> only advertise positions for people who are comically well-decorated; Principal engineers with 10 years of experience, plus the masters degree, plus a bunch of specific cloud orchestration, scalable systems, or other devops experience that just seems entirely impractical to accumulate without simply advancing at the same company or FAANG for 15 years, which seems itself to be an unachievable tenure in this millennium.
You don’t need to spend 15 years at the same company or at FAANG to acquire these skills.
One issue that a lot of people face is that their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience and more about accumulating 1-2 years of experience 7-10 different times. It can take some deliberate planning to work your way upward over time and across companies rather than repeating the same arc over and over again.
Another trap is when people who want to be high-level ICs end up in management for a while, slowly getting further and further from working on the tech.
In this job market it’s hard to go from unemployed in one country to direct hire Principal in another country unless you have an extraordinary skill set. It will make more sense to get your foot in the door at any job that might work, then move up from there.
"One issue that a lot of people face is that their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience and more about accumulating 1-2 years of experience 7-10 different times."
This could also be worded as:
"One issue that a lot of people face is that they did not work at prestigious technical companies. Having a long tenure at such companies gives hiring managers confidence in placing them into principal level roles, regardless of what the candidate actually learned at said company. Everything is about the illusion of competence."
I think it's closer to "companies won't hire people to do $THING unless they've done $THING before." That, combined with overinflating requirements, interviews that don't bear a lot of resemblance to the actual job, and interviews that are far more difficult than the actual job, plus perhaps a dose of what you said, seems to explain it. The first of these things is probably related to having people with HR or sales backgrounds (recruiters) reading resumes without understanding what they're reading. The latter two seems mostly like cargo culting FAANG interviews (and, from what I hear, even FAANG interviews are the same in the sense of not being all that related to the actual job yet also being more difficult).
Disagree. I've worked with engineers who were taking on much more business responsibility after two years than others who are basically moderately proficient code bots after twenty. There is a huge difference in competency at the stuff that scales well, such that some people don't even notice it's a skill at all and others instantly gravitate to it it. Principal roles are for the people who learn to do them (with some error bars of course.. And everyone knows when that happens).
When you've worked with truly exceptional people it becomes clear that there truly are 10x and 100x engineers and it's not just that some people did better at politics.
But plenty of companies don't know about this and do succumb to stupid politics. It's a tragedy, really.
I once worked as the sole maintainer of an old legacy product while the company spent 2 years trying to create a new product to replace it. Eventually they abandoned all work and most of the team left.
During the transition months, I managed to convince upper management that now would be a good time to update the legacy product with all the knowledge gained over the past years.
So I spent about a couple of months or more (fuzzy memory) directing a group of people more skilled and talented than me, converting a coffeescript codebase to typescript, fixing a whole bunch of bugs and performance issues and updated a neglected codebase to something they can actually hire people to work on.
After that experience, I was promoted to tech director and leveraged that to become tech lead at future jobs.
Thanks for the example. I suppose that's a fairly unique position to be in, but one that you could have chosen not to pursue. On the surface, the only way that's different than my most recent experience is that of being the director of the initiative, or otherwise responsible for the whole project, (also being laid off doesn't help). Do you think things would have gone differently had people not jumped ship?
It's definitely a case of 'right time, right place'. But I also had several factors that helped increase my luck surface [0].
- I had experience with early versions of angular.js (1.2~) and typescript (1.x~)
- I was willing to dive into an unknown codebase in an unknown language (coffeescript 1.x) that no one else wanted to touch
- I had almost a whole year to get familiar with the codebase, the intricacies and weird bugs, and the crazy amounts of OOP in it
- I came from the old definition of full stack (design + dev + database + user facing), making me a generalist among a bunch of technically minded people
Also, everyone was pretty demotivated and mentally checked out. Some had spent 2.5 years working on the project, there was a public launch for the beta release, press releases and a whole PR event to our existing users. Less than a month later, the board/investors cancelled the project. Even the CTO was pretty checked out and let me do whatever I want, which was probably how my crazy proposal got through. Within 2 months, we lost the entire upper senior engineering division, from CTO down to team leads. There was a huge debate about whether or not to even keep the engineering division, if it would be better to sell our current product to our rivals and re-focus on being a design agency. That didn't happen because our rivals came to us first asking if we would buy them...
Then either jump jobs or get promoted. This is the nature of tech. High risk, high reward. Work for the public sector e.g. US Digital Service if you just want something boring and stable.
For a lot of people the only option is to jump jobs. At small and mid size companies, it's literally not possible to have the impact of an L6+ Google equivalent most of the time. Rough for people not working in the tech industry and wanting to get in, but that's why you get downleveled and honestly it's usually appropriate even if your previous title was staff and now you're a SWE2 or senior.
I suppose the nature of that quote is more about the exaggerated nature of the requirements compared to the rather unlikely ability to fulfill those requirements without gradually climbing at a company with an endless level of advancement in an IC role, but not excluding the possibility it could be done otherwise. That said, I definitely suffer from this problem, but it's in-part a result of both no clear way to advance in most circumstances, and repeated volatility in both the market, world, and my life. Now, there aren't jobs to advance from, even if I could land one, and prior to being laid off, I'd most likely have just continued doing either my regular course of work or eventually being offered a managing role. My impression is that it would be a rare circumstance to be offered a higher level IC position at a different company without making a horizontal move in role and building the trust there.
I wouldn't say I've actually repeated the same arc ever, it would just seem that way on the surface, and maybe I should think about how to make it not seem that way.
You don’t need to spend 15 years at the same company or at FAANG to acquire these skills.
One issue that a lot of people face is that their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience and more about accumulating 1-2 years of experience 7-10 different times. It can take some deliberate planning to work your way upward over time and across companies rather than repeating the same arc over and over again.
Another trap is when people who want to be high-level ICs end up in management for a while, slowly getting further and further from working on the tech.
In this job market it’s hard to go from unemployed in one country to direct hire Principal in another country unless you have an extraordinary skill set. It will make more sense to get your foot in the door at any job that might work, then move up from there.