Thinking of moving back home where there's not a ton of options but there are still big companies (not necessarily tech, think finance, consulting etc), as well as a bunch of startups. Now, my question is, what kind of roles should I pursue if I leave Databricks as a senior eng ( think L5 at Google)? Would I be aiming for > senior, like staff?
G will down level
Did you even read the post? Also, G wouldn't downlevel databricks AFAIK.
Are you still going to be an engineer? I was mid level at Google and got offered team lead/staff IC roles when I interviewed at big consulting firms like BCG.
Yes, still engineer. Mid level like L4?
Yeah L4. But BCG team lead still couldn’t match the tc
You will be too specialized, probably have to become full stack generalist, re skill = downlevel. It's like a NBA player switching to baseball, yes skills are transferable, but you still have to master applying them to another domain.
I look at it in terms of profitability per employee. For example I am principal level at Apple which means my output is expected to be that of a moderate size team of 20 or so. Apple profit is $2.4M per employee. If I moved to someplace like GM at a profit of $50k per employee I would expect to land at the chief engineer level reporting to a VP leading an org of 1000 or so.
I don't see how profitability of person between separate industries is comparable. Scaling people up increases complexity
Yeah this doesn’t add up to me. Skill set of managing an org that large doesn equate to the skills being a highly skilled domain specific, contributor in a highly profitable business.
You can run into issues moving outside of tech as the other industries may not have any need for an SWE focused on distributed systems. Brush up on your full stack front end, database, low code tools in addition to some back end. You could need to go down a few levels.
Thanks, but I don't think that's true. SWE skills are pretty much transferable everywhere. It would be funny if e.g. a senior swe in a competitive tech company was downleveled *outside* of tech.