Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why? • Hacker News Board

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

#231

Post by mtnGoat » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

romed wrote: post #163

thrwthrwthrwy wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What advice do you have for junior developers trying to make it? Is there a niched area you specialized in or were you a generalist?

How about: don't believe in yourself because luck is everything? I walked into Google with 15 years of industry experience. I lucked out being in the early days of the web, lucked out in the dot-com boom, lucked out with a referral to Google, lucked out with real estate appreciation.

got to appreciate the honesty! i've seen some peers whom i felt really sucked at tech rise through what appeared to be luck alone.

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

#232

Post by foldr » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:34 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #150

sjg007 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One thing that helps is that Western Mass doesn't have to be remote. If you're in Savoy, yeah, you'd better like nature more than people. But the Springfield metro area has pretty cheap rent and is still 600k people with colleges and companies and a great food and music scene up in Northhampton. It's also within tolerable driving or train distance of Boston if there's something you really want to get to. Working remo…

>a great food and music scene up in Northhampton

The food scene in Northampton is great by the standards of rural MA. There are only 2-3 restaurants there that are any good at all.

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

#233

Post by throwaway6119 » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

You won’t see a lot of ex-Apple people posting here because of the deeply-ingrained conditioning to never talk publicly about anything that goes on there, even after you leave.

I’ll say I liked the company in general. The rank and file engineers were smart and nice to work with, a real pleasure. But people were meaner and egos were huger the higher up the org chart they were, and I had to interact regularly (daily) with people 2-3 away from Tim.

Ultimately I made it 4 years, pretty much to the day my last stock vested. Manager said they don’t give refreshes, so I’m not going to take that big a pay drop to keep going there so reluctantly quit. I’d go back in a heartbeat if they weren’t so stingy with pay/RSUs.

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

#234

Post by Itaxpica » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

kevstev wrote: post #219

dunpeal wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't it be explained simply by relative sizes? Most estimates I've heard are that Google has over x10 times the number of software engineers than Facebook.

Looking at 10ks filed with the SEC for both from the end of 2017, FB reports 25k employees vs Google's 80k. There is no breakdown on how many of those are engineers, but I would assume that the ratios are similar. I was interested in looking, because that would be somewhat in line with the ratios I see in terms of resumes, though I don't have real numbers, it feels more like 15:1. I see resumes from google every week…

Facebook's NY office is also significantly, disproportionally smaller than Google's. Google's NY office is the largest outside of California and is in many ways a second heart of the company, it really doesn't feel like a remote office. Facebook's NY office is extremely small even considering that Facebook is a smaller company than Google (their largest office outside of California is, IIRC, Seattle).

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

#235

Post by gbustomtv5 » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:43 PM UTC

rizwan wrote: post #220

twblalock wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot-on, and it's also true in organizations without stack ranking. It's actually not a cynical way to view your job. If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? I've consistently seen that successful engineers focus on work that has an impact, and they are good at making it known. The first part is obviously good, but a lot of enginee…

> If what you do doesn't make an impact for customers and/or other teams in the organization, was it really worth doing? The problem is that, at review time at Google, you have to be able to "quantify" the impact. Many types of impact are quantifiable (e.g. "Made server request scale from 100 query-per-second to 1,300 qps", "reduced code size by 30%", etc.). It's much harder to measure, say, the impact of a refactor…

You quantified what you said is hard to quantify.

Measure commits/authors before and after a refactor.

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

#236

Post by jakevoytko » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:45 PM UTC

paulcole wrote: post #200

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…

Sadly a lot of what's featured on Etsy now is mass produced crap masquerading as handmade. I get why it was essential to the business. You can only grow so much as a small truly handmade market. Then it's OK to sell "vintage" clothing and on and on...

Yeah, I hear that. Growth is absolutely a factor, and fairness is another factor. Like, how do you define "handmade" without punishing people who get too successful ("oh no, I have more orders than ever and can't make them all myself anymore. Do I have to stop selling if I get help?"), and while still being simple enough that content moderators can fairly and reproducibly apply rules for listings that are challenged. You basically end up at one end of the spectrum or the other, "everything has to be truly handmade, and we're okay being really restrictive" or some variant of "authorship is really the thing we care about".

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

#237

Post by fizwhiz » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

SubuSS wrote: post #207

I spent about 7 years at MS and 7 in amazon - mostly around databases. Now I have been with Snap for about 3 years and it has been going great. My reasons were: - 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…

That stock tho.

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

#238

Post by mpweiher » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

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…

> money is to buy things that matter to you.

Yes.

> To me, not working at a corporation matters.

Yes. Don't see myself every going back. And don't have to.

"Money is coined freedom" -- Fyodor Dostoevsky

If your money is not buying you freedom...you're doing it wrong. :-)

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

#239

Post by awojtasz » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:53 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #205

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…

>Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts 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. ;)

Ssshhhh don't let anyone in on the secret! This is from a native! :)

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

#240

Post by awojtasz » Thu, Oct 11, 2018, 6:59 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #150

sjg007 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One thing that helps is that Western Mass doesn't have to be remote. If you're in Savoy, yeah, you'd better like nature more than people. But the Springfield metro area has pretty cheap rent and is still 600k people with colleges and companies and a great food and music scene up in Northhampton. It's also within tolerable driving or train distance of Boston if there's something you really want to get to. Working remo…

Wow, you know Savoy! I'm a native of the area. You're correct - my favorite towns are Ashfield and Williamsburg near the Northampton area. I'd make a plug for North Adams right now. Williams College is in the the next town over, and Mass Moca is driving a lot of development that has been quietly happening over the past year or so.