391–400 of 418 posts
I left "big corporate" after 8 years (AWS, VMware) of which last 2 as executive/VP, to join a young startup as CTO, and then founding my own company as CEO. Both experiences have been extremely challenging and/or disappointing, for multiple reasons. The startup I joined as CTO was a total disaster, despite a big series A and two seasoned serial entrepreneurs as founders, and it failed few months after I left. Running…
Xoogler here. Of note is the fact that your FANG "level" means very little outside of FANG, so if this is something you define yourself by, I'd think twice before leaving. If you've earned your stripes fair and square though, you'll be fine, although you'll be making a lot less money (assuming you're at least the equivalent of Google Staff SWE money wise; if you're 5 and below, there's a good chance you'll be making…
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…
> 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…
FAANG is about the worst preparation possible for starting a company. The skillsets are completely different, and in many ways diametrically opposed. I'd suggest working for an early-stage startup before starting your own (e.g., 5-10 people). Or step down gradually. Work at a company with 50-100 people, then 5-10. Companies and roles are very different at different orders of magnitude.
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…
Thanks for sharing that, good example! I have done well in my career, but for 20+ years working for large companies, I took Mondays off every week and had HR/accounting only pay me 80% of my salary. Later when I was a consultant, I would also take long periods off, like you do. I left money on the table, and I am fine with that.
Edit: Hey you are that Mark Watson! Truly love your blog!
Xoogler here. Of note is the fact that your FANG "level" means very little outside of FANG, so if this is something you define yourself by, I'd think twice before leaving. If you've earned your stripes fair and square though, you'll be fine, although you'll be making a lot less money (assuming you're at least the equivalent of Google Staff SWE money wise; if you're 5 and below, there's a good chance you'll be making…
L5 is 3-400k total comp. Expect to make more outside? Doubt it
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.
I was then told the new hire got up to speed faster than I had (no shit) and that this reflected negatively upon me.
I'm an ex pretty sr level exec at a few of those FAANG companies (we'll add an M on there to make that true). I transitioned out in 2016 to redesign my path and optimize for my quality of life. It's been the best decision I could have possibly made, though I'm not sure I could have made it earlier since the hindsight afforded by being in my 40s allowed for a far greater understanding of what was important than if I h…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> mature tooling that exists at FAANG I never worked at FAANG but even after more than 10 years working in tech, it still surprises me how undervalued well working tooling is. I'm not talking about 100% automation with infinite possibilities. Just really basic stuff, like deployment or setting up a development environment. That should always be a no-brainer.
I used to work at Google, and I find the tooling much better on the outside. Heroku is much better than Google's deployment tool; Github is much better than their review tool. The only things I miss are the snacks and the searchable codebase
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 feel like I've seen the tooling problem with a couple ex-Googlers, but more and more the FAANGs have started to sell their tooling as cloud products so the difference isn't what it once was.