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Ask HN: Communities for Staff+ Engineers?

20 points by drstewart ↗ HN
Are there any communities (Discord servers, forums, IRC channels, etc) geared towards staff+ engineers?

There are times I just want to participate in high level discussions or bounce an idea off of a group of peers dealing with similar challenges. It seems most solve this by reaching out in-network, but I'm hoping there's something out there that's a little more structured and self-selected.

17 comments

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sudhirj
Could you post an example challenge? Would these be technical or managerial?
drstewart
Technical, as I believe more resources exist on the managerial side, but for questions that aren't easily searchable (as obviously those are easily solved on their own).

Example: I'm planning for how our company's API design will evolve long term. I might want to connect with others who have done this and ask what their approach was. Did they evolve from what they have or build from the ground up or use a domain driven design from first principles? Did they organize the APIs around team ownership? Is there tooling that proved particularly helpful in a migration?

In short, I suppose it's boils down to having a group of people that you can ask "I'm tackling X problem, has anyone else done it before? What was your approach?" and hear their stories, warnings, gotchas, or recommendations.

Another reason is just to generally participate in discussions around current trends and problems that are being worked on. I feel like there's a lot of good content out there (blogs, podcasts, white papers) that I'm just missing due to lack of visibility.

sudhirj
I was just planning to start exactly this, once I have a big enough audience at https://sudhir.io - would you expect this to be paid and moderated, though? Would $25 per month be reasonable if I restricted it to senior level members and discussions?
angrais
I personally would not pay for the "privilege" of such a service as it just feels forced. Part of the goal is to build a network or friends rather than simply gain responses to questions
sudhirj
Yeah, it would be pretty snobbish / country club-ish. Think it might make more sense to keep it free and open to anyone, moderate out off topic or unsuitable discussions, and maybe charge for an associated job board.
bradhe
r/ExperiencedDevs has some stuff in there.
comprev
This is a reasonably good resource and the moderation keeps out "junior" topics quite well.
jonas_kgomo
We are currently building this platform for technical and engineering bottlenecks. Generally each company has a developer relations department to help customers integrate, for example Stripe and Hasura have a Discord, IRC (dev relations as a service). But we are looking at making this more accessible. Wondering how this could best suit what you are looking for, open for suggestions! https://affordance.app
seattle_spring
Whatever the solution is, it would be great to be able to filter out people who have inflated their own titles. Bouncing ideas off Staff+ level engineers would be great, but not if it's permeated with "CTO"s, "VP of Engineer"s, or "Lead Engineer"s that just graduated from HackReactor the week prior and founded their own blog and called it a company.
klohto
Why the negativity? You can easily filter “them” out. Even so, you can see if somebody’s advice is nonsense, it’s not the title that matters.
jonas_kgomo
Who are the audience of the community, is it engineers at companies, independent developers or founders? What would be the focus, is it scaling issues, security attacks, technical debt insurance, tools and infra advice?
fragmede
Hacker News :) You probably won't get frontpage traction with a generic AskHN post, but you might still get some traction and discussion, as we see here.
gwittel
Rands in repose runs a leadership slack server which has a staff-plus eng channel:

https://randsinrepose.com/welcome-to-rands-leadership-slack/

mooreds
Came here to say this. The rands slack has a number of virtues:

* large, with over 10k members. This lets you see a lot of different perspectives.

* because he used to work at slack, it doesn't suffer from the 'memory hole' or other limits of the typical community slack. There's a ton of knowledge you can gain just by reading old messages.

* curated. No one can just join, everyone has to send an email to him. I don't know what kind of vetting happens, but there's at least some.

* active. Almost too active, it can be overwhelming. But this means that when you post a q, you tend to get some kind of feedback (unlike some other communities I've been in).

* clear code of conduct https://github.com/randsleadershipslack/documents-and-resour... I know they have active moderators, not sure I've seen anyone get kicked off, but definitely folks have been scolded (personal experience).

* clear purpose: promote tech leadership. Not just for VPs, CTOs, but any kind of tech leadership.

That said, haven't joined the channel that parent mentioned, but have definitely had some great high level discussions in some of the other channels.

Fun fact, anyone can start a channel there. When I was a startup CTO a few years back, I started #startup-cto and now there are 1000+ folks in the channel.