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rt4 posted:I'm waiting!!! Aight, some initial things: 1. I was hired originally to run a small native engineering team and to eventually hire out a second fullstack team for an upcoming initiative. My first day I'm in my onboarding meetings and during a break, two Tech Leads walk in and introduce themselves to me because I was "their new manager". Turns out, I was now managing two teams of frontend engineers in addition to the native engineering team. When I confronted my (new) boss about this, I got a "Oh well we ended up shifting the hiring priority for the team and I forgot to tell you and figured you'd be okay with the additional scope". I'm fine with responsibility, but it was the first indication that communication and professional decorum were severely lacking. I'd been emailing with the team and my boss for a couple weeks leading up to my start date and none of that came up. 2. In my first hiring debrief as the hiring manager, we ended up as a group deciding that the candidate wasn't the right fit and below the level that they'd come in as comp wise, so we passed on them. I received a follow up email from the loving technical recruiter stating "This candidate has enough experience, would be an internal transfer and someone from the other company has vouched for them so we're going to extend an offer". My jaw literally hit the floor when that happened, I looped in my boss and our head of HR. I at least blocked the hire, but they kept that recruiter on the job because my boss "had developed a good working relationship with him". Never in my experience had I been overruled, as a hiring manager, by a recruiter. This then lead me to severely question all of our hiring/recruiting practices as odds are these types of decisions had happened before. 3. My second week on the job, company was launching a "Pop Up" shop in SOHO (NYC, shopping district, expensive as hell). We're neither a brick and mortar shop, nor a retailer, which made this decision slightly puzzling. When asked about the why and what sort of metrics we were trying to drive, I received blank stares and a bunch of "CEO wanted to keep the buzz going". So in addition to the 6 weeks of paying premium rental space, this also required a bunch of ad-hoc work by the engineering team to handle the new flows of users and shopping patterns that the service wasn't built to handle. This also required product teams to pause part of their roadmaps to "support the popup". This ended up breaking a fair amount of initial integrations and caused two teams to scramble over the weekend to ensure users could purchase items. 4. Two full product teams (about 10 engineers) were pulled off of their systems and roadmaps for an entire half (6 months) because leadership needed "quick wins" to help some of the internal teams be more efficient on some of the third party services/tools that they used to do their jobs. This resulted in the teams building chrome extensions to sit on top of things to "hack" around some functionality. These were labeled as "prototypes" even though we on the engineering side said this was a horrible idea and it was incurring a crazy about of product and technical debt that'll mean people will become overly dependent on them. The "justification" was that they wouldn't be long term solutions, you wouldn't have to support them, and they'd only be in development for a "sprint or two" and then we'd move on. Fast forward to today and those teams have not returned back to their work, receive production support requests about extensions breaking/not working on people's various computers and the work the extensions provide are now "core" to the business succeeding. RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Does this end up being a big deal? I try to make it to around 2 years at least but I've got some promising prospects going now, but my BigN recruiter wants me to try again in six months because I was so close and I feel like I'm pretty likely to take such an opportunity if I have it. Doesn't really make sense to put my life on hold hoping for that though Not at all, everything can be explained. To be fair, I was at my previous place 4 1/2 years and was in a good spot to move onto a next venture. This one was very, very different.
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Dec 12, 2019 18:25
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Staff, senior staff, principle etc.
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Dec 16, 2019 02:01
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Hippie Hedgehog posted:How long have you been in business? Do you expect such a "culture" can prevail long-term, or will there be pain once the company grows to the point that it has to enforce stricter practices? Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it) companies don't get to 300 engineers overnight. This means you can evolve and iterate towards processes that work and make sense for your company at the time and set yourselves up for success in the future. More pessimistically: odds are your company is never going to get to that size so don't put yourself at even more of a disadvantage by working on things prematurely.
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Dec 16, 2019 22:40
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JawnV6 posted:Weird thread here where you're presuming size correlates to strictness. Big thing? GOTTA be strict. Small team? GOTTA be lax. I agree that domain will force certain standards to be more important than others but I disagree that body count is irrelevant. As your headcount grows, along with different teams all moving at different paces, the ability to ensure standards for performance, best practices, internal libraries, intra-team mobility and hiring are more and more important.
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Dec 19, 2019 16:32
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Look into TAM or SA roles at AWS. Bunch of folks here can speak about it.
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Dec 20, 2019 20:06
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Queen Victorian posted:Anyone here ever had their toilet paper startup stock turn into actual money? 0 and 22k for me. Would have made more money had I worked at a company that compensated me accordingly but that's how it goes.
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Jan 12, 2020 22:52
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kayakyakr posted:I've been enjoying The Manager's Path: a Guide for Tech Leaders because it covers that very same transition from team lead to manager. This is really good for you to get a good high level grasp of things. I read through it before starting my role as an EM at a larger tech company, even though I'd been managing managers before and it helped call out things for me. I've also been reading An Elegant Puzzle which goes deeper on organizational challenges. It's good so far and less applicable for a first time manager but is helping provide context to a lot of decisions.
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Feb 28, 2020 19:25
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We've stopped doing all in person interviews and while we *can* do them all remotely, it's definitely not going to be ideal 
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Mar 11, 2020 17:52
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Been at "big tech but not FAANG" for about 2 years now (mostly during Covid) after 10 years of smaller/startup work. Feeling pretty bored and chatting with a bunch of early stage companies to see if I can head of engineering and build out an org. I feel pretty crazy moving away from a good company that pays way too well but I've come to the realization that being bored just isn't worth it for me. Definitely not a woe is me situation as we're super loving privileged work in this field but still feels like odd decisions to be making.
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Jul 30, 2021 18:10
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Guinness posted:I feel you, in a very similar boat. 2.5 years at a big-but-not-FAANG company as a senior dev and overall just kind of bored/burned out from the tedium of the same problems day in and day out. I did the small company/startup thing years back and it was more fun, but certainly less stable and less well paid and has its own host of bullshit problems. But at least I got to work on more cool stuff. Glad I'm not alone! Agreed though, grass isn't always greener on the other side. No doubt in my mind about the *amount* of work that'll have to go into it and having to go with a higher risk.
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Jul 30, 2021 21:50
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