Ask HN: What's left for early startup engineers as the company grows?

I've heard that before. You were very productive coding, almost too busy and if they promoted you then they would be one good coder short. It was easier to hire somebody fresh with an outside look to think long-term. I expect you will soon be heading a 'special projects' group as a perk to keep you motivated (that group might build a second website or launch in another country or create prototypes so that could be great). The only thing you could have done would be to insist on becoming a/the CTO from the beginning and not let them hire anybody on top. Were you cut for that from day 1? Often investors add pressure to replace parts of the team with 'more experienced' experts, that can also affect founders (being stripped of CEO and president titles).

The rub with startups is that leadership may not have experience with developing careers.

From what you've written, it seems like you really don't have a lot of experience developing careers either, which is one reason to bring in an experienced engineering manager. It's not a knock on your skillset managing a 10 person team and delivering. Just a realization that management isn't something you can just quickly learn on the job.

My advice: have a discussion with whomever the new engineering manager is, and explain your career aspirations and the current dilemma you have.

Leave.

Be pragmatic: there will be other opportunities which are equally interesting and staying isn't helping. You could be CTO at a different startup. Further, you should be approximately at your zenith at the company and they should be able to provide a strong reference, if you stay dissatisfied your performance and appearance will suffer - along with your potential for future employment.

Also happiness is about the journey (career, parenting, etc). If you're not on a journey you won't be happy!

sounds like you're in a great position to craft the position you want, and then shop around your experience to other startups

if you get a bite, go back to your startup, say you have another opportunity, see how much they want you

When they were hiring all these people... how did you react? did you express interest in these roles?

At a company with 45 people, all of the roles you mention probably should be dedicated roles/teams. You didn't do anything wrong, you were just successful at growing a company.

If you want to wear a lot of hats, go join another early stage company (the items you mention make an awesome resume). If you want to grow at the current company, pick an area or two (development+strategy or management) and let the ceo know what you are interested in.

You helped found a company and fell in love with the work of a founder. You can't re-found the same company, so found again!

You can play the lottery ticket game and move on, taking your 2 years of vesting with you.

Only do this if you think you've set the company up for long-term success and it will still be successful even without you there.

Also only do this if you think you can make out better in the long-term (more money, more equity, equally sure thing elsewhere), otherwise just buckle down and ride out the remaining 2 years.

Unless you think your current company is trash, then just bounce.

Were you considered for these roles or entirely left out of the process? How much have you actually talked to your management about this?

One thing you need to come to grips is that regardless of how smart you are, the VP of engineering is probably someone that has a lot more experience and clout than you do. If they aren't, then the senior management of the company is terrible. If your company has grown to the size of 40-50 people, that's the time when they need real experience to help drive them forward. They can't take a chance on a great programmer who has never managed an organization before or grown it from 40 to 200 people. So you need to accept that.

But you should stick by the VP of Engineering and learn whatever you can from them. Be their right-hand person, and try to become someone that the entire company goes to for technical issues. It's not hard to be the de facto CTO, just make sure you are a part of all the technical decisions, and a positive guiding force for the company. As you become more and more the face of technical decisions, eventually you'll be recognized for it, or you can go to another company in that higher role.

If they haven't elevated you into a senior management role after doing all those things successfully then they're probably fucking up.

if you believe in the company, and the founders, go to them and fight for what you've created and your position. If they don't listen and help come up with a solution to retain you, it's probably time to move on.

> Where did I fail to claim my part when the company was growing?

You don't give us a clue to answer this. Your whole story is about things that happened. You haven't told us about what you wanted. You haven't told us anything that you did to get what you want. Did you know what you wanted? Did you do anything to try to get it for yourself?

> I should just "be happy."

I call bullshit. If you were happy to passively accept what's being handed you (money, responsibility, acclaim), you wouldn't have made this post. Honest mindful gratitude makes a person happier, but cloaking bitterness with false gratitude, which this sounds like to me, will make a person ever more bitter.

You have to start with what you want.

If you want to keep doing everything like you did before, then you should make a career as early stage CTO. If you want reward and acclaim for that, then you have to negotiate it up front, usually as a nice slice of equity. Be advised, there's risk in that.

If you want to grow with a company, then you won't be able to do everything you were doing before. You will have to focus. And you have to assert your case that you want the role and can be successful in it. To grow with the company in one of these roles, you'll need to cede the other roles to new teammates. You will probably have to mostly stop coding. You will have to embrace the thousand headaches that come with the new role as the company grows.

These are two possible career strategies. There are others. All start with knowing yourself. All depend on asserting yourself.

It's time for you to start your own startup. I'm dead serious. You have demonstrated a lot of necessary skills. All you need is a cofounder and an idea. Take your time and be selective. As an experienced technical person you will be much in demand as a cofounder; you have the upper hand and can pick whom you want to work with. Or even do it solo if no one shows up that you feel good about.

Your career path is your responsibility. Don't expect anyone else to care about it, though occasionally someone might.

Who do you report to? Did they discuss these hires with you? If you have a good relationship with the founder, you should frankly express what you'd like your trajectory to be and come up with a plan to make it happen. If this isn't something you can discuss with your founder or whoever you report to, then you should look for a better place to work that is willing to listen to you and to help you grow.

Is there a certain role you feel you were overlooked for - VP of engineering? Manager? Or did you want to continue being an engineer? If it was the former, the time to voice your desire has probably passed. If it's the latter - and you really do just like writing code but want some sort of recognition - well, take the money I assume you'll earn and think of that as recognition.

You've got a bunch of options, depending on your interests and skills.

You could be a repository-of-lore brilliant coder / guru. Sounds like this is roughly what the CEO has carved out for you right now.

You could be CTO/Head of Engineering. You may or may not want this job or be suited to it, based on what you've said so far.

You could sink down into the organization as a (hopefully) really rich mid-level engineer and enjoy the ride.

You could do it again as a founder rather than early employee somewhere else.

I think you should figure out what would be best for you, what you want, and then see if the CEO agrees and will make it happen. At some level, if you're a few years into vesting, and the company is successful, it may not significantly change your financial outcome to stay -- you have early stage stock in a successful startup. More could be nice, but it won't change your outcome 10 or 100x, like moving to a founder role would.

Lots of good options; just don't do the west coast thing and stew on it while you write increasingly bitter tweets and blog posts. :) Today is a great day to get some clarity!

Interesting question you might ask yourself, do you want to be in management or not? Do you want to be customer facing? Or not?

When companies are small the jobs are all blends because they have to be, you just don't have the resources to do more. But as the company gets bigger (presumably through growth and not just a funding bump :-) you can allow folks to focus full time on specific roles which, in theory, gets you better execution of those roles.

A friend of mine once said you often could figure out what role you liked "best" by the first thing you did when you got in, did you check the build? (developer) did you check email? (manager) did you check the web? (marketer) A bit simplistic but it does make for interesting introspection.

As employee #2 you're well connected with the CEO and the other founders, and you can talk about what you want in your future. You should sit down and have that talk with them.

Could be worse. I know someone who was an early employee of a startup. She had the desk nearest the front door, so she ended up being the receptionist. Five years later, she's still the receptionist.

The main question I have, which I don't see addressed in your description: do you have a meaningful equity stake commensurate with the contributions you perceive you made?

You might need to adopt the "owner's" mentality - which is that as long as these people are growing the value of the company, you are free to focus on what you enjoy the most, while they work to make your equity more valuable.

That said - if your contributions in all these areas are truly valuable, at a small company, there's always a case to be made for someone to be spanning functional areas, if they have the expertise and chops to add value. Probably worth a conversation internally. As others have said, assert yourself a bit.

This seems relevant: http://jacquesmattheij.com/first-employee-or-cofounder although in this specific case it's not much help.

I think ChuckMcM's advice of chatting with the founders a bit sounds good. You could try and spin it in a positive way... "I was doing all this stuff, and even if it was really crazy at times, I felt like I was growing a lot and contributing a lot, and I feel like I'd like to continue that somehow. What do you think?"

There are tough questions to ask yourself, and I applaud your introspection. One of the challenges of a rapidly growing company is keeping up with it. Hiring is about finding the right person for the right time. When a company changes drastically through growth, expectations and functions change. The person who did x may be unqualified to do y. In short, the company grows faster than the individual. Another dynamic is that as the organization grows, the need for generalists gives way to specialized employees.

I think this is a very powerful statement you made: "all the tasks I did were less challenging than some critical parts of the code base I wrote from scratch". This tells me that the problems that interest you the most are coding and architecture problems, and that you are happiest when solving those problems. Employees will have the greatest positive impact when they are focused on tasks that they enjoy. But it seems that you desire something more. What is dissatisfying about the current situation? Are you bored with the coding? Are you jealous of others getting recognition? Are you frustrated with the direction of the organization? Are you frustrated that you are no longer "that guy" whom everyone depends on? All of these circle around the same question: where do you want to be?

Leadership comes in many shapes and sizes. It's not just about how many direct reports you have. Fundamentally, great leaders shape the direction of an organization. Employees look to that person for advice, encouragement, and approval. It sounds like the company decided to hire others for formal leadership roles. A very difficult and powerful question is to ask yourself "what is the VP doing that I wasn't able to do?" There is a tactical reason that the CEO hired the VP, and it isn't because of credentials. Perhaps it's his/her ability to communicate across teams, or gain the confidence of management? Don't let your ego tell you "nothing, I'm better than them"; there is a reason they are VP. Different jobs require different skill sets, and understanding where you are strong and weak is critical your success. Being an engineer who kicks out mission critical code is fundamental to the success of the business, but it is extremely different than developing and managing a team. With a humble attitude that is always looking to improve, there is no stopping your career growth.

People have taken you for granted and don't care about you, period. 1. Be vocal about what you want, be it a raise or promotion! This is America. If you don't ask, you don't get anything. 2. You have other options! Go make your own awesome startup. If you have so many skills like you said, why not? 3. Just out of curiosity, are you white?

People have taken you for granted. 1. Be vocal about what you want, be it a raise or promotion! This is America. If you don't ask, you don't get anything. Are you an American? 2. You have other options! Go make your own awesome startup. If you have so many skills like you said, why not? 3. Are you aware of your own weaknesses? Maybe there is major weakness about you that stopped you from getting promoted but you are not aware of it!

If it's a promising company, ride it out 2 more years for vesting. Were you interested in any of the roles you mentioned?

I have a similar story in some ways. Employee #1 at a startup, wrote much of the initial codebase, been with the company now for a bit over 7 years. We’re 20 people now, and have dedicated people for support, UX, QA, product management, etc etc all of which I used to have a hand in in the early days. I manage a small team of developers (not all the dev, just the clientside team), I still code a good bit (obviously less than before) and I’m involved in a lot of product discussions to figure out what we’re going to build. We’ve struggled a lot with figuring out the right title for me, and as long as the actual work is the right mix for what I like then I don’t really care all that much. But I’ve been recently brainstorming appropriate titles that better reflect what I do, beyond just being a developer (which has been my title since day 1), and I’ve come to settle on “Technical Director of Product”, which I don’t think is a real job title in any normal world. I make sure that I’m heavily involved in product decisions, because the thing I’ve found the most satisfaction in is defining and building product, and shaping the direction of the company through influencing the product development path. And I’m grounded in the technical side of that, which is an important distinction to me, since too often “product people” have no technical background and just lob things over the fence to engineering without understanding the tech side of the house.

So for me the important thing was trying to understand what parts of the job I really want to prioritize (in my case active coding and product definition) and regardless of title making sure I inject myself appropriately. So that means if there’s a conversation about a new product we’re thinking about building I make sure I’m in those conversations from the beginning.

If you’ve been with the company from essentially day 1 you likely have a decent amount of political sway, even if you don’t know it. I’d start by figuring out which parts of the things that you listed you actually want to stay involved in. As another commenter mentioned, if you really want to wear all those hats then maybe finding another brand new startup is the only real choice. But if there’s one or two areas that are dearer to your heart then I’d try to figure out how to make that your day to day activity. And I’d hope given your history with the team that you can have a dialogue with the founder(s) about how to make that happen. At the end of the day the title doesn’t really mean shit, but if you’re not loving the work then you owe it to yourself (and they owe it to you) to figure out how to make that right.