I’ve been a SWE for about 1.5 years and really like distributed systems and a lot of DevOps aspects. I find building webapps and other pure SWE tasks to come pretty easy and scaling and systems to be pretty challenging (intellectually stimulating). If I’m being honest I really don’t see myself wanting to do the whole FANG TC hopping thing for the next decade or two of my career and am really passionate about entrepreneurship (which I’ve had success at in the past). I totally see myself wanting to be a serial entrepreneur after paying my dues to being a SWE/SRE at big companies to learn how to create products. It’s pretty hard to be a good leader if you can’t empathasize with the builders. I’m pretty torn over which path to take: SWE vs SRE. To me it seems like SRE could be a great experience to learn how to actually scale a product once it gets more users and make sure that it maintains its terms of service. Especially since building full stack applications comes pretty easy to me. I also notice there can be a bit of us vs. them mentality with SWE vs. SRE folk. One side (SWE) makes me think SRE won’t allow me to continue to grow my dev skills and I’ll be seriously lacking when it comes time to launching something. The other side (SRE) makes me think that they can do the SWE role just fine and they are smarter because they know OS internals and infrastructure that the SWE’s don’t. The SRE option makes more sense to me to be honest, however, I want to take all things into consideration when it comes to choosing a path to go down. Can I get some opinions on how to proceed with a goal in mind?
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Despite the myth of the hands on founder/engineer/genius, the most important skill for a founder is sales. Things are actually built by the people hired to know things, your job is to ensure funding is coming in. You can do this by having actual technical cred and kick-starting the technical stack yourself or you can also just bullshit literally everything if you're good enough (the most popular is to have someone else do all the technical legwork and take credit for it by titling yourself chief Engineer or whatever). It doesn't matter how many steps you take in between, your first job is to sell your vision to investors. So yeah, I think learning anything technical beyond trends and buzzwords is an inefficient path to your stated goal.
Thanks for chiming in. You make a really good point. I guess I just really look up to how much execs who were really good engineers (Gates) were basically unbullshitable in meetings. That’s why I want to spend time as an engineer. Would spending time in sales be beneficial before starting something or do you think that’s something you can learn as you go or hire to help with?
I don't know the answer; I'm more Woz than Steve. But my understanding is that these days the key skill to sales is being able to generate buzz on social media. You don't need to take a job to start learning that. If you want to learn somewhere tech evangelism might give you a chance to learn the ropes with the safety net of a job. Also within Cisco there are VARs which are tiny startups where you help sell products for Cisco ..there is a whole community around it and maybe not a bad place to peek your head into and learn from the inside. Sorry I can't help more, I was being a bit cynical :). But seriously I think you should be thinking less about tech stacks and more about how you can generate followers, go viral, etc.
The problem with a lot of startup founders is they try to prematurally scale. By the time you will even care about scale and SRE work your startup should be large enough that you aren't really involved with it technically. So go SWE to get the product focus.
Join amazon. You get/have to do both lol
Forgot to mention that I’d also like to learn how to develop an awesome culture that has ethics and pays people competitively
Lol touche. Fwiw I do think Amazon has those things, which is why it has been so successful for so long. You either drink the koolaid or you're removed and that gives the company an extremely cohesive culture.