[mcemilg]

> the employers don’t ask “what you are able to do?”, instead of “what are your credentials/studies”.

I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without CS degrees; it also affects developers who have spent time working at small startups that haven't significantly scaled. If you haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale projects, you might lack impressive accomplishments or credentials to showcase. This issue can compound over time, leaving you stuck in positions that are less rewarding than even mediocre jobs, regardless of your true capabilities or the quality of your work.

Some people say that you can build open source projects or build products to show what you have. Balancing such efforts with a full-time job can be challenging, as these undertakings can consume most, if not all, of your free time. This creates a vicious cycle where you're continuously overextending yourself just to prove your worth. It's a demanding situation that can impact both your professional and personal life.

[lubujackson]

Referring to the "small startup experience" not mattering - I would say it is almost like an alternate track as an engineer.

I have trouble landing interviews at FAANGs with 15+ years as an eng. and successful acquisitions as a founder - but those don't mean anything if you don't have direct knowledge of certain tools to handle scale or experience guiding projects across departments, etc. Which makes sense for any role past junior, since part of the value you bring is experience and only some of your experience is directly applicable. Vaguely being competent doesn't really move the needle.

On the other hand, I've heard stories of people getting hired from a FAANG going to a startup and not able to shift their mindset to a "make it work" approach, so the challenge goes both ways.

[dasil003]

I've also had the experience of failing FAANG interviews after being very successful at smaller scale. Since then I've made the leap, and I can tell you that experience in the 10-100 developer range is extremely valuable and can make you very upwardly mobile once you get a foot in the door. People that have spent their entire career in big corporations often have a lot of assumed constraints based on groupthink and the vagaries of whatever specific org leaf nodes they've been exposed to. Often they will have worked for years under bosses with no real clue about the actual decision making process and strategy behind their work. It's extremely hard to develop an end-to-end understanding and strategic viewpoint in these environments. Startups offer much more opportunity to learn the big picture and the strategic considerations behind different functions. Obviously anyone can claim to be doing a startup—there's a lot of the blind leading the blind, and people playing house—but if you find one with an interesting vision, a bit of traction, and good colleagues you can learn lessons that will translate well to leadership at big tech.

Coming in the front door will be hard though, because recruiters and the first layer of technical interviewers will likely not have context to judge your 15+ years of experience. Look for referrals and directly talking to hiring managers. Also, read some writing from notable SV management writers like Will Larson and Camille Fournier, this will help you learn some of the shibboleths and how hiring managers think. Finally, if you don't have legit scale-up experience, look for that first. There's a range of companies with engineering teams of all sizes which can provide good stepping stones for learning as well as hireability optics.

[giovannibonetti]

> On the other hand, I've heard stories of people getting hired from a FAANG going to a startup and not able to shift their mindset to a "make it work" approach, so the challenge goes both ways.

But at least they get the job, so they can try to learn. Hence it doesn't go both ways.

[Hermitian909]

> Referring to the "small startup experience" not mattering - I would say it is almost like an alternate track as an engineer.

It can be but doesn't have to be. A lot of people prefer to hire folks with some small startup experience because such people almost always better at thinking about businesses holistically. Many people who spend their entire careers at big companies can only reason about their little slice (lots of bad takes on businesses here).

A common way to make VP of engineering at big tech is the following 5 job hops:

1. Manager at big tech

2. Manager at startup -> promotion to director

3. Director at big tech

4. Director at startup -> promotion to VP

5. VP at big tech

The problem comes when someone gets too senior with relevant experience at scale. I (generally) can't hire someone with 15 years of experience who's never worked at scale. They're going to be bored out of their mind with mid-level work but simultaneously I can't actually trust them to not screw up something in senior+ roles, either technically or socially.

[ghaff]

It's probably like a lot of other transitions to related but different careers. In my experience, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't--which probably says that as a prospective employer (and employee) there is an additional risk factor.

[sam2426679]

Probably an unpopular, "grass is always greener" opinion, but this is why leetcode-style interviews can be a good thing at FAANG. Anyone with time and an internet connection can gain experience with data structures and algorithms via leetcode, whereas it's much harder to get hands-on experience with scaling real transactions-per-second on your own. And, as contrived as leetcode is, it does measure something about your ability to grok how code and infra scale against time and space.

[tough]

How reasonable is for a non-us based developer to even try?

FAANG positions in Europe are OK-ish but not such a deal breaker to me to dedicate so much time to -useless- stuff, I'd rather build cool shit

[itronitron]

>> as contrived as leetcode is, it does measure something about your ability to grok how code and infra scale against time and space

While that is certainly possible, I don't think that is typically the case in leetcode style interviews...

[em-bee]

that and most FOSS projects are also not large-scale, or as a contributor you are only working on small patches that hardly qualify as large-scale experience.

[hinkley]

Or they don’t see the scale, which leads to friction with users. You don’t see how your tool gets used, leading to DevEx issues with the project, people asking with varying levels of politeness why you built things that way.

But at the end of the day the feedback is only so valuable, even when it comes with PRs.

[darkclouds]

> If you haven't had the opportunity to work on large-scale projects, you might lack impressive accomplishments or credentials to showcase.

Whats a large scale project and why should they be viewed as an accomplishment?

I myself have pioneered the use of some tech for use in situations where it was not thought possible, I've worked on big projects that have included the largest in the world, for employers that include being listed in the stock market.

>I believe this issue extends beyond the scope of those without CS degrees

Does that make me worth a $718,000 Google Software Engineer or a $100,000 junior coder?

What price do you place on exploiting the vagaries of law that results in new legislation being created to curtail your activities?

The founders of Google, Facebook, Microsoft & Apple all started with no university degree, but they did all end up with stock market listings and some legislation to curtail their activities.

So do University degrees limit your earning potential whilst making it easier to find a job, whilst having no university degree seems to increase your chances of getting a stock market listing and some legislation to curtail your activities.

What a topsy turvy world we live in!

[ecshafer]

The founders of google were Stanford phd can students. I don’t know if they go their phds or not.

The founder of Microsoft was a Harvard math major that probably could have gotten into an r1 phd program if the stuck it out for what 1 more year?

The founder of Facebook was a Harvard cs major that could graduate if the stuck it out.

Dropping out early to start your business is very different than someone who never went to school or flunked out of their freshman year.

[Paul-Craft]

Not just that. Engineers get pigeonholed into tech stacks as well. It's almost as if companies (recruiters, really) think a senior engineer can't learn another programming language or something. They come at you with "we're looking for someone with strong golang experience," when there's no way to get "strong golang experience" without working someplace that uses it.

[szundi]

Learning takes time

[gloryjulio]

I can resonate with that. I regret not pushing harder to get into the bigger companies earlier. The scope increase in invaluable. You are not going to get it by urself unless u r extremely lucky and be able to scale ur own business to the comparable degree

[rvba]

Finance is full of people with MBAs and two left hands that cannot do anything on their own.

[swores]

Are you actually asking a question relevant to the thread or just spamming a self-promotion?

I ask because I don't see any reason that paid open source contributions wouldn't be as good as non-paid open source contributions when it comes to gaining/demonstrating certain types of dev experience (though ofc without the benefit of also potentially showing character traits related to being willing to donate time for free), so I'm struggling to imagine you wrote that comment actually hoping for any answer other than "great thanks for telling us about the thing you founded". Apologies if I've incorrectly jumped to a bad faith interpretation - if so, you could maybe be more clear in explaining what your question actually is; if my assumption was correct then I'd suggest thinking twice before using low-effort and low-value comments for promotion, since people (and in particular people who would be valuable to have using your service) are liable to be put off by any product/company/service that spams in such a way.

[ayewo]

FWIW, your comment didn't seem like self-promo or spamming to me. In fact, I consider it to be on-topic because it plugs an important gap that has always existed for people that intend to contribute to OSS but cannot due to their immediate circumstances.

The "bug bounty" model is already used for eliciting security contributions from security researchers so it is a good thing you've extended it to elicit general contributions from devs looking to contribute to OSS and be paid for it.

BTW, there's an over-representation of TypeScript and Rust amongst the projects you have listed. I'm curious is this because you already have strong network in these communities, hence the over-representation or it is a consequence of something else?

[OptoContrarian]

If it did work here, what would an example of contributing through algora.io look like? Would this be under projects or experience?