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Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

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Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#361

Post by username90 »

smrr723 wrote: post #216
sriram_malhar wrote: post #53

I quit full-time work in 2001, after being burned out in the dot com boom. I did well for myself financially after the startup I was in got bought. The phrase "well" is of course subjective, considering that no colleague of mine quit. I left a whole lot of money on the table, but never once have I regretted it. I decided that the name of the game is to optimise quality of life. That means, infrequent brutal deadlines…

> That means, infrequent brutal deadlines, minimal (pref. zero) commute, opportunity to learn, and spend time with family and friends and be of use to society at large. This is what I'm aiming for in the near term, but how on earth do you find a position with infrequent brutal deadlines?

I work for Google and have never had a deadline during my years there. I tend to set up my own goals, sometimes I meet them and other times I don't, but nobody has held me to any dates.

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#362

Post by war1025 »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #358
sriram_malhar wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consult, I teach (distributed systems) at a university, I sit on a few technical advisory boards for a few companies. I don't really go out of my way to find clients; word gets around and I get referrals. If the problem interests me, I'm happy to sit with the potential client and give pointers and advice (for no charge) even if I don't want to take that project (cf. rule 1 -- never pack my calendar). It is a win-wi…

Sorry, can you clarify how you got your health insurance taken care of? I know a number of people that would retire if they could, but need the health insurance for themselves/family/kids.

Health insurance is the single thing that would sink my finances if I wasn't working. Everything else you can minimize costs on pretty significantly. Health insurance is on the order of $1-2k / month even for the worst plan (family of 5).

I lean right on political issues, but it wouldn't hurt my feelings at all if a Democrat won in 2020 and actually pushed through significant healthcare reform.

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#363

Post by techslave »

whitehouse3 wrote: post #291
badfrog wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> these engineers, while they all tend to be very smart, tend to be borderline junior engineers in the real world Define "real world"?

Small-medium sized businesses without dedicated devops people. I'm working with an ex-Googler who struggles with basic dev stuff like * How to make a Python environment for a brand new project * Source control basics like commits and merging * Reading documentation or using SO * Basic command-line debugging or even using print() statements! I've asked a few times: "How did you get anything done before?". And (S)He re…

$10k/month gives you pause? that’s intern wages. so that you hired a low skilled person gives you pause? it should.

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#364

Post by techslave »

bob33212 wrote: post #183
alasdair_ wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just realize it's not going to be anything like a giant tech firm, where you don't realize they actually do 99% of the job for you. This. So much this. All those teams of devops people, the SREs, the QA people, the network engineers and all the other unsung heroes don't exist in a startup yet the people who only ever worked at BigCo assume that they do and so forget about all of the problems involved in building a…

I almost got burned by this. The COO of the company basically asked my why I wasn't getting anything done. I had to be direct and say that I'm happy to spend 100% of my time coding new features, but he is going to have to answer the phone when a customer says the site is down, because I will be too busy coding.

at least there is a customer. you need to prioritize in a startup and your COO is telling you that you have the wrong priority. it’s not useful to have a reliable monitored system that no one uses.

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#365

Post by war1025 »

TurkishPoptart wrote: post #359
GuiA wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Financial Independence/Retire Early The core idea is to define your annual expenditures (let’s say $50k), a long term investment strategy you personally feel comfortable with (say 5% ROI), and from there you can deduce the amount you need to save to be financially independent (in this case, $1M).

What do they tend to recommend in terms of generating passive income? Just investing in index funds and high dividend-yielding stocks (Ford, AT&T)?

Mr Money Mustache [1] advocates just investing in index funds. Others push things like real estate. Really depends on where you interests and talents lie.

A common thread that these people tend to find though is that once you've saved up that much money, what you have actually learned is how to efficiently grow wealth, and I have seen very few examples of people actually just stopping there and coasting. Usually they just keep on trucking, maybe shifting into a different field.

[1] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#366

Post by cubicmeter »

OnlineGladiator wrote: post #8

> First, what is the environment like for exiting high-level former-FANG employees? For most employers, it will be a positive. There may be a handful of very small startups that see it as a negative, but the reality is a very small startup is so different from a giant tech firm that the hiring team is probably correct in assuming you've never had to do something incredibly arduous without enormous support (I once had…

" Starting a company is much harder than you think it is - no matter how hard you think it is; it's harder." This is very true, I wish there was an easier way to start.

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#367

Post by cortesoft »

wil421 wrote: post #225
lotsofpulp wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Beginning in 50s, health insurance alone is $25k per year in premiums with after tax money plus ~$13k out of pocket maximum per year. Don’t know how a couple can afford to forego that, especially if they have assets that can be taken, the hospital will come for them.

$25k is a bogus number. I know several self employed people. The highest earner is paying $900 a month and the other is paying $800 for 2 people. Another person I know who is 1099 and makes less than $30k is paying about $75 a month. Personally I paid about $30 per month working part time as a waiter in college making about $20k a year.

How old are they? Insurance gets a lot more expensive as you get older.

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#368

Post by war1025 »

satokema_work wrote: post #332
nvarsj wrote: post #149

These kind of posts keep making me think I should go work for a FAANG so I can actually retire one day. Anyways, as someone on the other side, who has never worked for or applied to FAANG, I have a few reactions. First, your salary is absolutely ridiculous. I know hard working people who have built their own businesses with blood and sweat, and they still don't make as much as a slacker engineer at FAANG. So I'd say…

I've been told more than once that your average Midwestern software engineer blows your average west coast engineer out of the water, but never seen it elaborated on like this. Tooling does make a great difference - I was shocked when I had a coworker actually speak out against automating mundane git commands.

Upvoting for the boost to my Midwestern ego :)

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#369

Post by war1025 »

techslave wrote: post #363
whitehouse3 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small-medium sized businesses without dedicated devops people. I'm working with an ex-Googler who struggles with basic dev stuff like * How to make a Python environment for a brand new project * Source control basics like commits and merging * Reading documentation or using SO * Basic command-line debugging or even using print() statements! I've asked a few times: "How did you get anything done before?". And (S)He re…

$10k/month gives you pause? that’s intern wages. so that you hired a low skilled person gives you pause? it should.

Outside the tech bubbles, that is an obscene amount of money.

The fact that that amount of money is regarded basically as chump change is something that is very strange to certainly myself and I'd guess most people outside those regions.

Re: Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?

#370

Post by taurath »

ramraj07 wrote: post #39
taurath wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boredom was the biggest thing for me at my startup. When waiting around for the business guys to make the right partnership for 3 months while you refactor for a demo for the nth time....

That doesn't sound like a typical startup experience though. Typically it's the opposite: too many things to do and the deadlines are always too short.

Yup, and I WANTED the typical startup experience when I joined, so I left once I could see there wasn't much traction, plus a few more red flags.
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