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

Ex-AWS. I joined when the service I was on was under a year old. It was a good team to be on inside AWS, in general.

That said:

1) I ultimately felt powerless to make changes. Hiring people in to the service was (at the time) proving to be a massive uphill struggle. It just wasn't one of the "sexy" services to be working on, and the ops team didn't have a dedicated manager who could focus on that. It left about 90% of my work consisting of two things. Compliance work, and region builds. Even outside of that, a lot of the things that slowed us down were things like established tooling that had seen _zero_ proper business funding until later in my time there (I some are drastically improved), and this absolutely absurd obsession with re-inventing the wheel in every single team to do exactly the same things, even when the task required months of engineering time (I shudder at the thought of how much money got wasted paying engineers to re-do the same work, and re-discover the same bugs and problems.) I ultimately had no power to drive things forwards.

2) One manager left, and the replacement had absolutely no interest in the operational aspects of the platform. They seemingly only felt empowered to say "yes" to managers above them. Even if that meant their team was working 80 hour weeks. (the manager has since left and things have improved, so I'm told). One of the things that got to be absolutely insane was the amount of effort involved in launching a region. It needed dedicated developer time, and that particular manager just didn't give a damn. That manager's attitude and refusal to work on operational concerns were a big source of my frustration in the team. Looking around AWS, all I could see were other teams that were in a worse operational position, suffering serious levels of burn out, and I just decided I wanted nothing more to do with it.

Here's a big tip: If you make operations a priority, you can land features far faster. You don't keep tying up staff doing manual stuff or fighting fires.

I left AWS and joined Oracle to work on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, for a number of reasons. Not least of which was that a former manager from the service I worked for in AWS is running the Compute platform. I knew him, knew what he was like, and trusted him when he said one of the most important things to him was keeping operational burden of the platform down. I'd learned to trust his judgement in AWS, and it's something he's continued to deliver on here.

I'll be honest, this is one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had. Better pay, better benefits than AWS, great co-workers, senior directors with their priorities straight. Managers that politely but firmly insist you take time off if you ever have to do extra hours (and follow through with you if you don't.)

Ex-Amazon here. I spent eight years working at Amazon in Edinburgh, on three different teams - a now-dead music encyclopedia to complement IMDb, a team doing recommendations on the Amazon homepage (we were the 'customers who bought X also bought Y' team!), and finally an ill-fated graphic storyboarding tool for Amazon Studios.

I'm now working at Sequentec, a two-person contracting company providing engineering services, primarily for wave/tidal power startups in Scotland. My boss, a veteran of the industry, is a mechanical/hydraulic/electrical/control systems engineer and general jack of all trades. I write C code for B&R industrial controllers, using a proprietary Windows-based toolchain. I also write a lot of Python to get logged data off the controllers and into databases, and occasionally I'm called on to do fairly random things - reliability analysis, network/VPN engineering, wi-fi antenna selection, wiring and soldering of sensors, and a lot of interfacing to serial peripherals with custom protocols. I've programmed atop a tidal platform in the middle of a large river, and on a gantry above one of the world's most advanced wave tanks. It's great.

I left Amazon for a lot of reasons: eight years is a long time for a graduate job, the culture had changed a lot since I'd joined (less of an emphasis on work-life balance, and growing from 30 to 90 devs meaning that I no longer knew everybody's name), and I needed a job with more flexibility (I now work effectively part-time). It was definitely the right choice for me, even though I took a large pay cut to do so.

I’m curious how much is the TC for doing stuff like this?

TL;DR - there are other things to optimize for than the maximum amount of money possible. It might not even be a sensible goal.

An extremely common theme heard from people with a lot of money is to get your money working for you.

Another extremely common theme is you hear from the same people is after a while they realized it just didn't make them happy like they thought it was going to.

Theoretically there is a certain maximum level of feeling good that's possible in a day. My goal these days is to optimize for that. I'm not there yet, but I can see a path to it. At some point the pursuit of money puts pressure against some of that happiness in one form or another. At least that's been my experience and observations. It's not an absolute rule but a reasonable hueristic.

If from an emotional perspective it wasn't possible to feel any better than you did, what would more money actually do for you?

IMO a lot of people need to dig much deeper on their 'why' for chasing the maximum amount of money possible. It's not 'wrong' to do so, nor am I judging anyone for doing it, I just think it's quite a one sided perspective that that should be the goal and that alone.

It's mostly about status and getting laid at an instinctive level. I realized this after already having a child, so I've technically passed on my genes and recently a vasectomy, so I can't even pass on any more genes. Yet my instincts are still the same. Chase after status, position yourself to be the fittest mate possible. We just can't turn those drives off, so once we've earned enough money and our happiness is no longer increasing as a function of getting more money at some point after that we actually hit an inflection point and things start to go the other way.

I can totally see how a roof over your head that can't be taken away from you and low AF overheads makes life feel like a breeze. That's actually worth a lot, just not in Dollars.

What are examples of things you took initiative on (without violating NDA or revealing personal details?) Are we talking about new major products/features? Did you join with past experience/at a senior level? What org/product area?