Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zmgsabst | Hacker News Reader

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> I just want to spend most of my time doing the latter. I just don’t give a fuck about impact or convincing others to work on my idea.

SDE 2 is a career position at Amazon — and it sounds like that’s what you want: to stay at that level, but working as the “point man” on increasingly important technical systems.

I would say that SDE 3 (senior) and SDE 4 (principal) are fundamentally political — you’re responsible for aligning the technical vision between teams and across whole organizations, as well as training SDE 1s and SDE 2s. You’re going to need to communicate, a lot, to do that.

Those roles aren’t management, but you’re also not an IC at SDE 3/4 the same way you’re an IC at SDE 1/2.

I think it’s okay to turn down promotions you don’t want.

If you are unusually good at being an SDE 2, there's not really a way to leverage that into pay or recognition or harder projects. Until you get the promo you will just be doing the same borderline-menial work any SDE 2 can do, a fungible story points resource. Although it's great that the engineering IC ladder provides an alternative path to people management, there is no alternative path to being a professional meeting-talker. We do not allow unusually capable individuals to write code that the median engineer couldn't write (because then the median engineer definitely couldn't maintain it). Instead we ask them to supervise and direct the work of the median engineers.

I actually think the best way to leverage mostly-solo intellectual work into business results and recognition might be data science. Models and analyses are allowed to be arbitrarily sophisticated and as long as the rest of the org understands the inputs/outputs/performance characteristics, they're content to treat the internals as black box. So data scientists can really go all out intellectually on their technical artifacts in a way that engineers can't.

Big tech has some specialized, high level/pay roles where someone can be successful just by being an excellent engineer, even with average communication skills. I've seen these in areas such as Compilers and Operating Systems Kernels, for instance. These jobs are, however, highly specialized and require extraordinary and domain-specific technical skills.

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