8 ms·

I have a couple ideas for you from my own experience. There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could ment

I have a couple ideas for you from my own experience. There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could mention who would fight hard for your type of experience. Not necessarily SaaS click-and-drool tools for corporate drones, but unique and opinionated products that have some significant engineering innovation inside. Those companies have essentially no ability to attract talent organically, anyone interested in FANG would turn up their noses, and their number one problem is quality people. In many cases the CEO/CTO leadership is incredibly strong and smart; the colleagues are happy, motivated, intelligent, and disciplined; and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged. They're vital to their customers but under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast. It can be very rewarding and compensation is decent. The tradeoff is the big exit is vanishingly unlikely. Second idea is go into consulting/professional services. Not Accenture or anything horrible like that, but dozens of boutique/smaller firms with decently inspiring leadership and a very high standard of colleague. Work is variable in interest and environment, pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.

leojfc 2y ago
I would second the mid-size B2B option here. I found professional services a bit stressful for what the OP is saying. But I also think it’s really personal. Since turning 40 I tried: moving into management at a ~100 dev company; IC at a big tech firm (first time I’d worked somewhere really big as a dev); and now I’m back to running tech side of things at a startup. I don’t think I could have known in advance which of those was going to work for me. There were a lot of positives to the first two, even though I ultimately left. Turns out I actually do prefer a) small places and b) a mix of management and IC work. But I’m absolutely sure that’s not true for everyone. OP might feel like they want something very different from running their own startup – I also felt pretty burnt out on that after 7 years of my own – but once they’ve had some time they might remember why they went that way in the first place!
mlacks 2y ago
wasn't going to reply but you called out Accenture. I work at the Government Contracting arm of Accenture called Accenture Federal and it is by far the best place I've ever worked ( I worked in submarines for a decade so probably nowhere to go but up from there). It ranks highly in those marketing pieces "best places to work" if you're into that sort of thing. anyway, I highly recommend Accenture Federal. Great projects, benefits, and WLB
- roland35 2y ago
  That's true there is nowhere to go but up if you're in a submarine!
  - rickydroll 2y ago
    Some passengers from the oceangate submersible Titan might have a different opinion.
- shulber 2y ago
  I work for Accenture too. It's like any giganto-corp, there are parts of the organization that are great and parts that are not so great. I was lucky to be hired into one of the very good areas. I've worked for a bunch of other Fortune 500s and it's the same story. I think at that scale it's basically impossible to have a uniform culture.
InsideOutSanta 2y ago
This. I'm now working at a small- to mid-sized (~80 people) local B2B company. Pay is fine, they offer 100% WFH if you want, but they also have nice offices, they make good and stable revenue with reasonable growth targets, the actual work is somewhere between interesting and mind-numbingly stupid (e.g. integrating with poorly documented enterprise software - can be fun, but can also be aggravating), people are mostly happy. There is a focus on delivering for clients rather than following processes. I have about an hour of required meetings a week, 15-30 minutes technical meetings where people bring up any tech roadblocks or things where they need help, and a 20-45 minute sprint planning meeting. There's one monthly "show cool stuff" meeting for the whole company where everybody can voluntarily show something interesting they made. The rest of the time, I'm writing code, documentation, helping coworkers, talking to clients, stuff like that. There is very high trust, e.g. people make honest effort estimates and there's no punishment or bad feedback if they're missed. There's a wide variety of skills because it's hard to attract top performers. This makes it easy to get hired (they immediately invited me for an interview after I sent them my CV, and made an offer after talking to me for 30 minutes), and it also means there's a culture of helping people and being patient and understanding when people are making an honest effort, but don't quite get things on the first try. I'm working eight hours a day, five days a week, and when I'm done with work for the day, I don't think about it until the next day. It's nice.
- brainwipe 2y ago
  This has been my life for the last 10 years and I know who my children really are. They're evil and I love it.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    If you let that (evil) go too far you'll regret it.
- jb74427442 2y ago
  Hi InsideOutSanta, This sounds like a place I'd enjoy working at. Email is HN username at gmail. Thanks
- 2y ago
dhd415 2y ago
My longest employment stint was at such a company and it was a very good experience for me. That said, even though I worked at such a company for a while, I don't have a very good idea how I would go about identifying other such companies with open roles. Any suggestions on how to do that?
- tomrod 2y ago
  I wonder if Crunchbase would be useful here?
  - bix6 2y ago
    Responded to another thread but Pitchbook or Crunchbase can both be helpful. Try: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage-venture-funding https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...
    - stogot 2y ago
      Isn’t the Series D or E when a painful restructure or layoffs or pivot occurs or is that a later round?
  - mcmcmc 2y ago
    For identifying companies by size/funding/vertical sure. Been a while since I used it (thank god I got out of sales) but they almost definitely track headcount growth if not actual openings. Trouble is you probably won’t find it in the free version
- cloverich 2y ago
  VC firms often have recruiters that are familiar with the stage and quality of their portfolio amd can provide warm introductions. Last go round I gave them my criteria (no moonshots, solid revenue, post series A, no crypto) and had several quickly lined up.
mobilene 2y ago
This. 1000% this. I'm 57 and still kicking around the industry deliberately choosing companies like the ones described. It's also important to note that I have a small network of people also working for companies like this who have helped me and sometimes have outright hired me.
AaronM 2y ago
I work for a place very similar to what you described. Its a really good gig
karaterobot 2y ago
> pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer. Oh, well said there. Worked consulting for 13 years, and this was the main source of stress. You feel like it's your fault—and are sometimes treated by management like it's your fault—because you're on salary and they have nothing for you to work on. Emphasis on 'they'. That feeling of being on the chopping block, unsure of whether you'll be laid off or not, recurred independently about 3-6 times a year.
- cableshaft 2y ago
  Wow, 3-6 times a year? At my firm I've been on the same project for almost a year and a half, and the previous project was over a year. I did have about 6 weeks of downtime in between them though, and if they were doing layoffs then maybe they would have given me the axe. I did knock out a cloud certification during that downtime though, which was beneficial to them for keeping their partnerships. Did your firm just never get any extensions to projects? My firm tries pretty hard to get those any chance they get. Or were they all like due diligences or something?
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    The longest I ever worked on a contract was 2 years, the shortest was probably 2 hours. Most projects were 1-3 months. At the company I'm thinking of, they kept a public list of people who were "on the bench", which meant they'd finished a contract, and the company didn't have another one for them yet. In sports, being on the bench sort of implies that you can't cut it, but 99% of the time that's not how it was.
- quintes 2y ago
  I agree professional services can stress you out. Being billable means you’re on multiple projects at some points if you’re good and if you’re not you’re benched. I need to figure out if I go back to professional services again as it can be a strain and I’m late stage career principal/ enterprise architect that joining a company to work on “cool projects to put on your cv” is not a selling point any longer
guiomie 2y ago
"C/D+ stage 100-500" where could I find a list of such companies?
- bix6 2y ago
  Pitchbook if you have access/a friend, otherwise crunchbase. I’m on mobile but try this: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage-venture-funding https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...
pc86 2y ago
The question I always run into for your first point - how do you find these companies? If I want to move into a brand new business vertical, by definition I don't know any of the players or know where to look for that - for lack of a better word - audience.
- grajaganDev 2y ago
  Imagine that you are a customer of that vertical and search accordingly.
antisthenes 2y ago
> and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged > under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast How do you reconcile these 2 statements? Maybe there's something else you mean by work/life balance?
- scrumper 2y ago
  Yeah fair question and one I thought would come up. Tl;dr: those are orthogonal concerns - work/life balance doesn't mean the job is easy, it means it's not toxic and doesn't kill all your time. But more fully, what I mean is: A healthy (what I meant by "good") work/life balance means you work, and you have a life. You have mostly normal hours excepting maybe an occasional crunch or need to travel to a client; you can go to the doctor if you need to; nobody complains if you have to take a few minutes' break to mediate a fight between your kids during the school holidays; PTO is taken by most people and isn't a big deal - that sort of thing. The second statement is about what the work side is like. There are jobs where you show up, punch a clock, maybe do a code review or make some pointless changes to a CRUD app, but mostly sit around collecting a paycheck. At least for me, that's soul destroying: feeling like you're doing nothing of value, not even contributing to whatever bullshit purpose statement your employer has invented. Then there are jobs where you are flogged to within an inch of your life, abused daily, have your priorities shifted without any input, have to deal with multiple conflicting managers directing what you do, are subject to politics, maybe pay comes late... Awful. I'm describing a middle way where you are very obviously aware that you're part of a team facing real challenges, your work has noticeable impact, there's effective competition and sometimes they win and everyone feels it. Your days go by quickly, meaningful stuff gets done (at least, within the context of the company if not solving world hunger), the triumphs take effort and the defeats hurt. The problems you're solving are meaty, you're under reasonable but fairly continuous expectation to deliver high quality work and other people and teams are relying on you to do that.
cableshaft 2y ago
Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my previous jobs were onprem. I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% of potential hours) and can get approval from the client (which for me hasn't been an issue). Even the year where I was a bit under my utilization due to no fault of my own (they didn't have me staffed on a client for six weeks so I wasn't billing anything and then when they finally did at first I could only bill 10-20 hours a week) it didn't stop them promoting me that year and giving me a pretty decent bonus. Also the only job I've ever had where I can expect an annual bonus worth a damn. I had one for one other job briefly but it was small and they took all bonuses away after two years to save money. They do encourage working extra hours on internal initiatives and things like that, but I mostly haven't and it hasn't hurt much (maybe I get a slightly somewhat lower bonus and I'm getting promoted a bit slower). While there's a lot of younger people at the firm, there's several older engineers here too, including a few guys in their 50s. I'm also like 99% WFH. I go into the office every once in a while for quarterly parties or for some important in-person event, but otherwise I'm fully WFH. Which has been especially important this year as I've been having some issues with my legs and have had to have several medical procedures on them and work on the couch a lot to keep them elevated. I don't think I could work for one of the Big 4, though, those sound completely exhausting. I hear 60+ hour weeks is often the minumum expectation there. I've got a life outside of work, including games I'm coding in my spare time, I don't need that shit.
- xeromal 2y ago
  Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out
  - cableshaft 2y ago
    Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants? At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job. My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase. If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that. Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.
pdimitar 2y ago
How do you find these places if you're not an American?
jimmytehbanana 2y ago
Can confirm. At 40 I left the large corporate engineering world for a smaller company. Haven’t regretted it. Better quality in terms of pay, time off, managers, leadership, communication, and work relationships. The smaller teams and clear communication that a smaller company can provide improves the overall quality of the job.

leojfc 2y ago

I would second the mid-size B2B option here. I found professional services a bit stressful for what the OP is saying. But I also think it’s really personal. Since turning 40 I tried: moving into management at a ~100 dev company; IC at a big tech firm (first time I’d worked somewhere really big as a dev); and now I’m back to running tech side of things at a startup. I don’t think I could have known in advance which of those was going to work for me. There were a lot of positives to the first two, even though I ultimately left. Turns out I actually do prefer a) small places and b) a mix of management and IC work. But I’m absolutely sure that’s not true for everyone. OP might feel like they want something very different from running their own startup – I also felt pretty burnt out on that after 7 years of my own – but once they’ve had some time they might remember why they went that way in the first place!

mlacks 2y ago

wasn't going to reply but you called out Accenture. I work at the Government Contracting arm of Accenture called Accenture Federal and it is by far the best place I've ever worked ( I worked in submarines for a decade so probably nowhere to go but up from there). It ranks highly in those marketing pieces "best places to work" if you're into that sort of thing. anyway, I highly recommend Accenture Federal. Great projects, benefits, and WLB

roland35 2y ago
That's true there is nowhere to go but up if you're in a submarine!
- rickydroll 2y ago
  Some passengers from the oceangate submersible Titan might have a different opinion.
shulber 2y ago
I work for Accenture too. It's like any giganto-corp, there are parts of the organization that are great and parts that are not so great. I was lucky to be hired into one of the very good areas. I've worked for a bunch of other Fortune 500s and it's the same story. I think at that scale it's basically impossible to have a uniform culture.

InsideOutSanta 2y ago

This. I'm now working at a small- to mid-sized (~80 people) local B2B company. Pay is fine, they offer 100% WFH if you want, but they also have nice offices, they make good and stable revenue with reasonable growth targets, the actual work is somewhere between interesting and mind-numbingly stupid (e.g. integrating with poorly documented enterprise software - can be fun, but can also be aggravating), people are mostly happy. There is a focus on delivering for clients rather than following processes. I have about an hour of required meetings a week, 15-30 minutes technical meetings where people bring up any tech roadblocks or things where they need help, and a 20-45 minute sprint planning meeting. There's one monthly "show cool stuff" meeting for the whole company where everybody can voluntarily show something interesting they made. The rest of the time, I'm writing code, documentation, helping coworkers, talking to clients, stuff like that. There is very high trust, e.g. people make honest effort estimates and there's no punishment or bad feedback if they're missed. There's a wide variety of skills because it's hard to attract top performers. This makes it easy to get hired (they immediately invited me for an interview after I sent them my CV, and made an offer after talking to me for 30 minutes), and it also means there's a culture of helping people and being patient and understanding when people are making an honest effort, but don't quite get things on the first try. I'm working eight hours a day, five days a week, and when I'm done with work for the day, I don't think about it until the next day. It's nice.

brainwipe 2y ago
This has been my life for the last 10 years and I know who my children really are. They're evil and I love it.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  If you let that (evil) go too far you'll regret it.
jb74427442 2y ago
Hi InsideOutSanta, This sounds like a place I'd enjoy working at. Email is HN username at gmail. Thanks
2y ago

dhd415 2y ago

My longest employment stint was at such a company and it was a very good experience for me. That said, even though I worked at such a company for a while, I don't have a very good idea how I would go about identifying other such companies with open roles. Any suggestions on how to do that?

tomrod 2y ago
I wonder if Crunchbase would be useful here?
- bix6 2y ago
  Responded to another thread but Pitchbook or Crunchbase can both be helpful. Try: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage-venture-funding https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...
  - stogot 2y ago
    Isn’t the Series D or E when a painful restructure or layoffs or pivot occurs or is that a later round?
- mcmcmc 2y ago
  For identifying companies by size/funding/vertical sure. Been a while since I used it (thank god I got out of sales) but they almost definitely track headcount growth if not actual openings. Trouble is you probably won’t find it in the free version
cloverich 2y ago
VC firms often have recruiters that are familiar with the stage and quality of their portfolio amd can provide warm introductions. Last go round I gave them my criteria (no moonshots, solid revenue, post series A, no crypto) and had several quickly lined up.

mobilene 2y ago

This. 1000% this. I'm 57 and still kicking around the industry deliberately choosing companies like the ones described. It's also important to note that I have a small network of people also working for companies like this who have helped me and sometimes have outright hired me.

AaronM 2y ago

I work for a place very similar to what you described. Its a really good gig

karaterobot 2y ago

> pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer. Oh, well said there. Worked consulting for 13 years, and this was the main source of stress. You feel like it's your fault—and are sometimes treated by management like it's your fault—because you're on salary and they have nothing for you to work on. Emphasis on 'they'. That feeling of being on the chopping block, unsure of whether you'll be laid off or not, recurred independently about 3-6 times a year.

cableshaft 2y ago
Wow, 3-6 times a year? At my firm I've been on the same project for almost a year and a half, and the previous project was over a year. I did have about 6 weeks of downtime in between them though, and if they were doing layoffs then maybe they would have given me the axe. I did knock out a cloud certification during that downtime though, which was beneficial to them for keeping their partnerships. Did your firm just never get any extensions to projects? My firm tries pretty hard to get those any chance they get. Or were they all like due diligences or something?
- karaterobot 2y ago
  The longest I ever worked on a contract was 2 years, the shortest was probably 2 hours. Most projects were 1-3 months. At the company I'm thinking of, they kept a public list of people who were "on the bench", which meant they'd finished a contract, and the company didn't have another one for them yet. In sports, being on the bench sort of implies that you can't cut it, but 99% of the time that's not how it was.
quintes 2y ago
I agree professional services can stress you out. Being billable means you’re on multiple projects at some points if you’re good and if you’re not you’re benched. I need to figure out if I go back to professional services again as it can be a strain and I’m late stage career principal/ enterprise architect that joining a company to work on “cool projects to put on your cv” is not a selling point any longer

guiomie 2y ago

"C/D+ stage 100-500" where could I find a list of such companies?

bix6 2y ago
Pitchbook if you have access/a friend, otherwise crunchbase. I’m on mobile but try this: https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage-venture-funding https://www.crunchbase.com/hub/software-companies-late-stage...

pc86 2y ago

The question I always run into for your first point - how do you find these companies? If I want to move into a brand new business vertical, by definition I don't know any of the players or know where to look for that - for lack of a better word - audience.

grajaganDev 2y ago
Imagine that you are a customer of that vertical and search accordingly.

antisthenes 2y ago

> and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged > under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast How do you reconcile these 2 statements? Maybe there's something else you mean by work/life balance?

scrumper 2y ago
Yeah fair question and one I thought would come up. Tl;dr: those are orthogonal concerns - work/life balance doesn't mean the job is easy, it means it's not toxic and doesn't kill all your time. But more fully, what I mean is: A healthy (what I meant by "good") work/life balance means you work, and you have a life. You have mostly normal hours excepting maybe an occasional crunch or need to travel to a client; you can go to the doctor if you need to; nobody complains if you have to take a few minutes' break to mediate a fight between your kids during the school holidays; PTO is taken by most people and isn't a big deal - that sort of thing. The second statement is about what the work side is like. There are jobs where you show up, punch a clock, maybe do a code review or make some pointless changes to a CRUD app, but mostly sit around collecting a paycheck. At least for me, that's soul destroying: feeling like you're doing nothing of value, not even contributing to whatever bullshit purpose statement your employer has invented. Then there are jobs where you are flogged to within an inch of your life, abused daily, have your priorities shifted without any input, have to deal with multiple conflicting managers directing what you do, are subject to politics, maybe pay comes late... Awful. I'm describing a middle way where you are very obviously aware that you're part of a team facing real challenges, your work has noticeable impact, there's effective competition and sometimes they win and everyone feels it. Your days go by quickly, meaningful stuff gets done (at least, within the context of the company if not solving world hunger), the triumphs take effort and the defeats hurt. The problems you're solving are meaty, you're under reasonable but fairly continuous expectation to deliver high quality work and other people and teams are relying on you to do that.

cableshaft 2y ago

Yeah I've been working at a smaller consulting firm for the past three years and doing fine. Also helped me update my skills, especially cloud skills as all my previous jobs were onprem. I've been mostly getting away with just over 40 hour weeks, although if I was on any other client at the company I'd be expected to bill 45 hours. PTO is very flexible as long as I'm meeting my utilization for the year (working 85% of potential hours) and can get approval from the client (which for me hasn't been an issue). Even the year where I was a bit under my utilization due to no fault of my own (they didn't have me staffed on a client for six weeks so I wasn't billing anything and then when they finally did at first I could only bill 10-20 hours a week) it didn't stop them promoting me that year and giving me a pretty decent bonus. Also the only job I've ever had where I can expect an annual bonus worth a damn. I had one for one other job briefly but it was small and they took all bonuses away after two years to save money. They do encourage working extra hours on internal initiatives and things like that, but I mostly haven't and it hasn't hurt much (maybe I get a slightly somewhat lower bonus and I'm getting promoted a bit slower). While there's a lot of younger people at the firm, there's several older engineers here too, including a few guys in their 50s. I'm also like 99% WFH. I go into the office every once in a while for quarterly parties or for some important in-person event, but otherwise I'm fully WFH. Which has been especially important this year as I've been having some issues with my legs and have had to have several medical procedures on them and work on the couch a lot to keep them elevated. I don't think I could work for one of the Big 4, though, those sound completely exhausting. I hear 60+ hour weeks is often the minumum expectation there. I've got a life outside of work, including games I'm coding in my spare time, I don't need that shit.

xeromal 2y ago
Consulting definitely is a good way to exercise a bunch of different skills and languages. I'll say though that I feel like my resume is toxic for being one though. Bums me out
- cableshaft 2y ago
  Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants? At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job. My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase. If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that. Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.

pdimitar 2y ago

How do you find these places if you're not an American?

jimmytehbanana 2y ago

Can confirm. At 40 I left the large corporate engineering world for a smaller company. Haven’t regretted it. Better quality in terms of pay, time off, managers, leadership, communication, and work relationships. The smaller teams and clear communication that a smaller company can provide improves the overall quality of the job.