3 ms·
If every senior you hired left in 6 months, there is something wrong with your company. Likely on three levela ends - when evaluating people, when telling them
by watwut 6d ago
If every senior you hired left in 6 months, there is something wrong with your company. Likely on three levela ends - when evaluating people, when telling them who you are so that they can select themselves out and when they are in.
Btw the same goes for when every junior leaves in 6 months. Or whatever demographic group.
- scruple 6d agoI had the same impression. Surely we aren't the ones who are wrong! It couldn't be us! I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years. I left after 8 months and it was because the company and org and team culture were a horrible, broken, dysfunctional mess, and the people who were capable of changing it didn't want to admit why they had the problems they had in the first place.
- swiftcoder 6d ago> I've been in software professionally for over 20 years and in that time I have only left 1 employer before 5+ years You've had a somewhat traditional career there by HN standards. Most of Silicon Valley was promo-hopping ever 1-2 years for the whole middle period of your career (somewhat curtailed now by the job market). It was really popular to FAANG -> startup for 6 months -> FAANG-1-level-up for a good chunk of the 2010s
- scruple 6d agoSure, but I went through startups, too. I just hung on for dear life and the people above me were willing to hear about issues with culture and work on it. Only the last 4 years of my career have been at a FAANG.
- DanielHB 5d agoSimilar for me except that my tenures are usually 4-6 years, except this one job that I lasted 1 month because I fundamentally didn't want to do the work I was assigned to do (and would keep doing for at least a few months, probably longer). The work was essentially web scraping complex systems, which is not a case of "you don't need someone with my experience to do this" and more like I just didn't want to do it because it did not improve my current skills at all. It is not like in the interview they told me: you will be doing web scraping for months on end. Or that I even thought to ask.
- swiftcoder 6d agoYou aren't necessarily wrong, but the data also isn't there - one engineering hire bouncing per year is not really significant. I do think that startups are pretty rough when it comes hiring. We don't pay BigTech salaries, we expect engineers to wear a lot of hats, and we don't offer the kind of management chain isolation a big company does. It takes a particular kind of engineer to enjoy/thrive in that environment, and a lot of engineers transitioning from big companies don't realise the extent of that until they've struggled with their first startup role.
- verzali 6d agoAlso the engineers that do manage in that environment tend to get screwed anyway when you scale up.
- DanielHB 5d agoI dunno, I found that kind of environment a lot easier to work with. The really hard environments are when the tech teams are large, to get something done you need to talk to 3 different teams and get them all to agree to do something and _when_ they are going to do it. And that is just when you can talk to the engineers directly, it gets worse when you need to escalate on the management chain. Startups are easier because most of the time you usually only need one rubberstamp (and sometimes none!) to do something. It gets much worse though once the startup scales up and becomes massive. Then it tends to be worse than big corps because there at least they have processes.