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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?

#401

Post by bogomipz »

GuiA wrote: post #250
schnable wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's FIRE?

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).

>" a long term investment strategy you personally feel comfortable with (say 5% ROI)"

Could you elaborate? Why would you need a level of comfort with an ROI? Or is the thing you need to be comfortable with actual the risk involved in getting that target ROI? Is that what you mean?

Also is the "million" you mention just a hypothetical? Although a million is a lot of money I don't thinks it's enough it's large enough to to qualify as being financially independent no? At least not in the US or EU. You would still need to work full time as it's not enough to retire on.

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

#402

Post by dsewnr »

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…

Good story. I'm just considering to change my career to seek a new job for work-life balance.

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

#403

Post by mark_l_watson »

sriram_malhar wrote: post #395
mark_l_watson wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Me too!!. As I said I was burnt out, but it wasn't an instantaneous quitting. I was offered a promotion to the of an engineering manager, and I counter-offered that I'd take Fridays off with no change in pay. Best goddamn decision ever. Every week followed by a three-day weekend! The downside is that you quickly find out how redundant you are when it comes to meetings and decisions taken! It took a few months to get…

Glad you like my blog!

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

#404

Post by melshay »

badfrog wrote: post #245

I left to work on tech at a trading firm. It pays more, and IMO the work is more interesting and less stressful.

I've toyed with the idea of working in fintech, but none of the job descriptions ever caught my idea. Can you describe your work and why you think it's interesting?

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

#406

Post by Spooky23 »

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.

For an average, absolutely. I can hire an engineer where I live for like $85k as an FTE who will develop into an above average one in a couple of years.

The difference is that certain talents and deep specialists only exist in the hubs. It’s similar to medicine where you want to go to NYC or Boston for certain diagnoses.

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

#408

Post by GFischer »

blablabla123 wrote: post #196
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…

> 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.

We're using Azure at my current workplace, and the amount of legwork you can get done is pretty amazing (as long as you're willing to pay for it). We have an ARM template to set up environments, deployment is painless with Azure DevOps, etc.

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

#409

Post by o-__-o »

ambicapter wrote: post #324
o-__-o wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was you, 5 years later I am working at a FAANG making 400k/yr Mind you I was making only 80k less at my last job, a non-FAANG startup. So not saying FAANG is everything, but the workload is sufficiently less than the mad max startup lifestyle.

What did you do in the 5 intervening years?

Worked for three startups then started my own. I got an offer from a FAANG company that I couldn’t turn down, so I put my company on pause.

Will probably return to my startup after I leave my current gig

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

#410

Post by GFischer »

nscalf wrote: post #284
blablabla123 wrote: post #196

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.

And it's totally reasonable that this isn't common place. The team I'm with now has been spending a lot of our spare time at work trying to get a suite of tools built out to make things like logging, message publishing, etc. spun up easily. It is very painful. The simple case is pretty simple, but if you add any complexity to it you're in for a world of pain.

Not sure what stack you're using, but Azure Application Insights is very nice for logging. And they have lots of tools for what you're mentioning (but you have to pay for them). If not, maybe you do have to build them (and it might be monetizable even!)
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