Any advice on handling being an engineer at a shrinking team?
I work at a Series A startup. I joined on the promise that it would be 16 backend engineers a year from when I joined. It never grew and maxed out at 8 (non-eng headcount experienced the most growth). Fast forward to 18 months and it's looking like between parental leave, illness, responsibility differences, and general departures, in a few weeks I'll be one of 2 backend engineers actually writing code, and one of 3 backend engineers overall.
There's 1-2 resume-building projects I'd like to stay for, but it's likely that one of them will get deprioritized. I've never been happy in this role for a slew of reasons, reasons for which others have left. This could very well leave us at 1-2 backend engineers in Q1-Q2. We are hiring, but I suspect we'll only backfill 1 role as 1-2 engineers are on "temporary leaves" (but one leave is 3 months, the other is basically indefinite).
Any advice on what to do in this strange situation? I'd like to say that I'm considering quitting and want to train another backfill, but it could hurt me more than anything else. I'd be interested in more options (no backend engineer's comp has increased in the 18 months I've been here except 1 underpaid / underleveled person) or a small sabbatical of 5 weeks. I wouldn't mind a senior title but lots of qualified engineers have been rejected for it so I stopped putting weight on the title. But all of those are a little rude to accept if I quit less than 6 months after.
edit: removed some typos, clarified some timelines e.g. months -> weeks
I think most advice is going to be the same. Your options are leave or bring up your dissatisfaction, and the second one turns into the first in several scenarios so you need that ready.
As for "rude to accept", you do what works best for you. From startups to corporations you have to care about yourself and your position because it is literally not their job to do so, and that's in the best case scenarios. If it works out and things get better, great. If it doesn't, time to start applying with your fancy new title. You probably don't want to kick down the door and throw your two weeks on the CEO's desk before flipping them off and walking out but any reasonable and professional behavior is fine. If this is a small startup then it's even less likely to matter if someone feels you've burned a bridge.
Edit-
Something else I forgot to mention:
Are you sure there's going to be a company in 6 months? It's a startup. They fail. Saying we're going to have 16 engineers and being down to 2 is often not a sign that they'll be sticking around much longer, and it's better to be shopping for a new job while you have one paying the bills than it is to be hunting for one after the company goes under.
For one, you should make sure to use all the leverage you have. As one of TWO engineers, you leaving will be very not good for the company. You have the voice and power to push to work on things you want to work on, so make use of that. It's one of the biggest powers of small companies - you are no longer a cog in the machine.
I would use that to try to get some more resume bait, get another 6 months to hit 2 years, and about 3 months in start looking for new opportunities.
Exactly what /u/douchebag said. I've banged on too much about my own experience of staying too long elsewhere to write here.
I've also had the dubious privilege of being the last technical staff member at a startup which burned through its capital too quickly and ran right into the teeth of the 2008 crash - it was literally in the same building as Countrywide Mortgage.
There is no valor in being the person who terminates the other employees' accounts, collects the access cards, and turns the lights off.
The other thing I learned is that startup bros are delusional bullshit artists who are capable of convincing others that 10x growth is their birthright, regardless of what realistic market research would have indicated.
It sounds like eventual failure may be the direction your startup is bending in. Current market conditions might be kind enough to allow the company to stay afloat for quite a while, if they keep cutting headcount, holding down salaries, and overworking those who remain. But take a very hard look at the company's business prospects and decide if you want to go down with the ship unexpectedly, or choose when you leave.
Edit: I was today years old when I looked up that startup for old times' sake and found out the company's entire C-suite got very long Federal jail terms for the unbelievably criminal things they did to establish the business. The heck with personal opsec, it's too instructive a story not to share. I was a contract work-to-hire buried in the technical guts of the Sunrise, FL sales office, mainly doing desktop/network support and Salesforce admin, and didn't have the slightest inkling all that was going on. If I wasn't working so hard, I might have paid attention to the occasional rumor about burn rate, the lavish spending and lifestyles of the C-suite and salespeople, and run for the hills ASAP.
This might not be an entirely representative example of current tech startup culture, but don't let the thrill of working on something new blind you to the fundamentals of the business you're working in.
The ugly truth and the cautionary tale is that I didn't wake up in time to leave voluntarily. They simply folded up the Florida sales office altogether with the excuses of the financial crisis and Walmart getting into the pharmacy distribution business. I was just one of the last staff out of that location. Apparently, they tried to keep the business going for another year, getting even more crime-y.
Are you sure you want to identify your specific state and office? You do you, just thought I'd ask.
That was 15 years ago. :-) I'm sure I've left enough breadcrumbs here over the years that I could be doxxed, but I think I'm past caring. My public Internet presence is very muted, by present-day standards.
I genuinely didn't think you came off rudely at all! (Also, tbh, engineering is full of personalities that are kind but not always "nice;" you get used to it and learn a lot from it). A lot of the sentiments here are things I've said to myself, or to others (easier to be objective), or have had said to me by friends...
This... makes a lot of sense based on previous interview experience and I appreciate you (and others) writing that. The stuff I would do for that project honestly doesn't sound impressive, the design + actual deliverable is.
I appreciate everything you wrote. When I read my own post out loud and everyone's responses, it sounds like a failing startup. But being in it, it's hard to not qualify that with excuses and think I'm crazy. Combined with the stuff I didn't write about the company (layoffs, loss of market lead, etc.), I know that it is probably failing slowly. It's not the "as of 2 hours ago, we're dissolved, today is everyone's last day" I expected, but it is probably going to be more and more work piling up as people leave... it feels different to consider that my own projects may not benefit anyone after completion.
Accepting a pay raise and/or senior title and then leaving after 6 months is not rude at all. It seems that you feel obligated to your company, but you must not be. They were not able to grow the team as intended, which should be their problem, not yours. They also did not increase backend compensation for 18 months, either because they simply cannot financially or do not value the developers. Both are valid reasons to start looking for another job.
Also, if they cannot increase wages, they should at least be able to increase total compensation through shares.
If you personally feel this company has a good product and you want to stay longer to see if something comes out of it, then I would recommend setting a period (e.g. 6/9/12 months) for yourself to define how long you will be staying. Then after this period, start applying heavily (of course it does not hurt to apply beforehands, too!)
I wish you all the best.
I have been in this exact situation and my advise is to spend your time building your resume to leave for a new company. DO NOT let them convince you to stick around based on the premise that they will be building a new large team around you (like I did).
Heads up that it's a terrible job market for software engineers now (Winter 2023). I attempted a job switch and found that companies are only looking for senior level unicorns. It was basically a giant waste of my time and PTO.
It seems like in the 6 years since I last changed jobs, everyone lost their mind and started doing Google/Amazon style interviews. I was being given "big web" system design interviews for non-web positions. A C++ not web product company had me "code architect" a REST API in c++... like, for real?
What really got me was the complete lack of respect for my time. If you know you're only going to hire a silicon valley unicorn, don't drag everyone else through 5 hours of interviews. This is opposed to 6 years ago when I submitted 2 applications for jr positions at my top picks, got 2 interviews, and the interviews lasted 1 hour. I got 2 offers.
With this said, as long as you're getting paid, you may want to stick it out until the market changes. You may have better luck than me with your experience at a series A and if you are located in a better area (ie, California). The economy looks to be turning around, so maybe things will get better if a recession is really avoided.
I wouldn't worry about resume building too much because resumes don't get looked at by humans anymore. You pretty much have to game the resume system by putting the right keywords to get past the robot screeners. And by the time you get to interviews, they don't really care about your past projects unless they 100% align with their current stack.
Hopefully the software world will regain some sanity soon. Sorry if this turned into a big rant. Just know what you may be potentially getting into. It's rough on the mental health being rejected so much.
Regarding resumes… in my opinion you never want to be in the position of relying on a resume to do any work for you. For me a resume is a tool to get passed around after I’ve got a recruiter’s attention. When they schedule an interview they’ll include a link to the pdf in the calendar event, etc.
So the age old advice is to build and lean on a professional network, which I understand isn’t necessarily actionable advice in the short term.
Whatever you decide to do, please make sure you have good boundaries with your workplace.
It can be tempting to work extra hours because other folks have left, but the truth is that's not your responsibility. It's the company's responsibility to hire replacements, the numbers shouldn't have gotten this low. The company won't even notice if you work extra, they'll just see that as your new baseline and expect it all the time.
That's a problem, one that in a series A company could be escalated all the way to the CEO.
I'm not a fan of the model where senior engineers design projects to be executed by less senior engineers. But in a large team I understand it. You're not a large team, everyone should be coding
Yeah, candidly, I am a bit resentful of it. I don't take it too personally, and other times I appreciate it, but I don't think we can "afford" people who aren't coding, and when the architect-type decided to change a design a few times, it was up to me to do that (plus the other work I was supposed to start). I enjoy working a lot, but when it's increasingly not my choice it's not great.
Working at a startup has been interesting, I had a pretty different image of them (earliest I'd worked at at length was a Series C, which shortly got acquired) and of technical people in general. Having been here for a while, I've learned dysfunction is a state of mind, not a quality inherent to size or maturity. And I don't think it has as much to do with individual quality as I thought it would.
Quitting your job is a skill to be honed and this is an excellent opportunity to practice it.