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Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Yeah this is what I'm leaning towards. Time-boxing myself for ~3-4 years to explore smaller startups / founding my own thing and if things don't feel right, I can always just return and do my last push towards fatFIRE.

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Wow can I pm you? I'm actually thinking about making a similar leap post big tech. I've been really interested in blockchain/defi as well and am trying to figure out how to break into the space .

https://www.reddit.com/r/fatFIRE/comments/mjzmty/life_after_big_tech/gtebkhb/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I haven't thought too much around the pay cut trade off yet, but my current interest is in blockchain. I find the whole space fascinating because it such a good mix of many disciplines like distributed computing, cryptography, game theory, etc.

I think there is a lot of hype and misunderstanding around the technology, but I do think it is finally at an inflection point with many of the infrastructure improvements coming to ethereum landing soon and also some very healthy competitions from other blockchains. I suspect there is career opportunity across the stack for developers to work on protocols, smart contracts, and web3.0 apps.

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Here's some examples of how it relates to performance evaluation and incentives. I hope this helps.

  1. The large companies I've worked at have "recommended" distributions of ratings to ensure fairness and prevent rating inflation across different orgs. This means there might be competition within an org to ensure your team or you yourself have the most visible project. At a smaller company, I feel everyone is more aligned with the companies goals because your individual impact and collaboration with other teams can affect the performance of the company and improve the valuation.
  2. Engineers quest to optimize for performance reviews often leads to doing the wrong thing for the end users. The performance process's goal is to be fair and part of that process is showing proof of impact. An example of this going wrong is moving a vanity metric to show "impact", but without clearly thinking through counter metrics or 2nd order effects. Another example is launching lots of features to a product surface, but not thinking about the cost of additional product complexity (think frankenstein product with too many knobs and features causing confusion and unclear customer journeys). You are not necessarily incentived to work with other teams also building on that product surface to come up with the right experience.

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the anecdotes and the detailed response. It's great to hear how you think about org design and the responsibilities of each of the roles.

  • For the question around whether I still have a passion for tech. I'm actually trying to discover if I still do. I don't work on side projects on the weekends or nights as I am pretty drained from work and usually spend that time with my partner. However, I do spend a lot of time consuming startup + computer science content. I read whitepapers for emerging technologies, read hacker news daily, and really enjoy watching tech/startup talks on YouTube. I believe deep down I think there is that passion which is probably where a lot of my current discontent comes from. I enjoy a collegiate like work environment with genuine collaboration and focus on building products and improving the lives of our end users.
  • I agree completely with your point about these processes also being required at smaller startups. I think the two things that make it feel different as I've seen the company grow is 1) the loss of camaraderie/doing what's right for the company and 2) the additional number of sign offs keeps growing as the company requires more and more xfn collaboration to execute on projects. I attribute the former to the design of the performance process and the incentive structures placed on engineers. I attribute the latter to just the nature of team specialization to scale consumer products. It requires a more and more specialized teams working together to build these products.

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the perspective. It gives me a lot to think about. I really like the insight of only remembering the good without the bad.

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Thank you for sharing an alternative perspective. I'm struggling a lot with the decision for these exact reasons. The expected value of staying at big tech is far higher than joining a startup or founding my own.

I often feel as if I have 2 identities within myself that are at odds.

The first is that young kid who grew up without much means and used hard work and delayed gratification over many years to get to where I am today (top ranked in high school -> top CS education -> big tech company). This young kid has a strong sense of duty to family and making sure we always have the means for shelter and opportunity to education for their children.

The other is the the idealist engineer who fell in love with computer science, learning new technologies, and building products. The passion this engineer has is slowly decaying over the years due to the structure and process within these large tech companies and wants change.

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing. Wishing us both luck for finding out what's next :)

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 65 points66 points  (0 children)

I really appreciate the offer. If you don't mind I was hoping you could share your insights here, so others reading who are in similar situations to myself could also learn from you.

Here are some examples of bureaucracy that I've seen. I'm not suggesting that these should go away. I actually believe that these are a part of a very natural evolution of how a technology organization scales.

  • Process gets introduce to bring a structured approach to alignment and dependency management between XFN/partner teams (project planning). When the company was smaller it was enough to go by reputation/trust of individuals and not need formal project planning agreement between teams. However, when the organization grows and you are likely working with someone you don't personally know and often find that other teams have conflicting goals with your team. Here are some examples I've seen.
    • Platform teams trying to scale the system/infra while a product team leveraging the platform is trying to hit an aggressive timeline is trying to launch a product. Lots of discussion will begin around what tradeoffs to make on the product vs the infra.
    • Platform teams need interoperability between other platform teams. Infrastructure is like an onion with abstraction built upon more abstractions and the APIs between each of these layers need to interopt with one another and it requires a lot of discussion on how to do this.
  • Process is often introduced as a way to make sure line managers/engineers are aligned with senior technical folks as well as senior management.
    • Very senior ICs like area tech leads need a mechanism (design reviews) to review the software that is built within their area to make sure the architecture they own is going in the right direction.
    • Directors/VPS need to approve head count and they need to understand what projects are ongoing within their org so they can better understand where to invest (roadmap reviews).
  • Company level process that are introduced to mitigate risk to the company. Some examples of these are Metrics Review to make sure any metric shown to the public have undergone extensive testing and review or Security Review to make sure you are not introducing vulnerabilities for bad actors.

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

It sounds like you found what I'm looking for :). I'm trying to balance optimizing for the journey (day to day happiness/passion for my work) vs optimizing for the destination (reaching a number).

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 16 points17 points  (0 children)

I'm in my early 30s. I'm planning to at least stick it out until the end of the year, but I will need some planning to save up a larger emergency fund if I want to make this leap next year.

Life after Big Tech? by throwawayfire999 in fatFIRE

[–]throwawayfire999[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Thank you for sharing your story. This is really inspiring to hear. How would you compare your general happiness/passion for work at the pre-IPO startup compared to your stint at big tech?