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“For example, a senior title at Big Tech typically expects more from an engineer than a small developer agency, a non-tech-first company, or a recently founded

“For example, a senior title at Big Tech typically expects more from an engineer than a small developer agency, a non-tech-first company, or a recently founded start-up does” This is simply not true. Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. Typically have a narrow specialty and a good grasp on how it fits into the larger Org’s strategy etc. Senior engineers at a small shop do EVERYTHING. Front end, back end, DBA work, training and upleveling juniors, PM work, sales calls and client support occasionally. Also more involved in product and strategy.

celim307 5y ago
This has been the opposite for me. Yes I wore a ton of hats at the startups I worked at but working at big tech I’ve been exposed to scale and quality standards beyond what I was used to before. Plus my coworkers are all higher quality so it’s like being in college again and hanging out with all these smart people I’m learning from just by interacting with them. And this is coming from someone very cynical of big tech otherwise
mabbo 5y ago
I think there's a lot of variability here. I've met Principal Engineers at Amazon who never write a line of code and barely do any mentoring (I don't like those PEs). But I've also worked with Senior and Principal Engineers who do incredible work, mentor, truly lead. They are force multipliers, making adjustments to the course of the organization in ways that have huge benefits and gains. And if you dropped these people into a new challenge with a totally different stack and business, they'd do the same thing there too. I hope to someday be one of those people.
- angrais 5y ago
  Given your emphasis on lead, do you have any recommendations for books or blogs to provide insight into how to be such a good leader?
  - zip1234 5y ago
    The Army has a manual on leadership that is really quite good. There are obviously parts that are not applicable but much of it is very useful. https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN20039-ADP_6-22-001-WEB-0.pdf https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN20039-ADP_6-...
  - infamouscow 5y ago
    Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin Jocko also has a very popular podcast where he further dispenses leadership principles.
romanhn 5y ago
Have you worked at a FAANG? I'm sure it depends on company/team, but it was pretty common for externally hired senior engineers to struggle (and sometimes flame out) due to consistently high and enforced expectations, different mode of work (extremely cross-org and cross-functional) and very high ambiguity (which can also come with low handholding in fast growing areas).
- caturopath 5y ago
  I have worked at a FAANG company and my experience was very much like the poster's. Everyone around me seemed to really heavily weight the expectations placed on folks at each level going up, but nothing was like the actual responsibility levels people had in the orgs I'd worked in before.
- Kranar 5y ago
  I worked at Google and Microsoft and left both of them and started my own company precisely because of how hard it is to get anything done at bigger companies, and comparatively speaking Google is one of the less "bureaucratic" companies to work for with much less friction compared to the other FAANG companies. Working at a start up company allows you to be far more productive than at a bigger company. You are not shoehorned into any particular position and you need to be able to excel at multiple areas and be able to switch gears rapidly. One month I'm using React/TypeScript to implement new front-end web pages, and then the next month I'm working on improving the green-thread scheduler we use for our backend systems in C++, and then after that I jump into Kotlin to work on the mobile version of our app. All of the developers here are able to work across the different projects and pick what areas they want to, some choose to focus just on a particular area and that's fine, but others can jump across a variety of different technologies, and as I own the company I like to get involved in a little bit of everything. At Google, I'd be lucky to be working on one narrow facet of one of those areas over the course of a year. Startups are absolutely not for everyone and they can lead to burn out, as is evident from many posts to HN, but for people who really want to immerse themselves in tech and want to work on a variety of different technologies I just can't see working at a bigger company comparing to it. That said it's definitely true that if I didn't have Google/MS on my resume, no one would have taken my startup seriously, so it's worth getting some experience at FAANG for the credential, and then jumping ship after a couple of years if the opportunity arises. Also there were nice things about Google as an environment, like tech talks, and I absolutely miss Testing on the Toilet. You can recreate some of that at a smaller company but the scale at which Google is able to do it is very impressive and hard to replicate. That said you can always go back to FAANG and recruiters from both companies are just an email away.
MattGaiser 5y ago
That still seems to be expecting more in terms of skill. I have only ever worked on small teams with smallish companies in my short career, so I have had to handle everything from test to database to frontend to cloud config. I really don't think these kinds of roles let me master anything because I am so often switching modes. If you get to focus, you probably become more skilled very quickly.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> This is simply not true. Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. I don’t know where this myth came from, but it’s not true. Aside from the isolated stories about mismanaged FAANG departments that don’t have many responsibilities, FAANG jobs tend to have high standards and high expectations. FAANG companies don’t pay the highest salaries without expecting high output. The engineers may not be spread thin across many domains like in a startup, but they are expected to have both broad and deep knowledge within their speciality, and to deliver work that meets the highest standards.
- mathgladiator 5y ago
  The gap emerges because doing everything under is vastly different than doing strategic work across multiple organizations. It's the difference between captaining a small boat versus a super carrier.
- pcmoney 5y ago
  Having worked at both I can say this with a high degree of certainty from my experience. Even if you have a dedicated Sr at a BigTechCo it is just a much bigger boat to move. Also I have seen people promo at FAANG for projects that would be considered trivial/part of the job at a smaller shop. Command line utilities, improved CI pipeline etc.
- pcmoney 5y ago
  Also FAANG doesn’t pay the highest, top 10% maybe. IIRC google explicitly targets 80th percentile. Unicorns, Jane, HRT, all pay more typically.
QuercusMax 5y ago
Your mileage may definitely vary, especially based on what kind of team you're in. Senior SWE at a small company was significantly less responsibility than Senior SWE at Google. As a Senior at Google, I was doing almost everything you say a "small company" Senior does, aside from DBA work and sales calls. I suppose if you're just a cog in the machine of some huge org like Ads or Search you might be right, but a smaller product team might look a lot more like a small company than you might realize. There is a lot of extra overhead of various sorts, but I wouldn't say the responsibilities are significantly less.
fsociety 5y ago
Sometimes it is. In my experience I was expected to do less at a start-up but to do it well. Yes, I worked across the stack and often would find myself doing varied things but instead of stacking more on in a day, it was more like quickly shifting priorities each day. Now at a larger company I’m expected to spin many plates so to speak. I’m measured on my ability to write code, pitch projects, design architecture, manage cross functional relationships, interview many candidates a week, have company outreach of some form, mentor junior members, deal with organizational politics (this is the big draining one), participate in project reviews, run projects for new employees to work on, provide feedback to all my peers, tons of personal development planning and self-reviews, manage third-party relationships, respond to incidents and be on-call for things not related to my team, learn new things every year aka personal development, and more. And if I fail in one of the four areas in a performance review I can be put on a performance review plan. I’m making it sound more grim than it is, but for my experience there are just more things to do and there are no compromising them. Maybe other individuals are better at this or work with a manager that has less expectations, but this is my experience. I think I was a better programmer at the startup, but I have more organizational impact at the bigger company.
hellisothers 5y ago
This isn’t the case but your statement is true all the same. Smaller shops engineers DO do everything which is valuable at a small shop but is not valued at all at a large shop because it doesn’t scale. Once you’re working at scale different values surface like being able to communicate and drive consensus, focus on one (high impact) thing, and do higher leverage work. When I went from small-co to big-co I also didn’t understand what others valued and I languished a little trying to do all the things. Now I’m in the groove and look back at how much easier it was to just do all the things.
dahart 5y ago
> Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. I initially mis-interpreted this sentence to be talking about quantity rather than roles, it seems like others here got the same impression. It’s important to recognize the part you quoted was talking about quantity and not role, and what you’re talking about is role and not quantity. It’s also important to recognize that engineers with a lot of experience are biased toward working at stable companies and not startups. From experience, I would agree with the article that the common expectation in startups very much is that you have to make do with junior developers when hiring, and if you get high quality senior engineers with a lot of experience, you’re pretty lucky. While there’s some truth to startup roles sometimes being more broad (less focused) and big-company roles being more deep (more focused), might it be best to stick to personal experience rather than claim what a broad group of other people’s experiences is without really knowing? As a founder with a partner in an initially 2-person company, I did only front-end while my partner did only back-end. Our dev roles were more focused than by previous big-company jobs, but we both had to do non-dev work too, of course. As a sr/principal in a FAANG-type company, I’m doing more mentoring of juniors, more sales and support calls, and also more math & research, than I was doing with my startup. I’m also involved in product coding, algorithms, and design prototyping. So, speaking personally, I can’t exactly confirm your view that startups are broad and big-company roles are narrow. For me, the difference is that with a startup there were some tasks that I just don’t have at a big company, like doing taxes. The other main difference is that my own company was mine, and big-company work is structured around the organization. It’s not so much a difference in the amount or the type of work, but a difference in the ownership and motivations and what success and failure looks like at any given time.
908B64B197 5y ago
> Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much I could see why some at smaller companies would believe that, or rather prefer to believe that.
- pcmoney 5y ago
  Why would that be? I have worked at both.
summerlight 5y ago
> This is simply not true. Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. Typically have a narrow specialty and a good grasp on how it fits into the larger Org’s strategy etc. I don't think this is true. Big techs have surprisingly many moving parts even for minor engineering projects and that complexity is the main motivation of hiring smart people from the globe. Most SWEs in big techs are generalists, not specialists. Do you want to launch something in Google? Then good luck dealing with all the facets from general engineering to other topics like security, privacy, latency, quality, measurement, logging, scalability, redundancy, monitoring, resource management, access control, data retention, documentation, testing, release, i18n and even inclusion nowadays. Upon all the technical debts accumulated over 20 years. Oh, did I mention organizational dynamics? Usually you need to deal with 5~10 teams for getting anything non-trivial done. And it is a very fun thing to find out the current owner of very specific dependency to avoid accidental breakages.
- pcmoney 5y ago
  I would politely say that that just means it is harder to get things done so you accomplish less and by definition “get less things done” at a BigTechCo Navigating a bureaucracy is a skill. And doing so can help get things done but in and of itself it is not actually getting anything done. Getting things done at a BigTechCo definitely takes more effort.

celim307 5y ago

This has been the opposite for me. Yes I wore a ton of hats at the startups I worked at but working at big tech I’ve been exposed to scale and quality standards beyond what I was used to before. Plus my coworkers are all higher quality so it’s like being in college again and hanging out with all these smart people I’m learning from just by interacting with them. And this is coming from someone very cynical of big tech otherwise

mabbo 5y ago

I think there's a lot of variability here. I've met Principal Engineers at Amazon who never write a line of code and barely do any mentoring (I don't like those PEs). But I've also worked with Senior and Principal Engineers who do incredible work, mentor, truly lead. They are force multipliers, making adjustments to the course of the organization in ways that have huge benefits and gains. And if you dropped these people into a new challenge with a totally different stack and business, they'd do the same thing there too. I hope to someday be one of those people.

angrais 5y ago
Given your emphasis on lead, do you have any recommendations for books or blogs to provide insight into how to be such a good leader?
- zip1234 5y ago
  The Army has a manual on leadership that is really quite good. There are obviously parts that are not applicable but much of it is very useful. https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN20039-ADP_6-22-001-WEB-0.pdf https://armypubs.army.mil/epubs/DR_pubs/DR_a/ARN20039-ADP_6-...
- infamouscow 5y ago
  Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin Jocko also has a very popular podcast where he further dispenses leadership principles.

romanhn 5y ago

Have you worked at a FAANG? I'm sure it depends on company/team, but it was pretty common for externally hired senior engineers to struggle (and sometimes flame out) due to consistently high and enforced expectations, different mode of work (extremely cross-org and cross-functional) and very high ambiguity (which can also come with low handholding in fast growing areas).

caturopath 5y ago
I have worked at a FAANG company and my experience was very much like the poster's. Everyone around me seemed to really heavily weight the expectations placed on folks at each level going up, but nothing was like the actual responsibility levels people had in the orgs I'd worked in before.
Kranar 5y ago
I worked at Google and Microsoft and left both of them and started my own company precisely because of how hard it is to get anything done at bigger companies, and comparatively speaking Google is one of the less "bureaucratic" companies to work for with much less friction compared to the other FAANG companies. Working at a start up company allows you to be far more productive than at a bigger company. You are not shoehorned into any particular position and you need to be able to excel at multiple areas and be able to switch gears rapidly. One month I'm using React/TypeScript to implement new front-end web pages, and then the next month I'm working on improving the green-thread scheduler we use for our backend systems in C++, and then after that I jump into Kotlin to work on the mobile version of our app. All of the developers here are able to work across the different projects and pick what areas they want to, some choose to focus just on a particular area and that's fine, but others can jump across a variety of different technologies, and as I own the company I like to get involved in a little bit of everything. At Google, I'd be lucky to be working on one narrow facet of one of those areas over the course of a year. Startups are absolutely not for everyone and they can lead to burn out, as is evident from many posts to HN, but for people who really want to immerse themselves in tech and want to work on a variety of different technologies I just can't see working at a bigger company comparing to it. That said it's definitely true that if I didn't have Google/MS on my resume, no one would have taken my startup seriously, so it's worth getting some experience at FAANG for the credential, and then jumping ship after a couple of years if the opportunity arises. Also there were nice things about Google as an environment, like tech talks, and I absolutely miss Testing on the Toilet. You can recreate some of that at a smaller company but the scale at which Google is able to do it is very impressive and hard to replicate. That said you can always go back to FAANG and recruiters from both companies are just an email away.

MattGaiser 5y ago

That still seems to be expecting more in terms of skill. I have only ever worked on small teams with smallish companies in my short career, so I have had to handle everything from test to database to frontend to cloud config. I really don't think these kinds of roles let me master anything because I am so often switching modes. If you get to focus, you probably become more skilled very quickly.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> This is simply not true. Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. I don’t know where this myth came from, but it’s not true. Aside from the isolated stories about mismanaged FAANG departments that don’t have many responsibilities, FAANG jobs tend to have high standards and high expectations. FAANG companies don’t pay the highest salaries without expecting high output. The engineers may not be spread thin across many domains like in a startup, but they are expected to have both broad and deep knowledge within their speciality, and to deliver work that meets the highest standards.

mathgladiator 5y ago
The gap emerges because doing everything under is vastly different than doing strategic work across multiple organizations. It's the difference between captaining a small boat versus a super carrier.
pcmoney 5y ago
Having worked at both I can say this with a high degree of certainty from my experience. Even if you have a dedicated Sr at a BigTechCo it is just a much bigger boat to move. Also I have seen people promo at FAANG for projects that would be considered trivial/part of the job at a smaller shop. Command line utilities, improved CI pipeline etc.
pcmoney 5y ago
Also FAANG doesn’t pay the highest, top 10% maybe. IIRC google explicitly targets 80th percentile. Unicorns, Jane, HRT, all pay more typically.

QuercusMax 5y ago

Your mileage may definitely vary, especially based on what kind of team you're in. Senior SWE at a small company was significantly less responsibility than Senior SWE at Google. As a Senior at Google, I was doing almost everything you say a "small company" Senior does, aside from DBA work and sales calls. I suppose if you're just a cog in the machine of some huge org like Ads or Search you might be right, but a smaller product team might look a lot more like a small company than you might realize. There is a lot of extra overhead of various sorts, but I wouldn't say the responsibilities are significantly less.

fsociety 5y ago

Sometimes it is. In my experience I was expected to do less at a start-up but to do it well. Yes, I worked across the stack and often would find myself doing varied things but instead of stacking more on in a day, it was more like quickly shifting priorities each day. Now at a larger company I’m expected to spin many plates so to speak. I’m measured on my ability to write code, pitch projects, design architecture, manage cross functional relationships, interview many candidates a week, have company outreach of some form, mentor junior members, deal with organizational politics (this is the big draining one), participate in project reviews, run projects for new employees to work on, provide feedback to all my peers, tons of personal development planning and self-reviews, manage third-party relationships, respond to incidents and be on-call for things not related to my team, learn new things every year aka personal development, and more. And if I fail in one of the four areas in a performance review I can be put on a performance review plan. I’m making it sound more grim than it is, but for my experience there are just more things to do and there are no compromising them. Maybe other individuals are better at this or work with a manager that has less expectations, but this is my experience. I think I was a better programmer at the startup, but I have more organizational impact at the bigger company.

hellisothers 5y ago

This isn’t the case but your statement is true all the same. Smaller shops engineers DO do everything which is valuable at a small shop but is not valued at all at a large shop because it doesn’t scale. Once you’re working at scale different values surface like being able to communicate and drive consensus, focus on one (high impact) thing, and do higher leverage work. When I went from small-co to big-co I also didn’t understand what others valued and I languished a little trying to do all the things. Now I’m in the groove and look back at how much easier it was to just do all the things.

dahart 5y ago

> Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. I initially mis-interpreted this sentence to be talking about quantity rather than roles, it seems like others here got the same impression. It’s important to recognize the part you quoted was talking about quantity and not role, and what you’re talking about is role and not quantity. It’s also important to recognize that engineers with a lot of experience are biased toward working at stable companies and not startups. From experience, I would agree with the article that the common expectation in startups very much is that you have to make do with junior developers when hiring, and if you get high quality senior engineers with a lot of experience, you’re pretty lucky. While there’s some truth to startup roles sometimes being more broad (less focused) and big-company roles being more deep (more focused), might it be best to stick to personal experience rather than claim what a broad group of other people’s experiences is without really knowing? As a founder with a partner in an initially 2-person company, I did only front-end while my partner did only back-end. Our dev roles were more focused than by previous big-company jobs, but we both had to do non-dev work too, of course. As a sr/principal in a FAANG-type company, I’m doing more mentoring of juniors, more sales and support calls, and also more math & research, than I was doing with my startup. I’m also involved in product coding, algorithms, and design prototyping. So, speaking personally, I can’t exactly confirm your view that startups are broad and big-company roles are narrow. For me, the difference is that with a startup there were some tasks that I just don’t have at a big company, like doing taxes. The other main difference is that my own company was mine, and big-company work is structured around the organization. It’s not so much a difference in the amount or the type of work, but a difference in the ownership and motivations and what success and failure looks like at any given time.

908B64B197 5y ago

> Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much I could see why some at smaller companies would believe that, or rather prefer to believe that.

pcmoney 5y ago
Why would that be? I have worked at both.

summerlight 5y ago

> This is simply not true. Seniors at FAANG type companies simply dont do that much. Typically have a narrow specialty and a good grasp on how it fits into the larger Org’s strategy etc. I don't think this is true. Big techs have surprisingly many moving parts even for minor engineering projects and that complexity is the main motivation of hiring smart people from the globe. Most SWEs in big techs are generalists, not specialists. Do you want to launch something in Google? Then good luck dealing with all the facets from general engineering to other topics like security, privacy, latency, quality, measurement, logging, scalability, redundancy, monitoring, resource management, access control, data retention, documentation, testing, release, i18n and even inclusion nowadays. Upon all the technical debts accumulated over 20 years. Oh, did I mention organizational dynamics? Usually you need to deal with 5~10 teams for getting anything non-trivial done. And it is a very fun thing to find out the current owner of very specific dependency to avoid accidental breakages.

pcmoney 5y ago
I would politely say that that just means it is harder to get things done so you accomplish less and by definition “get less things done” at a BigTechCo Navigating a bureaucracy is a skill. And doing so can help get things done but in and of itself it is not actually getting anything done. Getting things done at a BigTechCo definitely takes more effort.