Understanding growth opportunities at a company
I'm trying to better understand how to select a company that has good growth opportunties.
My priority is to get into a company where I can grow the fastest in my career. Unfortunately, at this time getting into big tech/prestigious companies is not an option for me and I am choosing between typical tech companies
I have already watched the masterclass on selecting teams and companies
My questions are as follows:
- In the video, it's mentioned "Growth solved all problems". It's not really clear to me why? Obviously if a company is moving backwards, then I understand, but between a company that ships products every 6 months vs every 1-1.5 years why exactly is 1 company better than the other in terms of how it impacts my growth opportunity
- How do I know if a company has good growth opportunities?
Discussion
(2 comments)- 26 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
- When a company is growing rapidly, new problems emerge. Problems lead to opportunities, and opportunities lead to impact for strong engineers. Impact is the currency through which you achieve career growth. So if a company is doubling in revenue, number of users, or headcount every year, you can be sure that there's impact and scope to be found.
- Faster iteration cycles lead to more data points to learn and showcase your work. So all else being equal, it's better to go to the company which ships every 6 months instead of every year.
- To discover if a company has good growth opportunities, start with your network. This video from David Pan (ex-VP of Engineering at Mixpanel) goes through that in-depth.
- It's especially valuable to talk to senior ICs at the company. Managers have an incentive to sell, but you'll get more honest answers from Staff/Principal engineers who can describe their work and how it'll evolve over time.
- When a company is growing rapidly, new problems emerge. Problems lead to opportunities, and opportunities lead to impact for strong engineers. Impact is the currency through which you achieve career growth. So if a company is doubling in revenue, number of users, or headcount every year, you can be sure that there's impact and scope to be found.
- 25 months agoEng @ Taro
I could argue that companies that ship products faster forces you to move faster, which will make you grow faster because you'll get more experience in the same amount of time as a company that ships slower.
I would also say that you should focus on company revenue growth because great engineers want to be part of a fast growing rocket ship. As a result, you will work at a company where you can learn from other great engineers. If you compare this to a company that's stagnating, a lot of the great engineers will recognize this and will have moved on to greener pastures.
