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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?

#211

Post by tzakrajs »

devy wrote: post #203
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…

> bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage Thanks for sharing your experience Michael in that blog post. Can I read that "$200k paid in case" as in all paid off without loans even from family/friends? If so, $200k seems like a high saving amount considering average American household are in credit card debts. In other words, Google job did pay really well…

That is correct, this is fairly typical compensation for the OP's level.

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

#212

Post by romed »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #197
romed wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What's the benefit of waiting for promotion and then leaving? Any benefits you gain from that? Naïvely I'd assume it'd make sense to collect some of the extra cash for a while.

Maybe for some people it's a game? I have no idea. The pay isn't as progressive as their recruiters claim. A high-performing Senior SWE makes money pretty close to what a newly-promoted Staff SWE makes.

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

#213

Post by hamstercat »

devy wrote: post #203
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…

> bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage Thanks for sharing your experience Michael in that blog post. Can I read that "$200k paid in case" as in all paid off without loans even from family/friends? If so, $200k seems like a high saving amount considering average American household are in credit card debts. In other words, Google job did pay really well…

Considering the salary offered by FAANG and other big tech companies, saving 200k$ is very doable. Yes some people are in credit card debts, and that proportion is higher than it should, but saving that amount of money is not unheard of. Most people just spend all they have (and a little more), which leads to not having that kind of savings.

Doing so in just 4 years may be harder (again, depends on your spending), but if you have a little nest before then I don't see what's so strange about it.

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

#214

Post by thrwthrwthrwy »

kevstev wrote: post #194
thrwthrwthrwy wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What skills do you need to work as a software developer in algo trading and HFT? What sort of job titles should you be searching for? Most jobs in this space seem to want Statistics or Applied Math related majors. I want to look for software development jobs in HFT.

Generally low level C++ will do it. I have been out of the game for about 5 years now, but when I left the game was all about speed speed speed. We weren't trading smarter anymore, it was just about trading fast. If you are faster, you don't just put an order out there with an opinion that the market will move in your favor, you get an immediate risk free return (risk free assuming operationally everything works as e…

Great, thanks!

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

#215

Post by didip »

scaleout1 wrote: post #164

Why are almost all the replies by ex Google engineers? I thought I would see an even distribution from all FAANG companies but replies are pretty heavily skewed toward ex google employees. Is this because 1) Google culture is completely different from other FAANG companies? 2) Engineers at other FAANG companies dont quit their job? 3) or they dont browse HN in their free time?

If I were to guess, don't kill me for this.

Working for Google creates a much bigger cognitive dissonance compared to other FAANGM.

Google disproportionately promotes culture as number 1 reason to work there, where as the rest of the companies are just that: companies that make money.

Imagine the surprise when a person joined Google and realize it's nothing but another large company.

I have heard that FB has similar issues, but those are just that: rumors or things I read online.

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

#216

Post by briantmaurer »

Ex SWE at AWS (2013-2014) – I enjoyed working with the team I was on and I learned a lot. It was a great experience, but I've always wanted to work on some ideas I'd written down. I resigned as soon as my student loans were paid off and I'd saved enough money to pursue those ideas for a couple years.

One of the most memorable days of my life was the day after I resigned from Amazon.

For most people, their decisions, stressors, happiness, etc. are largely defined by external forces – whether by school, work, finances, family, etc. For me, this was much more true than I realized. I had always thought of myself as someone who was highly independent. But, that following morning (and most mornings since) I woke up with a feeling of nearly complete autonomy. That feeling was much stronger than I expected. It has been incredibly freeing and has significantly affected how I approach life.

Since, I moved back to Minnesota and am currently working on my second project – https://mutambo.net. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to play recreational sports. We raised a small seed round and our remaining runway is a little over 1 year.

--

My first project was put on pause after teaming up a with co-founder (Ex Google) and choosing another idea. I would like to finish the first project some day.

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

#217

Post by puglr »

Worked at a few startups gobbled up by Google. Second time decided to stick around. I think Google is an overall incredible company to work for. Far from perfect (and getting worse in some important areas of employee happiness), but I'd do it again.

I just need to be my own boss for a while. Working on things that you're not 100% passionate about can really wear one down.

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

#218

Post by joshuamorton »

q3k wrote: post #58
branksy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many companies, yes. However, unlike many companies, they actually have a process where you can submit your "weekend projects" for Google to review and "gain back" explicit ownership of them. Basically Google just checks to make sure it's not competing with anything Google's already doing, and then contractually assigns it back to you. (And anecdotally, if it does compete, you may be offered the opportunity to j…

This still kills the possibility of quickly collaborating with someone on a project in your free time. Any time you want to even start working on something together, you have to wait a couple of days for approval. This simply doesn't work if you want to be active in a hackerspace or any other community where you iterate on projects quickly.

>This still kills the possibility of quickly collaborating with someone on a project in your free time. Any time you want to even start working on something together, you have to wait a couple of days for approval.

This depends on the project. If you and the project maintainer are ok with Google maintaining copyright over the code, there's a self-approval process that takes ~2 minutes.

And of course, that's only necessary if I'm working on the side project using company resources. If I'm not, I literally can't do the self-approval. There's only an issue if you want to maintain copyright should you want to monetize your product. Most hobby projects won't encounter those issues.

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

#219

Post by kevstev »

dunpeal wrote: post #182
kevstev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Looking at 10ks filed with the SEC for both from the end of 2017, FB reports 25k employees vs Google's 80k.

There is no breakdown on how many of those are engineers, but I would assume that the ratios are similar.

I was interested in looking, because that would be somewhat in line with the ratios I see in terms of resumes, though I don't have real numbers, it feels more like 15:1. I see resumes from google every week, FB... its so rare I can't even give you a consistent interval, once every few months?

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

#220

Post by rizwan »

twblalock wrote: post #193
technofiend wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To quote your article: The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was quantifiable. I couldn’t prove that anything I did had a positive impact on Google. If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a moment’s notice. Don't take this as an ad-homimen att…

This is spot-on, and it's also true in organizations without stack ranking. It's actually not a cynical way to view your job. If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? I've consistently seen that successful engineers focus on work that has an impact, and they are good at making it known. The first part is obviously good, but a lot of enginee…

> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing?

The problem is that, at review time at Google, you have to be able to "quantify" the impact. Many types of impact are quantifiable (e.g. "Made server request scale from 100 query-per-second to 1,300 qps", "reduced code size by 30%", etc.).

It's much harder to measure, say, the impact of a refactor where you made the code easier to reason about and more maintainable, so that future work can be done on it more easily.

I witnessed the same thing at Google; I worked on a project that everyone joked only existed because the person who wrote it wanted promo, and the best way to get it was to design a very complex system, and convince others to adopt it. (He did get it, and promptly switched teams.)

Some things have been made better, though. I've heard that going from L4 → L5 now involves much more influence from your manager, since they would know and, without quantifying something like a refactor, can speak to the positive impact you had in a project.

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