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Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

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51–60 of 449 posts

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#51
Ex-Amazon (and ex-Vmware) here.

Worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014 (Europe, then Asia, then USA), then Vmware (also USA) from 2014 to 2016.

I then spent ~1 year at a startup, as CTO - the experience sucked, and I consider it to simply be a big mistake.

1.5 years ago, I left that job, worked on a new idea, and in August 2017 I founded a startup, Fabrica, with two other friends.

I am still there. No salary. Bootstrapped until March, then raised some angel money. Doing ok.

I will never go back to the corporate world. I'm done with it. I have some money on the side, and I firmly believe that money is to buy things that matter to you. To me, not working at a corporation matters.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#52
post #2

Freelancing and consulting. It's fun, pays decently well and is fully remote. Left Google SRE because of how mentally draining it was, how draconian the IP clauses were (everything you create belongs to Google!), and how generally I didn't see a future for myself there.

Do SREs (i.e., site reliability engineers) typically write software? Are there many problems that software can solve for SREs?

The message emitted as marketing to the outside world about SRE's is that they spend at least half their time writing code - improving monitoring, fault tolerance, recovery, etc. Because being called out of bed sucks.

If that's actually true is another question of course.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#54
Ex-Amazonian, not in a software related position. I left for the same reason a lot of the fellow commenter did, internal politics, promotion / development and shitty bosses (two levels up, but that's where it counts).

For one, as great as Amazons Leadership Principles are in theory, in practice they are used more than a weapon than anything else. Once the higher ups have made up their mind about a person, no amount of feed-back will change that. In the end perf reviews resemble court-martial, except in a decent court-martial you are present to defend your self.

I realized that too late. Internal "voting rings" self-promoting members at the expense of other are aggravating this even further. I would still do it again though, only with a clear exit strategy from day one. Rough guideline, if you failed to get promoted or transfer internally by year 2 - 3 you are by default dead. A transfer buys you another 2 odd years of runway.

What did definitely not help was stock development. I joined in early 2014, initial RSUs have beem granted nased on 2013 expectations, the value increased by a factor of 10 by now. So AMZN had yet another incentive to reduce the number of employees in my generation of hires. And they did.

Funny side note, around two years after I left they implemented tje two high level solutions I proposed back the day and got axed for.

Since then I had two employers which didn't work out. Mental note: take the sabbatical immediately after leaving, failed to get start-up ofbthe ground and finished my studies.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#55
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I had really really had enough of my bosses Its curious how these companies claim they are totally different or even unique but just turn out to be the very same. >>I wasn't promoted when I figured I deserved it This is again one of those large company political things. Year long promotion packet building, lobbying your work with promotion committees, getting a willing boss, and doing other routine political ground…

Big companies are all this way, people don't realize it before they work in one - you are just a cog.

Also, in a big company, culture is not homogeneous. Your direct manager and team will create their culture, with mild influence from the surrounding corporation.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#56
post #48
post #23

Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…

Do you feel disconnected in Western Mass? I am not sure how remote you are but I live in a remote area now but work remotely and feel it. Hell, even in the Bay area I was remote-is since the commute was isolating. All I can say about the culture there is that you have to job hop to develop relationships that may lead to future opportunities. *Btw your cartoon on your blog is good. If that's your original creation you…

I don't, but I've only been here 7 weeks so far, so it's too early to tell. I'm pretty solitary, so I'm hoping the disconnectedness works out okay.

I wish I could draw those cartoons. I work with a freelance cartoonist named Loraine Yow (https://www.lolo-ology.com/). I wrote a blog post about how the process works: https://mtlynch.io/how-to-hire-a-cartoonist/

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#57

Does Microsoft count? It's in the same market cap as Amazon and Google. I've been consulting for the past year while I build a few side-projects, hoping they'll turn into businesses. I'm making more than I ever have before and this was only year one. My hope is the next few years the time spent marketing myself through blogs, podcasts, and some books I'm working on will pay off either to make raising money easier for…

Thats great! How did you start with finding consulting projects and building street cred? Has writing blogs bring you more business yet?

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#58
post #14
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even something you create in the weekend belongs to google when you are in contract with them ?

Like many companies, yes. However, unlike many companies, they actually have a process where you can submit your "weekend projects" for Google to review and "gain back" explicit ownership of them. Basically Google just checks to make sure it's not competing with anything Google's already doing, and then contractually assigns it back to you. (And anecdotally, if it does compete, you may be offered the opportunity to j…

This still kills the possibility of quickly collaborating with someone on a project in your free time. Any time you want to even start working on something together, you have to wait a couple of days for approval.

This simply doesn't work if you want to be active in a hackerspace or any other community where you iterate on projects quickly.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#59

I was a SWE L3 at Google for three years. I left after having similar problems with the promotion process mentioned by others. Since then, have moved from SF to Ecuador and started a humor publication explicitly making fun of companies like FANG ( https://techloaf.io ). It’s very cathartic...

Hey, uh .... why the f do I need to give you my e-mail address to read your stuff?

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#60

It’s strange that there’s nobody from Amazon here, just people from G

Two more Amazon comments popped up minutes after your comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193697

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193670

The reason why ex-Googler responses dominated for the first ~2 hours is because of timezones, I think. Out of FAANG, Google had the largest headcount on the east coast. The question was asked at 5AM PDT so the west coast folks were not up yet.

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