the hobbyist development I had done on the Dreamcast.
Now, the job turned out to be an entire shit-show. This was a company who claimed to develop software but didn't have a license for Visual Studio. No one knew how to manage a SQL Server. Etc. They were looking for a glorified help desk technician who could write some config file level stuff for the software package they were a reseller for.
However. They did contract the bulk of their networking to another company. And also contracted with the owner to be the effective CTO or something. Eventually, that guy knew I wasn't happy or challenged at the job. And when he heard I was looking, he just offered me a job. So I became a contractor for him.
Eventually, one of our clients had their developer just walk in the middle of a project and they needed me there like every day to salvage the situation. After a while, they realized it would be more cost effective to just essentially buy me. So now I work for them, and I have for the past 6 or 7 years. Timeline is a little fuzzy. This client is major. You've heard of them. Now, I get recruiters contacting me and solicitations in my email even though I haven't actively looked for a job since 2007. Even though the place I work for is not even a technology company.
I also had no degree and wound up working for a small software company as an IT "intern" which quickly lead to being their sole IT person. That company was also a complete shit-show, but had I not worked there I wouldn't have gained the skills that lead to my current role, which is the best job I've had yet.
Sadly, I can't even really credit that first job with any skills.
Maybe familiarity with SQL Server Management Studio.
The only thing it allowed me to do was to shift so I would develop projects on the company dime rather than at home. If I wanted to learn python, I'd write some web services in python for my job rather than for some bullshit at home.
This shows the distinction between the value of resumes (whether it’s school or job or whether) is in large part just signaling and not actually about skill set.
Relevant comment of mine from a previous, mostly unrelated thread (context was "Berkeley gives you a parking space if you work there and win a Nobel"):
> The rich get richer. I remember filling out school and early job applications. I was struck by how my list of awards and recognitions was kind of a sham—most of them were each a consequence of some earlier achievement, and so on. It felt like getting a check and being able to cash it more than once.
ML is maybe a good example of a hot field that's sucking up the best as well as upper middle performing developers only to later spit them out when the meltdown comes. That in itself may not be a problem if you get your foot in the door of a company you're happy at. On the other hand, if you're just hanging on it might be sobering to have to switch from Google to a smaller company in a more affordable region.
Having the wrong experience can also be better than no experience. My early career was full of what I call "negative learning" experiences. I was essentially taught what not to do with clear demonstrations of why it shouldn't be done. Eventually it became apparent that every job, every experience even has lessons you can learn from, whether they be positive or negative reinforcements. This open minded approach where I strive to be as objective as possible made working as a solo dev for 7+ years a successful and not particularly scary endeavour.
My first attempt at a trendy Silicon Valley tech company was at one of the FAANGs where my friend had previously gotten in and referred me. I was told that I was going to have to do a homework project because my bank * background.
I've applied to several other companies where I was told outright I was not being considered because of my bank background, or that the odds were against me because of my bank background. One company had me write an essay justifying why I would be a good hire in spite of my bank background. Ironically, one was a company that used .NET as their primary stack - .NET being the darling of banks and other big crufty old school enterprises and often shunned by other trendy tech companies.
Speaking of .NET - most of my early career experience was as a .NET developer. That too opened up a whole bunch of discrimination so that I removed any mention of .NET or C# in my resume and LinkedIn once I decided I no longer wanted to work for banks or other old school companies. Being able to pivot to Python and JavaScript opened doors.
Having said that, having a bank background is not a showstopper to getting a job at a Silicon Valley tech company. I've managed to make the jump, and many of my ex-colleagues from banks have also made the jump. The biggest hurdle seems to be whether you want to put in the time to grind leetcode or not.
* "bank" here could probably be interchanged with most crufty old school tech-as-a-cost-center enterprises in general.
A personal anecdote that gives some credence to this theory:
Some years ago, after the Economic Crash of 2009, I attended a course in Progammable Logic Controllers which was designed to be a module for electrician's Continuing Professional Development. I, a Civil Engineer, had no background in this topic and said as much to the tutor. "Don't worry, he said, "the people with no experience nearly always do better than anyone else". This surprised me. It also surprised me when I came joint top in the course results.
People with experience can’t be asked doing the course because they know better anyway :) of course you do better because you probably take it seriously
I believe this has to do with the perception and signaling of potential.
Potential, when unrealized, contains more parts unknown than the known. You can measure some things - like GPA, school ranking, standardized test results, and so on.
If/when you do get employed, then that also becomes a new measure - and to some degree, lays the foundation for other speculation.
Put this way: If someone opts to work for a "C" level company, does this change the expected value of that candidate? If the candidate is "A" level, why would they join a "C" level company? The simplest answer for an observer, would probably be that they are simply not "A" level material, and probably closer to where they've been.
IMO - that's flawed thinking, as there are tons of variables, but it seems to be how many think. It's like with sports - often times top clubs will get top talent.
But yeah, back to the perception. Now you have a new datapoint - which could could drag you down - while your competitors still have the benefit of less information. These candidates can leverage their potential more, simply because the people hiring know less about them, and will have to take a larger chance / risk on hiring them. But as long as their other measures are ok, that might be worth it.
An anchoring effect is at play.
Professionals, and people more in general, are defined by what they have done so far, especially after becoming full-fledged adults. The best predictor of tomorrow, on average, is today.
Working from the bottom up sounds good on paper, and in theory it makes sense, because it is an archetype: the struggle, working your way up and then reaping what you have sown. But that is not how we see the paths of others.
Interestingly, baseball is the only sport in which the ordinary athlete, not the exception represented by the 20-year-old Dominican superstar, has to go from the minors to MLB. In all other sports, there is no adult developmental league to speak of. Sure, players transition from lower to higher level teams all the time, but those teams, apart from the usual exceptions, fly around in the same rarefied atmosphere of excellence.
For those who haven't done anything yet there is a "maybe, who knows" penciled next to the box, but for those who have done poorly there is a big "on to the next" written next to it.
The assumption is that large course deviations are unlikely and not sudden. It's like air temperature: the best predictor of tomorrow's temperature, without knowing much or anything else, is today's temperature.
A person in a strong relationship today is more likely to be in a relationship a month from now than someone in a "weaker" relationship today. You might say, "Well, that's obvious," but it's a similar lens to the one we use to look at other people's professional lives, which is that, by and large, people are more likely to be in the future what they have been for five years than what you think their potential might be.
As someone who worked in academia before moving to the technology sector, the main concern I found with hiring managers was that I would be "too academic." You may think these labels are meaningless: everyone can change and adapt quickly to new realities or to their jobs. But there is a certain mindset that undoubtedly can remain for quite some time, when not forever.
Yes this is true and unfortunate but what is the relevant advice for hiring managers here? Ignore resumes altogether?
I worked at a FAANG company for a long time and now work at a startup. In general I have no desire to replicate their hiring but I would still consider the FAANG engineer resume line as a very strong positive signal.
I’m not trying to be elitist. I know that the best engineers I’ve ever met would not be recognizable by a simple resume screen. But even at a startup we get hundreds of resumes per open position, we do need some filtering criteria.
In general every HN discussion around hiring seems to go in the same circle. Absolutely nobody is happy with the status quo but also nobody has a working solution they can share that’s not riddled with personal biases.
I went from a life insurance company in the Midwest to a pretty desirable tech company in the last few years. This tweet [0] from patio11 (linked from the posted tweet) basically sums up my path:
> If you’re early career, try to get into a high-status engineering employer or consider a status arbitrage like e.g. a stint at one of the many startups which are known to recruiters but can’t match Google offers and so feel perpetually understaffed.
I went to a YC-funded startup. It wasn't a well-known startup by any means, and there were fewer than 30 employees when I left. I don't think anyone there was ex-FAANG, and they didn't pay at anywhere near FAANG levels. But startup employees are in the talent pool for big tech companies in a way that insurance company employees generally are not.
Anyway, when I had been at the startup for a year, I cold applied for my current position on my current employer's website, and here I am. Zero chance I would have gotten a callback if I'd applied directly from the insurance company, even though I would still have been able to do my current job effectively if I'd never gone to the startup.
Any advice on up-leveling here? I'm a generalist backend dev that's bounced around startups for a while and am now pushing 40 and have been thinking about how to specialize before it's too late
It is definitely true for the most part. I took a software engineering job in A software firm that’s considered on of the OG Silicon Valley company after I graduated. Unfortunately, I very quickly realized that whenever I applied to FAANG or other “SV cool kids” companies, I would not get an opportunity, meanwhile, new grads from my same Uni kept getting those jobs. You don’t get interviews because you work at a non glamorous company, but you work at a non glamorous company because you don’t get interviews. It’s a tough cycle that takes some serious work to get out of.
A thing that may be at play here is that you add “years of experience” on your resume, and therefore as a lateral hire, are expected to get paid more and therefore the risk aversion.
Another thing at play could be the recency of experience. Your most recent item on the resume is what catches the most attention, so if it is something like SWE at Walgreens vs Senior at MIT, the latter sounds more promising (even if it’s not true).
TLDR; there are consequences of not starting at the right company, because they compound over time.
But basically, go somewhere that isn't a black mark on your resume. I mean, there are obvious companies like Veritas, IBM, Symantec, Oracle, Cisco, HP (not Aruba), PornHub, ... which should be avoided because they have, for good or for bad, poor reputations for the junior candidates coming out of them (senior is quite a bit better - if they still code, which you have to watch out for). Anonymous startup (not crypto) probably a better choice, plus you will learn more.
This is something that I have always suspected at some level.
I think wrong experience isn't bad as long as you are willing to be convinced otherwise. For me, the pain kicks in when someone with the wrong experience is not open to alternatives.
Unfortunately, the true willingness of a candidate to entertain alternatives is not something you discover until many weeks/months into the real deal.
As a consequence, resumes with very little technical matter in them have been appealing to me far more than those loaded up with framework-of-the-week and "best practices" word salads.
The one thing you do learn when in a job that gives you "wrong experience" is that you're in the "wrong job" for what the "right job" would be in the future.
I think you have to be in a "wrong job" before you can understand what a "right job" is.
I do not agree with the premise though as it's assuming that people cannot discern the difference. It's akin to talking about knowledge vs. wisdom and the typical explanation of fruits and vegetables. It makes little sense in this context as people are much smarter than given credit.
I am kind of living by this; I really don't see how a "menial" job experience transfers onto "exciting" jobs. If you want to do ML or program computer graphics, 5 years of writing CRUD code in Python will probably not do wonders for you. Unless of course before that you had scarce programming experience, and even then I don't see why would you need to sit all of those 5 years out. Seems like this kind of advice boils down to "dress for the job you want...".
> Having no experience can be better than having the wrong experience
One case this is true is when learning a physical skill, for example, playing table tennis. If you already have a specific habit of hitting the ball, changing it to use a correct stroke is vastly harder than simply learning it from scratch. Overwriting brain paths is harder than making new ones.
Imagine you are building a weight lifting team. You want strong people who are willing to work hard.
Someone from the US Olympic marathon team applies! Wow! This guy is really good athlete. But..clearly his experience is with long distance running, not short intense bursts. He likely won’t be a good fit.
The marathon runner’s experience is so different from what’s expected from a weight lifter, the two things won’t interfere.
My favourite example of this is performers with a background in dancing who then go on to do martial arts scenes in films. It’s many of the same movements, and being a dancer gets you a large part of the way there for choreographed fight scenes, but then you get to the details, and they’ve spent so much time training to move with a certain softness and gracefulness that the snappier, more explosive movement in martial arts becomes incredibly difficult for them. This is especially obvious with kicks, both in terms of leg movement and foot posture.
Referring to the title I think this is exceedingly the exception, not the norm (excluding bad hiring policies). Learning what not to do is more valuable than starting with a clean slate
Referring to the twitter post, I agree. No point wasting time if a better opportunity already presents itself
Yes, it's called ageism. Young and fresh is perceived as better than experienced because some bozo will make the argument that they've been doing software engineering "wrong".
This is definitely true sometimes, but the “wrong” kind of experience can definitely hamper people.
I have a highly skilled senior developer with a desktop app development background who joined our web team, he’s excellent at many tasks but keeps getting tripped up when dealing with state. He logically knows how it works, but his muscle memory when programming is so used to being able to rely on state that it’s hard for him stop letting those concepts leak in and trip him up.
He’s still an amazing asset to the team, but in this case he does have some experience that’s hampering him in a new role.
> He’s still an amazing asset to the team, but in this case he does have some experience that’s hampering him in a new role.
OK, but how much could it possibly "hamper" him if he's still an "amazing asset"? Is it a permanent condition? Or is it just something that you noticed once or twice and made a mental note of?
We all have gaps and shortcomings. Overcoming them is a matter of practice, but if someone is second-guessing and judging every brain-fart, that's not good for anyone.
This was just an example where someone with no experience may have had an advantage. They would have had to learn as well, but wouldn’t be fighting against their muscle memory.
We all have strengths and weaknesses. I was arguing against the concept that this can all be attributed to ageism. That there are types of experience that can hamper you.
Lol, it's web development it's not rocket science. He doesn't need to wait for the next reincarnation cycle before he can be made fresh again to learn Redux.
State management is also a thorn for desktop apps that need to talk to a server. Or even desktop apps that need to use a local data store, and whose UI has effects not stored when saving. E.g. this is why the MVVM pattern exists in WPF (the last desktop platform I worked on). And things like Reactive Extensions.
JS/React in some sense is just using a high level desktop development language, fetch is rpc, and the server is ... the server.
if anything the ageism goes in the other direction IMO - "experienced" commands a salary premium even when their actual skill and useful experience is no better than a fresh grad.
Specifically, he cites a statistic that 50% of the people with “no experience” he knows are getting ML and other such jobs at Big Tech companies. In this case, I think he’s likely pre-filtering his sample set to people with significant programming/math or other such experience.
I do a lot of mentoring of college grads. If anyone shows an interest in Big Tech I always encourage them to apply and help them get the process started. However, it is not my experience that 50% of your average (or even above average as mentoring programs tend to select for the more ambitious) CS grads are walking into something like a Big Tech ML job with no relevant experience.
Always apply if you’re curious. If nothing else, you will learn the interview process and see where you need to improve for next time. However, don’t feel bad if you don’t get the dream job right away. Most people really do have to pivot up through some more average jobs first before landing the Big Tech jobs with huge paychecks.