Ask HN: What are the downsides of working at FAANG?

Interviews at google seemed 50/50 split leet code (or interviewer showing off being clever) and reasonable questions.

I recall thinking that my MS interview questions seemed perfectly reasonable, but that was too long ago for me to recall specifics.

As a someone who has been the interviewer I think that people really don’t understand what whiteboard interviews are doing, and a number of claimed “leet code” questions are not. Part of it is that if you’re interviewing at Apple or MS knowing basic algorithms and complexity analysis is important because working at those companies you will be the one implementing such things so other developers don’t have to.

A lot of what people are calling leet code on HN, Reddit, etc are what I would consider foundational knowledge, not anything crazy.

Politics: present at all companies, big and small. My wife worked at multiple startups and the politics and behavior were vastly worse than she experienced anywhere else outside of academia.

Bureaucracy: this is kind of true, but good management tries to minimize it. Across multiple roles that only real bureaucratic problems I ever had were disclosures, and generally they either happened immediately or I didn’t actually need them. Some bureaucracy that you definitely get at bigger companies is HR related, but oftentimes that’s because small companies don’t have dedicated HR. That can lead to serious problems of it’s own.

Impact: far too team specific, certainly at a smaller company you have the potential to have a greater impact on the business itself, but you also have a lower probably of having impact outside of the businesss.

Work/life balance: outside of crunch periods I never had any work/life balance issues. Those are much bigger issues at small companies and startups. Generally what I see is that when people come into a FAANG straight out of college they still have the college “100% work all the time” mentality. They also don’t have experience in actually releasing software: it takes time to learn to actually realize that not everything is “must ship critical”. It took me a few years to get to “this bug does not actually impact users, so it is ok to punt to a follow on release”

The big thing to note is that politics and similar is a /much/ bigger issue outside of engineering: program management and organizational management tend to have an element of “we have to fight about who gets resources”. But again IME the FAANGs I’ve worked at have many more systems in place to limit that. When it goes wrong is when you have politics at high levels in the organisation: VPs, etc. Geberally though in IC positions you’re insulated from that by distance - but at smaller companies that distance is reduced and becomes sad.

If you're applying to, say, Google, you do this once then have a very well-paid job for life (theoretically). That, to me, is a good trade-off.

Just work remotely.

It's more about "who you know" than you might realize.