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Comment by b9a2cab5 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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?

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."

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)_/¯

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