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Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

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Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they can always point to their resume, which lists a prestigious faang company. I worked for a well-known tech company for a couple years, with a grueling interview process. I regularly get cold called by recruiters asking me about "my time at X". So it's a good thing, from a career perspective. Whether it's a worthwhile thing of itself is a personal choice.

Does this ever get old? From what I've seen, former FAANG hires get paraded around like some exotic pet at some smaller companies. It's kind of cringy as an onlooker. I once worked at a place with executives who had "hire 3 people from google" as a KPI.

It's cringey as hell, but from a "making my career" perspective, it's clearly valuable to many in charge of hiring.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not there person you replied to, but I think I would probably stay at my current job if I was financially independent. I work for a small company. The company does foreign language training. Most of the business is one-on-one classes between real teachers and students. My job is basically R&D to figure out ways we might use software to improve the teaching/leaning process. My primary focus is on virtual reality,…

I’m genuinely happy for you! Few people will ever get this level of satisfaction.

Yes, it's not easy to find, but it exists out there.

I think a lot of people's dissatisfaction comes from the narrative surrounding "financial freedom". We get bombarded with the idea that financial freedom is the one, true path to working on your passions.

For a variety of reasons, I think that's bullshit.

It creates a false hope that there is some state one can achieve that is free of misery. There is no perfect job. Every person working on their passion project also has a lot of chores they don't like that they have to perform or their project will never see the light of day. C'est la vie.

But more insidiously, it denies the concept that one could be happy working as an employee somewhere. It makes me wonder whether it's a narrative intentionally designed to keep people "in their place". By creating a narrative that "financial freedom" is necessary to work on one's passions, it pushes the worker to not look elsewhere for greener pastures. "Stay where you are, the grass is always greener, blah blah blah". Sure, we can certainly get into situations where we are blind to how good we have things. But there are also lots of very toxic places. And just because you're more likely to go from one toxic place to another doesn't mean that the toxicity is "natural" or "inevitable" or "just the way things are".

So the first step is to accept that happiness and satisfaction and having a contented disposition are choices one can make now, not the result of achieving some financial endpoint. Your boss wants you to work overtime to make an impossible deadline happen? His problem. You weren't the one to set the deadline. He needs to own up to his failures.

And then the second step is to be more open minded about where you might work or what work you might do. I used to do nothing but web and database development. I thought that was the only thing I'd ever get hired to do. And I had only ever done it for consulting companies. I tried to get out of it by getting a job doing software product development at a bunch of companies. I kept getting told that I didn't have any product experience, that my consulting experience "didn't apply", that I had never worked on a single project for 10 years straight.

Uh, I don't know a whole lot of people in any field who have worked on a single project for 10 years. They exist, and that's amazing, but that's just not the bulk of people in any industry.

So I just stopped asking permission to do the things I wanted to do. I just started writing exactly the software I wanted. I dragged it into my consulting work (a little easier when I was freelance, but ultimately not that hard even when I wasn't). I didn't ask approval for anything. Occasionally, I got in trouble for it, but most of the time either went completely unnoticed or the benefits were recognized, and it was fine. But the key point was that, even those few times I was getting in trouble for doing whatever the hell I wanted, it was still better than the long period when I was doing what I was told and getting brow-beat all the time to work overtime and do things "The Company Way" or whatever.

That's one of the reasons I constantly advocate for exclusively working for smaller companies. Most small companies don't care how the work gets done, as long as it gets done. Sure, Microsoft and Google and Facebook are going to flip their shit if you unilaterally decide "this code that I wrote is open source". They want you to ask permission first, to write up a business case for why it's better to be opened first, probably develop it in-house for a while before opening it, if ever opening it, if you ever get approval to work on it at all. And some smaller companies attempt to cargo-cult this behavior, but if you just end-run around them, they don't realy care. They just put up with it.

Or not. Maybe they fire you. But if they do, it's not the end of the world. I've only ever been fired from one job, and that was unrelated to my technology decisions. It was also one of the best things that ever happened to me, as it broke my fear of getting fired. I started on this life of "do whatever I want, but do it to the best of my ability" after that and everything has been so much better ever since.

Just... protect yourself. Be a little mercenary about your work. It's your work. Most places actually have lots of jobs, you just don't know where to look for them. Get out into the community and meet people to find them.

Most of our fears about what could happen with our employers and our work situations are pretty unrealistic. It's pretty rare for people to end up on the street, homeless, just because they refused to work overtime. It usually takes a substance abuse problem, or a mental health crisis. Which you're more likely to fall into if you're unhappy. So choose to be happy. And then do whatever it takes to protect that happiness.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#333
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ive heard FANMAG mulitple times nowadays.

I think that for it to make sense, Netflix needs to be removed just as much as Microsoft needs to be added.

Hollywood is terrified of Netflix. It's much more exciting than Microsoft.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#334
Are you on a product team? What level of experience do you have?

I joined a unicorn recently and have felt similar feelings, however I am on an infrastructure team and there is tons of work to do so it's relatively easy to not stay blocked (if we are blocked it's usually our fault). That said, we end up blocking a lot of teams (lack of resources, lack of tooling, things just take a long time). I find the architecture pretty standard so it's easy to navigate around though

> only a few very small changes get done

I can echo that. I've tried to make bigger/more changes but the team can't keep up with them and they introduce too much risk. A lot of my day-to-day winds up being balancing risk, change, and upside. The work is a lot more deliberate which is good for big changes and bad for small ones

> I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week

To be clear, I would not recommend doing this. I strongly prefer to work hard and then find a place where people work as hard as you. Complacency is the worst (for me)

> it's possible the rest of the team is doing that too, but I have no way of knowing

It's a bit unsettling that the team doesn't talk about things like this

> when I look back at the progress made since I joined and estimate the cost to the company (salary, servers, etc) it's frankly disgusting

How much value have you added though? At my company we have multiple simple fixes that save multiple millions of dollars annually. It's pretty easy to justify cost at scale. Maybe you need to examine the value you're providing further?

> I find it unsatisfying and like a waste of my time on earth

This says "it's time to move on" to me. I would go to a smaller company personally or move to a different function (e.g. infrastructure). I sympathize with your comments about dev speed - that's a huge one for me. It sucks to be bottlenecked by development process rather than bottlenecked by something more in your control

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#335
post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ive heard FANMAG mulitple times nowadays.

I think that for it to make sense, Netflix needs to be removed just as much as Microsoft needs to be added.

I think you're underestimating the international potential of Netflix. The only place where they are facing any competition is the US.

Even there the content produced by their competitors is getting bought by Netflix later down the line for international distribution.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#336

It's possible that your or your team's productivity is actually bad, and in general at the company you are expected to do more, but the team you are on is a puddle of low productivity within the overall org. How would you know if this is the case? There are a few signs. What degree of tenure do other people on the team have? If old-timers aren't on the team, or worse, if they leave the team for others within the comp…

These are very good points. I'm curious what the process is from the perspective of the manager. I'm new at the management side of things and was always a top performer as an IC (so didn't get a chance to learn how its down on the flip side). My biggest challenge is figuring out how to give negative feedback (and not destroy a weak player's morale). If someone is having not performing well, I act as a cheerleader and suggest ways of improving. I'm not sure how strong I could/should go (I'm not going to berate anyone since I am not a psycopath). By not providing stronger feedback, I think I am failing the struggling teammember since they may eventually get put on a pip. Any blogs, books or suggestions on how to develop this skill?

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#337

I remember talking to a senior person at FB (wears a suit on friday). I asked "how is hiring?". Their response: terrible. People like this OP game systems, know how to test, understands what the boss wants, know ahead of time the questions they will be asked, etc. They have gamed the entire system. So! They tend to get through the interview with ease. The problem is... now what. What is the next thing they need to ga…

This is on the companies themselves. You show young talent some kind of game then that's the game they'll play.

https://youtu.be/FNEDJPeoHZo

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#338
I don’t work for a FAANG, but a SV tech company that’s still pretty big: I find myself surrounded by productive, driven, competent engineers who are all working a breakneck speed when it’s necessary, and taking it a bit easier when it’s not. It’s very satisfying too.

So, no, it’s not all like that.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#339
post #111

At apple, you cannot browse internal resources. At fb and google, it is called SWE instead of SDE. Amazon has SDEs. (perhaps netflix too?) Although you might be smart enough to know that and misdirect. Even at the best universities, best tech companies, best startups, you will find pools of miserable and unmotivated people. Don't get stuck. There are brilliant people everywhere and certainly at faang. Find them, lear…

I know engineers at Apple and they have full access to the source for almost any project.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#340
post #3

I've never worked at a FAANG company but, for when you do reach you do choose to stay are go, can you put a burner email in your profile? A lot of engineers at startups, like myself, want to work with talent that is skilled enough to get into FAANG bit too bored of the extremely glacial pace these companies work at. On a more on topic note: I've heard about, and observed, similar behavior from friends of similar comp…

Does it really take skill to get into a FAANG or just the ability to do algorithms well enough to get past the interview?

I think that if you selected:

1. a random person from the tech industry, and

2. a random person who has worked at a FAANG company for 1 year.

I'd assume that on average person 2 is no worse an engineer than, and potentially a better engineer better than, person 1.

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