Ask HN: Do companies hire principal and staff level engineers from job postings?
I'm in the same hole as a ton of other people in Canada and the U.S, such that I'm unemployed and prospects are nil. What I'm seeing is that most companies, if they have any postings, have chosen to only advertise positions for people who are comically well-decorated; Principal engineers with 10 years of experience, plus the masters degree, plus a bunch of specific cloud orchestration, scalable systems, or other devops experience that just seems entirely impractical to accumulate without simply advancing at the same company or FAANG for 15 years, which seems itself to be an unachievable tenure in this millennium.
I've been some kind of software developer for nearly 10 years, not all in a professional capacity and I don't claim that, but I'm not qualified for these positions; I just don't really have any other option but to chance it.
My question is, are qualified people actually hired through this channel, or are these postings just a formality so they can bypass some bureaucratic requirement?
Edit: Is it worth spending the time on a decent cover letter that indicates I'd be interested in discussing a lower seniority position if they don't consider me qualified for the Staff or higher? Also, this isn't relegated to startup land, more traditional online retailers, and others who's core competency isn't necessarily software
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 93.1 ms ] threadYou don’t need to spend 15 years at the same company or at FAANG to acquire these skills.
One issue that a lot of people face is that their career has been less about accumulating 10-15 years of progressively more complex experience and more about accumulating 1-2 years of experience 7-10 different times. It can take some deliberate planning to work your way upward over time and across companies rather than repeating the same arc over and over again.
Another trap is when people who want to be high-level ICs end up in management for a while, slowly getting further and further from working on the tech.
In this job market it’s hard to go from unemployed in one country to direct hire Principal in another country unless you have an extraordinary skill set. It will make more sense to get your foot in the door at any job that might work, then move up from there.
This is difficult to avoid because most companies don't have a progressively more complex requirements for people to learn from.
This could also be worded as:
"One issue that a lot of people face is that they did not work at prestigious technical companies. Having a long tenure at such companies gives hiring managers confidence in placing them into principal level roles, regardless of what the candidate actually learned at said company. Everything is about the illusion of competence."
During the transition months, I managed to convince upper management that now would be a good time to update the legacy product with all the knowledge gained over the past years.
So I spent about a couple of months or more (fuzzy memory) directing a group of people more skilled and talented than me, converting a coffeescript codebase to typescript, fixing a whole bunch of bugs and performance issues and updated a neglected codebase to something they can actually hire people to work on.
After that experience, I was promoted to tech director and leveraged that to become tech lead at future jobs.
- I had experience with early versions of angular.js (1.2~) and typescript (1.x~)
- I was willing to dive into an unknown codebase in an unknown language (coffeescript 1.x) that no one else wanted to touch
- I had almost a whole year to get familiar with the codebase, the intricacies and weird bugs, and the crazy amounts of OOP in it
- I came from the old definition of full stack (design + dev + database + user facing), making me a generalist among a bunch of technically minded people
Also, everyone was pretty demotivated and mentally checked out. Some had spent 2.5 years working on the project, there was a public launch for the beta release, press releases and a whole PR event to our existing users. Less than a month later, the board/investors cancelled the project. Even the CTO was pretty checked out and let me do whatever I want, which was probably how my crazy proposal got through. Within 2 months, we lost the entire upper senior engineering division, from CTO down to team leads. There was a huge debate about whether or not to even keep the engineering division, if it would be better to sell our current product to our rivals and re-focus on being a design agency. That didn't happen because our rivals came to us first asking if we would buy them...
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425525
But plenty of companies don't know about this and do succumb to stupid politics. It's a tragedy, really.
For arbitrary magic variable $THING, this is a tautology!
I wouldn't say I've actually repeated the same arc ever, it would just seem that way on the surface, and maybe I should think about how to make it not seem that way.
For example, very common to see European PhD graduates move to usa as their first job as staff or principal.
Job postings are often run through HR, who typically lack enough context for the role to know what they truly need. They put in the usual language and pad the requirements. Think about what the real role is, and OBJECTIVELY ask yourself if you could do that job. For example, someone with three years of hard-core React is probably what they really need when they say they want someone with 15 years of Javascript.
For the edit, idk if anyone reads cover letters, but I bring it up with the recruiter durring the initial call that staff mignt be a reach for me and it it doesn't work out lower levels would be ok
I've also applied to all the standard tech companies over the years, but have never once received an interview. I don't really blame them, I'm not some stellar candidate, but I still do it just in case I get lucky. I've had colleagues who couldn't debug a program to save their life (I know because I did it for them) making several times my pay now at the name brand techbro places. I also know some very good devs I worked with at these companies too. I can't say there is anything different about them on average than anyone anywhere else I've worked, so don't give up if you really want to work there. One guy I know finally made it in after nine years of not getting in, and is getting a huge salary, and major recognition for his work, and promotions, so it can happen, just like winning the lottery happens.
Outside the super-compensated roles there often are a dearth of people applying with both 10+ years experience AND competence in the requested tech stack. That being said, the interviews are totally a crap shot. I've had ones where I aced every question and they passed on me. I've had others where I didn't know a lot of what they wanted but they were sufficiently impressed to give me an offer.
Stop thinking about actual ability to do anything and start seeing it for what it is, a game, or better yet, a gamble. You just keep rolling the dice and hope something lands.
For myself, in the current environment over the past two years it's been taking 6+ months of looking constantly doing 1+ hours of applications and interviews daily before I received one or more offers. No cover letter, but spending money on recruiters reviewing and recommending changes to my resume, and applying like a madman at literally thousands of positions on job boards and directly with the company. Have gotten ghosted, gone through five rounds only to not receive an offer, all the normal stuff you hear about.
Generally I've been receiving maybe one or two HR callbacks for every hundred or two hundred applications. Of those HR callbacks maybe half I make it past the tech screening to the first interview. Another half or less I get to a final round. So all in all I've been doing a few hundred applications over several months for a single offer.
If I was really desperate, which I was in the past dotcom and 2008 crash, I would take one of the horrible W2 contract roles that pay barely above McDonalds wages. I've had these sustain me from going homeless for up to a year before I could get something more in line with a regular salaried job at more typical engineer pay. But I'd take those jobs in a heartbeat if I had no other job lined up.
Note I just went to state school with a bachelors, have no top tech companies in my record, am well over 40, and haven't really achieved anything other than getting back up on my feet after getting repeatedly knocked over by downsizing and offshoring.
Good luck, and don't give up. If the Irish can achieve independence after 800 years of subjugation, it's a reminder even in a tech down economy we can find our place in the sun too.
Would love to hear more details on how this happened if you don't mind sharing.
I just absolutely do not buy that I took ~5 CS classes and did a great job on the interview questions.
I don't think I did a great job -- but, I was a deeply specialized self-taught iOS engineer who had built a point of sale.
When you're at Google, work is more episodic and less in-depth, so I had a seemingly unusually wide and in-depth knowledge base.
And iOS devs were considered hard to get. And Google had a special focus internally on getting iOS-specific interviewers who, at least in 2016, usually did a lot of work with non-iOS specialists.
So you have these sort of inherent biases towards me seeming relatively impressive to their day-to-day experience with other Googlers. Then, I'm fairly convinced the leetcode problems we do add a significant "luck" portion.
I spent about 6 hours a day, 6 weeks before interviews, in Cracking the Coding Interview and was still missing problems in the 1st chapter towards the end.
I'm selling myself short, probably. But looking back, I see it as luck, structural factors, and what pushed it over the top was focusing on communication / thinking out loud in the interviews. As long as you're intelligent, familiar with the material, and your interlocutor is having an okay day, you'll come off well.
Your experience with interviews and rate of response feels very familiar. Roles I'm definitely qualified for and interviewed well with just not turning out at the last step, and every other variation of it being a dice roll.
I have 15+ YoE, and currently working at FAANG. I've spent the last few years leading a team of engineers to deliver one of the top priority projects of my org with estimated impact of +$100M ARR, and I have been consistently rated high performer. I also have some niches skills that are particularly on demand these days. I am not actively looking, but I am open to hear from recruiters. Due to my situation, I only entertain Staff+ roles or equivalent.
Recently a well known company (not big tech) reached out for a Staff role. After the initial screening, the recruiter came back to me saying that they could loop me for a senior role, because my experience doesn't match the expectations of a Staff role.
I honestly don't know what to make of this exchange. Is the market unreasonably tough these days or are my expectations too high?
> After 15 years at a FAANG you must be drowning in money
I have 15 yoe total, not all in FAANG. And almost all my career is in EU anyway. My net worth is probably an order of magnitude smaller than you think. If you worked an average software dev job in the US for 15 you almost certainly have more money than me. Also, as a 40 years old renting a 2 bedroom with my family, I am still motivated by money.
> list yourself as looking for work, take the interviews
I've been doing this for months. My tally is something like this: about half of the recruiters ghost me, I got one rejection and two downlevels. I can count with one hand the number of companies that I've talked to that can match or beat my current comp. For reference, I receive one contact or more a day from recruiters on average.
Talk to the talent orgs at VCs.
Revenue impact can be tricky, because more times than not - it’s a function of the size of the company you work for more than anything else.
Relative impact (%), along with absolutely impact ($) - is the more meaningful way to quantify impact.
Eg
Then when you leave every company thinks you’re insanely over qualified.
If it's a lot of things with this or that, and the submission isn't send postal mail to this address with this reference etc etc, maybe it's just picky recriting.
I recently checked and one of those job postings expired and was replaced with an equivalent posting in December. The other job posting (from a different company) is still open.
Channeling dang:
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
all of these skills are also achievable within a couple years by being a relatively trusted engineer at a startup
nothing is more heart-pounding than the first time you push an update to 100 thousand people, with no guardrails but the ones you yourself have installed
My advice is assume there are 1000 people applying for the same job as you, and you need to tailor every single resume for the job. If it says "Staff" just go for it and don't downplay your experience. Give it your best and let THEM be the one that tells you you're not qualified. Make it your job to study and be so well prepared that they can't tell if you are qualified or not.
I'm assuming that the job market will be bad like this for another 2-3 years so buckle up.
The companies do hire principal and staff levels from such postings (as well as from other channels). But even more important, many companies are open to hire at a different level. They create a single posting (e.g., to avoid HR hassles) and if the person they like is at a different level they will adjust it in parallel with sending an offer. So unless it is clear that the company only needs principal level hires I would send a resume there as well.
For example, HR might give the hiring manager a single slot and insists on having a specific level in the posting. What this often leads to is the hiring manager aims as high as HR lets him (usually easier to hire at a lower level than approved than at the higher level). Those 2-3 levels might end up as a union of all requirements and skill lists can get ridiculous. Bottom line -- if the company is interesting and your skills are relevant I would apply.
The market today is not great. Many companies overhired during zero interest and covid stimulus times and are now reverting to the mean. IMO it will get worse before it gets better as unprofitable companies run out of money. So I would focus on areas where there should be less competition: secondary metros (not bay area); larger, profitable companies (expand beyond software-specific companies); hybrid or on-site jobs (fully remote are especially competitive now); etc.
If you apply, apply well: have a few polished resumes and, if needed a good cover letter (no need to be super company-specific; put company name, copy-paste 2-3 main relevant points from your database of snippets and let ChatGPT fix the style). Good luck!
It might be helpful to consider the manager equivalent which is like a high level director or low level vp.
In part it is helpful as the role has some similarities in that it involves influence. It’s a more difficult position perhaps, since the influence required comes without the same power. The highest level roles can include influence outside the organization as well.
Don't assume every job listing is just for a single open position. For more junior positions, there may be several vacancies.
It’s not surprising that the requirements are very high. These roles exist to fill a specific business need.
Caveat: this all applies to FAANG and adjacent. Other industries use different titles, but the use of the word “staff” usually indicates that you’ve adapted the Google career ladder.
And while the amount of jobs on that level is - understandably - a lot smaller than lets say "senior software engineer" they still pop up because while there is a enormous demand on the junior/senior level (and quite some supply) highly skilled people who can perform on beyond that are extremely scarce while there is quite some demand due to a ever expanding IT market.
At least especially here in Northern Europe, YMMV.