u/johny_james wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Hello Michael, I have one question that seems like a **chicken and egg** problem. What do you think about senior engineers that don't have a lot of hands-on experience with large-scale systems but understand and know the concepts by reading books or are trying the concepts on si
u/michaelnovati replied ·
Yeah typically means you'll get down-leveled to E4. And if you pick things up really fast you can get promoted to E5 VERY fast, like a year.
Now I don't think you necessarily need large-scale experience exclusively, you can have extremely complex smaller-scale problems you've solved, but you need to demonstrate the same patterns and complexity in managing that these large-scale problems always come with.
For example, let's say you worked on a NASA moon lander. There's like 1 or 2 of them, but you had to work on a huge team solving complex problems with a lot of complex API's between systems and complex technical challenges, but scale? Not really.