Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

> It may even work for most workers but for some us, we cannot mentally "compartmentalize" the day job as the isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slog and then use the weekend activities to make up for it.

Remember that the absolute majority of humanity are working soul-sucking slog jobs to get a salary to be able to afford a home and food and some nice things.

We who work in tech are extremely fortunate to be able to find jobs that are both very well-paying as well as fulfilling. Thank your lucky stars that this is a possibility for you.

I wonder if you are at risk of doxxing yourself with some peculiar typos and grammar mistakes.

Almost 9 years in one and been on several teams, and yes, this is kind of how they are. But you might be interpreting things wrongly. Here's how I look at it.

Firstly, you're measuring pace compared to companies that are struggling to survive, while these companies are not.

Secondly, the benefit to these companies of hiring boatloads of staff (89.9% of staff are newer than me and there are about 5 times the number of people now than when I started) is not really to get a lot of stuff done and done quickly; but instead the following:

1) More eyes on a problem means potentially less defects, even if it slows things down. Especially with giant systems like search or ads or huge social media sites a small change not well considered and done quickly could cause serious problems. Your job at this company is truly more like an engineer than a developer. You're not there to "develop", but to slowly and carefully engineer.

2) It's like firing a shotgun, something is bound to hit the target. You hire 80,000, 100,000 etc. engineers and one of them is bound to produce something genius. At least that's the theory.

3) The more brilliant well-paid developers you have internally the fewer are out in the market doing work for competitors. (Or worse, creating new competitors)

Having been through an acquisition and then seen others, I feel like #3 is most important to understand management behaviour. They simply cannot afford to have the market disrupted. Luckily for them most of our industry churns on this process: a) Get VC, b) Make something 'disruptive' c) Get acquired by the people you're disrupting d) Rest & vest.

While here I've seen some of the most brilliant engineersing and cleanest nicest code. But all done for rather banal and slowly implemented tasks.

... Also the process has surprised me, I've been on projects that felt like ridiculously slow and mismanaged progress was what was going on and then 6 months later and not really delayed there was this shiny beautiful product sitting on a store shelf with code in it that I worked on (a very small amount), and I honestly couldn't figure out how it got there because the whole process seemed so broken to me. And yet there it was, and it was good.

So for advice, what I'd say is this: if you're young and in the early stages of your career still then spend 4-5 years, dig yourself into it, learn what you can, and then _move on_. If you're older, like me, well, you could find your niche and milk it until you can retire. [Not sure I'll last that long myself, tho, I'm looking for something new now]

Honestly, you are surrounded by really smart people, there is a bottomless amount of knowledge you could absorb in companies like this, even if the work can seem unsatisfying.

EDIT: I should also mention that you should be careful about measuring productivty right now -- during this COVID-19 situation -- compared to normal times. Things are moving very slowly right now.

> why would an American company offer to pay me twice as much as I could make in the UK if I'm in the UK? They only have to offer a little bit more to inceltivize me to take the job.

If they have the money, e.g. they're a large corp or a startup with VC money to burn, they tend to not watch costs that closely and it should not be a problem. I've received multiple offers for six-figure remote jobs in the US (I'm from Eastern Europe) and so far only one offer for less than $100k - that one offer was from a small, profitable self-funded startup.

OTOH, if you're already making say $100k in the UK and want to double it by getting a $200k remote offer, then it's considerably harder. I'm betting it would require a lot of valuable and unique experience in your CV.