41–50 of 64 posts
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Famous FAANG companies: Coca-Cola and AT&T.
You've either missed the principle discussed here or are being willfully disingenuous.
Software has almost limitless potential to improve people's lives and personally I prefer to use whatever talents I may have to that end. It doesn't pay as well as adtech, fintech or social networking (though here in the UK the difference is far less than in parts of the US) but it can be much more useful and/or interesting.
My manager called me in to his office. I had to sign an NDA before he would even tell me what it was about. I was getting assigned to a secret, hush hush, project. Something exciting and new. I was to work on... The Fire Phone. Later, when my manager joined the program too I got to demo the Fire Phone for him. I could see disappointment in his face as he asked me - "Will you use this phone when it comes out?" I told…
I've never worked at a FAANG, but still this resonated with me. I'm 20 years into my software engineering career, and if I'm being honest, I've accomplished nothing. Literally, not one project I've ever worked on has seen any significant deployment or had any notable impact on the world, not even my small part of it. Just project after project that's ultimately abandoned or shuttered. Sometimes the company goes under…
But maybe I just have low expectations or am in the right line of work.
My relatives work at Amazon and Netflix. None of them have time for anything other than work. The culture at those places seems unbelievably toxic. I am the same age as them, make more money, live in a more pleasant place (i.e. not an overpriced West Coast city), and have a lot more free time and freedom. I did this by working at (or starting) boring lifestyle software companies that sell for $10-100M.
My relatives work at Amazon and Netflix. None of them have time for anything other than work. The culture at those places seems unbelievably toxic. I am the same age as them, make more money, live in a more pleasant place (i.e. not an overpriced West Coast city), and have a lot more free time and freedom. I did this by working at (or starting) boring lifestyle software companies that sell for $10-100M.
Surely you recognize that the odds of getting into a FAANG are higher and the process more repeatable than starting and selling multiple businesses for $10-$100m...
Yes, I do realize that. I meant that I have always made better money than people in Silicon Valley make (when adjusted for inflation), and I did it while working for these types of businesses.
Nowadays I do start my own, but if I were just a salaried tech worker, I would still be working fewer hours and have more spending power than someone working for Amazon or Netflix.
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> You don't spend nearly as much time mucking around with broken open source components. I was recently frustrated with a poor quality open sourced FAANG library. At one point the error message was something like "Successful: operation failed." There are also the cases where services are just built on open source components, then branded. I have much preferred working and integrating with open source components, as w…
The experience between "using a thing that a FAANG company threw over the wall to the OSS community" and "using a FAANG's developer infrastructure, which is staffed by a team of developers, as well as an on-call team with a 5-minute response time for large issues, and highly responsive mailing lists or chat rooms for individual issues or questions, and whose code is visible to most employees and accepts contributions…
We raised several issues, including the one I mentioned.
They were put on the backlog several months ago, and haven't been looked into yet, although I mentioned they were a blocker.
I also have to chase up some unanswered emails.
The original comment was an opinion that you don't have to spend time "mucking around" with "broken" open source components.
My experience has shown that just because something is provided by FAANG doesn't mean the experience is necessarily any better.
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The experience between "using a thing that a FAANG company threw over the wall to the OSS community" and "using a FAANG's developer infrastructure, which is staffed by a team of developers, as well as an on-call team with a 5-minute response time for large issues, and highly responsive mailing lists or chat rooms for individual issues or questions, and whose code is visible to most employees and accepts contributions…
We have company support from FAANG, without mentioning which specifically. The library is an SDK used to interface with one of their core products. We raised several issues, including the one I mentioned. They were put on the backlog several months ago, and haven't been looked into yet, although I mentioned they were a blocker. I also have to chase up some unanswered emails. The original comment was an opinion that y…
Right, like I said, there's a difference between the level of support you're receiving and what the internal infra receives. Your experience is totally unrelated to the developer tooling teams at FAANG. Those teams don't, generally speaking have external clients, and when they do they don't have the same support requirements.
It's like if I said "I really enjoy the concierge service I get as a premium partner of my credit card company" and you replied that you didn't get that perk. Sure you don't, but I do as do the other people who pay for it.
Your experience as a not faang engineer doesn't provide any insight into how things work internally, and it's really weird to say that they are wrong. Or on other words, yes, FAANG companies can provide different levels of support for things. In the case of they're internal dev tools, the support is better (and a lot of the tools are generally better, although GitHub is finally catching up)
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I prefer not to break NDA's or risk doxxing at this time, but here are 2 fairly recent examples that have leaked in the mass media from large corporations. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/coca-cola-accused-of-re... https://nypost.com/2021/10/29/att-offers-staff-critical-race...
I don't doubt that racism like this sneaks into D&I presentations, but I have to call out that the sources are the Daily Mail and NY Post--both are known for bias and not being especially reliable sources. At the same time, I don't think more authoritative, centrist news outlets would cover this story, either.
Upsides: pay is decent, a number of really smart people there, good places to learn.