Hacker News Reader

Comment by a4isms | Hacker News Reader

I interview 50% or more of the senior engineers we (A YC-backed company that is post-IPO and still growing rapidly) hire. I assure you that our interview process for engineers at this level is weighted towards significant involvement in projects.

We consider it unacceptable if all the projects a candidate wants to talk about "began before I was hired, and shipped after I left." And that's what you get if you are an aggressive job-hopper your entire career, not just at the beginning.

I am never against someone wanting to negotiate the compensation they deserve for the skills they have developed. And certainly, for many skills, job hopping is the strategy for maximizing your pay for the skills you are able to learn and refine in 1-2 years per job.

But if you don't develop the skill of taking a major multi-year project from inception to completion, there is a skill you don't have that we will not pay for by hiring you at the top two levels of our org.

View on HN

> major multi-year project

I'm not sure what company you're at but there is certainly not a multi-year project in any I've worked at. There are long term _product_ roadmaps but in order to stay agile you never commit to something as big as a multi-year project. There are only individual features that get committed to. Even in core infra (heavily technical) where needs and solutions are known committed work goes out a year tops.

Absolutely you want people who delivered things from start to finish but I've never heard of those things taking multiple years. If it takes 2-3 years for your product to go to market it's a failure, regardless of whether it's an external or internal product.

This probably depends a lot on your industry. In my industry, every product I've worked on took multiple years to ship. It wouldn't be unreasonable to want to find sr engineers who had been through the whole cycle from early planning to post launch support.

Out of curiosity, what product does your company make? What kind of moat do they have if anything you do can be replicated in under a year by a competitor?

are you not involved in the product roadmap and how that gets translated into the individual, smaller projects that get you there? then you may not be as senior as you think ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If a product takes 2-4 iterations to reach maturity, and a candidate is only involved in one of those iterations, they haven't participated in the complete multi-year product cycle from skateboard to scooter to bicycle to motorcycle to car, to borrow a popular metaphor.

If a roadmap goes out 3-5 years and a candidate only executes on one or two of those years, the candidate hasn't gained experience with which parts of a roadmap stay committed and which ones change in response to new information/priorities.

Most of this does not apply to a hot startup where the founders are still coding every day, but those aren't the only senior engineering opportunities.

My meta-experience is that the kinds of things I'm talking about tend to be most highly prized by companies that have been around longer than a startup, and now have problems to solve technically and organizationally that can most effectively be solved by people who have stayed in one company longer than one-two years.

Such companies aren't usually as exciting as pre-IPO startups, so absolutely no side-eye from me if anyone reading this is thinking "You can take that job and shove it, I'm busy inventing the future on a two-pizza team in a six-pizza startup."

p.s. There's more than just shepherding long projects, that's just the easiest thing to explain. But to add some colour, other things a senior engineer is expected to demonstrate are:

1. Experience with the consequences of their choices. Ok, you were able to get a job at company X, get up to speed, and lead a major cross-team or cross-group initiative within two years. What happened after that? Did it create the desired outcomes? Why? Why not? Were there unanticipated consequences? What part did you play in dealing with those?

2. Experience with change. Managers--even entire management orgs--change. Were you around long enough to live through one such change? Or did you jump ship without acquiring any experience or scars from the change? Strategies change, e.g. Pivoting from B2C to B2B, or weaning a company off a dependence on sales-led growth. Do you have experience with not just the technological consequences, but the organizational consequences? Do you have the skill of creating an oasis of calm within the chaos?

p.p.s. I want to be very clear that there's nothing magic in my mind about being a "senior" engineer. You don't have to be a senior engineer to make more money in this industry: You can be a serial intermediate!

Consider someone who works as a team lead at a startup for two years, it goes IPO, they cash out. Do they stay, learn about working in a bigger company and become the kind of person I'm describing above?

Yes, if that interests them. But that isn't the only road. They could also go join another startup. Lather, rinse, repeat. With luck and skill, they could keep honing their skills as a leader of teams in a fast-paced early-stage environment, without ever becoming the kind of person a 500-person engineering group is trying to hire as a Principal Engineer.

Nothing wrong with that, it's the engineering equivalent of a serial entrepreneur. Some founders want to run their company for their entire career, like Ken Olsen, Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos. Others are happy to sell out and start all over again.

Do what makes you happy. I'm just explaining what one company is looking for at a senior level.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com