I think if you don't break into major SV companies early in your career it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard.
I dunno. I've had pretty good luck breaking into SF companies, and I didn't get started until 40. But I'm a glutton for punishment and went through a lot of grinding to make that happen. I'd say it depends on how flexible your mind is, and how bad you want to put in the work to get it.
> "...it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard."
One person is saying it's hard because of ageism/bias against old applicants.
One person is saying it's hard because you have to study.
The disagreement is not about it being hard, it's about why and it's a pretty substantive difference.
I think a lot of this comes from the superstar model implicit in the VC ecosystem. One perennial theme in the SV approach to business is the idea of making a lot of bets with skewed upside. Like buying call options, the vast majority won't pay out. But if you do it right, a small handful of homeruns will make up for the rest.
I think this mindset easily carries over from the investing side into the hiring side. What is an employee, if not a risky upfront investment? Especially at a hyper-growth startup that's already bleeding cash flow. Very few 23-year olds will be productive enough to justify a quarter million in compensation. But a handful of very talented ones, when put in a high-impact position with a ton of responsibility will knock it out of the park.
The median 40-year old experienced engineer is almost certainly more competent and productive than someone fresh out of school. But Silicon Valley doesn't optimize for the median, it optimizes for fat right tails. Hire or invest in a 23-year old SWE and there's always a small chance that you be scooping up the next Elon Musk. At 40, Elon Musk definitely wasn't browsing through monster.com.
However, I believe this paradigm rests on a faulty premise. A more reliable way to create an exceptional organizations is to build an exceptional culture, not try to bottle the lightning of individual superstars. Unfortunately, that approach involves sacrificing some sacred cows of Valley ideology.
Building a strong corporate culture requires effective managers, as well as brilliant engineers. The typical founder does not fit the mold of an effective corporate manager. 28-year olds can be good managers, but a 50-year old with decades of experience is almost certainly more likely. Replacing the founder with a professional CEO is anathema is the modern "founder-friendly" culture.
Beyond that a professional manager at the helm very likely means a more button-down corporate orthodox environment. Not necessarily because it's better, but just as a byproduct of how the CEO is used to operating. Mitt Romney runs a very different shop than Adam Neumann. Put Mitt in charge of the next startup, and things are going to start looking uncomfortably more like Initrode rather than the typical hipster startup.
It also seems like pay and experience are also a huge factor. I worked at a F500 once headquartered in the midwest. I was paid really well. I brought up wanting to move out to SV and the COL adjustment they mentioned would have been a paycut.
Plus it seems like major tech companies downlevel you if you don't have relevant experience at peer companies. And salary negotiation is harder if you don't have competing offers.
I was single and was fine renting a small apartment, so the COL hit wasn't too bad. But moving out west if I had a family or owned a house would have been a major lifestyle change.
> Plus it seems like major tech companies downlevel you if you don't have relevant experience at peer companies.
That's it I think - they see an engineer with relevant experience, but not at the scale of them and think it's not the same. Maybe they're right? I don't know.
> I think if you don't break into major SV companies early in your career it becomes extremely hard to do so later on because people start assuming you must have already tried and failed so aren't at the right standard.
All the companies I know of let you interview multiple times.
You do have a chance. You should wonder if you want it. Ignoring the ethics of each company, the lifestyle is not for everyone. You should try to figure out if it's a good fit for you or not.
Well, most of them involve (pre-Covid) living in one of a few extremely expensive cities.
All of them involve being a single person in a huge organization, which is very different from being (for example) the CTO of a lifestyle business or the first hacker of a startup.
A friend of mine works on CSS optimization at Facebook. That is both narrower and deeper than anything you would do at a small company.
There's also the question of who your coworkers are. Large companies are large enough that you can spend all your work time with other devs. That's not true at a small company.
