There are plenty of startups and “startups” that are about a decade old and would benefit from someone who has both an understanding of how real startups work, how to ship things, and also has enough experience to be reliable in what is no longer an early stage company, and maybe isn’t really a startup anymore.
A lot of these companies make reasonable money and pay well enough. Not $100k and “$10MM in stock if it works out”, but probably between 170-300 depending on where they’re at, the structure, etc and it’ll be real cash money. The company will probably do something boring but very necessary. You’ll make great friends and have fun.
This is true, but around here a lot of those jobs are what one of my professional circles calls "adult supervision", and I feel 30 is a bit too young to be targeting those.
Yeah. Lots of startup experiences is a good indicator of lots of technical war stories, and having been "that guy" or part of a team where a bunch of seemingly workable approaches to problems failed spectacularly is a _very_ valuable skillset to bring to the table with a bunch of fresh grads or early career devs. You probably need another decade to get the same sort of collections of war stories about managing people and teams and higher management, which is another skillset the "adult supervision" needs.
Having said that, I've seen teams of fresh grads and bootcamp trained devs, where some 30 year old adult supervision might have saved projects or companies from expensive or existential disasters. "No, we are NOT going to build this critical project's frontend on the JavaScript framework you and two of your bootcamp buddies spent the last 4 weekends writing."
Yup. I agree with the thoughts here. I just moved to a company as the Adult supervision role. I agree at 30 you’re probably closer to the “Lieutenant”, which is a role I’ve played before. I wouldn’t count someone out from playing a bigger part just on age though. I’ve seen plenty of hubris (most recently in the form of home rolling a Kubernetes/ECS alternative. Twice. RIP productivity) from people I’d describe as one year of experience twenty five times.
More than anything I think the OP just needs a change of atmosphere and even as an IC with technical management or a middle people manager somewhere stable he’ll have an interesting time with a very different environment.
The adult supervision guy is usually asked questions about the size of the teams they have lead in the interview. You get to be the adult supervision by having experience leading teams. You get to become team lead by being the best person on your team when the team lead leaves.
This is frankly exactly what I'm looking to land. I've just had a really hard time differentiating / finding leads. Similar to product stuff it seems like roles in the space are very few and far between and given how flooded the market is it's been very difficult just to get in the door.
Any suggestions where I could start to ween my way into this space?
See my other comment about PE funds. We call these mid-stage companies. A great number of them are partially or majority owned by PE funds who are into growing tech companies sustainably. You can actually find that out by looking on PE fund websites and linked in posts - they tell the world when they acquire things, and very frequently make fresh hires upon doing so.
One of the things we do is provide 3rd party opinions on what they might want to hire upon acquisition. Definitely one of the big ones is "senior test engineer". Not tester, but person who builds all the test infrastructure and trains other devs on how to do it properly.
A lot of these companies make reasonable money and pay well enough. Not $100k and “$10MM in stock if it works out”, but probably between 170-300 depending on where they’re at, the structure, etc and it’ll be real cash money. The company will probably do something boring but very necessary. You’ll make great friends and have fun.
Keep an eye out, see what’s out there.