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Same boat as you, tried for a decade to figure it out, tried many of the suggestions here, eventually gave up and switched to starting small startups and then w
by dbrueck 4y ago
Same boat as you, tried for a decade to figure it out, tried many of the suggestions here, eventually gave up and switched to starting small startups and then when they start to grow past a certain point, transitioning to someone else and then moving on to a new company.
A lot of people are just really good at different stages of a company's growth. Me, I'm good at starting from scratch and going until we've shipped the first few major versions of a product or service and have a small but significant number of paying customers. I like the chaos, the blank slate, and I'm not overwhelmed by analysis paralysis on what we should do. I love being involved in everything and wearing lots of hats, and being knee deep in both architecture and development.
Other people are far, far better than me at taking it from there and growing it to "enterprise" level and having 1000s of paying customers. They are good at taking things that were owned by one person and growing a team around it, filling in the feature gaps, etc. They are good at maturing the company's organizational structure as well as the product offering.
Once I had the lightbulb moment that (a) I wasn't very good at those later stages and that (b) I had zero interest in becoming better at them, it allowed me to choose a more compatible career path and made me way happier. Thinking of it as a relay race has also helped me do better at planning ahead for the eventual transition. Just one example: I do much better now at preserving documentation around a lot of our original thinking/planning, especially tradeoff discussions of now vs later things.
- flashgordon 4y agoDamn how does one find such gigs and do so in a sustainable way?
- dbrueck 4y agoDIY, mostly. The first one that was truly my own I did by starting a dev-for-hire/consulting company and stashing some of the proceeds on the side to fund development of my first startup, and then from there it's self-sustaining. For passing the baton to the right people, finding those people is partially luck to begin with and basic networking, but after awhile you know a good group of people that you've worked with in the past (or are friends of them). More than once I've handed things off to some of the same people - I'm ready to leave this gig right as they are ready to leave the prior one.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- d3mony 4y agoI've gotten a lot of gigs through this site. Sustainable? hahaha
- flashgordon 4y agoHa. Well true that sustainable is a very vague metric. Working out of a faang definitely puts you in comfort zone and as I get older I am trying to see how to wean off it and go independent (even if it is a bit more of a slog) so I can diversify more and really utilize more of myself. Retirement isn't close but isn't looking rosy either :)
- jacobmarble 4y agoI'm curious, do you join startups as an early employee, or do you start new companies?
- dbrueck 4y agoLast few have been my own, but I heartily recommend first joining other startups as an early employee - you win if the company does well, but even if it doesn't, you can win by gaining many years of experience in a smaller number of calendar years.