Maybe? It’d at least make it an option, but I think Dagon’s reply is right: it’d be very hard for me to evaluate if you actually need me, and if you don’t actually need me then the opportunity cost for everyone ends up being high enough that it’s probably a no.
it’d be very hard for me to evaluate if you actually need me
May I ask if you evaluated this yourself? (I’m guessing: based on EA orgs being too small and with too little growth, so your own edge isn’t there, so they better hire someone else. But I’d be happy for clarity here if you’d help me out)
Yes, although not recently for any specific position. If someone came to me with a position or I saw an ad for a position (closest thing recently had been Lightcone, and I think I didn’t pursue basically for reasons above based on what I read) Is have to think about it.
I’ll exit my user-research mode and just share that EA orgs currently have a hard time hiring devs, especially senior ones. My fairly-confident assumptions is that the devs simply don’t apply, but beyond some guesses, I wasn’t sure why. Both of you are sharing reasons which I read as mostly “the orgs are not a good fit for my skills—I’m better at managing ~100 devs, not ~3”. First of all I’d like to thank you for sharing this—it’s helping me understand this unclear picture, so, like, this is an actual thank you. :)
I expect that the EA orgs would answer your concern with “Not enough people are applying, surely not very senior people. The alternative for you working with us is that we’ll have a dev with 1-2 years of experience, who is also, eh, not ideal for the position”. And also, “you will have a higher impact working with us, including if we pay you a ton of money, compared to donating 5X what you’d donate if you’d keep working at FAANG”. I don’t know if they’d actually say this, but it is my guess (I’m currently working on figuring out this field as you understand)
May I ask for your thoughts on this?
(Maybe as a person the orgs are trying to speak to, maybe as an advisor to me who is trying to make progress on the problem)
Sorry I missed there was a question here originally, thus the late reply.
I guess my thought is put your money where your mouth is. That is, if EA orgs really want more senior folks, they’re going to have to pay for it and not rely on people being mission aligned enough to take a pay cut.
I think realistically the way to get folks is to offer more cash than they can get in the private sector (where stock is often used to offset cash compensation). So for example offer 30% more cash than 95th percentile for the level you want to hire. For example, if someone wanted to hire me to work at an EA org they’d have to pay me at least $450k/year annual cash comp by this algorithm, and thinking about it being offered that much cash given the tradeoffs of working at a smaller org where I won’t get to exercise all my skills feels fair in that I’d be even on taking that option vs. continuing at my current job.
I haven’t closely followed EA developer job postings in years, but my sense is that they fall into three categories:
WebDev
CRUD apps
ML Eng
Any of these would be a waste of a staff engineer- the first two because what the jobs require is such a small subset of what the engineer can do, and the third because it requires a bunch of skills they don’t have (while still not using the ones they do).
From a total utility perspective, it seems better that EA roles are filled by junior engineers, while senior engineers leverage their additional skills to earn more.
This doesn’t apply to absolutely every job (LW/EAF are serious works of engineering), but I do wonder if EA orgs are looking to hire more impressive people than they can actually make use of.
Startups sometimes have founders or early employees who are staff (or higher) engineers.
Sometimes this goes terribly: the staff engineer is used to working in a giant bureaucracy, so instead of writing code they organize a long series of meetings to produce a UML diagram or something, and the company fails.
Sometimes this goes amazingly: the staff engineer can fix bugs 10x faster than the competitors’ junior engineers while simultaneously having the soft skills to talk to customers, interview users, etc.
If you are in the former category, EA organizations mostly don’t need you. If you are in the latter category though, EA organizations desperately need you, for the same reasons startups want to hire you, even though you also have skills that we won’t be able to use.
If someone is considering applying to CEA I’m happy to talk with them about whether it would be a good fit for both sides, including which of their skills would be useful, which new ones they would have to learn, and how they would feel about that. Some people really like being able to meet a promising EA at a party, hear about one of their issues, rapidly bang out a PR to fix it, and then immediately see that EA become more impactful (and know that without them—it wouldn’t happen). But other people really like the “make a UML diagram” style of work, and don’t enjoy working here. It’s hard for me to guess or to give a generic answer that will fit everyone.
It seems like you are bucketing senior eng skills into bureaucracy or… agility? ability to work quickly and responsively? That is missing most of what makes staff engineers staff engineers. Start-ups want engineers who are overpowered for the immediate problem because they anticipate scaling, and decisions made now will affect their ability to do that later. EA is growing but AFAIK not at nearly the speed it would take to make use of those skills: you’re more likely to end up with something terribly overbuilt for the purpose.
From what you describe, I think you’d be much better off looking for a kick-ass mid-level PM with a coding background who wants to get back into engineering. They’d be giving up much less (both in terms of money, painstakingly acquired skills they enjoy using, and future option value), and are more likely to have the skills you actually want.
> Start-ups want engineers who are overpowered for the immediate problem because they anticipate scaling, and decisions made now will affect their ability to do that later.
I’m sure this is true of some startups, but was not true of mine, nor the ones I was thinking of what I wrote that.
Senior engineers are like… Really good engineers? Not sure how to describe it in a non-tautological way. I somewhat regularly see a senior engineer solve in an afternoon a problem which a junior engineer has struggled with for weeks.
Being able to move that quickly is extremely valuable for startups.
(I agree that many staff engineers are not “really good engineers” in the way I am describing, and are therefore probably not of interest to many EA organizations.)
I’m a step lower here (senior engineer) and the reasons I and the people I know mostly don’t apply to EA orgs is that we get signals that they don’t want or value us: No remote work, generally not many actual engineer openings, various posts saying the way to get a job is to work unpaid for months in the hopes of getting attention, and at least one EA org lowballs salaries.
Maybe? It’d at least make it an option, but I think Dagon’s reply is right: it’d be very hard for me to evaluate if you actually need me, and if you don’t actually need me then the opportunity cost for everyone ends up being high enough that it’s probably a no.
May I ask if you evaluated this yourself? (I’m guessing: based on EA orgs being too small and with too little growth, so your own edge isn’t there, so they better hire someone else. But I’d be happy for clarity here if you’d help me out)
Yes, although not recently for any specific position. If someone came to me with a position or I saw an ad for a position (closest thing recently had been Lightcone, and I think I didn’t pursue basically for reasons above based on what I read) Is have to think about it.
I see, thanks
As I said in the other thread:
I’ll exit my user-research mode and just share that EA orgs currently have a hard time hiring devs, especially senior ones. My fairly-confident assumptions is that the devs simply don’t apply, but beyond some guesses, I wasn’t sure why. Both of you are sharing reasons which I read as mostly “the orgs are not a good fit for my skills—I’m better at managing ~100 devs, not ~3”. First of all I’d like to thank you for sharing this—it’s helping me understand this unclear picture, so, like, this is an actual thank you. :)
I expect that the EA orgs would answer your concern with “Not enough people are applying, surely not very senior people. The alternative for you working with us is that we’ll have a dev with 1-2 years of experience, who is also, eh, not ideal for the position”. And also, “you will have a higher impact working with us, including if we pay you a ton of money, compared to donating 5X what you’d donate if you’d keep working at FAANG”. I don’t know if they’d actually say this, but it is my guess (I’m currently working on figuring out this field as you understand)
May I ask for your thoughts on this?
(Maybe as a person the orgs are trying to speak to, maybe as an advisor to me who is trying to make progress on the problem)
Sorry I missed there was a question here originally, thus the late reply.
I guess my thought is put your money where your mouth is. That is, if EA orgs really want more senior folks, they’re going to have to pay for it and not rely on people being mission aligned enough to take a pay cut.
I think realistically the way to get folks is to offer more cash than they can get in the private sector (where stock is often used to offset cash compensation). So for example offer 30% more cash than 95th percentile for the level you want to hire. For example, if someone wanted to hire me to work at an EA org they’d have to pay me at least $450k/year annual cash comp by this algorithm, and thinking about it being offered that much cash given the tradeoffs of working at a smaller org where I won’t get to exercise all my skills feels fair in that I’d be even on taking that option vs. continuing at my current job.
I haven’t closely followed EA developer job postings in years, but my sense is that they fall into three categories:
WebDev
CRUD apps
ML Eng
Any of these would be a waste of a staff engineer- the first two because what the jobs require is such a small subset of what the engineer can do, and the third because it requires a bunch of skills they don’t have (while still not using the ones they do).
From a total utility perspective, it seems better that EA roles are filled by junior engineers, while senior engineers leverage their additional skills to earn more.
This doesn’t apply to absolutely every job (LW/EAF are serious works of engineering), but I do wonder if EA orgs are looking to hire more impressive people than they can actually make use of.
Startups sometimes have founders or early employees who are staff (or higher) engineers.
Sometimes this goes terribly: the staff engineer is used to working in a giant bureaucracy, so instead of writing code they organize a long series of meetings to produce a UML diagram or something, and the company fails.
Sometimes this goes amazingly: the staff engineer can fix bugs 10x faster than the competitors’ junior engineers while simultaneously having the soft skills to talk to customers, interview users, etc.
If you are in the former category, EA organizations mostly don’t need you. If you are in the latter category though, EA organizations desperately need you, for the same reasons startups want to hire you, even though you also have skills that we won’t be able to use.
If someone is considering applying to CEA I’m happy to talk with them about whether it would be a good fit for both sides, including which of their skills would be useful, which new ones they would have to learn, and how they would feel about that. Some people really like being able to meet a promising EA at a party, hear about one of their issues, rapidly bang out a PR to fix it, and then immediately see that EA become more impactful (and know that without them—it wouldn’t happen). But other people really like the “make a UML diagram” style of work, and don’t enjoy working here. It’s hard for me to guess or to give a generic answer that will fit everyone.
It seems like you are bucketing senior eng skills into bureaucracy or… agility? ability to work quickly and responsively? That is missing most of what makes staff engineers staff engineers. Start-ups want engineers who are overpowered for the immediate problem because they anticipate scaling, and decisions made now will affect their ability to do that later. EA is growing but AFAIK not at nearly the speed it would take to make use of those skills: you’re more likely to end up with something terribly overbuilt for the purpose.
From what you describe, I think you’d be much better off looking for a kick-ass mid-level PM with a coding background who wants to get back into engineering. They’d be giving up much less (both in terms of money, painstakingly acquired skills they enjoy using, and future option value), and are more likely to have the skills you actually want.
> Start-ups want engineers who are overpowered for the immediate problem because they anticipate scaling, and decisions made now will affect their ability to do that later.
I’m sure this is true of some startups, but was not true of mine, nor the ones I was thinking of what I wrote that.
Senior engineers are like… Really good engineers? Not sure how to describe it in a non-tautological way. I somewhat regularly see a senior engineer solve in an afternoon a problem which a junior engineer has struggled with for weeks.
Being able to move that quickly is extremely valuable for startups.
(I agree that many staff engineers are not “really good engineers” in the way I am describing, and are therefore probably not of interest to many EA organizations.)
I’m a step lower here (senior engineer) and the reasons I and the people I know mostly don’t apply to EA orgs is that we get signals that they don’t want or value us: No remote work, generally not many actual engineer openings, various posts saying the way to get a job is to work unpaid for months in the hopes of getting attention, and at least one EA org lowballs salaries.
Thank you very much for sharing! This comment is valuable for me