tl;dr 20 yoe software engineer and small company founder looking to get into FAANG and equivalent. Q1: which company/role do I have best shot at? Q2: management or IC? Q3: interview now or prep longer? TC ~400k/yr, all cash and 100% equity First, I'm grateful for stumbling onto the Blind community a few weeks ago and it's been eye opening. It's given me information and therefore the confidence to pivot away from the government sector and jump into the more interesting and lucrative modern tech industry. I entered school just as dotcom was collapsing which left a lasting impact on me to never take a pure-tech company seriously. And well, now that impression just is silly. I'm late to the party but better than never. * About me: 20 yoe as IC software engineer, 15 yrs as manager/leader, 6 yrs starting/running my own company and managing employees. I also code full-time personally at NASA on behalf of my company. TC ~400k/yr, all cash, this is my company's profit and I'm the sole owner w no investors... so 100% equity too but not worth much. I've done almost everything under the sun w exception of the big tech / modern tech companies. Extensive amount of vertical scaling in aerospace, cyber security, image and video processing, text and graph processing, computer forensics, etc. which mostly involved multithreading/multiprocessing/GPGPU/FPGA balancing CPU, memory, disk IO, and network resources (bus and interconnects in come cases). My limited horizonal scaling experience is from NASA deploying image processing software as containers into a kubernetes/AWS framework scaling up to ~20 EC2s peak. NASA data processing is still single-node-oriented because algorithms often have to process the entire collect as a whole and distributing that outside of RAM/SSD is going to hit your performance hard. * What I want to do: Looking to work for a FAANG or equivalent that would match, hopefully exceed, my current income (obviously not all of it cash) and either sell my company or hire someone to run it. I'd be content continuing current path but the government space can be very dull and slow at times. Most important to me: 1) WLB, 2) stay in Los Angeles area 3) reliable income. * Questions 1. Which companies/teams do I have the best shot at? Sounds like companies like Google, LinkedIn, Adobe, and Stripe would meet my criteria? I think I need to find companies/team that can either benefit immediately from my single-node scaling, breath of software/management experience, or at least be patient for 3-6 months as I ramp up on modern web architecture. 2. Would I be a more attractive candidate as a manager or IC? I enjoy both and have done both concurrently throughout my career. And now I'm both on even higher level: 1) Senior staff at NASA writing code and advising/mentoring/etc. 2) Managing/growing my company and employees off hours and weekends. Ideally I want to manage/lead 50% and code 50%. Coding is like music/arts/sports to me so want to do it as long as I can. 3. Cram for 2 weeks and interview or prep for 3-6 months? I turned my LinkedIn "I'm open to new opp" feature a couple weeks ago and was inundated by recruiter messages. I'm in contact w recruiters from a few FAANG and series C companies and done a few phone interviews. I turned the feature off after 5 days because 1) I realized I'm not ready for LC and system design interviews 2) I need to learn more about the current tech job landscape - I've been in gov for too long. I'm taking the next couple weeks off work so I can cram for interviews and also take a few trips. LC is new to me - done some intensive interviews before but they were more algorithm/design discussions and not actually code and test in front of audience. I've done ~4 mediums so far and only one of them in 30 mins without hints optimally. I feel like I can get hang of them in few weeks but not too sure. I'm very comfortable w single-node software architecture/design but limited on distributed architecture - I bought several books and been reading them the past week. I'm understanding the concepts just fine, even fun finally learn about how things I've used every day is designed at scale, but I don't know how well it will translate to the actual interviews. I'm more than confident that I can soak all this stuff up quickly once I start working tho - I learn by solving real problems like a good engineer hah. So should I push back the recruiters I'm currently in contact to continue in 3-6 months or take my shot after cramming for 2 weeks? And should I turn the LinkedIn feature back on to talk to more recruiters now or wait after this round? I'll probably interview w like 5 companies right now. #tech #government #faang #aerospace #linkedin #stripe #google #adobe If you've read the entire post and are in LA, I'll buy you beer.
Define companies / or areas you are not interested in and interview at them as a part of your interview preparation. You need some time to find out what market and your potential employers expectations are.
This is good advice. I do have a final round w a company next week (they're smaller and don't LC) and I'm mainly doing it for practice - unless they really sell me.
You sound awesome OP. Awesome background too. Hope it all goes well for you.
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Any updates??
I would talk to as many recruiters as possible to expedite your interview prep process. they definitely help you and you can think of it as free practice. the interview process is pretty difficult and can definitely warrant studying for a bit but the learning curve applies differently to everyone. if you’ve been in one place for a while it may be beneficial to practice a bit more. there are communities online that can help! in LA so excited for the beer (; but actually good luck and god speed
Thanks. Yeah I've been reading that recruiters legit want to help you (except when it comes TC negotiation time) so perhaps I should be completely transparent to them and tell them to give me 3-6 months for me to really prep for the interviews to show the best version of myself. If I do take that long time I may implement a simple distributed app over the cloud using some key technologies - that'd really make the concepts stick. I'll DM you for beer ;-)