[avip]

It's a (thoughtful) list for the "senior engineer in 500+ heads company".

If you work for a small startup (where you'll be forced to be "senior engineer" if you like it or not), you'll have no "manager", "peers", "projects", "hiring", "mentoring", "networking", and so 95% of the list items immediately pop.

[jefozabuss]

Manager = CTO/CEO

peers = peers

projects = you’d have at least one (and smaller additions to the product that could be projects in their own) hiring = you could be involved in the hiring process even though probably the CTO will handle it

mentoring = you can mentor others or get nentored by e.g the CTO

... etc

so where is that 95%?

[littleblah]

While I agree to certain extent, you still have these things in different shapes and sizes. Startup teams are a tight knit community in my experience, but as it scales, these aspects start to show their heads.

[icebraining]

I worked at a five person startup, and I had all of those.

[arcticbull]

If you're at a startup you better be hiring! That's your #1 job! You better keep that bar high because the next round of folks will be hired by them. Further, at a small startup you can't get away from a bad hire, they're literally adjacent to you for 50+ hours a week.

Further to this point, networking is crucial too, but it's more networking outside the company. With other startups, with other technical folks -- your hiring pipeline is built on your personal network until you get to at least 20+.

[littleblah]

To add to this, I found these resources great:

1. https://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-hire

2. https://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec02/

[SMFloris]

As the CTO of a small-ish startup, this rings so true. All our employees were hired from our network. Its only now that we'll look for other sources to benefit or hiring pipeline.