Career advise for developer reaching 45 ( Sr folks please reply)
Note: Younger SW guys please GTFOH. For your pleasure My CTC is 470K per annum(15 + years, 7th year in US). Also no trolling please, this can happen to you guys too. Need some real good advise. I hope this post can be used by many more in similar situation Background: I will be 45 in couple of years. Came here at age of 35. . Last 7 years have been super good- - similar to a new grad, started at 100k PA and now its 470K PA. I changed companies which gave me rise but I now realize that folks do not trust me as domain expert as earlier. Also instead of joining FAANG in my early days I prefered startup hence my CV is not hot. Current: Got fed up with my current job and with million of loan, I decided to look for another large company. To my surprise, companies from my domain do not want to hire me because I have not worked in my domain from last 3 years and before that i worked for smaller companies, so no credibility as senior engineer (JFYI 2 years back Amazon interviewed me for Principal Engineer which is not the option now). At junior engineer level tier 1 companies silently prefers lesser exp folks. I can survive in my current company with similar pay for as long as company is doing good. I fear if I do not do tough and domain specific work then I will lose my market value further. I am interview phobic , Google evaluated me for Staff and finally rejected by HC - 3 managers were ready to work with me. I get nervous and bomb 2 coding round(one bad one worst) the third was very good. Facebook interviewed me for E6 and rejected me because I bombed one coding round. Reality is all the codes were simple and I can verbally speak line by line code, provided no one is watching me and/or deciding my fate. Lyft autonomous division was eye opener, they did not consider me for my domain specific group ( i guess people think if I am great then it should have been visible from achievements). Question: I do not want to give up yet and migrate to other domain like infrastructure/devops etc. I still feel that I am strong system software engineer. I plan to spend couple of years or bit more say upto 4 - 5 years so that my rest of 15 years opens up). Folks have been in my situation please suggest, so far . I could think of following 1. Apart from day job - spend dedicated few years on some emerging open source project related to my domain. If I spend 2-4 years I can definitely make a name there. concern - tough to get into open source and tough to find which one is going to be in demand. Plus big company politics still there ( they have strong say in popular OSS) 2. Work for tier 3,4 company but work in my core domain and hope the skills which I acquire will make me relevant( of course with constant updates). concern - Big company tend to ignore tier 3, 4 contribution for senior roles. 3. Instead of working on domain sp work, work on interview preparation, for person like me with interview fear, I will have to practise much much more and try to get into some tier 1 company and stay there for long. concern - Interview is largely luck ( sp for person of my type) and with every unsuccess the pressure increases. Also, I have seen so many rejections now and mainly due to the fact that my achievements are not worth the job. 4. Accept alternative domain - like cloud infrastructure, SRE, devops etc where younger generation from top college do not try, where domain knowledge helps a lot. concern - compromise on interest, low pay I guess (may be not) etc. 5. Try startup from my domain - top startups avoid senior folks who have not proven, rest are risky for next few years, given my financial goals etc. Guys - what should be the strategy, I would ;like to know. I am bit concerned now but know if I plan well I will be fine. I strongly believe "when going gets tough then tough gets going" update 8/26 : Lots of good advise. I will start separate thread based on certain suggestions.
I am basically in the same boat. Have you considered getting on manager track?
Outside its tough as no experience and internally I I fall behind in queue. Interestingly google on rejecting me for staff, interviewed for manager position but ended up rejecting me. Also, not sure I am ready to take mgmt role, i wanted to try with open option.
Tldr
Are you principal architect in salesforce which is a level below smts
I think your career is a dead end. I'm a fresh grad btw
1. For this TC you should considering just staying in your current role 2. Stop thinking of companies as “tiers” -what do you lose if a so called tier 3 company hires you as principal engineer?So many of them will. I would rather take that than work at google as some random engineer at this stage in your career
I would just focus on preparing for interviews, if it takes longer so be it, don't let your past interview failures discourage you, as you said interviews involve a lot of luck. Good luck!
You’re looking for something that doesn’t exist. SWEs at big companies are expected to be fungible. This is even more true at higher levels because you’re expected to lead teams that have many different focus areas. That’s the reason for the generic LC style interviews, they don’t care what your specialization is in. If you’re not passing interviews for higher levels it’s not because they don’t value your specialization history, it’s because they think your missing some of the foundations expected at higher levels. Though it’s still true to some extent, SREs (and similar) are a bit different where they often do care about your specialization. There are a lot of different areas in that aspect that require a strong depth of practical knowledge and appreciate it. That being said though, again the higher level the more fungible, even cross over so that a high level SRE could just as easily be a high level SWE.
You have fear of interviews with 15+ exp? That is something to concentrate on.
Thanks. can you give some details on when you write "something to concentrate on". You may correct and thats why I am here to learn from others and correct.
Work on your interviewing skills. There is no shame in failing interviews. I used to do poorly at interviews. Few things that helped me improve. 1. Knowing that both me and the interviewer want me to get hired. If they didn't, they wouldn't go through the process. 2. Interviewing someone is stressful as well. Start conducting interviews for your company, you'll see what separates good from bad candidates.
How would you assess your interpersonal abilities, during interviews and in working with colleagues?
In interviews - my communication was not best (sp for non technical interviews), though haven't heard any explicit negative feedback though At work - People closer to me think I am super good. This account for some of the top interns, some peers and few seniors. I had issues with folks who were political. I have pledged that I will be friendly and professional with every one so work in progress till then.
Just wondering why you asked?