Ask HN: What are the downsides of working at FAANG? • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by amerkhalid » Tue, Jan 18, 2022, 4:17 PM UTC

olliej wrote: post #51

romanhn wrote: post #9

Leetcoding is certainly a big one. Having to jump through performative interview hoops is a tough pill to swallow for experienced folks. Took me many years to put my feelings aside and recognize it as the current normal. Otherwise, plenty of reasons, many dependent on specific companies. Some examples based on both first-hand knowledge and hearing from others: Facebook/Meta - tough performance culture, bad work-life…

I’ve gone through multiple interview processes with apple and never dealt with leet code. 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 under…

I have been practicing leet code on and off for a bit. I understand all data structures and algorithms that these interviews supposed to cover. I can explain and teach these concepts to others.

But leet code questions are still riddles to me. I have also been watching videos of some famous programmers solving leet codes on YouTube and even they get stumbled and take almost an hour to solve some of these questions.

But once I have seen a solution and memorized general approach, I can solve it under 20 minutes. To me, leet code is more about memorization than actual problem solving skills.

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

#62

Post by romanhn » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 5:40 AM UTC

gaws wrote: post #55

romanhn wrote: post #9

Leetcoding is certainly a big one. Having to jump through performative interview hoops is a tough pill to swallow for experienced folks. Took me many years to put my feelings aside and recognize it as the current normal. Otherwise, plenty of reasons, many dependent on specific companies. Some examples based on both first-hand knowledge and hearing from others: Facebook/Meta - tough performance culture, bad work-life…

> Leetcoding is certainly a big one. Having to jump through performative interview hoops is a tough pill to swallow for experienced folks. Took me many years to put my feelings aside and recognize it as the current normal. 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.

Unless you're planning to spend the rest of your life at one company, your theory is not true. The next company is likely to follow a similar process, even if they're not Google caliber.

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

#63

Post by heurisko » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 6:51 PM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #48

heurisko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The original comment was an opinion that you don't have to spend time "mucking around" with "broken" open source components. 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…

I misread the original comment, apologies.

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

#64

Post by DiggyJohnson » Wed, Jan 19, 2022, 7:10 PM UTC

olliej wrote: post #52

logicalmonster wrote: post #18

For me, it's 2 big reasons. 1) Dealing with climbing the corporate ladder, covering your ass from backstabbers, and all sorts of company politics are bad enough to deal with in fairly small companies where you might have a handful of business relationships to deal with, let alone in mega-corporations where you might be working in one small project department with dozens and dozens of people and several layers of mana…

The mere fact that you’re calling it anti-whiteness and anti-maleness indicates that you’re not a person I would want to work with. You need to provide examples to back up your claims. Examples that aren’t simply “company is trying to recover from its historically racist and sexist recruitment policies”

This is exactly the sort of comment that makes me not want to work with you. Who are you to assume the role of the individual in a battle against companies with “historically racist and sexist recruitment policies”? From my perspective, the burden is on you to demonstrate that this isn’t a emotionally charged reaction to the current political zeitgeist?