Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why? • Hacker News Board

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

#181

Post by cm2012 » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:12 PM UTC

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?

I make 3x what I did as in house doing the same amount of work, after all other expenses.

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

#182

Post by dunpeal » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

kevstev wrote: post #112

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 recr…

Can't it be explained simply by relative sizes?

Most estimates I've heard are that Google has over x10 times the number of software engineers than Facebook.

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

#183

Post by hemantv » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:15 PM UTC

Ex Amazon Ex Microsoft here.

Moved to bay area, bought a cheap house in Hayward CA, paid off my mortgage early.

Started my own company Goodly (www.goodlyapp.com) I am learning a lot on daily basis and enjoying it throughly. Even though I work crazy hours it doesn't feel like work at all.

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

#184

Post by tankdoan » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

stillworks wrote: post #100

tankdoan wrote: post #91

Ex Netflix. Joined a promising startup with 1 - Great mission 2 - Impressive engineering culture 3 - Super boring name: Farmers Business Network FBN is the only reason I haven't moved away from the Bay Area. We're hiring too, if anybody wants to shoot me an email I'll forward it along. tan@farmersbusinessnetwork.com

Can you expand on 2) please if possible ? How it is different from Netflix ?

Sure thing. I was blown away with the intelligence, experience, and humility of the people on the engineering team when interviewing. I went into the process thinking "this could be cool, I like the mission" and left the process with "These people are really sharp and down to earth, I hope this happens." Since we're a small team here (I don't want to make it sound like I'm bashing my old team, because they very good at the layer they work on. The depth of knowledge across the stack is probably deeper at FBN. For example:

I was having an issue with Hibernate not doing what I wanted it to do. A knowledgable former team member showed me the bug ticket that had been open for some years and how to work around it.

At FBN, my first project involved multiple systems + the front end, a I was annoyed by a networking issue. I raised it, was showed a workaround by using socat, and the root cause was fixed a couple days later. I had no idea socat even existed.

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

#185

Post by earhart » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:22 PM UTC

krashidov wrote: post #133

earhart wrote: post #44

I did ten years at Microsoft; loved it, but wanted a change, and Google desperately wanted people with VM experience to build GCE. I was at Google for six years; I had a lot of fun building various parts of cloud, but then at some point realized I didn’t really care a lot about the component I was working on, and looking around, I didn’t see a lot of other projects going on that I really felt passionately about. I ha…

It sounds like you're very happy with your career decisions. How long did you work on the startup before it was acquired?

The startup was vertex.ai; I worked there for a little over two years.

It was very educational (in a good way), despite the uncertainty around paychecks (just from the higher odds of going under at some point down the road). For people who’re in a financial position to handle some paycheck risk, I’d definitely recommend trying a startup.

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

#186

Post by wpietri » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

rburhum wrote: post #73

mrlinx wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you share why you think that's a problem in his approach/method?

The first time I built a business, I made the same mistake as the OP: "Then, it struck me: what if ingredient parsing was the business? If this was a problem for me, then surely other developers struggled with it as well. Hopefully, some of them made money and would give some of said money to me if I solved their problem. Thus, the idea was born for Zestful, my ingredient-parsing service." Before starting to write a…

100% agreed. As a coder, the comfortable thing for me is always writing code. But every unshipped line of code is a bet on what I believe users want. It's only when I have people try it that I find out it's useful.

And really, one can learn so much about what people want without having them use anything. User context interviews are hugely helpful. But my favorite thing is real-world tests even before there's a product. If most of your sales will come via people clicking on an ad and looking at a landing page, test that first! If people won't sign up, there's no point in building anything after that.

A good example comes from my cofounder at a startup we did in 2010. At the time, we had theories about an app that people would mostly discover through their Facebook feed. We used Greasemonkey to do user tests and found out that although some liked our idea, most people hated it. So we threw that out and did something else. But two other startups went on to build the same idea and fail with it. We estimate we saved $2m in learning what they learned. Ignite talk here: https://vimeo.com/24749599

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

#187

Post by callmeed » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:24 PM UTC

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #51

Ex-Amazon (and ex-Vmware) here. Worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014 (Europe, then Asia, then USA), then Vmware (also USA) from 2014 to 2016. I then spent ~1 year at a startup, as CTO - the experience sucked, and I consider it to simply be a big mistake. 1.5 years ago, I left that job, worked on a new idea, and in August 2017 I founded a startup, Fabrica, with two other friends. I am still there. No salary. Bootstrapped u…

Does that mean you would turn down a lucrative acquisition offer from a big corporation?

That seems to be the paradox of founding a startup for the reason you stated.

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

#188

Post by draw_down » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

A lot of the answers are a bit underwhelming. Which is fine. But it makes me think, sure working in a bigco is lackluster, but so are many of the other options, and you might as well get paid for your trouble. “Being the one in charge” seems cold comfort to me if the thing you’re in charge of isn’t all that great itself.

Working in a big company allows you to disconnect a bit, focus on getting done what you need to accomplish that day, and then going on about the rest of your life. And then eventually you can just stop altogether. It seems just fine so long as you don’t get caught up in the internal rat race, and don’t get too wrapped up in the ideas they try to sell you about being part of a community and all that stuff. Just do your piece, every day.

Also, it's darkly ironic that one of the best-case scenarios after leaving is that your new venture gets picked up by... a large company.

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

#189

Post by devmunchies » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #10

johan_larson wrote: post #7

I left Google after three years as an SDE because I had really really had enough of my bosses, I wasn't promoted when I figured I deserved it, and a project that meant a lot to me wasn't getting the staffing it needed to succeed. I left for a more senior position at a smaller, less prestigious software company, though I've moved again since. Right now I'm working remotely from Toronto for a Silicon Valley start-up. U…

> That famous proverb about Japanese nails absolutely applies. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."

The Chinese equivalent: the quacking duck gets shot.

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

#190

Post by omgbear » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 5:31 PM UTC

Ex-Googler, worked in ads for ~3 years. Wonderful experience, don't regret any of it, had a great manager and director, definitely focused my opinions on what leadership can and should do (Take responsibility, back you up). I really appreciated the engineering culture and learning experiences.

Left to join a 4-person startup my friends founded, still there going on ~5 years. Definitely enjoy the freedom and faster pace of changes, but the stress of responsibility is much more real.