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The culture around FAANGs has always been a bit strange. People associate making a lot of money with being good at building tech at both a personal and a compan

The culture around FAANGs has always been a bit strange. People associate making a lot of money with being good at building tech at both a personal and a company level and unfortunately that isn't necessarily valid in either case. New hires who have been living inside the Big Tech bubble for a while can come with issues that others here have already described. Consequently startups should probably downlevel many people coming from FAANG roles for exactly the same reason that FAANGs downlevel many people who haven't been worshipping at the altar of scalability in their previous roles. The skills and methods are different and some of them aren't very transferrable. Of course that's not to say good people who have been working at large scales can't or won't adapt. But on day one nobody cares that you've been a Staff/Principal leading projects with 25 developers and a mature development environment if you're joining a startup that needs to raise a Series A before the end of its runway this summer. The abilities you need in that environment are things like identifying the most essential supporting work that can't wait while still spending most of your time on getting the main job done and hitting the deadline. If you can't roll up your sleeves and get the job done then you don't need to worry about a PIP. There are only 10 of you anyway and you're all out of a job in six months if any of you doesn't pull their weight.

beacon294 3y ago
It would be absurd to downlevel these folks. Probably the mismatch is an investment and both org and employee will need adjustments that are mutually beneficial.
- Silhouette 3y ago
  It would be absurd to downlevel these folks. In which direction? Both make sense to me. A good employee might adapt to their new environment quickly and in that case obviously they should then be levelled up appropriately. But there is nothing about being Staff/Principal at a BigCo that says you're going to be anything special as a senior in a startup - in fact the opposite can be the case for reasons others have mentioned - and there is nothing about being an excellent contributor at a startup that says you're going to navigate the scale and the politics of a BigCo effectively. It seems reasonable to start a new hire at a level where you would expect they do have the required skills (including soft skills) and then look to make more effective use of them if and when they've settled into the new environment.

beacon294 3y ago

It would be absurd to downlevel these folks. Probably the mismatch is an investment and both org and employee will need adjustments that are mutually beneficial.

Silhouette 3y ago
It would be absurd to downlevel these folks. In which direction? Both make sense to me. A good employee might adapt to their new environment quickly and in that case obviously they should then be levelled up appropriately. But there is nothing about being Staff/Principal at a BigCo that says you're going to be anything special as a senior in a startup - in fact the opposite can be the case for reasons others have mentioned - and there is nothing about being an excellent contributor at a startup that says you're going to navigate the scale and the politics of a BigCo effectively. It seems reasonable to start a new hire at a level where you would expect they do have the required skills (including soft skills) and then look to make more effective use of them if and when they've settled into the new environment.