As there's increasingly more money to be made in careers in tech, there are more people/companies selling stuff that guarantees to get a high(er) paying tech job.
Be vary of outlandish/unrealistic promises and resources.
A thread with advice, and examples to avoid:
1. Important: there are few shortcuts.
The easiest way to get higher-paying positions, in order:
1. Have a high-paying position already 2. Be on top of your game in a tech niche 3. Have a strong network (ppl you know well in tech) 4. Have a standout profile 4. Interview well
2. The internet is full of shortcut examples. Like "From learning to code to Google in 6 months."
These all suffer from survivor bias. They are great at making you feel hopeful, but also demotivate when you won't get the same results.
Tech careers usually take years to build.
3. On careers taking years: It took me 12 years from the first time I was paid to code, and 8 years from my first fulltime job to make it to Uber (complete history: linkedin.com/in/gergelyoros…)
The majority of people have careers closer to this, over straight into {awesome company}.
4. Now, I do think it makes sense to buy resources that can help you grow faster and learn more. These range from books, through courses to services like mock interviews.
However, as there's more money in these, more people create them. How do you find what is worthwhile?
5. Always look at the professional background of someone creating a resource (book, course etc)
- Have they done the job they talk about?
- Do they offer a learning path, or a clear structure?
- Do they offer realistic claims? (Hint: no one can guarantee interviews/offers etc)
- Outlandish claims (as a hiring manager, I'll tell you there is no way anyone can guarantee an offer)
- Resources with no information on who created them (how can you tell if they have the experience?)
- Reviews on landing pages that are clearly fake
8. There's a lot of overpriced resources often with bad advice. Many of these are heavily advertised on e.g. YouTube, or do sponsorships. Let me pick apart a few examples to show how you can spot obvious rip-offs:
9. Don't waste your money #1: Paper Moon Resumes
a) Obviously fake (and hardcoded) numbers. Check Internet Archive.
b) All reviews are fake (no social links, and they had stock images before I called them out)
c) No information on who created this resource, beyond a random co
10. Don't waste your money #2: The SDI, 2nd Edition.
This is more subtle:
- Copy-paste of the similarly named original book. But this one has no 1st Edition.
- The author has no background in software engineering
- Almost all detailed reviews come from interns the author employs
11. Expect that *you* will have to put in the work for your career, over expecting to be able to buy things that magically make things better.
Transcript from a C-level crisis meeting months after the "We've raised $700M at a $6B valuation" gigantic announcement at a tech company.
A story on why the no employee equity policy hurts at the worst time. Warning: painful read ahead.
CEO: "What do you mean we can't grow?"
CTO: "Hiring is tough, but that's not the biggest issue. People are leaving like flies."
CEO: "We just raised $700M. Surely money is not a problem."
COO: "Actually, the exit surveys show that money is exactly the issue. Our competitors offer 50-100% more compensation to devs."
CEO: "That must be wrong. How can they pay twice that much? I thought we're paying top of the market?"
CTO: "Actually, the data we bought was wrong. We were paying a good salary, but we were well below 50%th market percentile based on e.g this report: blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engin…
A recently IPO'd company mandated moving over to JIRA because... well, reporting, and lack of options. So they did.
As a data-driven company, they ran a survey afterward. The NPS for JIRA among engineers: -83. This means that 83% of devs would recommend *against* JIRA (!!).
Now I'm not saying JIRA is terrible... but it requires a long, and painful learning curve that most people don't tolerate. And, let's be honest: they hate.
It's also why companies like @linear are capturing the market with startups and places where engineers are decision makers.
JIRA also increasingly has a perception problem after years of treating decision-makers as their end users, not the engineers forced to use a tool to move things around.
Those engineers are now becoming decision-makers. And they want to desperately avoid JIRA, given the options.
Here's an insight from someone not in Big Tech: it's rare that engineers go "broad" in traditional companies, thus cross-functional teams are hard. However, in Big Tech it's still pretty common (and encouraged!) to work/move across stacks (e.g. do backend changes as a web eng)
A few things that make this more common at these companies:
- Internal open-source model (anyone can put up PRs)
- Monorepos & 1-step build processes
- Heavy automation & LOTS of automated quality checks ("if the tests pass, you can push it")
- Hiring for generalist engineers
On the last part - hiring for generalist software engineers - Big Tech gets a lot of flak for the interview process that is... generalist. Rarely going deep into e.g. specific frameworks.
And this is intentional. They want/need people who won't be tied down to one language/tech.
In my observation, burnout in tech is (finally) starting to hit managers, their managers, and their managers, hard. Quote from a VP Eng:
"After 1.5 years of 15-20 Zoom meetings per day, I hit my limit and can't do it anymore. I'm taking the rest of the year to recover." (cont'd)
Some very interesting follow-ons of this trend: 1. Fast-growing startups very much struggle to hire director-level or above... and are promoting ICs/inexperienced managers as directors (yes, really) 2. The demand for experienced senior managers (and above) is exploding
3. Until now, most companies have been mostly concerned with IC burnout (ICs are in the largest numbers). It was assumed senior managers who get paid more/have more vested interest(equity) would sort themselves.
The fact that these people are quitting is a *huge* warning sign.
Uber's CTO, Sukumar Rathnam stepped down just 12 months after joining the company.
I left Uber shortly after he joined as CTO, and here are my thoughts on this departure, from the sidelines. A thread
1. This was never meant to be an easy job. SK joined after the 2020 Uber engineering layoffs, low morale, and sinking stock price.
By the time he was in, attrition was high, and he had large shoes to fill that Thuan Pham, Uber's CTO of 7-years left behind.
2. Uber was also without a CPO at this time: Dara stepped in to fill this role. One more challenge.
3. The tension with what engineering wanted (build for the long-term) and Uber's business needs (get to profitability the short- or medium-term) were always at odds.
The tech hiring market has never been this hot: not even during the Dotcom Boom. I talked with dozens of tech hiring managers (from managers to CTOs), swarms of people switching jobs to answer:
Why this is happening, and what are companies doing who keep growing?
A thread:
1. Covid-19 being the tipping point of companies going all-in on digital. Not just e-commerce, but all industries are investing *big* money to move to digital.