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Downsides to working at a tech giant

blog.garrytan.com

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Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#441

Post by thesausageking »

Palantir built a lot of ICE's software systems. Among other things, when ICE was using children crossing the border to go after and arrest their family member, "the key place where that information was stored and communicated to be able to prosecute them was through the ICM and Palantir’s information sharing."[0]

I would encourage anyone to think twice about taking money from Gary or similar VCs who only care they lost out on $200m and not the many families that have been broken up and children imprisoned because of what their companies do.

[0] https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/08/20/palantirs-controversi...

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#442

Post by Alex3917 »

garry wrote: post #263
yowlingcat wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the pessimism in this thread bothers you, imagine how much your woefully out of touch survivorship bias and bothers everyone else in this thread? One of the top comments that responds to your post tells you that the math changed. This is true. The fact that neither you nor Garry talk about the concrete specifics of this means that you're either unaware of it, or worse, intentionally sweeping over it. You really th…

I appreciate this, and am trying to take this to heart. But it is also possible to survive. And if you do that, you don't merely survive, you thrive— that's what product market fit looks like. I've been lucky to see it dozen of times first hand, and it's nothing short of magical. When founders and teams pursue something without product market fit, it's a high cost to pay and a terrible outcome for most everyone. This…

> When founders and teams pursue something without product market fit

How do you know if you have product market fit until you pursue something though? The standard advice on this is completely contradictory:

E.g. on the one hand, you have the advice that adding more features will never result in product market fit, because most of the features will be too far down the funnel to move the needle and they won't ever solve whatever the core problem that's making the thing not successful in the first place.

On the other hand, you have the advice that you shouldn't pursue growth until you have good retention, which basically implies that you should keep working on the product almost indefinitely even without product market fit.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#443

Post by TheCoelacanth »

sneak wrote: post #237
commandlinefan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the moral of the story, as far as I can tell, is: 1) make sure to know the kind of person who can write you a $72,000 check as if he was leaving a tip at Starbucks, 2) impress him enough that he’s willing to offer you $200 million when you’re 23. I see now where I went wrong in my youth.

Surprisingly, these sorts of people are both not that rare and relatively straightforward to connect with. A year of low level engineer’s salary is, relatively speaking, not a lot of money in our industry/society, regardless of what that figure ultimately works out to as an integer.

There are 607 billionaires in the US out of 320 million people. You need to meet over half a million people to average one person with Peter Thiel's level of wealth.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#444

Post by georgeburdell »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #410
georgeburdell wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG pay has gone through the roof while startup pay has not. I am not a software engineer, but I still work in a field rife with startups. I don’t even work at a FAANG, but I do work for the industry leader in my field and I’m making a safe $250k annually after 5 years. I have gotten a few startup offers just to test the waters and I’m generally being offered $175k + $50k-$100k in stock options. Sounds OK if you ex…

> FAANG pay has gone through the roof while startup pay has not That's because FAANGs have been profitable and startups haven't, in general. There's no rule of the universe saying startups have to be unprofitable. A profitable startup can, in fact, pay through the roof.

Once again, I assert that the valuations are rising too high, too quickly, and so even if you are optimistic about profitability, you won't see a return that's worth leaving your golden beanbag chair at a FAANG. Why would I join a startup after an 8-9 figure Series A valuation for a 10-figure market? And yet, that's what my options were in my industry.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#445

Post by achiang »

malisper wrote: post #157

If you want a good reason to not join Google in particular, Google does not train their managers. When I was interviewing with Google, I interviewed around 8 friends of mine that worked or previously worked at Google. Lack of management training was a something that every one of them brought up. Two of them had even been managers at Google and basically said "yeah, we weren't trained". The way it's been described to…

All managers in Google (engineering and non-engineering) are encouraged to take a 2-day immersive course. There's a course for "experienced manager, but new to Google" and a course for "new manager" with content tailored to the two different populations. There are also many many many mandatory trainings that span the gamut from allyship and inclusiveness, to local laws, to how we do performance reviews and comp. In the first year alone, I would guess something O(~weeks) of these trainings.

There are also countless hours of opt-in training for pretty much any subject where you want to improve your skills.

In Google SRE, combo TLMs are considered to be an acceptable short term solution for team turnover, but not a long term best practice. TLMs are highly encouraged to find a different TL for the team.

In addition, all SRE managers (SRMs) are paired with an experienced manager as their mentor.

Ultimately though, apart from the mandatory trainings, no one can really force you to be a better manager. The big feedback mechanism is that internal mobility is very high, to the point where managers have essentially no power to prevent anyone from leaving their team. So if you suck, you will get bad scores in your own performance review and everyone on your team will just transfer away.

I called out the SRE-specific bits, and a few common practices, but it could be that there are different practices in other engineering orgs.

Source: I'm an SRM, and speak only for myself.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#446

Post by tachyonbeam »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #410
georgeburdell wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAANG pay has gone through the roof while startup pay has not. I am not a software engineer, but I still work in a field rife with startups. I don’t even work at a FAANG, but I do work for the industry leader in my field and I’m making a safe $250k annually after 5 years. I have gotten a few startup offers just to test the waters and I’m generally being offered $175k + $50k-$100k in stock options. Sounds OK if you ex…

> FAANG pay has gone through the roof while startup pay has not That's because FAANGs have been profitable and startups haven't, in general. There's no rule of the universe saying startups have to be unprofitable. A profitable startup can, in fact, pay through the roof.

> A profitable startup can, in fact, pay through the roof.

But most startups don't become profitable, most startups fail.

IMO, you should basically assume that any stock options a startup offers you are worth zero. Decide if you want the offer based on the base pay and how interesting/stimulating the work is.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#447

Post by debt »

thesausageking wrote: post #441

Palantir built a lot of ICE's software systems. Among other things, when ICE was using children crossing the border to go after and arrest their family member, "the key place where that information was stored and communicated to be able to prosecute them was through the ICM and Palantir’s information sharing."[0] I would encourage anyone to think twice about taking money from Gary or similar VCs who only care they lo…

Also, I think this point might be missed to some young people, once you work on drone software that kills people or ICE software that detains people, you cannot reverse your contributions.

That work will permanently be part of you and your career.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#448

Post by [deleted] »

TuringNYC wrote: post #350
austenallred wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and FB were paying less when they were founded than most startups I see today, adjusted for inflation. The difference is that now Google and FB pay way more . More than startups could ever dream of competing with. Everyone I know at FB or Google is making $225k+, with the average/median being around $300k/yr. Absolutely no way new startups can play ball with those salaries, and FB/GOOG certainly weren’t paying…

>> Google and FB were paying less when they were founded than most startups I see today, adjusted for inflation. You'd have to adjust quite a bit for inflation. The average rent has skyrocketed 300% since the time Google was a pre-IPO company. I would not mind a "low" Google 2004 salary if I could somehow also lock down a Mountain View 2004 mortgage. Also, tuition and student loans have risen. So while im at it, i'd…

[deleted]

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#449

Post by mavelikara »

Grimm1 wrote: post #401
jarjoura wrote: post #221

For all the startup founders and VCs in this conversation, you are cheap motherf*ckers. When I read that engineers and employees prefer FAANG companies because they pay better, I want to remind you that it wasn't always like this. 10-15 years ago startups paid way better than big tech. Big Tech rewarded you by getting to specialize on problems and working at scale. The reason FB and Google pay well is because when th…

The average turnover is a little over 2 years at BigTechCo so half of the people never see that 4year total compensation.

That _position_ pays that much over the 4 years, irrespective of how many different people filled those positions in those years.

Re: Downsides to working at a tech giant

#450

Post by tracer4201 »

Grimm1 wrote: post #411
tracer4201 wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I misunderstood what you’re saying here but I don’t think it’s accurate. My salary plus stock compensation has been $300K+ each year as long as I’ve been with my company. Of course there’s market volatility in RSUs but I have yet to take home less than $300K in any year during the 5 years I’ve been at a FAANG. I’m an engineer FWIW.

I may be inaccurate, I've been using sites like payscale to do the measuring here for averages. If that really is the case then RSUs are quite insane and I'd have to revise my statement. Edit: The sites I'm using make it seem like the RSU compensation is the one time grant for 100k+ over the 4 year period so if its really a 400k+ stock grant over the 4year period then yes there's really no way to compete with that fo…

I wouldn’t use Payscale or even Glassdoor. Levels.fyi is more accurate I think, although obviously some people definitely inflate their numbers, and there’s a self reporting bias.

FAANG total comp is crazy... obscene. I earn quite a bit more than one of my siblings who’s a doctor, and all I have is a bachelors degree.

All this does have a cost. Not counting potential monopolistic practices, ads being literally cancer, etc etc, the stress and anxiety level is high.

I don’t expect to keep doing this for 20 years. In 5 years I’ve learned a ton and still meet people who are way smarter than I am and have better judgement.

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