201–210 of 449 posts
I was a E5 security engineer at Facebook. Left after 4 years because I married a Canadian, was sick of living in the bay area and FB had no way for me to continue working where I wanted to live. I enjoyed the job a lot but non-career stuff (including allowing my wife to start her career after finishing her PhD) was a higher priority. I moved to Canada and spent two years working remotely as a security manager for Ube…
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The first time I built a business, I made the same mistake as the OP: "Then, it struck me: what if ingredient parsing was the business? If this was a problem for me, then surely other developers struggled with it as well. Hopefully, some of them made money and would give some of said money to me if I solved their problem. Thus, the idea was born for Zestful, my ingredient-parsing service." Before starting to write a…
This is a great argument for entering into an existing market, rather than trying to find a new one.
I suppose that this is still entering an existing market since the people who comprise the market exist already exist, but it's new in the sense that this group of people collectively have a need that isn't being met. And sometimes the goal of market research is just to find one of those unserved (or underserved) markets.
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…
Thanks for sharing your experience Michael in that blog post. Can I read that "$200k paid in case" as in all paid off without loans even from family/friends? If so, $200k seems like a high saving amount considering average American household are in credit card debts. In other words, Google job did pay really well with RSUs and bonuses so that you can save up to buy house in one shot?
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Congratulations on making Staff after only 2 years. You’d think it would be alarming to Google how often engineers leave immediately after being promoted.
What's the benefit of waiting for promotion and then leaving? Any benefits you gain from that? Naïvely I'd assume it'd make sense to collect some of the extra cash for a while.
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…
You have no idea how much the people of Vermont appreciate this. Be sure to tell all your friends who want out of NY how great Western MA is. ;)
Moved back to Atlanta after five years at YouTube in SF to be close to family and afford a house. Discovered that Square has an office here, saving me from a descent back into Corporate IT. Haven't looked back. We're hiring :-)
In what part of Atlanta is Square’s office?
- Agility. Snap moves 10x faster than amazon/ms.
- Small size. Our dev community is so much smaller than Fb etc. Last quarter our reported user count was around 188MM? So the amortized # of customers influenced per dev is very high.
- Ownership. I am the tech lead for all of analytics in snap (an uber lead as we call it). In Dynamo I was the TL for the storage part alone, my other offers from fb/twitter/oracle et al were around running parts of their machinery. Nothing came close to the extent of ownership provided by snap. An L1 in snap owns 5x of what an L1 would own in FAANG.
- Rest of the benefits remain equal / better: You are surrounded by smart people, you have hard problems to solve, perks, benefits and comp are very equivalent to / better than fang.
That's pretty much what I tell people during my job sells / interviews as well! If you are looking for the above, you can't beat small companies. On the flip side - FANG do have the scale very few others can only dream of reaching (dynamo did millions of qps per region and ran in 10s of regions). I am obviously hopeful we will make snap that big :)
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Congratulations on making Staff after only 2 years. You’d think it would be alarming to Google how often engineers leave immediately after being promoted.
What's the benefit of waiting for promotion and then leaving? Any benefits you gain from that? Naïvely I'd assume it'd make sense to collect some of the extra cash for a while.
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Contractors still do a bit better than employees, though HMRC keep talking about seriously cracking down on the practice.
Cracking down seems like a bad idea.. you lose dynamic flexibility on both sides. What would the upside be?
I served at Google as an SRE for 2+yrs. I burnt out and ragequit. Now I'm an SRE at a startup. I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true.