For my entire career (15+ years) I’ve worked at startups as a designer who codes. I really enjoy the startup scene, wearing multiple hats, and shipping quickly.
The older I get though, the more the opportunity cost of not joining a FAANG type is weighing on my mind financially.
I’ve never applied to one of these companies, and while I know my skill set is incredibly valuable to startups where urgency and velocity are important, I’ve wondered if I could even be hired at a much larger company where urgency seems less critical, and roles seem more specialized… I’m sure I could apply as only a designer or front end dev, but I really enjoy both and would hate to give one up.
If you work at one of these companies, have you ever worked with a colleague who does both? or do you? And if so, how was the experience?
Thank you!
In my experience, how much flexibility you have in your role varies drastically depending on where you land. I've worked in two different organizations in Amazon. One was beset by significant institutional inertia and therefore I had less freedom to exercise all of my talents.
The current team I'm is both is very new and it's the first time the something like this team has existed in my organization. So there's much more a start-up feeling, and I'm using a lot more of my skill set than I did previously.
Amazon is such a large company that no one can really speak of the 'Amazonian experience'. I've known people who had terrible jobs such as the posts you'll find on Blind. On the other hand, I decided on a Wednesday afternoon that I was taking a 4 day weekend for mental health reasons. My boss had no questions.
UX Engineer might be a good way to get your foot in the door. And then meet as many people as you can for 1-2 years. From there you can find new opportunities that better align with what you're super passionate about. It's what I did, and it's worked out for me.
As a UX Engineer, you'll work as part of a UX team in a challenging, fast-paced environment. You’ll demonstrate your creativity, analytical skills, and knowledge of user-facing technologies to create prototypes that identify the best product experiences, launch innovative features, build tools that accelerate UX teams, bridge between design and engineering discussions, and enable efficient, high quality execution.
UX engineer was mentioned here and that is typically a valid term for the role you describe too, this is what they are called at Google.
Im a principal at AWS whos worked across a few areas over the years.
Information density is ugly and it makes software hard to sell. This is part of why commercial software is almost universally crap.