Which industry to pick?
I'm currently considering switching jobs. My goal is to grow to staff eventually. Because staff-level engineers are required to have a deep understanding of the business and create scope based on business goals, having a good understanding of the industry seems to be a good skill to have.
All of my experience is in e-commerce. I have owned products that range from consumer-facing to the internal admin and management side. Therefore if I continue with the e-commerce industry, I will be able to take advantage of my existing experience. One company I can think of would be a good fit is Instacart. However, I believe coming up with creative business ideas and having the focus to dive deeper into the business require curiosity and interest. I've never had an interest in e-commerce and I also came to find the e-commerce industry not exciting. I also have concerns that e-commerce tech companies usually only can provide opportunities and compensation on the lower end of the spectrum, due to the nature of the industry still relying on the unit economy of physical goods, and is usually subject to lower margins. But on the flip side, I also understand that interest sometimes comes after you are good at something, so maybe my existing knowledge will help me to be good at coming up with business ideas, and I could grow interest from there.
Alternatively, the industry I'm interested in the most is fintech. I am into finance, for example, I once built a budgeting tool (similar to Mint) over a weekend for my personal use. However, I've also heard fintech can be pretty tedious. Fintech companies usually integrate with banks, and banks have generally older tech. Outside of finance, I cannot think of any industry I'm particularly interested in. However, I have a general interest in working for tech companies where the product is the software, not using software to sell something physical.
May I get some advice on how I should go about considering the industry as part of my job search journey?
Discussion
(5 comments)- 0a month agoEng @ Taro
My goal is to grow to staff eventually. Because staff-level engineers are required to have a deep understanding of the business and create scope based on business goals, having a good understanding of the industry seems to be a good skill to have.
I do believe that having expertise in the industry is secondary and can be learned on the job. When a company is recruiting, they are primarily focused on the engineering capabilities of the person first with the assumption that they can probably learn about the domain later.
So, you still have the capability to explore different domains to find out which domain you really enjoy working in.
- 08 days agoSenior-Level Software Engineer [OP]Gopuff
That’s freeing to know. Thank you Charlie
- 0
a month agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroI've worked at 2 Fintech companies, PayPal and Robinhood. I think Fintech is a great space, but the bank integration really isn't that bad and most engineers aren't working on that. At Robinhood, the main bank integration is the transfers flow and we outsourced it to Plaid. The Plaid SDK is admittedly sort of a mess, but it was only maintained by 2-4 engineers (1 of them was my little brother at some point).
Fintech is largely tedious due to the huge amount of regulation, especially if you are a licensed broker like Robinhood is. Robinhood is literally the only company that made me do an extensive background check to start working there - I had to go to a place to register my fingerprints! However, again, I think this isn't too bad as it's largely abstracted away from you. At a top-tier fintech company like Robinhood, you can still grow fast.
That being said, e-commerce also has a ton of complexity and is an established $1 trillion+ dollar industry. I would be incredibly surprised if there wasn't a top-tier e-commerce team somewhere out there where you would enjoy the work and have a clean path to staff.
At the end of the day though, I'm a huge fan of following one's passion. If you're passionate about finance, try applying to some top fintech companies and see what happens. Your path to staff will be delayed of course by switching domains, but as a senior engineer, I'm sure you have good fundamentals and can learn quickly. I recommend our senior to staff course as well: [Course] Grow From Senior To Staff Engineer: L5 To L6
- 08 days agoSenior-Level Software Engineer [OP]Gopuff
Thank you Alex for sharing! You mentioned “Your path to staff will be delayed of course by switching domains”. That’s is my concern as well for switching domains. Given that engineering skills are transferable, could you elaborate on which part of the domain switch is the main cause of delay, and a guesstimate time range of delay it would cause?
- 08 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
The main damage caused by a domain switch is weaker product direction. If you work in a particular domain for a long time, you understand the regulations, what its users want, and in general, what works and what doesn't work.
As an example of domain consistency helping careers, a lot of the engineers I saw grow fast at Meta ads were people we poached from Google ads. Since they had a ton of ads knowledge (and Google is a more mature ads business than Meta), they were able to come up with bold, successful experiments very efficiently (often just copy-pastes of what they did back at Google). A lot of these engineers got to Staff and Senior Staff quite quickly.
However, there are 2 caveats here which is why I don't think you should let this detract you from following your passion:
- You can expedite product domain expertise-building - If you talk to your PM, UXR leads, and data scientists more, you can develop an understanding of the market way faster. You can also spend more time going to conferences, reading white papers, and simply trying out competitor products. With all these tactics, you can probably shorten the delay from senior -> staff to just 1 year, which really isn't a lot in the grand scheme of your career.
- You can mitigate all of this by working on infra - Product direction is only relevant if you work on product. Let's say you are a video performance specialist. Your life isn't that different if you work on video streaming at a social media company or a telehealth company, even though those are 2 very different business verticals.
