5 ms·

Staying a productive IC your whole career is fairly straightforward: I really think it comes down to never "coasting" and always being open to learning new thin

Staying a productive IC your whole career is fairly straightforward: I really think it comes down to never "coasting" and always being open to learning new things. The problem is a lot of older people seem to believe that once they get to a certain point, they're entitled a position and respect. Is it a wonder why younger people, who might be more up-to-date than them, don't want to work with them? The trick is to never get that kind of "old" and remain a lifelong learner.

deweywsu 5y ago
nefitty 5y ago
It seems like some people fall into this trap if they manage to get into FAANG. I would be scared of that happening to me. It's like, your entire view of the industry was built around hitting the winner's podium, and once you've achieved that, where do you go? There's only so many gold medals to go around on the podium itself, anyways.
- asdfman123 5y ago
  Depends on why you do it and what you do there. I'm at FAANG and still learning plenty. I'm not here to hit an arbitrary goal but because I have to have a job and it pays well, so might as well turbocharge my savings. But yes, you should always respect the journey. It never stops: keep participating in it, and keep your eyes open.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    That's good to know! The challenges you find must be myriad. It does sound fun.
- groby_b 5y ago
  I'd overall suggest stepping away from the idea that growth is so one-dimensional that you can "win" at it. But even if it were, there's plenty of room within them to grow, and just getting in is far from "you've achieved it all" If we stay with that idea for a second: FAANG companies have tens of thousands of engineers. Getting there isn't a "gold medal". You're barely in the stadium. If you made it to Principal Engineer, congrats, you've gotten through the qualifying rounds. Still plenty of room to strive. There are plenty of valid reasons for why you choose or don't choose FAANG. But "Where would I go once I've achieved that" really shouldn't hold you back.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    Perfect framing, thank you.
- dinvlad 5y ago
  Or you get "old" and experienced enough to realize it's all the same things every day, everywhere :-) And I can almost guarantee startups are much more learning-conducive than FAANG in that regard.
  - barrkel 5y ago
    You learn different things at startups vs FAANG. A startup probably won't be able to afford the standard of engineering that you can find at places like Google. There are good practices you can learn there that you probably won't see at a startup. As a company scales up, coordinating effort across teams becomes more important for getting stuff done, even as a senior IC. You no longer know the whole stack (assuming you're an early employee) and have to ask other teams to adapt interfaces and add functionality to get your stuff to work. However, that's the default at FAANG. Coordination is the name of the game and it's so meeting heavy because it's a lot of work to keep everyone aligned, on the same page. You can learn interesting technical things either way, but it's easier to find a niche as a specialist at a large company. Startups usually need generalists in the early days. I spent eight years at a startup (4th engineer, rose to chief architect after CTO left, was most senior engineer of 40 or so in co) and joined Google last March. I learned a lot when I joined the startup (Rails was new to me) and I added some hard yards of scaling up database utilisation with very little extra hardware over the years, but the pace of learning declined over time and my degree of specialization increased as I focused on the biggest bottleneck the business had, technically - even while the business was of course more interested in fattening up its product line for valuation. I learned a huge amount when I joined Google too, though a lot of that is due to the parallel universe quality of working at a company that had to solve many scaling problems for the first time and did so with inhouse tech which didn't become industry standard (I blame monorepo - it makes it too easy to have incestuous dependencies). A bigger part of the learning was the mode of getting things done between teams. I haven't learned much in terms of transferrable tech, but I have seen better engineering practices put into action, that we could not afford - and didn't have strong enough singular opinions on - at the startup. I can say it's not the same things every day, everywhere. There is no end to the code at Google, there is more than you can ever hope to understand and it changes too fast anyway. At a startup, you can understand almost everything. More work is political at largeco, necessarily because the org tree sometimes needs shaking to get things moving, but also simply sociologically - a startup is a small team, largeco is a whole nation with internal rivalries and whole divisions that never need to communicate much.
musicale 5y ago
This doesn't pass the smell test for me, for several reasons: Most of the "new" ideas in computing (neural networks, quantum computing, etc.) aren't new at all. Not to mention that Linux and macOS are basically 1960s-style operating systems. Knowledge of short-term technical details and skills at dealing with brand new systems are much easier to acquire than deep understanding of core principles as well as engineering experience. Dismissing senior colleagues as "entitled" and their knowledge and experience as worthless and refusing to work with them as a consequence would be a grave mistake.
- trulyme 5y ago
  Well it goes both ways. Young people are cocky and dismiss older peoples' experience as irrelevant, and more senior people think they've seen it all already and that there is nothing new that hasn't been around since 60s. Neural networks are a good example. If you skipped the last decade (/two) and you think you know about ANN because you mastered them in 60s... boy do I have news for you. :) Another paradigm shift for me was React (declarative web frontend development), and let's not even go into the whole Rust thingthing One of the biggest pitfalls of an experienced person can be lack of curiosity, and it is really easy to fall for it, because let's face it, most of the new things are crap and will be forgotten in a few years. However, there are nuggets to be found in the mud, one just needs to keep looking.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    >One of the biggest pitfalls of an experienced person can be lack of curiosity, and it is really easy to fall for it, because let's face it, most of the new things are crap and will be forgotten in a few years. However, there are nuggets to be found in the mud, one just needs to keep looking. It's easy to reflexively dismiss reimaginings of things that have been tried and failed half a dozen times over the years. But sometimes the concept has been tweaked enough, the environment is different enough, the technology underpinnings are better enough that it actually works this time. Virtualization (z/VM--or whatever it was called at the time) was mostly a curiosity on IBM mainframes for years. Then VMware came along (and Linux on Z was pretty successful on IBM mainframes as well).
granshaw 5y ago
We’ll, you know, it’s kinda true in other careers, and that’s where the belief comes from. Needing to constantly keep up is quite unique to Tech, and is a good or bad thing depending on your outlook

deweywsu 5y ago

nefitty 5y ago

It seems like some people fall into this trap if they manage to get into FAANG. I would be scared of that happening to me. It's like, your entire view of the industry was built around hitting the winner's podium, and once you've achieved that, where do you go? There's only so many gold medals to go around on the podium itself, anyways.

asdfman123 5y ago
Depends on why you do it and what you do there. I'm at FAANG and still learning plenty. I'm not here to hit an arbitrary goal but because I have to have a job and it pays well, so might as well turbocharge my savings. But yes, you should always respect the journey. It never stops: keep participating in it, and keep your eyes open.
- nefitty 5y ago
  That's good to know! The challenges you find must be myriad. It does sound fun.
groby_b 5y ago
I'd overall suggest stepping away from the idea that growth is so one-dimensional that you can "win" at it. But even if it were, there's plenty of room within them to grow, and just getting in is far from "you've achieved it all" If we stay with that idea for a second: FAANG companies have tens of thousands of engineers. Getting there isn't a "gold medal". You're barely in the stadium. If you made it to Principal Engineer, congrats, you've gotten through the qualifying rounds. Still plenty of room to strive. There are plenty of valid reasons for why you choose or don't choose FAANG. But "Where would I go once I've achieved that" really shouldn't hold you back.
- nefitty 5y ago
  Perfect framing, thank you.
dinvlad 5y ago
Or you get "old" and experienced enough to realize it's all the same things every day, everywhere :-) And I can almost guarantee startups are much more learning-conducive than FAANG in that regard.
- barrkel 5y ago
  You learn different things at startups vs FAANG. A startup probably won't be able to afford the standard of engineering that you can find at places like Google. There are good practices you can learn there that you probably won't see at a startup. As a company scales up, coordinating effort across teams becomes more important for getting stuff done, even as a senior IC. You no longer know the whole stack (assuming you're an early employee) and have to ask other teams to adapt interfaces and add functionality to get your stuff to work. However, that's the default at FAANG. Coordination is the name of the game and it's so meeting heavy because it's a lot of work to keep everyone aligned, on the same page. You can learn interesting technical things either way, but it's easier to find a niche as a specialist at a large company. Startups usually need generalists in the early days. I spent eight years at a startup (4th engineer, rose to chief architect after CTO left, was most senior engineer of 40 or so in co) and joined Google last March. I learned a lot when I joined the startup (Rails was new to me) and I added some hard yards of scaling up database utilisation with very little extra hardware over the years, but the pace of learning declined over time and my degree of specialization increased as I focused on the biggest bottleneck the business had, technically - even while the business was of course more interested in fattening up its product line for valuation. I learned a huge amount when I joined Google too, though a lot of that is due to the parallel universe quality of working at a company that had to solve many scaling problems for the first time and did so with inhouse tech which didn't become industry standard (I blame monorepo - it makes it too easy to have incestuous dependencies). A bigger part of the learning was the mode of getting things done between teams. I haven't learned much in terms of transferrable tech, but I have seen better engineering practices put into action, that we could not afford - and didn't have strong enough singular opinions on - at the startup. I can say it's not the same things every day, everywhere. There is no end to the code at Google, there is more than you can ever hope to understand and it changes too fast anyway. At a startup, you can understand almost everything. More work is political at largeco, necessarily because the org tree sometimes needs shaking to get things moving, but also simply sociologically - a startup is a small team, largeco is a whole nation with internal rivalries and whole divisions that never need to communicate much.

musicale 5y ago

This doesn't pass the smell test for me, for several reasons: Most of the "new" ideas in computing (neural networks, quantum computing, etc.) aren't new at all. Not to mention that Linux and macOS are basically 1960s-style operating systems. Knowledge of short-term technical details and skills at dealing with brand new systems are much easier to acquire than deep understanding of core principles as well as engineering experience. Dismissing senior colleagues as "entitled" and their knowledge and experience as worthless and refusing to work with them as a consequence would be a grave mistake.

trulyme 5y ago
Well it goes both ways. Young people are cocky and dismiss older peoples' experience as irrelevant, and more senior people think they've seen it all already and that there is nothing new that hasn't been around since 60s. Neural networks are a good example. If you skipped the last decade (/two) and you think you know about ANN because you mastered them in 60s... boy do I have news for you. :) Another paradigm shift for me was React (declarative web frontend development), and let's not even go into the whole Rust thingthing One of the biggest pitfalls of an experienced person can be lack of curiosity, and it is really easy to fall for it, because let's face it, most of the new things are crap and will be forgotten in a few years. However, there are nuggets to be found in the mud, one just needs to keep looking.
- ghaff 5y ago
  >One of the biggest pitfalls of an experienced person can be lack of curiosity, and it is really easy to fall for it, because let's face it, most of the new things are crap and will be forgotten in a few years. However, there are nuggets to be found in the mud, one just needs to keep looking. It's easy to reflexively dismiss reimaginings of things that have been tried and failed half a dozen times over the years. But sometimes the concept has been tweaked enough, the environment is different enough, the technology underpinnings are better enough that it actually works this time. Virtualization (z/VM--or whatever it was called at the time) was mostly a curiosity on IBM mainframes for years. Then VMware came along (and Linux on Z was pretty successful on IBM mainframes as well).

granshaw 5y ago

We’ll, you know, it’s kinda true in other careers, and that’s where the belief comes from. Needing to constantly keep up is quite unique to Tech, and is a good or bad thing depending on your outlook