As companies grow, they have to have a promotion process. I've never encountered a company where that promotion process accurately assessed contribution to the business or technical competence. At best, the two are weakly correlated.
So, what happens when a company succeeds is that the competent people eventually either get tenured, or they get forced out by bozos (I'm using this as a term of art. Look up the bozo effect.) Eventually, the bozos win, and the company becomes unable to do anything other than extract monopoly rent. Then, some technology or regulatory shift arrives, and the incumbent gets forced out by a startup, or they somehow shed their bozos for a while.
So, if you are competent and honest, you have three choices:
- Learn how to be productive despite the promotion criteria. This is the path to tears and burn out, because most of your colleagues will only be good at gaming interviews / promotions, and your attention will be split between that and doing your job (and probably their jobs), placing you at a significant disadvantage.
- Somehow become the tenured engineer on top of this mess, and try to create pockets of competence in the organization. Ruthlessly detect + fire the bozos. This isn't fun either.
- Leave for a startup that's targeting a weak and foolish incumbent, and then leave when the startup grows up and becomes the weak and foolish incumbent (a good sign that this is happening is that the founding engineering team is leaving, or that your boss's boss is incompetent.)
Note that the last option is the lowest stress one for technically strong engineers. It is very hard to fake your way through knowing what you are doing when the entire company has direct visibility into your work.
If you can somehow solve the above problem then you can build a company larger than any of the FAANGs.
So, what happens when a company succeeds is that the competent people eventually either get tenured, or they get forced out by bozos (I'm using this as a term of art. Look up the bozo effect.) Eventually, the bozos win, and the company becomes unable to do anything other than extract monopoly rent. Then, some technology or regulatory shift arrives, and the incumbent gets forced out by a startup, or they somehow shed their bozos for a while.
So, if you are competent and honest, you have three choices:
- Learn how to be productive despite the promotion criteria. This is the path to tears and burn out, because most of your colleagues will only be good at gaming interviews / promotions, and your attention will be split between that and doing your job (and probably their jobs), placing you at a significant disadvantage.
- Somehow become the tenured engineer on top of this mess, and try to create pockets of competence in the organization. Ruthlessly detect + fire the bozos. This isn't fun either.
- Leave for a startup that's targeting a weak and foolish incumbent, and then leave when the startup grows up and becomes the weak and foolish incumbent (a good sign that this is happening is that the founding engineering team is leaving, or that your boss's boss is incompetent.)
Note that the last option is the lowest stress one for technically strong engineers. It is very hard to fake your way through knowing what you are doing when the entire company has direct visibility into your work.
If you can somehow solve the above problem then you can build a company larger than any of the FAANGs.