51–60 of 648 posts
If you were on my team then low productivity would not fly. I see many teams at my FAANG company and all of them have very high expectations. The companies are big enough though that there are occasionally teams that don't hold up.
There were vast differences in the pace, communication style, and project success rate among them. There were very fast-paced projects with extremely sharp colleagues. There were small projects in contact with the prospective (non-engineering) users of the tool being built. There were slowish projects with some red tape thrown in. One project was outright canceled because of architecture not matching the changed requirements.
No, not al FAANG is "like this". No, every single company inside FAANG is huge, and very much varied within.
Walk around. Talk to people. Get interested in what other teams are doing. Do some research, because I bet the tools to look into other teams' work are there, as are informal internal forums. Find a better team, and migrate to it.
This doesn't directly answer your question and you didn't ask it, but I feel it relates directly to the source of your frustration potentially: you may never find a job that is fully satisfactory in terms of what you hope to find. I used to be in a similar boat striving to work towards and find some magical job that would make me feel fulfilled and purposeful. They all ended up having things I didn't like and would q…
I am working in a FAANG company, almost all the things slow the dev velocity down are originated from postmortem action items, new hire super stars stop complaining immediately after writing their first postmortems.
>Because of this, I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week. Sounds like the Change tool chain is way, WAY more efficient than my "20k+ employees corp but not FAANG" general career experience... Most places I've worked for (mostly mining/engineering) have a change process that takes 2-3 weeks to get something HURRIED through a change process. Maybe a non-technical role would suit you mo…
On the positive side, it was mostly relaxed, I could think about side projects and actually work on them after work, even though I "worked" more hours than the job after that. I think that's what kept me sane, but it was very refreshing to switch to a small company after that where you could get things done and generally mostly dealt with motivated folks you can get along with.
Worst story so far was from a high school friend who joined a 600k employees monstrosity. Getting almost nothing done because every fart needs to be approved but in addition a very toxic environment with lots of unnecessary conflict and dickery between different teams whenever they had to cooperate on something. Now it's a huge company and probably not all of it is like that, but boy I don't understand how he's still there and not completely dead inside or became an actual psychopath.
That is one premise in the film version of Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century.
The inequality in the distribution of capital that has been increasing since the 1970's, while wages stagnate, is at worst a trajectory that takes us to neo-feudalism, or something that resembles slavery, colonialism or caste systems. At best, it's a long-term recipe for social unrest.
FAANG is sitting on vast amounts of capital. Though FAANG employees may loathe the thought, it is arguable that, in the end, the market value is not based on the workers, it is based on the capital. Time will tell.
The relatively high salaries can be viewed as a protective measure to keep these workers from joining competing companies. We already know the FAANG CEOs, e.g., Steve Jobs, made pacts with each other on how much they would pay out for these workers.
The film suggests workers have become liabilities not assets. Workers are costs that can be cut when needed. You can decide for yourself, but when pacts are made to limit salaries, this to me sounds like limiting a cost, not limiting how much they will pay for an asset.
Taking a long view, thinking beyond simply my own welfare, I would have problems ethically working for FAANG. I do not see these companies as contributing anything towards solving the problems we are going to have as a result of the trend to which Piketty has drawn attention. If anything, these companies will be on side of capital not labour, and the "work" they do can be used to keep labour under surveillance and control.
Side question: Why is Netflix in FAANG? When people talk about the "Big 5" companies they have Microsoft, not Netflix, in there.
"I am not happy" - Yes you should quit. Keep in mind this year has been incredibly unusual in terms of productivity. All the issues you describe are opportunities to have huge impact on a global scale if you decide to solve any of them. But if you truly are disgusted by the state your company then that's not your path. I think you would likely thrive if you set your own path and work in an environment you built. You…
Switch teams? My experience were the first 2 years I was writing wholly new code and was able to write a ton. The next 3 years was all maintenance for new issues, requirements and I felt unproductive. Also, just in general it felt like my output went down 50% or more because of code review and tests. Those were all essential but up until my FAANG job no team I was on did that stuff (games). We'd just make the game an…
I think it summarizes a lot of office work. We're organized in processes which are efficient and/or necessary at the scale of the company, but which severely restrict and constrain us, making a lot of us unhappy.
For people for whom it's unbearable, there are two options: either join a small company or just check out completely, treat your job as some bullshit that brings you good money, be glad you're not cleaning toilets for 20% of your pay, and try to find fullfilment outside of work hours.