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

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

#151

Post by fernandotakai »

amyjess wrote: post #84
kamaal wrote: 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…

> 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 work to set you up for one. Honestly, I don't care enough about getting promoted to go through that whole rigmarole, nor would I quit a job over having to deal with that in order to get promoted. Of course, that…

that's exactly what i thought -- getting a "promotion packet" is absurd. your promotion packet should be the job you have been doing all year long.

then again, i hate office politics and i cannot see myself getting to close to this kind of big-company.

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

#152

Post by shimon »

mywittyname wrote: post #128
simonebrunozzi wrote: post #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 u…

How is running a startup better than being the CTO of a startup?

Not OP, but there are some common problems, assuming they were a non-founder CTO:

- Instead of leading an eng team, maybe CTO meant "our entire tech team".

- Maybe the founders sucked, or had personal conflicts.

- Maybe the business was broken in ways a technologist can't fix.

- Maybe the business was viable but this individual did not enjoy being a part of it. Could be anything from "there are too many salespeople yelling into phones all around me" to "the technical problems were not the sort I am interested in / good at solving".

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

#154

Post by rifung »

amyjess wrote: post #84
kamaal wrote: 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…

> 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 work to set you up for one. Honestly, I don't care enough about getting promoted to go through that whole rigmarole, nor would I quit a job over having to deal with that in order to get promoted. Of course, that…

> Honestly, I don't care enough about getting promoted to go through that whole rigmarole, nor would I quit a job over having to deal with that in order to get promoted.

Of course, that's also probably why I don't work at a FAANG and never will.

I don't think you should let that stop you. I work at Google and don't care about promotion. I expect that I will get it sooner or later but really don't care if I do or not. I get paid enough to live a decent life already so I prefer having the freedom to do what I think matters as opposed to what's good for my career since sadly those don't align as much as they should.

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

#155

Post by daveoflynn »

lemming wrote: post #119
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I was sitting next to people earning half as much as I was or less, just because I was a contractor and they were an employee. Was this still true after all the taxes, insurance, and stability factors are considered, or was this just your hourly rate?

As a contractor in the UK, I paid less tax than an employee would. HMRC brought in IR35 to try to combat that, but at the time I was contracting (early 2000's) most contractors were still paying less tax - I'm not sure if that's stricter these days. I was in London working in web & finance at the time, so it was a fairly distorted market. I did get bitten by the dot com crash, but even so I was only out of work for a…

Contractors still do a bit better than employees, though HMRC keep talking about seriously cracking down on the practice.

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

#156

Post by technofiend »

mtlynch wrote: 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…

To quote your article:

The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was quantifiable. I couldn’t prove that anything I did had a positive impact on Google.

If they hornswoggled me into helping them, it’s evidence of their strong leadership qualities. I was just the mindless peon whose work was so irrelevant that it could be pre-empted at a moment’s notice.

Don't take this as an ad-homimen attack because it's not. You fell into the same trap some other people do at stack ranked organizations.

These systems create evolutionary pressure and the people who thrive are those who adapt to the ranking system as much as the job. Right, wrong or indifferent the ranking system is part of the job and in the same situation the people I see getting promoted would have dedicated significant time proving anything they did produced value or they wouldn't have done it.

That's why (IMHO) it was so difficult to get anyone interested in changing our stack ranked system to anything else; because those who thrived under it were in charge of deciding whether and how to change and already knew how to succeed in the old one.

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

#157

Post by luisdfp »

jakevoytko wrote: post #26

I worked on the same team at Google for 4.5 years, and left 3 years ago. I was bored; I was getting better at doing the same thing, but I wasn't expanding as an engineer. I worked on a free product. We had no market incentives to make time-boxed decisions and could declare anything we did a success whether it was or not, which drove me nuts. I was at the New York office, so when the company got bad press you could us…

>"I'm not interested in technology for technology's sake anymore, but instead am motivated to solve problems that I think can be solved via technology."

Words to live by. :)

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

#158

Post by kevstev »

stuxnet79 wrote: post #142
kevstev wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in NYC, and hiring for a place that pays very well, possibly above FAANG salaries. I see a lot of resumes. A lot of those resumes are from Google, but very very few are from Facebook, and I find that to be a very curious thing. FBs office is not quite as large as Google's in NYC, but they have been around awhile and we are hiring out of both coasts and offer relocation. I am not sure if it is a quirk of our recr…

That's very interesting. I had a chance to possibly work at the NYC Facebook office which I didn't capitalize on, after reading this I'm having intense FOMO. Are you in Big Tech or Finance?

In a general sense, both. I am working in finance at a hedge fund now, but for a more or less pure tech group. My previous job was for a large e-commerce player, but before that I spent about a decade doing various forms of algo trading and HFT.

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

#159

Post by TACIXAT »

branksy wrote: post #14
jpic wrote: 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…

The assignment agreement took away all excitement I had coming to work for Google. It is so shitty. The two things I submitted to that process were rejected. I've kept on building stuff in my spare time (can't stop, won't stop), if they want to come after a side project that I made in my time, on my resources, with my ideas, and my code, that's their PR nightmare.

I cannot wait until I'm in a position to work on my own stuff full time.

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

#160

Post by bsimpson »

CydeWeys wrote: post #94
johan_larson wrote: post #7

I left Google after three years as an SDE because I had really really had enough of my bosses, I wasn't promoted when I figured I deserved it, and a project that meant a lot to me wasn't getting the staffing it needed to succeed. I left for a more senior position at a smaller, less prestigious software company, though I've moved again since. Right now I'm working remotely from Toronto for a Silicon Valley start-up. U…

My experience with Google has been the opposite, for what it's worth. I've been rewarded for, as an IC SWE, starting conversations with random people across the entire company to make things happen, and then executing on it. I even presented my launch at I/O this past May. I think it helps that I'm on a smaller team. So from my experience, it still very much seems like a "look for something that needs doing and do it…

It seems to depend a lot on your team and your manager. It's the first place I've worked where the vibe is: "you're clever: find something useful to do" from my very first day.
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