Comment by aristofun
2 days ago
> Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building
With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.
There will always be value and importance to networking, human relationships and communication. Because after all we're people, not robots.
But there will also be shift and evolution in management styles, just like we notice a shift in Leetcode interviews right now (less and less of this bullshit).
Change is the true "gravity" here.
Can you change the corporate culture of the companies that pay top of market any more than you can change gravity?
Sure I could change the culture by accepting a bullshit CTO position that is a glorified developer at a YC like startup that pays less than the intern I mentored when they got their return offer at BigTech and I could get meaningless “equity”.
But if I were in a position where I wanted to maximize my comp, I would play the game and convince a company with a lot of money to give me some of that money.
I just happen to care more about work life balance and making “enough” money now.
> With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.
Sadly this is majority of tech industry. Cargo-cult whatever the big players are doing. But all is not lost. Lots of interesting smaller companies with highly technical people advocate for a tech culture that rewards real Engineering over Salesman/Politician. For instance, a FAANG resume with business impact bullet points will be pretty useless for a small team building a database. Someone with PR commits to open source Databases would hardly need to prove themselves.
Out of 10 companies I’ve worked for over 30 years, I’ve only worked for two large companies - General Electric when it was still an F10 company and later Amazon (AWS) - I hated my time at each of them. In fact, I turned down an opportunity by a former coworker at AWS who was a director at another well known non tech company who was going to create a position for me to lead their migration to AWS and then their “modernization”. I turned it down even though I could have made about $50K more in cash than I was making in cash and RSUs at Amazon because I didn’t want to work at another large company after leaving Amazon.
It’s fine if you want to work at smaller “interesting” companies, I’m doing the same. But let’s not pretend there are no tradeoffs.
The intern I mentored their intern summer and the year after they got back, got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I was making at 46 in 2020 as a senior enterprise dev in Atlanta.
On the opposite side, now they are an L5 (mid level) Solution Architect at 25 working at AWS doing a similar line of work to what I do[1] and make the same total comp as I make as as a staff consultant working at mid size firm at 51.
If you want to make the eye popping big tech salaries - you have to play the game.
[1] I’m mostly post sales leading implementations and doing some management style consulting reports. My former mentor is pre-sales.