SWE Ouput at Startups vs Enterprise

Question

Im looking for some advice from software engineers who have worked at companies at various stages of maturity (like small startup, to unicorn status, to enterprise).

Im currently working at a Series B startup after having spent the last 6 years or so doing enterprise company work. Im just starting my third month at the company and have gotten feedback that i need to increase my velocity.

How do you go about finding the right balance of speed vs quality?

FatedCannon · Accepted Answer

I think I can respond as someone who has been both a SWE and a manager in both enterprise (non-FAANG) and startups and have also hired ex-FAANG employees.

First off, I don’t like a manager using velocity as an individual performance metric, it’s the wrong metric to use. Now that I have that out of the way, he is looking for more output.

In larger companies it is easier to focus on one thing and change requires a lot of up front design and work. At startups the mantra is typically demonstrating a working solution rather than talking about it. Even if it needs to be revised, a PR showing something, anything is better than weeks later only seeing a write up.

I once hired an ex-FAANG employee (they had been at both Google and Facebook) and was floored at how little output they had compared to others. They were obviously incredibly smart yet 90 days in they accomplished a lot less than even my junior engineers. When I dig into it, I came to understand he valued writing RFCs and discussing over executing as it is how he came up.

It took a lot of coaching to get him to produce MVPs of his work in progress, and I think the best advice I got to him was to open PRs not when he was ready for review but when he started. Once he did this, the discussions he spent so much time writing happened earlier rather than later.

Hope this helps your current situation.

Gelouko · Answer

That's a tough question, and depends on the maturity of your manager/team. Sometimes devs might be delivering a lot of features, but also adding multiple debts, avoiding tests... This in the end might bring the codebase to a 7-headed monster.Talk to your manager, understand how much others are delivering more than you, and then compare the quality of each one's work with yours.If your manager/team don't know the value of code quality, then you might have a problem, as they will prefer that you create bad code, but deliver, at all costs, and this is not healthy in the long term.I'm currently in a startup (after working for big techs and banks), and I actually had to influence them on why we should avoid bad code. If a problem appears due to that, it's even easier to influence them :)

madscience · Answer

That was a big struggle for me too, when I moved from FAANG to Startup.

My current bosses always talked about "MVP" or "Minimum Viable Product," meaning we should focus on shipping out a minimum product to attract early users and then iterating from there, but in my mind, a minimum product was something that was fully fleshed out, so it was an adjustment for me to think differently.

Something that helped me was changing up the mindset a bit and trying to think of the big picture/core of the product, building that, and then learning how to leave the little details aside for now to be able to ship faster.

I'd definitely ask your manager for more specific feedback besides just 'increase velocity' but this might be on the track of what they're thinking

Aspirant2023 · Answer

Instead of assuming, I would suggest look at peers and inwards first - Is your output being compared to an average of all others? For example, are you delivering 5 when everyone is delivering 7?I would suggest before making a judgement call and assuming that anyone who delivers more is compromising on on quality for speed look at data and metrics deeper

19g6ul1qkopcv · Answer

I ask the manager if speed or quality will give me salary raise and request more feedback of test engineers and product team too make continues delivery improving quality.

SWE Ouput at Startups vs Enterprise

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