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Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#111

Post by fermienrico »

CydeWeys wrote: post #90
fermienrico wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entrepreneurship is a lot more complicated. Each startup’s failure is unique and has various mix of challenges. Suggesting a book for someone who has failed running a startup right away is naive and glib. Also, the OP didn’t put too many details of why his startup failed. Asserting that they have poor entrepreneurial skills - how do you know if it wasn't circumstantial?

I didn't take the book suggestion to be naive/glib. It could actually be quite helpful. My brief involvement in a failed startup would have gone differently had I known more about the business side of things, and reading a good relevant book is one of the best ways to learn about something.

I strongly and passionately disagree. I’ve read many many startup books. They are all completely and utterly useless in my opinion.

If you want to know something specific say accounting, read a book about that specific area. If you want to know more about the “general” aspects of startups - listen to interviews of founders about which unique chellenges they faced.

I strongly discourage anyone starting a business to not listen to Sam Altman’s advice or anyone who gives generic “strategic” advice. These books are akin to “How to become a millionaire”. Yes, I’m talking about books such as “Lean Startup”, etc.

You get so much value from reading about specific aspects than from general startup books. Learn how each LEGO piece works and learn it well. You know, you’re going to have to rely on these specifics to actually get your business rolling. Strategic advice - you can consult your friends, discuss and determine the best course of action through your own acumen based on data that you have. That startup book on your shelf is not going to help at all.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#112

Post by kevstev »

akhilcacharya wrote: post #53

It’s strange that there’s nobody from Amazon here, just people from G

I am in NYC, and hiring for a place that pays very well, possibly above FAANG salaries. I see a lot of resumes. A lot of those resumes are from Google, but very very few are from Facebook, and I find that to be a very curious thing. FBs office is not quite as large as Google's in NYC, but they have been around awhile and we are hiring out of both coasts and offer relocation.

I am not sure if it is a quirk of our recruiting pipeline, but this seems to be an indicator that FB is a potentially better place to work.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#114

Post by romed »

drewg123 wrote: post #80
sjg007 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure! You could've kept working! Why did you retire?

I'm guessing "because he could". 8 years of L6 at Google should set you up for life if you move to a moderate cost area of the country.

Exactly. Now some other slob with a job has to pay to feed my family just because I can afford to buy a house and he can’t. The American way. The only practical problem with this scheme is the cost of private medical insurance is astronomical for someone who retires before Medicare age. So I might get some kind of token job just to get group health plan.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#115

Post by romed »

drewg123 wrote: post #76

Does it count if you move from one to the other? I spent 2 years as a L5 (Senior SWE) at Google in MTV. I could not negotiate a deal to work remotely under my VP or find a team under a different VP allowing remote work that I was interested in (and which was interested in me).. I left after promotion to staff (L6) and went to Netflix where I work on the Openconnect CDN. Netflix is so much smaller that I feel like I h…

Congratulations on making Staff after only 2 years. You’d think it would be alarming to Google how often engineers leave immediately after being promoted.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#116

Post by pjc50 »

mtlynch wrote: post #23

Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…

It seems mad that something like "ingredient parsing" could ever be a business; on the other hand, a decade ago I was sharing a house with a PhD student who was trying to do effectively the same thing with chemistry papers to extract relevant formulae. Worked well for clearly defined things like "1,1,1-trichloroethane", less well for colloquial things like "formaldehyde" or, god help you, "lead".

(Is a "lead researcher" the head of your team, a person researching the properties of the metal Pb, or a researcher made out of that heavy grey metal? This is practically an unsolved computational linguistics problem)

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#117

Post by guitarsteve »

Ex-Amazonian here.

Aside: Despite the company's not-so-good reputation in the media and forums, I enjoyed working there. For the most part I had good managers and coworkers. And once you've been there a while, you can transfer to a team with more interesting work, less on-call support, etc.

Anyway, my wife is a doctor, and she had to move for her residency. Amazon wasn't willing to consider remote work, and I'm not sure I'd want to be the one "remote guy" anyway, so I switched jobs to a 100% remote company. We're hiring, in case others would like to make a similar jump. :)

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#118

Post by thecatspaw »

BayAreaSmayArea wrote: post #22
microtherion wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056 Bottom line is that at least in California, employees theoretically have the right to IP developed in their own time on their own hardware, but in practice, there are numerous caveats, and litigation can be extremely risky. One of the caveats is that the invention should not overlap with a company's "existing or anticipated line of business", and…

Something that comes up in these discussions is the concept of “company time”. Company resources is clear cut, but what is company time for a salaried employee? How does that change with being a remote employee? I’ve moved to a strategic product role and honestly work less than an hour a day on average and seldom go into the office. If I decide to work on a side project does that restrict me from git commits between…

> Company resources is clear cut, but what is company time for a salaried employee?

Usually salary comes with an expectation of hours per week/month, and usually also comes with a software where you write down your hours, to track overtime, minus time, etc. So all the time you write down in that system, counts as companytime.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#119

Post by lemming »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #108
lemming wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great article about the promotion process and the employee dynamic at Google. It very accurately summarises much of why I quit there so quickly after coming in via an acquisition. That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money. I was very lucky to have a friend who taught me that very early (not about Google specifically, the same applies to any company). Wo…

> I was sitting next to people earning half as much as I was or less, just because I was a contractor and they were an employee. Was this still true after all the taxes, insurance, and stability factors are considered, or was this just your hourly rate?

As a contractor in the UK, I paid less tax than an employee would. HMRC brought in IR35 to try to combat that, but at the time I was contracting (early 2000's) most contractors were still paying less tax - I'm not sure if that's stricter these days.

I was in London working in web & finance at the time, so it was a fairly distorted market. I did get bitten by the dot com crash, but even so I was only out of work for about 6 months or so and that was a pretty extreme event. Realistically in the current environment job stability in a major IT centre like London is so good that contracting is pretty safe. In a more unstable market there would be a higher element of risk, for sure.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#120

Post by gt5050 »

VoidWhisperer wrote: post #89
gt5050 wrote: post #19

Working on my saas https://chartpoet.com Worked at Amazon from 2010 - 2012. Left because I wanted to create something of my own. Have failed twice at since then, hopefully will succeed this time.

Nitpick: You have MySQL listed as 'My Sql' with a space in the middle

Will fix this. Thanks!
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