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?

#441

Post by rasikjain » Sat, Oct 13, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

pr0zac wrote: post #72

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…

Hi, interested in learning more about your security career. Your contact info is not on the profile. Would like to catch up. My email is in the profile :-)

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

#442

Post by candiodari » Sun, Oct 14, 2018, 12:13 AM UTC

rericks wrote: post #422

bsimpson wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently joined a FANG and this is something that causes me a lot of anxiety. Our repos are hundreds of thousands of lines of code; how on earth can I, as a new hire, decide unilaterally that something needs to be added or reworked? I'm not at a startup, and the company's mission is decided at a level far above my paygrade. I need some degree of management to know what to do. I'm also not a very social person, and…

At a very high level you're wanting management, but really you're expecting someone else to solve your problems for you. These companies don't work like that. You have to find a problem and hammer it down.

If necessary (but only as a last resort) spend an hour each day increasing test coverage. That is just something you can do that will probably also yield further ideas.

Second, if you're at google, get a mentor. They probably have an internal tool for that, maybe even something hr-like.

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

#443

Post by exikyut » Sun, Oct 14, 2018, 2:01 AM UTC

rericks wrote: post #422

bsimpson wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I recently joined a FANG and this is something that causes me a lot of anxiety. Our repos are hundreds of thousands of lines of code; how on earth can I, as a new hire, decide unilaterally that something needs to be added or reworked? I'm not at a startup, and the company's mission is decided at a level far above my paygrade. I need some degree of management to know what to do. I'm also not a very social person, and…

It sounds like you're trying to self-discover initiative. Initiative is not a first-class thing of its own; it's an outcome of, for example, staring at an inefficiency until you can't stop twitching.

But (to use my example) "efficiency" is relative. It requires a good mental model of what fits into what and how. So, to solve for that, you'd focus on absorption, and taking-in as much of the environment you can in as much detail as you can - oh, and focus on the most insignificant things the most. (The idea is to stretch your attention span and make it grow.) Endeavor to absorb at the same rate on day 100 that you do on day 1 (ie, replicating the way you react when things are new/interesting). Not perfectly achievable (I don't think), but that's the approach I've used to get my brain going in the right direction.

As for sociability, that's something that needs to be practiced in its own right to get stronger, like attention span. A bit like learning to use a new tool, you can't immediately be fast at it without some initial purpose-less practice. (Always fun to bootstrap those kinds of things...)

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

#444

Post by solarkraft » Sun, Oct 14, 2018, 12:00 PM UTC

ccantana wrote: post #195

dxhdr wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It lost me until I came back and read this comment; I did not think to click "the email." The page reads as a standard newsletter subscription form so I just closed the tab.

Helpful feedback, thanks. Just updated the landing page to make things clearer.

Thanks. Good content! I still believe you're limiting your audience by not running it like a typical blog. But it seems like that's partly what you want to do.

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

#445

Post by ejanus » Sun, Oct 14, 2018, 12:32 PM UTC

fermienrico wrote: post #111

CydeWeys wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't take the book suggestion to be naive/glib. It could actually be quite helpful. My brief involvement in a failed startup would have gone differently had I known more about the business side of things, and reading a good relevant book is one of the best ways to learn about something.

I strongly and passionately disagree. I’ve read many many startup books. They are all completely and utterly useless in my opinion. If you want to know something specific say accounting, read a book about that specific area. If you want to know more about the “general” aspects of startups - listen to interviews of founders about which unique chellenges they faced. I strongly discourage anyone starting a business to n…

I agree with you ,and I also share your opinion.

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

#446

Post by ejanus » Sun, Oct 14, 2018, 12:33 PM UTC

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…

Which part of web are you learning?

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

#447

Post by technofiend » Mon, Oct 15, 2018, 1:31 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #290

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…

Actually it is deeply cynical I have seen: People aggressively going for promotion and as my team leader said "but he hasn't done any real work for 6 months". I saw some one going for the first management level spend a million pounds of share holder money and 15 man years redeveloping a system in oracle - Because having a project worth > 1 million and with more than 10 staff was a tick box for promotion.

What is deeply cynical is the guy who discovered the corollary to "Never do work unless you can prove its value" which is "If you can disprove the value of someone else's work so much the better." He literally took notes on every employee of his peers and then trotted them out for negative feedback during the end-of-year ranking process.

The resulting brinksmanship guaranteed his employees were ranked exactly the way he wanted. Ironic but he's now the head of a recruiting agency that purports to find top candidates via "big data" techniques yet he did his very best to subvert the system. So what exactly does he think he's datamining?

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

#448

Post by rockyj » Wed, Oct 17, 2018, 1:46 PM UTC

dhnsmakala wrote: post #378

amirathi wrote: post #268

Ex-Amazon engineer here. Worked for ~4 years in the Prime Music team. Contrary to popular belief, I had incredible time at Amazon. Learned a lot, good work life balance, progressed to L5 etc. Primary reason I quit is to start something of my own and not live under a draconian H1-B visa that treats people like second class citizens (will save H1-B rant for some other time). What am I doing now? I enjoy building dev to…

$2k/mo seemw very high for India (I'm not too familiar), are you supporting a family/spouse as well or is New Delhi just expensive?

I do not think so. Yes, it is ok if you are single but in India and earn 2k/mo, but remember everything is paid for and conditions are not very friendly. e.g. In Delhi you will most likely need a car (unless you WFH or live next to the office) and the fuel prices are among the highest in the world. You have to pay and save for your kids education (which can be pretty steep). Because of the heat and pollution, you have to invest in air-conditioning, air-purifier, water-purifier and the list keeps going on for a comfortable life. Also no health or social safety net means you have to maintain decent savings at all times.

Finally, the real inflation (not the official one) is high and any saving could potentially be worthless in a few years (except real-estate which is why it has absurd prices) which also means owning a home is quite hard.

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

#449

Post by gwbas1c » Wed, Oct 17, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

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…

> It's a place where you do what you are told

In my career experience, that has more to do with understanding what really needs to be done, and what brings value to the company.

I'm sure I've made some junior engineers feel that way after they tried to pull me into a long argument about brace styles, or after they wanted to refactor years of working code to use their favorite framework.