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This is a statistically horrible idea. The chance that your startup is going to replace even the compensation of entry level grad in any large city in the US d

This is a statistically horrible idea. The chance that your startup is going to replace even the compensation of entry level grad in any large city in the US doing enterprise development is almost 0. The “story” that has worked for me is that “no I’m not going to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls riding a unicycle on a tightrope. What we can do is talk like adults and we can discuss your real world business problems and see if I can bring my skills and experience to the table to help you solve those problems in exchange for money” I’m not going to spend 40 hours a week working and more time on the side working on a side project.

itake 4y ago
Just wondering, what is your TC? My understanding is that story works at Tier 3 companies that lack a structured interview process and are desperate for candidates (e.g. startups).
- scarface74 4y ago
  Seeing that I work at the alphabetically sorted first “A” in FAANG, I don’t think it could be considered a “tier 3” company. When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position, I wasn’t interested in either relocating, working as a software developer at any large company or doing the prerequisite DS&A monkey dance. We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a fully remote role consulting (yes it’s a full time position) in AWS Professional Services. I specialize in “application modernization” which is a fancy term for cloud enterprise application development + “Devops” + the standard type of work architects do at other companies. But as far as the startup I worked for being “desperate”. I got hired at my previous company because of an informal lunch with the then new CTO who needed someone to lead the effort to make the company more “cloud native” and help them pivot toward a micro service architecture because they wanted to sell the services as backend to large health care companies. Hint: I did that well enough to go from never opening the AWS console in mid 2018 to working at AWS two years later. My interview was all behavioral where I talked through some of my previous company changing successes at a startup and a company where I led the integration effort when they were on an acquisition spree. My “TC” is fine. It would be better if my unvested AMZN RSUs didn’t drop by half since I got hired. (Yes I knew the gatekeeping was going to start when i wrote the first post above)
  - iLoveOncall 4y ago
    That's a long story to hide the fact that by refusing to do LeetCode interviews you were not offered a software engineering position. You most likely are an SA, which is a position open even to business degree holders and is barely technical, no wonder you didn't have to LeetCode.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      You mean not being “offered” a position I didn’t want? I have never had any desire to be a software developer at a large company. I like being able to: - be on pre-sales calls with customers - writing the proposals/statements of work - deal with the decision makers from the customers side - architect the entire solution from the development side and the infrastructure/“dev ops side” - do the actual work - lead the user acceptance testing - move on to another project You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I care about titles? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. My “TC” allows me to do that very well. I a not an “SA”. I do hands on billable software development that goes in production at the client site. In the past two years I’ve done hands on keyboard coding in Python, C#, JavaScript, and Go. BTW, by the time I graduated from college in 1996, I had been a hobbyist programmer in 4 different assembly languages. I’ve maintained proprietary compiler tool chains for Windows CE devices and spent half my career bit twiddling in C and C++ with a little inline assembly. I doubt that you’re going to “out geek” me.
      - anon7725 4y ago
        Just for context, people in scarface’s type of role can “out-TC” many platform/product engineers of the equivalent level, depending on how rewards are structured. The downside that I’ve noticed is that field roles tend to be cut first in response to market weather/customer focus. But a skilled engineer doing field work is a valued commodity in general.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Yes and No. If I worked for an outside consulting company that would be true - with the inherent risks you stated. Working at AWS in ProServe, our compensation structure is the same as SDEs - 4 year initial offer, large prorated signing bonus, 5/15/40/40 RSU vesting schedule. It’s different for sales. The bright side is that there is always work. Worse case, I can be “hired” by another internal team that needs someone to implement a solution to show off a new service.
- hinkley 4y ago
  Reversing a binary tree is a reference to a FAANG interview. Money makes life easier. It isn’t the goal of your life. We aren’t playing a video game where the person who made the most money “wins” at life.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    See my other reply for more context. But given a choice in 2020 of working at any large company as a software developer where I would have had to relocate and staying at smaller companies, I would have definitely chosen smaller companies. By 2020, I already had the big overvalued house in the burbs, decent retirement savings, a good work life balance, etc. I fell into a role at BigTech almost by accident doing the type of work I enjoy - seeing a company’s problem, solving the problem, training, and putting myself out of job and moving on. Heck, my expenses are lower now than they were in 2020. Within the past year, I’ve sold my house, we sold our cars, and now we have a cheaper investment property/winter home where we stay half the year and we fly across the US the other half of the year staying in hotels. We own nothing physically can’t fit in three suitcases - two of which have to stay under 50 pounds.
    - anon7725 4y ago
      Your situation seems unique - not many people are game for 50% travel as they hit mid career. Consulting does offer an alternative path to engineering at big cos - usually the interview focus is on your experience and ability to interface with a customer rather than leetcode, etc.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        That’s true. But there was nothing stopping us from staying at home and traveling like normal people.
  - itake 4y ago
    I’ve worked at small startups and dev shops with low hiring hiring bars and I find way more “princesses” than I have working at Tier 2 companies with leetcode interviews. “Princess” - people that don’t take feedback, are extremely opinionated about their work, and act irrationally in regards to career or business decisions.
tra3 4y ago
The intent is to learn and produce and be an able to talk about rather than try to make money.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So if you aren’t “learning and producing” at your day job, what are you doing 40 hours a week?
  - tra3 4y ago
    I believe the gp was talking about the year of unemployment referred to in the original post. I was laid off for about a month earlier this year and it was the most productive I’ve ever been, open source contributions wise. Pragmatically, I should’ve grinded leetcode but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was really enjoying the open source work though, a combination of react and lisp. I did talk about it during the interviews and maybe that came across.
  - enraged_camel 4y ago
    Speaking as someone who has juggled both a full-time job and a part-time startup on the side before, I can answer this: both of them contributed immensely to my professional development, but in different ways, since the business domains were very different (which also meant developing proficiencies with different technologies and tooling).
    - scarface74 4y ago
      My perspective is different - not disagreeing with yours. My goal is to constantly be “putting myself out of a job”. That means I need to be able to recognize a problem or opportunity, understand the business context, do enough of an MVP or POC that the rest of the organization understands, train and move on. Sometimes the internal organization doesn’t have the desire or capacity to maintain or evolve the solution. In that case it’s my job to find an outside consulting company. I don’t do staff augmentation.

itake 4y ago

Just wondering, what is your TC? My understanding is that story works at Tier 3 companies that lack a structured interview process and are desperate for candidates (e.g. startups).

scarface74 4y ago
Seeing that I work at the alphabetically sorted first “A” in FAANG, I don’t think it could be considered a “tier 3” company. When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position, I wasn’t interested in either relocating, working as a software developer at any large company or doing the prerequisite DS&A monkey dance. We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a fully remote role consulting (yes it’s a full time position) in AWS Professional Services. I specialize in “application modernization” which is a fancy term for cloud enterprise application development + “Devops” + the standard type of work architects do at other companies. But as far as the startup I worked for being “desperate”. I got hired at my previous company because of an informal lunch with the then new CTO who needed someone to lead the effort to make the company more “cloud native” and help them pivot toward a micro service architecture because they wanted to sell the services as backend to large health care companies. Hint: I did that well enough to go from never opening the AWS console in mid 2018 to working at AWS two years later. My interview was all behavioral where I talked through some of my previous company changing successes at a startup and a company where I led the integration effort when they were on an acquisition spree. My “TC” is fine. It would be better if my unvested AMZN RSUs didn’t drop by half since I got hired. (Yes I knew the gatekeeping was going to start when i wrote the first post above)
- iLoveOncall 4y ago
  That's a long story to hide the fact that by refusing to do LeetCode interviews you were not offered a software engineering position. You most likely are an SA, which is a position open even to business degree holders and is barely technical, no wonder you didn't have to LeetCode.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    You mean not being “offered” a position I didn’t want? I have never had any desire to be a software developer at a large company. I like being able to: - be on pre-sales calls with customers - writing the proposals/statements of work - deal with the decision makers from the customers side - architect the entire solution from the development side and the infrastructure/“dev ops side” - do the actual work - lead the user acceptance testing - move on to another project You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I care about titles? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. My “TC” allows me to do that very well. I a not an “SA”. I do hands on billable software development that goes in production at the client site. In the past two years I’ve done hands on keyboard coding in Python, C#, JavaScript, and Go. BTW, by the time I graduated from college in 1996, I had been a hobbyist programmer in 4 different assembly languages. I’ve maintained proprietary compiler tool chains for Windows CE devices and spent half my career bit twiddling in C and C++ with a little inline assembly. I doubt that you’re going to “out geek” me.
    - anon7725 4y ago
      Just for context, people in scarface’s type of role can “out-TC” many platform/product engineers of the equivalent level, depending on how rewards are structured. The downside that I’ve noticed is that field roles tend to be cut first in response to market weather/customer focus. But a skilled engineer doing field work is a valued commodity in general.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        Yes and No. If I worked for an outside consulting company that would be true - with the inherent risks you stated. Working at AWS in ProServe, our compensation structure is the same as SDEs - 4 year initial offer, large prorated signing bonus, 5/15/40/40 RSU vesting schedule. It’s different for sales. The bright side is that there is always work. Worse case, I can be “hired” by another internal team that needs someone to implement a solution to show off a new service.
hinkley 4y ago
Reversing a binary tree is a reference to a FAANG interview. Money makes life easier. It isn’t the goal of your life. We aren’t playing a video game where the person who made the most money “wins” at life.
- scarface74 4y ago
  See my other reply for more context. But given a choice in 2020 of working at any large company as a software developer where I would have had to relocate and staying at smaller companies, I would have definitely chosen smaller companies. By 2020, I already had the big overvalued house in the burbs, decent retirement savings, a good work life balance, etc. I fell into a role at BigTech almost by accident doing the type of work I enjoy - seeing a company’s problem, solving the problem, training, and putting myself out of job and moving on. Heck, my expenses are lower now than they were in 2020. Within the past year, I’ve sold my house, we sold our cars, and now we have a cheaper investment property/winter home where we stay half the year and we fly across the US the other half of the year staying in hotels. We own nothing physically can’t fit in three suitcases - two of which have to stay under 50 pounds.
  - anon7725 4y ago
    Your situation seems unique - not many people are game for 50% travel as they hit mid career. Consulting does offer an alternative path to engineering at big cos - usually the interview focus is on your experience and ability to interface with a customer rather than leetcode, etc.
    - scarface74 4y ago
      That’s true. But there was nothing stopping us from staying at home and traveling like normal people.
- itake 4y ago
  I’ve worked at small startups and dev shops with low hiring hiring bars and I find way more “princesses” than I have working at Tier 2 companies with leetcode interviews. “Princess” - people that don’t take feedback, are extremely opinionated about their work, and act irrationally in regards to career or business decisions.

tra3 4y ago

The intent is to learn and produce and be an able to talk about rather than try to make money.

scarface74 4y ago
So if you aren’t “learning and producing” at your day job, what are you doing 40 hours a week?
- tra3 4y ago
  I believe the gp was talking about the year of unemployment referred to in the original post. I was laid off for about a month earlier this year and it was the most productive I’ve ever been, open source contributions wise. Pragmatically, I should’ve grinded leetcode but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was really enjoying the open source work though, a combination of react and lisp. I did talk about it during the interviews and maybe that came across.
- enraged_camel 4y ago
  Speaking as someone who has juggled both a full-time job and a part-time startup on the side before, I can answer this: both of them contributed immensely to my professional development, but in different ways, since the business domains were very different (which also meant developing proficiencies with different technologies and tooling).
  - scarface74 4y ago
    My perspective is different - not disagreeing with yours. My goal is to constantly be “putting myself out of a job”. That means I need to be able to recognize a problem or opportunity, understand the business context, do enough of an MVP or POC that the rest of the organization understands, train and move on. Sometimes the internal organization doesn’t have the desire or capacity to maintain or evolve the solution. In that case it’s my job to find an outside consulting company. I don’t do staff augmentation.