Career Advice About Startups

I have a lot of expectations on my plate, and it can be hard to handle. I'm being put on a project soon, but I do have some spare time here and there. How can I make effective use of this time, and is there anything I should focus on during onboarding in general?

I pretty much interact with everyone else through text-based means, which is all really pronounced in this remote covid era. However, I like to learn from other people directly, talking with them. For example, I'm currently working with a senior full-stack engineer doing things like pair programming and that has been helpful.

What can I do to get more of this deeper learning instead of trying to learn almost entirely through text?

Hi!

I had mic issues in the OH and couldn't ask live. How would you recommend I prepare for System Design interview questions, especially since I feel my experience at my previous company didn't prepare me well for these?

I have 2.5 years of experience at a big tech company and was recently laid off. Ideally, I’m aiming for an ~L4 level position as I was L3 in my past role and was nearing promotion. I’m getting more interviews at start-ups now, and they typically focus on system design rather than leetcode questions. At my past company, the tools were so powerful that I didn’t get the same breadth of experience a new grad might get at a smaller company. For example, I never touched or thought about our database or considered scalability for our services. In hindsight, I should have taken the initiative to find projects outside of my team with more scope, but now I know better!

My current plan is to read "System Design Interview" by Alex Xu and go through the Taro System Design Masterclass. Do you have any feedback on this plan? I recently had my first system design interviews and have more coming up. I want to prepare as best as I can with the time I have. I’ve accepted that I may not excel at first, but any feedback to improve my preparation plan and mindset would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I've been at my current company for many years, and I'm looking for a change of pace. I'm unsure how to bring this up properly with my manager in particular: How do I frame the conversation and when do I have it?

For context, I have a really good relationship with my manager. They were initially an engineer at the company like myself, and they've been with me since I've started.

I was excited to land a PR that introduced the latest Android frameworks into the app, but I got feedback from my manager that it would add confusion, making it harder for new engineers to onboard into the codebase. My PR didn’t land. How do I avoid this in the future?

I am a deep learning research engineer at an early stage autonomous driving startup and I just got an offer for a senior deep learning engineer in the autonomous team at Qualcomm. I am confused about it as compensation is low compared to industry standards but overall a bit higher from my current salary. (The base is quite low, but RSU's make up for the rest). The work is same what I do, so that will be nice.

I can either keep looking for other opportunities while staying at the startup or take this. I am not too happy with the offer but it is the best I have right now. I will be shifting to San Diego from NY and will also take a major hit in my social life.

Any suggestion on how the culture at Qualcomm is and how their machine learning and AI teams are? I am really confused if it will be worth it.

I've been working at this company for almost 2 years now and we recently started doing kick-off calls for big features. Before this, management would come up with features in private meetings and assign engineers tickets. We expressed our frustration with this approach so management started doing "kick-off calls" recently but would only invite 1 engineer or 1 data scientist depending on who they think should lead the feature/project. This is a 10-person company, and it feels like I have no room to be creative/propose solutions etc. I brought this up during retro and 1:1s with my manager and the answer I always got was "we don't want it to be a democracy" or "too many people/questions would drag the meeting longer than it has to" etc

I can understand this reasoning if it's a big team/company, but we're a really small team and it feels to me like they're not interested in hearing about other engineers' input, ideas etc at all. This causes me to think engineers are just here to do grunt work/grind. Am I being too cynical?

Right now I'm in a situation working for a startup that posts a video of a bug with little to no detail at all and sends it off to dev to be fixed. If there is information included, there is no standardization so it can be frustrating having to hunt this information down. I understand in startups I will have to learn to operate in a realm of ambiguity; however, the team is so small that I could potentially fix this with a little buy in.

Somethings that I've seen work in my previous job were having:
-screen shots of current state and future state
-video of current issue
-steps on how to reproduce
-device information
-potential solutions

Im new to the team and don't want to be "that" guy trying to change everything, so I don't want to come to them with any half baked ideas. Do you have an example of a strong story that I could use as a template for our tickets?

I spoke to the CTO of a YC startup yesterday. We had a nice, 20-minute chat, and then he said he'd send me a coding assignment to do.

He sent it right after. The assignment is to create a Django app that does some basic CRUD operations. I haven't used Django before, so I'll need to do that. I'll probably need to spend more than the 2-3 hours he said I should spend on it.

My question is, how long do I have to send this assignment back to him? I have a Big Tech interview coming up in a week so would rather study for that. Can I send the CTO the assignment a week and a half after he gave it to me? 2 weeks?

I can obviously ask him, but I'm not sure I want him saying, "oh, send it in the next couple of days." So if I don't ask, he might be fine with me sending it in whenever.

I'm an earlier-in-career software engineer, and I work in an extremely busy startup on a small team (<10 engineers). I do a lot of things, including:

1. Manual QA - I test every build and find a lot of crazy bugs.
2. Release/deployment - I make sure the apps go out well and am looking into CI/CD.
3. Development - I work wherever I can to fill in the gaps and am happy to pick up any ticket.

However, at the end of the day, tickets need to get done and I've had some trouble with that. How can I get better at this? Do I just need to "put in the reps" when it comes to coding?

I'm deciding between two companies, ie think FAANG and a pre-IPO startup.

The big difference is that

FAANG

• mid level engineering role
• work on high scalability systems in a cloud infrastructure division

Pre-IPO startup

• Senior full stack engineering role
• Work on building new products/features from scratch and continuing to evolve them

The Pre-IPO startup pay is certainly higher, and I think the company's prospects for earnings are higher. However, the FAANG role offers work on highly scalable systems, which I don't quite have much experience on. I'm a product engineering/full stack role.

I worry about there's not that many product engineering/full stack roles across FAANGs and for future job security, it might be worth building up the skillset for highly scalable systems?

When people talk to me, I have a tendency to pause. This has led to feedback that colleagues wish I could answer their questions faster. The problem is that I need to pause for some questions as I need the time to think and formulate a good response. Is there a way I can incorporate this feedback without sacrificing my answer quality?

Do you think that by being in a remote setup, it would be harder to learn skills like communication, building trust, and aligning people behind decisions? I'm interested in these skills for my work of course, but I also do have aspirations of building my own startup someday and I imagine these skills are useful there too.

So. DSA is relatively straightforward to get good at: methodically go through some common patterns and train yourself on the variations. However, system design is a completely different beast.

There's the hard science component of "this DB cluster will probably handle 10K QPS at this scale", eventual consistency, etc. System. And then... there is the art. Design.

I understand there's some level of mentorship/guidance involved, but I'd rather be a mostly hands-off self-improving machine like .

As far as I see it, this is what makes DSA straightforward to improve in: rigorously measure your own work against an objective set of metrics, rinse and repeat.

So my question is: How do you audit your own work when you do system design?

There are so many changes in the pipeline for my projects every single day - Everyone can bring in what they want to change and what they want to update.

I work on the front-end, and a lot of the time I'll get mocks, start building them out, and then get a big change in assets/copy a few days later. I also present to leadership sometimes and get pretty much feedback that warps the look and feel of the product after I've built most of it out.

How can I make this overall situation smoother?

I'm looking for red flags when it comes to seed stage startups that are still pre-PMF/MVP stage

Does number of non technical people make a difference? If a startup has too many sales people is that a red flag?

What are other things I should be concerned about?

My startup is doing well and there's a high probability of it being worth a large amount and it still has potential for more upside.

What are common regrets from people who left successful companies before their full vest? (And maybe more interestingly, what are regrets from people who only stayed to finish their vest when they wouldn’t have otherwise?) What’s a reasonable discount factor when considering opportunity cost of illiquid equity?

What role does good feedback received in a 360 review cycle have in the promotion / salary hike conversation? How to make the most of good feedback?

It's come to my attention that my company has about 10 percent android users. We hover around 98-99 crash free sessions according to Crashlytics. There are some features missing from the android app that our iOS counterpart does have so it could be that.

I was wondering if anyone has experienced this or had any tips to share.

I'd love to hear any decisions people made building side projects that you learned the hard way was a bad choice

I'll start:

Deploying ML models for a project is a pain. ML models are often 100-200 MB so you cant just deploy on a lightweight VM and it exceeds free tiers. I didn't want to pay to deploy a side project that has no users.

I tried digital ocean (i got a free 300$ credit) and it was a PAIN. I spent days 😭getting it working to no success. Eventually I used and it worked really well. Highly recommend. I wish I didn't try and deploy on a VM or use digital ocean for ML. Railway worked because it seamlessly downloads all the libraries from the code like heroku but cheaper but digital ocean's version of this had so many limitations with memory and ram and storage

At every Big Tech company, the stack is very custom and a lot of the hard problems are already solved. Because of this, is there a limit to the kind the learning you can get at larger companies (>1000 engineers), which you can bypass by going to a much smaller company (<50 engineers)?

Recently I had an oppurtunity with a strong startup (~10 people, innovative AI idea, but strong profits).

They paid all costs to fly me out so I can work with them for a few days to see if it's a match.

The problem was that when we met, the founders asked me what project I would like to implement in their system within these few days. I wasn't prepared to propose my own idea for how to extend their platform as I didn't know how they build things, and I wasn't sure if I can commit to completing a project in this short amount of times. I asked a few questions, and eventually the conversation landed on an idea I was excited about but I had no idea how to practically implement.

Moreover, their codebase was a mess (files with 10k+ lines, zero comments) and it was a weekend so I couldn't get much help from the engineers.

I've delivered a partial demo on the project, but ultimately wasn't able to ship the whole thing and did not receive an offer. I discussed with the CEO after and he mentioned that he liked my cultural fit, and he also thinks this project was too difficult, but he just doesn't see a good role where I fit currently.

I am trying to learn from this experience and what I could improve, and wanted to get any suggestions in this forum.

TL;DR: is being deeply involved in the details and not a hands off managerial approach to starting companies popularized by brian chesky and paul graham

Nothing much here, just thoughts? Anyone here working in startups going "founder mode"?

Hey All,

I have just completed interviewing at a seed-stage startup that is creating some stuff that I can really resonate with. The company is profitable, has huge growth metrics in the past 18 months, and tons of room to grow. I do have experience building the type of developer platform they are trying to build which is sort of specialized and I think the interviews went really well and according to the JD, after the onsite interviews the next step is an offer.

I received an email the next day asking me to schedule 15 minutes with the CEO and the Lead Engineer to discuss "next steps". I'm used to working at larger enterprises and tech companies, where I deal with recruiters and the interview processes are pretty straight forward and don't diverge much. I am hoping these next steps are to discuss a potential offer and to make sure I'm good to go with moving from a larger company to smaller company. I do have a few questions for the community though.

Assuming they discuss extending an offer:

1. Should I prepare to discuss comp? If so, is it unrealistic to expect a similar base comp to what I have now (~190k)? Basically all the senior engineers come from FAANG or mid-sized tech companies like me.
2. I'm not actively looking and am comfortable where I am at currently, albeit I am totally uninterested in my work and dread going in everyday, and really like what this company is building. Is there room to negotiate especially with no offers?
3. What are some good resources to gauge what sort of equity I should be looking for? I would be one of the first 7 FTE SWEs and a more senior one.

Also, are there any red-flags I should look out here?