1. Transfer to a TPM/QA Manager role at somewhere like Amazon or Microsoft. Bar is much lower to get into this role.
2. Get hired into a higher level than you could in a SWE role.
3. Transfer within the company to being an SDM
4. Now you are one level higher, in a management role, that would have taken you 5+ years of grinding and some luck to get into.
5. Spend a few years in this role, switch to other big co, makikg 400-500k+ while bossing around engineers much smarter than you.
^This path is how people are doing it. Never take equity in a startup, never grind away as a mid level engineer, fighting with ten other engineers for one promotion.
Edit:
Adding one point to this, if you found a company with a non technical CEO, and the company sees some success, all the focus will be on the CEO. The CTO role is highly replaceable, and there is a massive power shift that occurs once there is traction with a "finished" product. The CEO, especially in B2B Saas, is the face of the company. So the CEO can sit on his hands the whole time the product is developed, but then does reap huge gains. There's no easy answer, as many engineers do not have the soft skills for the role. But arguably, they could run these businesses themselves.
I love this comment because IMHO most organizations that have become dysfunctional host a large number of individuals that have hacked the company ranks the way you describe.
The pattern is identical in other industries and even in academia. Professors are supposed to be technical staff, but in reality most have become middle-managers bossing around scientists much smarter than them (paraphrasing the OP). Plus, they usually claim all credit for any breakthrough.
As a European, I think the US industry is much more innovative because this is less of a problem. It is still an issue, but at least technical people get some recognition.
If you want to see the extreme, come to Sweden. Here many see soft and hard skills as mutually exclusive. So hard work and understanding the nitty gritty details is extremely bad for your career, in many companies. You can imagine the culture it fosters.
But the situation is improving somewhat. At least that’s my impression. Like a drunk that has hit rock bottom we’re on our way to recovery. :)
> So the CEO can sit on his hands the whole time the product is developed, but then does reap huge gains.
This sounds off to me. Even if the CEO isn't a technical engineer literally working on the code, they are ultimately accountable for getting engineers and designers to build the right product. Building the right product is massively hard. Usually, it takes several wrong takes to get it right. 90% of startups fail.
When an engineer is hired post-traction, they may not see all the scars and dead bodies of those failed attempts. It may seem easy to manage if the product is already a hit, because when there is true PMF it's hard to mess up.
But that's like those stories about how the military in WW2 thought they should be adding armor to the areas of the plane that had holes after sorties. That was totally wrong; the real problem would have been to add the armor to the areas of the plane without holes, because *those planes crashed and were never recovered.* In other words, what "seems easy to sit on the hands" is survivorship bias, and ignores the brutal reality of struggle that any founder will be able to relate with. Assuming that "engineers could run these businesses themselves" indicates a very incomplete understanding of what is involved with actually building and running a business.
This is how its supposed to work in theory. As a CTO, you can easily end up doing all the work of the CEO, which he gains from. Its only when you go to write the software, that alot of the product decisions get made. This is what the ycombinator video is about.
> Even if the CEO isn't a technical engineer literally working on the code, they are ultimately accountable for getting engineers and designers to build the right product.
You haven't had to have meetings with a CEO before, have you?
Yes. If you're good at product you're typically good at sales. If you're good at sales you may not necessarily be good at product.
Sales is about navigating conversations to match someone's problem to a solution.
Product is about navigating conversations to understand problems and figure out what the solution should be in the first place.
If the product doesn’t sell itself, then the founders failed to make something people want. If sales lead the company instead of product, then market-making becomes the company’s actual product.
That's frequently true, but it really depends. Some CEOs are the HR person, entirely focused on filling roles with people who know how to sell/build/whatever.
I do know one CEO who is "the engineer". They're in a bit of a weird market, and it seems to be working. I rather expect he'll move to a CTO role once they're actually in production, though, when the focus becomes growth.
But then you have to work at Amazon. Been there done that got the T-shirt.
Honestly that’s not bad advice though. I did something like you recommended. A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about applying for an SDE position in mid 2020. I wasn’t about to sell my big house in the burbs of Atlanta that I just had built in 2016 to work at Amazon in Seattle “when Covid lifted”. Besides I hadn’t had to do a coding interview - ever. As an enterprise CRUD developer who knew AWS, had a network and knew how to talk to people.
After I kept talking to her, she suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS ProServe specializing in app dev + cloud. There was no coding interview.
I’m far from naive. I was 46 at the time on my 7th job and new from reputation and second hand experience that eventually Amazon is going to Amazon.
> So the CEO can sit on his hands the whole time the product is developed, but then does reap huge gains.
I think this is almost always false. And I say this as someone who has worked with many startups, and who has been both a lead engineer and a CTO.
I have seen so many startups fail because either:
1. They cannot talk to customers, or
2. They cannot close deals.
It is absolutely shocking how many startups have put in 3 years of heroic engineering effort, but still don't even know the job title of the person who would make the actual decision to buy their software.
But if you have a non-technical CEO who can convince 10 potential customers to sign a non-binding letter of intent, then you're in the game. Take that a competent investor and they'll find you a CTO.
Yes, you have a great point: folks who close deals, who talk to customers, who finds prospects are NOT parasites, even though they can make more than the hard working engineers. The real parasites are elsewhere.
Sadly this is mostly true. It used be at $bigtech you needed to be the equivalent of a senior engineer (L5+) to go into management. This is categorically not the case anymore.
TPMs, due to their role, work across orgs and interface more with leadership so they do seem to get a lot more visibility/exposure than normal ICs and do seem to get promoted into leadership positions more easily. My wife is less technical and is looking for a career change and last year I literally suggested this path for her.
(you can argue separately that this isn't as important which I might agree with on a case by case basis in that I've seen really strong leaders who are less technical who make up for in various ways but it's not the common case).
I think alot of engineers are under the impression that if they work hard enough they will be promoted. But actually, the company gains the most from highly productive mid level engineers. These are the workhorses, they do not want to promote them.
You never get promoted for “working hard”. You get promoted by showing your ability to work at a larger “scope”, showing “impact” and “dealing with ambiguity”. All of the leveling guidelines of tech companies I’ve seen or heard about have the same concepts.
The whole "scope" argument is the carrot on the stick. Many engineers, regardless of performance and scope, will not get promoted. They are more valuable to the company as work horses, even if they have higher level capacity and have shown that.
I don’t disagree with that. The best way to get a “promotion” is to work toward more scope, impact, ambiguity - and then leave.
Or in my case get PIP’d from Amazon with a nice severance and found a much less stressful job within three weeks at a smaller company. My hearts always been at smaller companies and I knew from the minute I virtually walked into AWS I wanted to go back to smaller companies.
What about the ambiguity engineers cut through when making decisions like whether to use "React" or "Svelte"? and subsequent success or failure, whatever the case may be. Are these decisions less important that top level ones?
I was actually just interviewing someone for a position for a green field project where I’m leading the backend parts across teams. I needed to be able to “fire and forget” an assignment where the requirements weren’t clear and there will probably be a lot of XYProblems.
I need them to talk to the vendor/customer, come up with a game plan, research the technology and present their idea to the team. I want them to know how to talk to developers, technical directors who don’t want to get into the weeds and non technical people.
After they have done the research - especially about a technology I don’t know - I want to lean on them to teach me and for me to be able to go to for advice.
I’ve given the thumbs up plenty of times for team members and now dotted line reports that impressed me by giving me “imposters syndrome”.
Organizations are generally pyramids, where you have fewer people on top than on the bottom. You can't promote everyone, so you have to decide on criteria - and hard work in software engineering isn't always high-leverage work. In my experience the best engineers can figure out the right work to get done, saving hours of hard work that never even needed to happen.
> TPMs, due to their role, work across orgs and interface more with leadership so they do seem to get a lot more visibility/exposure than normal ICs and do seem to get promoted into leadership positions more easily.
TPM here. More cross-org work: Yes. Interface more with leadership: Yes. Visibility/exposure: Yes. Easier promotions? Nope. Not in my experience.
There are fewer of us, therefore our org chart trees don't grow as fast as engineers' trees, therefore there are fewer opportunities to add a layer and move into it as a manager.
while bossing around engineers much smarter than you
How much smarter than you are they if you've taken an effective shortcut to getting paid significantly more while doing a lot less work? Working harder, taking all the stress, and earning less doesn't sound that smart.
> How much smarter than you are they if you've taken an effective shortcut to getting paid significantly more while doing a lot less work?
Being smart and how much you make aren't related. There are researchers working at universities in Europe being paid miserable salaries and yet making incredible discoveries (like medical ones) and these are incredibly smart people.
Meanwhile there are people with only a few neurons connecting raking in millions on "only fans".
And, no, the later aren't smarter than the former.
That's kind of the European dream. You work at uni, have fun pursuing your reasearch and earn enough money to rent a somewhat nice flat in the city.
What else could anyone want?
Heck, today i saw Sepp Hochreiter sitting in the tram on his way to uni. He could do anything in the world, yet he chooses to live the european academic life.
> Being smart and how much you make aren't related. There are researchers working at universities in Europe being paid miserable salaries and yet making incredible discoveries (like medical ones) and these are incredibly smart people.
Think about it, who's funding these researchers you're celebrating?
I'd argue being smart is linked to money. You don't need to spend all your time exploiting the markets if you're smart, but just enough to build a resource pool that can enable your endeavors. People work with what they got - in your latter example, they're selling their body. If academics were functionally smart, then it's a simple task for them to be able to exploit and win against a capitalist market.
The poster above you; they're the one who made an implicit claim about the value of software developers' work. You're welcome to disagree. Do you think everyone is paid fairly?
Does that logic still apply to teachers? How about public defenders? Food bank staff?
Yes.
Personally, I think they're all underpaid. But I don't set their wages. Society does that by agreeing a level of tax people are happy with, and then spending that money on public employee's wages. Collectively society has agreed to pay those people as little as possible. That's the important thing in any wage negotiation - you have to understand where the money is coming from, because ultimately that's who gets to decide the maximum limit of one side of the bargaining process.
So in the case of teachers you have an individual teacher's pay being an agreement between that person and how much Joe Random wants to pay in tax. Teachers are always going to lose out on that one.
The answer is either to educate the public about the value of public wealth (eg why higher taxes are actually better for society in many ways), or to privatise the education system. Neither works well on a national level.
It applies to anyone working in a free market. A software engineer can't be overpaid because all participants in the transaction are a part of a free market. The party writing the check strongly believes they're profiting from the transaction.
> Punishing people for believing in their work is called "exploitation".
I didn't make it explicit, but the point was about where you draw the line. Obviously a software engineer has a lot more bargaining power, but anyone is paid less if they believe in their work because the desirability of the job is a factor in the pricing. The more people who are conscientious and care how their work affects others, the more market forces drive down the price of important work.
For a lot of people, work happiness is also a big factor, as it should. You’re spending at least 1/3rd of your whole day at your work.
Choosing a specific path does not make you smarter per definition
> How much smarter than you are they if you've taken an effective shortcut to getting paid significantly more while doing a lot less work?
This is not about smartness, but about willingness for ass-kissing and ability of to play political games. This is not associated with intelligence, but with dark triad traits. Quite some smart people look through all this, but are incapable of changing the situation.
Parent is referring to the fact that the technical acumen of this kind of manager is usually far less than the engineers who are working under them, which leads to worse outcomes for the engineers in question (but is a fine career choice and a rational decision for the now manager).
>How much smarter than you are they if you've taken an effective shortcut to getting paid significantly more while doing a lot less work
I find it deeply troubling that so many people conflate “being smart” with “min-maxing labor and earning”. It reflects the strange belief that the best people are the best capitalists.
I take issue with the thesis that money is crystallized virtue where more of one is more of the other.
Money isn't a linear curve where $$$==happiness. More money does have a strong correspondence with happiness until you hit a certain level and then it falls off. A case of strongly diminishing returns where other sources of happiness will outweigh the need for more money. Things like liking your job being a big factor.
There are smart people burdened with a moral compass, which forces them to "do the right thing" which might be pursuing their passion or contributing to society.
Then there are smart people who are happen to exploit social structures to get ahead. Those becomes the sociopath CEOs and such.
There are also plenty of not particularly smart people who figure out how to get ahead exploiting social structures.
Theres also plenty of smart people, whos intelligence is restricted to their area of expertise. Technical knowledge doesnt transfer to strong political skills
Doesn't make the smart people who actually have a consciousness to answer to less smart than the rest
I know there’s some correlation between certain Big Five personality traits like consciousness and material success, but now I’m wondering which of those traits may also correlate with IQ.
That's a nice fantasy but most technically minded folks will quickly discover that political savviness required to pull this off is in fact a skill and the one they generally don't possess. Also, watch the hands:
> 2. Get hired into a higher level than you could in a SWE role.
I worry this whole comment chain is celebrating a coping mechanism of troglodytic engineering, that the ideal is to shape artisanal code-crystals undisturbed in a cave. We all wish there was a simple meritocracy of crystal-fashioning, with the master diamondsmiths sat at the top. If only, enough said.
The political savviness so scorned by the in-the-trenches coder might actually be communication, capacity for broader context, strategic foresight, emotional intelligence to debug and optimise teams, among the many other skills required to execute a product/project beyond programming. And good leads will pluck coders showing these skills out of the engineering corps and set them on a TPM track.
Perhaps it is only rarely the case. But it seems fair to observe that it is gentler on the ego to cast these rare and hard-earned skills as “playing the game”, PM mumbled-jumbo, etc.
At the same time, operators in bad faith tend to deploy just these skills, and a bad experience can incline one to wash their hands of it all and crave the rough diamonds of the cave…
No these teams with these people tend to be totally dysfunctional. It's not the case that they are skilled at producing value and doing important things for the product, just playing the game (often in a very evil way)
This was my experience after my startup was acquired. My boss, and my skip level were both former QA folks who'd never done any SWE work. I had more YOE as a SWE AND as a manager than both combined.
I feel personally called out, as this was very much my path. However, I did continue to train my engineering skills and would be very embarrassed if any of the senior engineers in my team didn't think I had the same technical skills as them.
Quite likely most of them think exactly that, but they are not so stupid as to say it in your face, you are after all in a position to have formal and disciplinary power over them.
Number 2 is easier said than done. I'm currently sitting at that terrible spot where I'm at the top of the IC ladder, and need to become a manager and have direct reports in order to continue climbing, but the dreaded chicken and egg problem prevents it: You need management experience to become (or job hop to be) a manager.
I had the same painful conversation with my boss that a lot of us have had: Became the top subject matter expert on my growing team, team grew to the point where my boss needed to insert a few managers under him, pitched myself for it and ultimately he hired outside the team because he needed someone who had already been a manager. This exact thing has happened in my last three companies.
Very few companies actually have pure IC roles that are truly parallel (in comp and prestige) with the people management ladder.
TPM at Amazon is a very high bar, and usually requires a technical background. I have one old coworker who got it, and didn't make it very long, saying it was too challenging.
I've never seen someone on the TPM ladder directly manage SWEs at google. Microsoft is different, the whole place is a shit show.
If you have first hand experience, that's better than my anecdote so I will defer. I was going off of the job descriptions, which basically made it seem like an L6 TPM needed to be both an L6 SDE AND a PM.
I have first hand experience dealing with them from the Professional Services side. Anytime I needed something technical, I would go through back channels to avoid them.
> There's no easy answer, as many engineers do not have the soft skills for the role. But arguably, they could run these businesses themselves.
Can you clarify this? They don't have soft skills? (And perhaps lacking in biz skills, e.g., working understanding of marketing?) But still they can run the company?
My experience has been different. Technology is relatively the easy part. People? On the other hand? People - leading, managing, marketing to them, etc. - is 10x more difficult. Human behavior is a complicated system. It's not something you can throw a couple of engineers at and poof! X weeks later you have a semi-perfect solution.
I’ve said the best thing that happen to my career and finances was to work at AWS for three years. The best thing that ever happened to my mental health was to get PIP’d from Amazon with a $40K severance, Amazon on my resume and finding a job three weeks later.
I actually would echo this at the skills level. A lot of the bigger companies kind of pigeonhole your skillset to one tech stack that is very company-specific and introducing new tech can be very difficult. At least that was my experience in my last three big corporate positions (now at a series C startup).
My personal preference and risk appetite takes me to successful small public companies or well-funded startups.
If I don't have a risk appetite, I'd go government or boring F500 companies that are starving for engineers.
Wherever I go, I am very particular about the mission and that I get along with the team and manager. The less the bureaucracy, the more likely I am to enjoy working for them.
But there is no way I will work for big tech with their miserable processes, culture and exploitative management. I am here to work, not to constantly walk on eggshells for BS rules.
What linked current Big Tech was early entrants into adtech and the related money-printing machine.
Now they are just large advertising platforms that do something to attract users and user data.
I think under similar logic, if you want to work for those companies for comp/prof development, it’s probably whatever next money printer is building out.
IMO this is probably AI, next-gen adtech that keeps the technology going post-GDPR etc (platform plays like FAANG or great user enumeration companies in the open ecosystem, although a lack of a non-obvious adtech product might limit the growth and prestigious of these types) maybe some top cybersecurity vendors if the problems get worse and regulations get serious, maybe defense tech (second gen ones following what Palantir did).
Happened to me. I was that unfortunate CTO for a fintech startup. Unqualified CEO with anger issues but with loads of money waited till past traction and nod from investors, then simply booted me and my team out on some lame pretext, going as far as bad-mouthing 2 years of hard work by the tech team and now the CEO and the board have ghosted and won't return calls/email to pay or honour employment contract terms! Sane advice above, DO NOT accept equity, always go for hard cash, lesson learnt the hard way!
> There's no easy answer, as many engineers do not have the soft skills for the role. But arguably, they could run these businesses themselves.
I like most of this comment, but this I always think this perspective completely misses the point.
No matter how technical your role is, working with other people is always going to be the most important part of your job. No matter how technically talented you are, your ability to deliver value to an organisation is going to be strictly bottlenecked by your ability to work with others.
This is especially true for leadership roles, where success or failure in the job is almost entirely decided by people skills.
You can have a technical founder who understands the product perfectly, and the understands the market perfectly, and has a brilliant strategic vision. But if they can’t lead people effectively, if they can’t represent the business to the public, if they can’t develop trust among the customers, then they have basically none of the skills required to run the business.
I did this by mistake. Got hired as a QA, transferred to dev in six months. I wouldn't technically qualify for similar roles in my company were I to apply from the outside.
It's not "after a few years", and plenty of people just fail completely at management. It's realistically the same "hack" as "jump around companies to get good raises" - i.e. companies will pay out to fill a position, but not to keep a position filled.
My experience of TPMs in the industry is indeed unfortunately people who were not particularly good at sw dev, and who are not particularly good at project management, either. But they take care of all the charts and annoying stuff and technical managers and directors can hold their hand while they pretend to be know what they are doing by using jargon.
OK, that was harsh. But not always far from the truth!
The distinction between a program, project, and product managers seems to be mostly dependent on the company you work at.
All the various "PMs" at companies I've worked for have done largely the same jobs that are some mix of managing the project and figuring out new features for the product.
The difference between ongoing operations, a project, a program, and a portfolio are clearly delineated in the Project Management Book of Knowledge, which is usually foundational knowledge for a project manager. If a person tries to practice project management without knowing this stuff, I’d agree with your use of scare quotes.
I believe that is (or at least was) true at Google - although from what I knew of the role, it sounded like it also covered what I would consider project management. (I think I would often consider program mangement to be coordinating/managing across multiple projects as part of a broader program of work, but I don't think that was what Google meant by that title.)
At Apple, the ubiquitous EPMs are Engineering Program Managers. But yep, I think we're just quibbling over terms that aren't standardized across (or even within) companies, but describe roles that are more or less the same.
1. Transfer to a TPM/QA Manager role at somewhere like Amazon or Microsoft. Bar is much lower to get into this role.
2. Get hired into a higher level than you could in a SWE role.
3. Transfer within the company to being an SDM
4. Now you are one level higher, in a management role, that would have taken you 5+ years of grinding and some luck to get into.
5. Spend a few years in this role, switch to other big co, makikg 400-500k+ while bossing around engineers much smarter than you.
^This path is how people are doing it. Never take equity in a startup, never grind away as a mid level engineer, fighting with ten other engineers for one promotion.
Edit:
Adding one point to this, if you found a company with a non technical CEO, and the company sees some success, all the focus will be on the CEO. The CTO role is highly replaceable, and there is a massive power shift that occurs once there is traction with a "finished" product. The CEO, especially in B2B Saas, is the face of the company. So the CEO can sit on his hands the whole time the product is developed, but then does reap huge gains. There's no easy answer, as many engineers do not have the soft skills for the role. But arguably, they could run these businesses themselves.