TL; DR - terrible student cum engineer -> got into management -> made it $$ -> made it even more $$$ -> on path of making even more $$$$ College and First job offer: I was mediocre student all my life. Barely passed college (cheated my exams). Got into a low tier tech company which had no tech interviews whatsoever. The toughest question I got asked which I answered absolutely incorrectly was - “how’s the weather in your city right now?”. Long story short on this one - I woke up 10 mins before the first on-site interview (remote video call as the EM was in EU) and didn’t even get a chance to look out of the window. I had to drive to the office for rest of the on-site later that day and they joined on a group call again and the weather was obvious from the conference room windows lol. Anyways, I got the job. One of the senior managers really liked me apparently (I have no idea why!). That was my only offer back then and failed literally all interviews. I faked an offer and got a decent bump. I’d have joined even if they halved the initial numbers. First job and time in engineering: Needless to say I had no skills whatsoever and had zero interest in learning anything. Initially I was assigned to work in a team where most of the engineers were in EU. I had to do some work. Passed time for 6 ish months and spoke to my manager and transferred to american based teams (where no one really worked shit). Spent another 6 months and told my manager I got an offer at fang (faked it) and that I want to become an EM to stay back. He quickly made me a lead and the job was basically to “mentor” spring and fall interns. After a year I was officially made an EM with one junior engineer who was full time and rest were interns. Some good interns came to know I knew no shit and most of the times when they threw an attitude I rescinded their return offers by giving rejection reason as “culture misfits”. Most good ones never even bothered about the return offer as that company was really a boringly dead boomer company. First fang offer: Faked experience as EM of two years although it was one year as TL and one as EM. Got interviews. The loop had only one tech round for which I was shit scared. Just watched some systems design videos on YouTube over the weekend before the on-site. Endured through a couple of them. The interviews were just cultural and principle BS which I successfully BS’d through. I bombed that tech screen. (I literally forgot to mention about load balancer in the interviews and I forgot what a CDN was). I thought I lost the job. They took their own sweet time and came back in two weeks with an exploding offer. I faked fang offer again. They got back with 1.5x initial numbers. Signed it. (Obviously lol). First fang EM job: This job was a breeze. Dream role and dream $$. But I had to relocate! :( My org had about 10% pip rate, my team however had 50-60 % pip rate. There were about 3-6 engineers in my team that I was managing. And I had to pip sometimes even 4 people during that year. Three of the teammates were “untouchables”. They were tenured and I cannot pip them. Two of them obviously never bother to work and I had to play ball with them. My team had rough on-call so PIPing people was easy. I had to give some BS reasons during the incidents when the untouchables were on-call and shifted blame to others along the lines of “it’s your lack of documentation that caused the outage” and got them fired. Basically my team had about 3-4 fall guys (rarely gals) throughout the year to feed the pip engine. I wanted to explore other opportunities after 2 ish years as one of the untouchables wanted my job and the stock losses interested me to potentially sign offers at really low stock price. Set-up interviews with Snap through fang referrals. Snap EM and current job: This was kinda my toughest interview. Although I came with strong referrals from my earlier fang manager mates. Half the people in the loop were from my current company. They were asking soft ball questions except for some google EM dude. I thought I got fucked again. But as always, Lady Luck was on my side and I got the offer in a week. I negotiated (saying I had offer from Meta. duh!) and got a 650k offer and started last week. Most of the interview questions were about pip, managing “low” performers and what my experience was with it. There were repeat questions about pip. They were like “tell me about a tough decision(s) you had to take to downsize a team or an org”. I nailed this - faked some and rest I told them about how I pip at my current job. Apparently I got a strong hire signal 🤷♂️ That’s it folks! Wanted to let it out! Cheers my fellow managers 🥂
I cant tell if troll or just indian uncle
+1 I read the whole thing and tbh I can believe half the stuff in this article but find myself unable to believe the other half. Don't know what to make of it lol.
The luck prevails
No one’s reading all this shit
Exactly lmao just give total yoe and tc
Happy for you !! Keep it up!!!
I always knew EMs were grifters 😂 Congrats on ur success!
Yeah I realized when our entire team was stressing out and my EM told me his job is pretty quiet
Wth is this post 🤨
Even though this is BS, the fact that this could very possibly be based on a true story is both terrifying and sad. This is the textbook definition of horrible management falling through the cracks and growing like a cancer within a company 👿
Honestly sounds realistic to me. You just need the audacity and can talk the talk.
Unfortunately I agree, that's why I said that OP is probably BS'ing but the story itself is believable. I think we all can think of at least one or two execs that fit the bill for this kind of management after reading that story 🥲
TC or GTFO
650k. Read the fuckin post
You wrote an essay bro. Couldn't find 650k anywhere in your essay!