Thread by @mipsytipsy

I want to give this a slightly longer treatment. ☺️ (Gergely and I *just* talked about it, so it's all rustling around in my head.)

I think it's a ✨great✨ idea for every engineer to spend at least a couple years at both a big company and a startup (series B or earlier).

https://twitter.com/gergelyorosz/status/1493837552440197120

It's hard to formulate career goals in your first decade or so as an engineer; there is just SO MUCH to learn. Most of us just kinda wing it.

But this is a goal that I think will serve you well: do a tour of duty at a startup and another at a bigco, in your first 10y as an eng.

Besides the obvious benefits of knowing how to operate in two domains, it also prevents you from reaching premature seniority. (charity.wtf/2020/11/01/que…)

The best gift you can give your future self is the habit of regularly returning to the well to learn, feeling like a beginner.

Most of us hate feeling like beginners. We associate it with anxiety, with failure, with not being good enough.

If you want to have a long, rich, rewarding career in tech, the best thing you can do is consciously retrain yourself to lean into curiosity and its discomfort. 🙃

If you're five years in to your career and only just starting to feel secure in your skills, it might seem batshit to walk out the door and drop yourself in the deep end of a completely different pool.

But that's exactly why you should do it. 💦🌊

You haven't spent five years memorizing docs pages and programming minutiae, you've spent five years learning how to *learn*. You're just starting to get good at it!

It will be so much faster & easier the second time. Soon you'll feel restless and uneasy *without* any novelty.

[[Btw -- no, you don't have to job hop to grow. It is TOTALLY possible to develop as an engineer at one company for 10+ years, especially if it's growing fast.

It's also possible to job hop yet never feel stimulated or challenged, or like anyone is investing in you/your career.

What's important is, does the work continue to stimulate you and push your boundaries, and occasionally scare you a little? 🙃

You can also have multiple roles within the same company. I've stayed at jobs for 5-6 years before, but never the same role more than ~2 years.

It also makes a big difference if you have a manager that cares about you and invests in you, and considers if their job to make sure this company continues to be the best place for you to learn and grow for as long as possible.

Those are a career accelerant too.

Sadly, they don't seem to be very common. Thus my advice here is aimed at the median case, where most of us sit, without devoted managers or mentors in our corner.

It is not a template. It is a framework that may be useful to some, and not others, and that's okay. ☺️]]

Back to the main plot: where should you work first, the bigco or startup?

Again, this is highly variable. But here are some reasons for doing bigco first:

* startups have fewer resources to dedicate to mentorship
* whereas bigcos tend to invest in a LOT of structure

(At Facebook, a friend once quipped that FB engineering was a highly oiled machine optimized for taking thousands of E3s (new grads) and churning them into E5s (senior engineers) as quickly as possible. Most of the energy of >=E6s went towards shepherding this transformation. 🤣)

God dammit I keep fucking up the Twitter threading. 🤬

So there's that. There's also the fact that, as far as I can tell, the more senior you are, the less likely some of them are to hire you. This probably isn't true of Netflix, but it def was of FB.

They flat did not know how to interview, hire, or retain senior engineers, and bewailed how much "retraining" an engineer from, say, Google (or anywhere else) needed.

You might get in as a line manager or an E5, but higher level hires were rare and successful ones rarer still.

But there are some very compelling reasons to work at a bigco.

* it's worth seeing how these large distributed systems and successful organizations work from the inside. There is no substitute for experience.

* the pedigree. It will open doors and pave your way. Maddeningly so.

* and the money. It's lifechanging, esp for those of us who came from nothing or had massive debt. I lived paycheck to paycheck before FB, and now I have a house and retirement account.

I could *never* have done honeycomb if not for my time at FB.

There's no shame in using your skills to provide for yourself, your family, and your community. There is no shame in craving security -- none. Even if it does mean selling your soul for a spell.

If that's you, you'll get no judgment from me. BUT.

If you're selling your soul, look hard at lifestyle inflation.

I know too many people who took the gig to get out of debt, then find themselves a few years later living paycheck to paycheck on that 500k salary. Or they went from 150k to 800, and now "need" 400k just to live.

I am not a financial advisor. 🙃 But at least maybe keep tabs on what the going rate is for your skills in the non RSU based economy. It can be really crushing to find your dream job and realize you can't afford to take it.

It's all 10x words if you feel trapped. Are trapped.

Lastly, remember that bigco isn't all FAANG. Those companies have so many applicants that they can turn people away for whatever rando whim of the day.

There are companies like Capital One, Amex, Nordstrom, etc that do great work, pay good money, and look shiny on a resume.