An Interview With An Early Engineer at DoorDash — Breakout Success Stories
What you’ll get from this post
- deepen your understanding of the benefits of joining a breakout company so that you can make the most informed and beneficial career choices possible for you and your unique goals and
- see how this person ended up at a breakout company, so that you better understand how you can end up at one.
So with that, here’s the interview!
🎤 Interviewer: I would love to talk for a couple reasons; One, to help other people understand the benefits of joining a breakout company we’d like to share success stories from people who joined breakout companies. Two, to help other people understand how you ended up working in a breakout company, so that they can understand how they can end up at one.
What are the top 1 to 3 benefits you’ve received from working at DoorDash so far?
👋 Interviewee: As I tell candidates who I interview for DoorDash, in the past three and a half years I have learned much more than in the proceeding seven years before that. And a lot of that was due to a combination of multiple factors, one including wanting to know everything in general which is obviously impossible but also in conjunction with being at a place where I was exposed to many different technical and non technical aspects of startups through about a 15x growth in terms of engineering team size.
The unique experiences that come with having to prioritize the challenges are various things that are important. That growth is sort of a forcing function of figuring out what’s important at any given point in time. As an engineer or especially one that works a little bit more on both sort of platform infrastructure side.
🎤 Interviewer: Is it because there is always so much to do that it is useful for developing prioritization skills?
👋 Interviewee: Not only prioritization skills, but also .. Yeah, a forcing function in developing competencies in general. You don’t have enough time to waste in long rabbit holes. If something is not producing results in a good enough amount of time after some buffer then it’s probably not a good idea.
🎤 Interviewer: How big was the eng team when you joined?
👋 Interviewee: Around a dozen or so engineers.
🎤 Interviewer: And then you joined in the summer of 2015?
👋 Interviewee: Yes.
🎤 Interviewer: Are you still there?
👋 Interviewee: Yes.
🎤 Interviewer: How big is the eng team now?
👋 Interviewee: Should be around the 200 mark by now.
🎤 Interviewer: Is it right that the primary overall benefit is the learning?
👋 Interviewee: There is that. I think people may not ignore the financial benefits.
Which some people may care about. Learning, professional development and for those that are interested the financial benefits. I think it’s hard to predict ahead of time, but I think if it goes well we could be comparable to sort of the Airbnb, Ubers, which is quite rare.
Let’s say you work a FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix Google) for a few decades, all that could be condensed into five years.
🎤 Interviewer: Can you expand on the learning aspect for you?
👋 Interviewee: It came in a couple ways. The learning is in prioritization and technical areas.
For example, I’ve now worked with almost everything on the back-end side apart from front-end and mobile, so back-end and below all the way down to SREish things. Just being able to understand most of that ecosystem and being able to discuss most parts of it at varying degrees of detail and even make impact in those areas.
On the non technical side, how engineering orgs operate, and thinking through how things are happening around me, and learning how to reason about those from empirical perspective and even anchoring that against what industry best practices or articles suggest.
🎤 Interviewer: Let’s say you were talking with yourself around early 2015 and this version of your younger self was leaning towards going to a big company instead of a potential breakout trajectory company, what might you say to convince this younger self of the benefits?
👋 Interviewee: Before I answer that it depends on each individuals mindset. If an individual is inherently risk averse or has a heavy emphasis on work/life balance and things like that, then that could be a challenge even at the start. But for those that might be up for it, which I was at that point in time, I would say the FAANGs / big companies, they’re great, but absolutely you’ll thank me for this later … Just do it. Just trust me on this even if it doesn’t seem to make sense.
🎤 Interviewer: Could you elaborate on the, “Just trust me on this?” How would you highlight the future benefits?
👋 Interviewee: I might express it like: think about how much you advanced and learned in the past however much long you’ve worked in big company and let’s accelerate that by like 5 to 10X let’s say, is that something that sounds like something you would want? If the answer is yes, then I think I don’t need to say anymore.
🎤 Interviewer: What type of people do you think might most benefit from joining breakout companies?
👋 Interviewee: Folks who are willing to make some sort of short term sacrifices. They don’t have to necessarily be extreme. There are still benefits to be gained even if one has more work/life balance or if they are not as ambitious, they are ambitious but not hyper ambitious. But the benefits will be most realized for folks that are willing to make temporary sacrifices in terms of certain lifestyle aspects. To the extent that one can manage it, thinking through the challenges of that kind of environment and delivering on them at an accelerated pace can be condensed a lot faster. If one’s circumstances allow for capitalizing on that, then they stand the most to gain.
🎤 Interviewer: If in the future you end up moving on from DoorDash to another company, are you going to be seeking a breakout company?
👋 Interviewee: Currently the answer is yes. Although I have heard cases where people get tired of it. Like, “I’m too old. I already achieved what I wanted.”
🎤 Interviewer: What would the benefits you hope to gain be from going to another breakout type company, second time around?
👋 Interviewee: I was there when there were 10 engineers and then maybe in a couple years we’re at a couple 1,000.
Then at an early stage startup, having gone through all that and assimilated that, be able to synthesize that into actionable impact, in that high growth breakout.
🎤 Interviewer: It’s given and continuing to give you a unique set of skills and exposure that will put you in a position to be uniquely valuable to other breakout type companies.
👋 Interviewee: Especially ones where the pace of growth has been and will be comparable to what we have experienced in the past three, however many years and in the coming few years.
🎤 Interviewer: Are there any skills that you now think are important for getting a job at a breakout company, that back then you didn’t consider to be important?
👋 Interviewee: I wouldn’t base it off of skills so much. For example, I was fairly new to the start-up tech stack when I first joined. I didn’t know anything about AWS, Python, Django, Elasticsearch, Redis, Postgres, any of this stuff. From my current situation, it was actually pretty embarrassing how little I knew at that time.
It’s more about both one’s mindset, as well as aptitude and persistence, grit. And being able to rapidly ramp up on whatever is unknown because there’s going to be a lot of that, more than at many other places.
🎤 Interviewer: Then on the inverse, are there any factors that you thought would be particularly important, but that seem less critical now in hindsight?
👋 Interviewee: Yeah. In a similar vein, I would say previous experience, especially big company experience is less relevant, especially at the earlier stages. Maybe it will become relevant later on and the relevance increases as the stage of the company grows, but I’ve seen people who had high positions at other big companies struggle at the equivalent level when coming here.
🎤 Interviewer: What kind of skills or attributes or habits would be beneficial to avoid struggling at a high growth startup?
👋 Interviewee: This is a hard question to answer. But I would like to say adaptability to new circumstances.
Figuring out things, resolving the unknowns quickly and decisively. I’m speaking a bit abstractly. It’s because the practical implementation details of them are very varied.
🎤 Interviewer: Which of the skills that you’ve gained so far in your time at DoorDash do you value the most?
👋 Interviewee: There’s both the experiential aspect as well as the mindset aspect, the less tangible parts of it. The tangible parts are the kinds of things you can put on your resume. I drove this such and such a project or whatever it is. And then the other aspect is what I mentioned earlier about persistence, grit, prioritization, adaptation to new situations that I hadn’t worked with before.
🎤 Interviewer: Now instead of skills, what would you say are the assets you’ve gained from your time so far at DoorDash that you value the most? For example, peer relationships with people in the company or the brand value.
👋 Interviewee: Yeah, those are certainly true. I think people will soon realize there have been many doubters on the web about our company’s success, but finally we’ve started to validate ourselves in the industry and so as a result of that many people who didn’t see the value in joining our company or were here but decided to leave, I think may regret it later.
Another class of intangibles are around the network, especially from the earlier folks, and the brand which will become apparent more in the coming years. Yeah, networks, relationships. I spent so much time with folks here and the same folks or mostly the same folks.
🎤 Interviewer: Alright, that’s the end of our interview, thank you very much for your time.
