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

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411–420 of 449 posts

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

#411

Ex-Netflix here. I was a senior dev at Microsoft and Netflix (8 years of professional experience) and decided to switch to freelance for a variety of reasons. Eventually that turned into starting a company that provides a home for ex-FAANG (etc) devs that want to switch to freelancing. Facet Development is a freelancer network made up exclusively of ex-FAANG engineers. Facet does the work of finding freelancing jobs/…

Is Facet only for senior devs or also for senior ex-FAANG data scientists?

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

#412
post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Company resources is clear cut, but what is company time for a salaried employee? Usually salary comes with an expectation of hours per week/month, and usually also comes with a software where you write down your hours, to track overtime, minus time, etc. So all the time you write down in that system, counts as companytime.

You've had this at tech jobs? I've definitely never had to track time at any of my tech jobs (nor have I ever been eligible for overtime .)

Yes, switzerland requires time tracking, including a requirement of certain break times if your shift is long enough.

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

#413
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to explain, not because of NDA but because of context specific things. Almost everything I do is open source, but can't fit into a comment. My only advice to people at BigCo is to make sure you have a good reason for doing whatever it is you're doing. Your boss telling you to do something is not always a good reason to do it. And make sure you have some kind of metrics that show your work is important. If y…

So say my boss assigns me a task of questionable value. Should I really question it having been there for a few months, or would they take it as I don't trust their judgement? I just started recently and was considering leaving for a startup, but have decided to stay and see if it gets better (I have only been at BigCo for few months). Mainly I feel like I'm not really needed, and it's a long existing and complex sys…

I am not the OP, but IMO when you have been at the job for only a few months telling the boss that he is wrong can provide some seriously negative return. You may be right but not understood or listened to or you may be wrong (e.g., because you are not aware of something they take for granted, etc.) and reinforce the "fresh kid who needs a lot of handholding" perception.

I would either build credibility at your local team first (seems slow given the setup you describe) or find another group that is more dynamic. Look for energetic team leads that run impactful projects, talk to them (face to face) and ask what would it take to join their team. My 2c. Good luck

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

#414
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to explain, not because of NDA but because of context specific things. Almost everything I do is open source, but can't fit into a comment. My only advice to people at BigCo is to make sure you have a good reason for doing whatever it is you're doing. Your boss telling you to do something is not always a good reason to do it. And make sure you have some kind of metrics that show your work is important. If y…

So say my boss assigns me a task of questionable value. Should I really question it having been there for a few months, or would they take it as I don't trust their judgement? I just started recently and was considering leaving for a startup, but have decided to stay and see if it gets better (I have only been at BigCo for few months). Mainly I feel like I'm not really needed, and it's a long existing and complex sys…

Yes! Don't necessarily question it and get into an argument. But both you and your manager have a different set of context and view on what's really important to the team and organization. Neither of you is necessarily more correct then the other.

If it turns out your manager was right (which is likely given you've only been there a few months), you'll at least get more context to understand why. You can use that context next time

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

#415
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried selling your recipe parser to retailers like Kroger. Many of them are firing up features to order online and they’ll have pickers pull your order together so you can grab it later.

I think there's a bit of a delta between where my service is and what they'd need. There would have to be logic to do fuzzy matching from the parsed ingredient to the items in their inventory that customers can purchase. There are competitors in this space that are already far ahead of me in terms of building shopping lists from ingredients, so it would be difficult to compete with them. My idea was to start with sma…

Interesting! I’d been noodling with this idea earlier this summer while chasing a lawnmower about the yard. The SKU match seems tricky. Guess I’m way late to the party haha.

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

#416
post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is how the rich turn the middle class against the poor, by attaching shame to public goods. healthcare should not be means tested, but if you can actually pass the test then by all means do it. you are not better than anyone else.

Nah, I think you’re being pessimistic here. I’m not OP but I’m in the boat and I turn down public assistance because it’s not what it was made for and the system is strained enough...also, I wouldn’t judge anyone else for taking it.

yes it is me, the pessimist, encouraging you to accept free healthcare. not you, the ideologue, who so deeply believes in your place above the poors that you self-impose austerity.

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

#417
post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to explain, not because of NDA but because of context specific things. Almost everything I do is open source, but can't fit into a comment. My only advice to people at BigCo is to make sure you have a good reason for doing whatever it is you're doing. Your boss telling you to do something is not always a good reason to do it. And make sure you have some kind of metrics that show your work is important. If y…

So say my boss assigns me a task of questionable value. Should I really question it having been there for a few months, or would they take it as I don't trust their judgement? I just started recently and was considering leaving for a startup, but have decided to stay and see if it gets better (I have only been at BigCo for few months). Mainly I feel like I'm not really needed, and it's a long existing and complex sys…

If you've only been there for a few months, how do you even know that the task is of questionable value? I'd take it as a very bad sign if someone who's still relatively new to the team thinks they know better than people who've been doing this stuff for years. Trust that your teammates know what they're doing, and if they really truly don't (which is possible), find a better team.

It took me around two years in to start feeling comfortable setting direction and priorities at a team-wide level. Of course, I was making my opinion heard long before that, but it was just that, an opinion.

At only a few months in you're still an unproven quantity. Don't expect to be getting the most important projects just yet. Take whatever you are given and knock it out of the park.

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, it matters a lot. I got some great advice from a friend who was already working at a big-ish tech company (Dropbox) when I joined Google. She said the #1 concern when picking a team was to find a manager I'd get along with -- that that's more important than anything else. And it was good advice. Managers set the tone for the entire team, and I'd rather be on a friendly, collaborative, supportive team doing a meh project than be on a dysfunctional team working on something "important". Studies have shown that the #1 factor causing job dissatisfaction is having a poor relationship with your manager, and then #2 is having a poor relationship with your peers.

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

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I firmly believe that money is to buy things that matter to you. To me, not working at a corporation matters. Damn dude that is a very good way of putting it

Not sure I interpret your comment properly, but did you mean that you particularly liked the sentence? Or was there irony instead?

FWIW I interpreted their comment as unambiguously "liked the sentence".

There's helpful perspective seeing freedom from corporate work as something you're effectively "buying" with less income, rather than avoiding because "it's less enjoyable".

People tend to be quite loss averse, so reframing it as a feature you're buying rather than loss you'll accept can really change how it feels.

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

#420
post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Contractors still do a bit better than employees Curious if that is actually true when comparing to tier 1 banks/hedge funds full time employee salaries+bonus+retirement+healthcare. Assume 600 GBP/day * 22 day/month * 10 months (realistically) full time work, that's 132k/yr. From that take out accounting, illness, insurance, healthcare, retirement, travel, possibly more. All things considered, once you get above 10…

600 seems low - I earned a lot more than that back in the day, and that was a long time ago. A quick search of jobserve.com for just "java" found roles quoting up to 750 on the first page, and if you're any good that'll be negotiable. And if you get into even slightly niche things (Oracle Coherence, in my case) the rates are much higher.

I don't think it's very far from the reality of your full stack app developer though.

Ie. 900+GBP/day is listed rarely and for very specific/niche things.

Then, the more niche it is the more likely it is that the downtime between contracts becomes longer I imagine.

Curious what your anecdotal experience has been, to the extent that it can be shared.

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