15 YOE+. I am currently an Architect Manager at a large company w/ over 100k employees and probably 20K in IT/Engineering. I was hired as senior dev -> Architect ->Manager. An Architect Manager who’s title is to manage other architects but in reality, I am managing a small team on SWAT projects. SWAT as in being inserted into adhoc new projects on-demand by CxO. There will be some pet project or something that needs to be delivered next week, I’ll round out my devs and we will produce it. We are known as the SWAT team commandos.
I haven’t coded in 5 years. But I do Architectural design and make day-to-day technical decisions, leading and managing my team. My promotions has been based on delivering big projects. Those projects then become full-fledge products that ends up becoming new departments; hiring 20-30 people. It will be 3 guys and myself who build a MVP. It was successfully demoed and then the company creates a department out of it.
Then I move on with my SWAT commandos to the next big thing. I am given greenfield – large scale projects where leadership gives me the discretion to hire/grow teams as needed. In the beginning, I was managing all the members, projects, writing up stories,etc. As I had to juggle multiple projects, I have official project managers to help me and do the Agile rituals, standups, and write the stories while I do meetings and system design. The PMs may manage the agile ceremonies but I still dictate how, who should do the work and their priorities. This makes me feel like a PM but I don’t get involved in the story creation, acceptance criterias and release management.
But as I wrote, I have not coded in 5 years but still do hands-on guidance. A dev would come to me on a solution and I’ll dictate how it should be done. E.G. “You can’t just drop database tables in your import.” Or, “You need to use an API gateway we have and add that to the CICD blueprint.” Or, “we need to build DR (Disaster Recovery)/Failover and this is how we do it…”
So I am actively hands on – code review, mentoring, and reviewing implementation.
Since I’ve been rather successful launching large scale projects with teams, I’ve been documenting them in my performance reviews and generally known as the Father or person who birth projects A,B,C,D… As my name is signed onto the white papers and software registries as the technical owner.
When I get my bonuses signed off, they usually are commented that I was directly responsible for the product end-to-end. And in terms of value, CEO usually shout out our accomplishments during Town Halls like “This quarter, a new product was introduced that saved 1000 manhours, or increased productivity, or improve customer satisfaction by 30%”
So documenting “impact, contribution, and value” isn’t a problem.
I also have “First mover’s advantage” in a lot of things. As I mentioned, our engineering teams are large and there are a lot siloes fighting for work. We’d be first to POC something then win the budget to implement. And we usually implement first before anyone. First to deploy K8s 8 years ago. First to ship a high volume, high transactional, scaleable highly distributed systems. First to meet to some regulatory compliance. First to ship a AI product used by millions in the entire organization.
First this and that. Our scrappy team of 8 will get a major deliverable out against a dozen of other teams. We are also routinely asked to demo and give architectural overview of how we built our products and get them out so fast. So I do a lot of technical internal TED like talks to other architects/staff/principals.
The first mover’s advantage is a bit harder to draft a narrative in a resume. Any pointers will be greatly appreciated. But the simple premise is. Give me a group of strong developers, some autonomy and I will be guy shipping multiple large projects and successfully deliver them over and over. Those projects will also be the most challenging in our industry domain,etc…
Now, I am thinking of leaving. Just for more pay. Possibly FAANG but I do not want to do leetcode. I know my accomplishments, high impact value, and scale of my work. I know I can lead a team in building a large scale, highly distributed, highly performant, and ultra-secure infrastructure dealing with large datalake of sensitive data. I am also known as creating jobs. Build a succesful product, it creates jobs , etc…
What roles should I be applying to? I still want to design systems and lead small teams that can deliver.
submitted by /u/theyellowbrother
[link] [comments]
r/cscareerquestions 15 YOE+. I am currently an Architect Manager at a large company w/ over 100k employees and probably 20K in IT/Engineering. I was hired as senior dev -> Architect ->Manager. An Architect Manager who’s title is to manage other architects but in reality, I am managing a small team on SWAT projects. SWAT as in being inserted into adhoc new projects on-demand by CxO. There will be some pet project or something that needs to be delivered next week, I’ll round out my devs and we will produce it. We are known as the SWAT team commandos. I haven’t coded in 5 years. But I do Architectural design and make day-to-day technical decisions, leading and managing my team. My promotions has been based on delivering big projects. Those projects then become full-fledge products that ends up becoming new departments; hiring 20-30 people. It will be 3 guys and myself who build a MVP. It was successfully demoed and then the company creates a department out of it. Then I move on with my SWAT commandos to the next big thing. I am given greenfield – large scale projects where leadership gives me the discretion to hire/grow teams as needed. In the beginning, I was managing all the members, projects, writing up stories,etc. As I had to juggle multiple projects, I have official project managers to help me and do the Agile rituals, standups, and write the stories while I do meetings and system design. The PMs may manage the agile ceremonies but I still dictate how, who should do the work and their priorities. This makes me feel like a PM but I don’t get involved in the story creation, acceptance criterias and release management. But as I wrote, I have not coded in 5 years but still do hands-on guidance. A dev would come to me on a solution and I’ll dictate how it should be done. E.G. “You can’t just drop database tables in your import.” Or, “You need to use an API gateway we have and add that to the CICD blueprint.” Or, “we need to build DR (Disaster Recovery)/Failover and this is how we do it…” So I am actively hands on – code review, mentoring, and reviewing implementation. Since I’ve been rather successful launching large scale projects with teams, I’ve been documenting them in my performance reviews and generally known as the Father or person who birth projects A,B,C,D… As my name is signed onto the white papers and software registries as the technical owner. When I get my bonuses signed off, they usually are commented that I was directly responsible for the product end-to-end. And in terms of value, CEO usually shout out our accomplishments during Town Halls like “This quarter, a new product was introduced that saved 1000 manhours, or increased productivity, or improve customer satisfaction by 30%” So documenting “impact, contribution, and value” isn’t a problem. I also have “First mover’s advantage” in a lot of things. As I mentioned, our engineering teams are large and there are a lot siloes fighting for work. We’d be first to POC something then win the budget to implement. And we usually implement first before anyone. First to deploy K8s 8 years ago. First to ship a high volume, high transactional, scaleable highly distributed systems. First to meet to some regulatory compliance. First to ship a AI product used by millions in the entire organization. First this and that. Our scrappy team of 8 will get a major deliverable out against a dozen of other teams. We are also routinely asked to demo and give architectural overview of how we built our products and get them out so fast. So I do a lot of technical internal TED like talks to other architects/staff/principals. The first mover’s advantage is a bit harder to draft a narrative in a resume. Any pointers will be greatly appreciated. But the simple premise is. Give me a group of strong developers, some autonomy and I will be guy shipping multiple large projects and successfully deliver them over and over. Those projects will also be the most challenging in our industry domain,etc… Now, I am thinking of leaving. Just for more pay. Possibly FAANG but I do not want to do leetcode. I know my accomplishments, high impact value, and scale of my work. I know I can lead a team in building a large scale, highly distributed, highly performant, and ultra-secure infrastructure dealing with large datalake of sensitive data. I am also known as creating jobs. Build a succesful product, it creates jobs , etc… What roles should I be applying to? I still want to design systems and lead small teams that can deliver. submitted by /u/theyellowbrother [link] [comments]
15 YOE+. I am currently an Architect Manager at a large company w/ over 100k employees and probably 20K in IT/Engineering. I was hired as senior dev -> Architect ->Manager. An Architect Manager who’s title is to manage other architects but in reality, I am managing a small team on SWAT projects. SWAT as in being inserted into adhoc new projects on-demand by CxO. There will be some pet project or something that needs to be delivered next week, I’ll round out my devs and we will produce it. We are known as the SWAT team commandos.
I haven’t coded in 5 years. But I do Architectural design and make day-to-day technical decisions, leading and managing my team. My promotions has been based on delivering big projects. Those projects then become full-fledge products that ends up becoming new departments; hiring 20-30 people. It will be 3 guys and myself who build a MVP. It was successfully demoed and then the company creates a department out of it.
Then I move on with my SWAT commandos to the next big thing. I am given greenfield – large scale projects where leadership gives me the discretion to hire/grow teams as needed. In the beginning, I was managing all the members, projects, writing up stories,etc. As I had to juggle multiple projects, I have official project managers to help me and do the Agile rituals, standups, and write the stories while I do meetings and system design. The PMs may manage the agile ceremonies but I still dictate how, who should do the work and their priorities. This makes me feel like a PM but I don’t get involved in the story creation, acceptance criterias and release management.
But as I wrote, I have not coded in 5 years but still do hands-on guidance. A dev would come to me on a solution and I’ll dictate how it should be done. E.G. “You can’t just drop database tables in your import.” Or, “You need to use an API gateway we have and add that to the CICD blueprint.” Or, “we need to build DR (Disaster Recovery)/Failover and this is how we do it…”
So I am actively hands on – code review, mentoring, and reviewing implementation.
Since I’ve been rather successful launching large scale projects with teams, I’ve been documenting them in my performance reviews and generally known as the Father or person who birth projects A,B,C,D… As my name is signed onto the white papers and software registries as the technical owner.
When I get my bonuses signed off, they usually are commented that I was directly responsible for the product end-to-end. And in terms of value, CEO usually shout out our accomplishments during Town Halls like “This quarter, a new product was introduced that saved 1000 manhours, or increased productivity, or improve customer satisfaction by 30%”
So documenting “impact, contribution, and value” isn’t a problem.
I also have “First mover’s advantage” in a lot of things. As I mentioned, our engineering teams are large and there are a lot siloes fighting for work. We’d be first to POC something then win the budget to implement. And we usually implement first before anyone. First to deploy K8s 8 years ago. First to ship a high volume, high transactional, scaleable highly distributed systems. First to meet to some regulatory compliance. First to ship a AI product used by millions in the entire organization.
First this and that. Our scrappy team of 8 will get a major deliverable out against a dozen of other teams. We are also routinely asked to demo and give architectural overview of how we built our products and get them out so fast. So I do a lot of technical internal TED like talks to other architects/staff/principals.
The first mover’s advantage is a bit harder to draft a narrative in a resume. Any pointers will be greatly appreciated. But the simple premise is. Give me a group of strong developers, some autonomy and I will be guy shipping multiple large projects and successfully deliver them over and over. Those projects will also be the most challenging in our industry domain,etc…
Now, I am thinking of leaving. Just for more pay. Possibly FAANG but I do not want to do leetcode. I know my accomplishments, high impact value, and scale of my work. I know I can lead a team in building a large scale, highly distributed, highly performant, and ultra-secure infrastructure dealing with large datalake of sensitive data. I am also known as creating jobs. Build a succesful product, it creates jobs , etc…
What roles should I be applying to? I still want to design systems and lead small teams that can deliver.
submitted by /u/theyellowbrother
[link] [comments]