Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#21

Post by Immortal333 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:17 AM UTC

gravypod wrote: post #3

I've never worked at a FAANG company but, for when you do reach you do choose to stay are go, can you put a burner email in your profile? A lot of engineers at startups, like myself, want to work with talent that is skilled enough to get into FAANG bit too bored of the extremely glacial pace these companies work at. On a more on topic note: I've heard about, and observed, similar behavior from friends of similar comp…

I've never worked at a FAANG, too. But main reason I want to work at one is that ability to do project at a scale which is not possible anywhere. Few project are no use for small companies/startups.

For example: Optimizing compile time (no need to invest for extra 1 minute speed up), working on high quality labelled data (i came from ML background, this is not possible in most of startups), analytics on data (questionable ethically), working on Ad platforms, working on large scale system.

In the last, Imagine, even making simple changes have bigger impact on real world.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#22

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:17 AM UTC

schoolornot wrote: post #13

Non-stop VC funding and explosive growth usually lead to this. Eventually your managers aspirations get the best of them and they hire middle managers and those people hire program managers and the feedback loop continues. This excludes the "friends" I mean cough cough "colleagues" that get hired into newly created positions of power. Then you have reorgs which is a whole separate issue. I don't think there is anyway…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#23

Post by tehlike » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

I can only compare g and fb. I can say fb moves a lot faster for a bunch of reasons. Google infra is better, but most stuff is fairly slow because of analysis paralysis, fear of doing mistakes and so on. Fb is more like let's make mistakes and figure out how to fix them as we go.

The age also plays a factor, fb teams are much younger, people have much more energy.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#24

Post by ramraj07 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

Gigablah wrote: post #4

Answer: no. Take a look at the work life of FAANG employees in their APAC and India offices.

Any discussion on FAANG culture in India?

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#25

Post by ISL » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:19 AM UTC

Sounds like there might be opportunities to help your colleagues make the environment better, so that together you can work to leverage the awesome opportunities/resources present at those companies to both make the world a better place and make the company more money.

I've been reading/contemplating Willinck/Babin's book Extreme Ownership of late -- I think you might find some resonance there.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#26

Post by realtalk_sp » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:20 AM UTC

CoolGuySteve wrote: post #15

At Apple, the amount of debate, code review delays, and interdepartmental meetings made everything take forever. I once waited 2 months for a code review there. A feature I wrote and pushed for Leopard didn’t actually ship until Lion. Back then there was severe priority inversion, anything the desktop needed got delayed by iOS priorities but also the senior engineers with magic rubber stamp powers were working on iOS…

This really goes a long way towards explaining the current state of macOS.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#27

Post by perlgeek » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:21 AM UTC

I cannot answer your question, but I have an idea for you: Before quitting, maybe try to get transferred to a different team and project?

Maybe you just had bad luck with your team allocation.

That said, if it's the same in all other teams, I'd totally quit as well; not having a sense of progress is devastating in the long term. (And made me quit science, btw).

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#28

Post by TACIXAT » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:21 AM UTC

At Google things got done but it was slowed down from messing with testing frameworks, code reviews, and build systems (not that this is a bad thing, just not what you expect when you want to write code). Coworkers were all very good at what they did. Work was a bit boring and it was sometimes shocking how much work went into adding a button to a page. It doesn't really sound like what you are describing.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#29

Post by viburnum » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:23 AM UTC

I’ve been there. My evaluations actually improved when I stopped fighting the system and simply stopped doing any work. But actually accomplishing something useful for the world is the most satisfying thing you can do, so find a way to do that and also make a living.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#30

Post by neixidbeksoxyd » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 6:25 AM UTC

I think being part of a big company will always be like that. The 10x performers will get paid 1.3x and the .5 performers will get paid .8x, so if you're smart and not particularly passionate about your work it makes much more sense to be a .5x performer. Also, usually the codebases tend to be quite complex with little to no documentation since that kind of work is not rewarded. This means the hundreds of engineers who later work on that will take 10x as long to complete anything but it doesn't matter because the person who wrote it already got promoted and left the company. Then these engineers lose motivation as a task that should have taken 1 month takes 10 months, and that also brings productivity down. This is why I look for teams that use open source technology because there is competition there and if your documentation sucks no one will use your code or another competitor will take over. This is why I'm convinced places that use proprietary tech are going to fail in the future since the natural forces of competition will cause the internal technology to stagnate.