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

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

#161

Post by slfnflctd » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:36 PM UTC

jasode wrote: post #81

jupiter90000 wrote: post #49

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…

>So at least what I did is stop trying to put so much of an expectation on my job to fulfill me. I took responsibility to find and do things at and especially outside of my day job that did fulfill me. I'm not debating you but I just want to point out that your advice depends on the personality. It may even work for most workers but for some us, we cannot mentally "compartmentalize" the day job as the isolated 9-to-5…

Absolutely 100% this. I worked for several very large organizations, and I am one of those people who just cannot cope with what feels like the pure insanity of it all. I would far, far rather take a huge pay cut for a more sane life, and I did. The alternative is feeling like I'm slowly dying.

Another thing-- even if your job is 'easy', the commute, the drudgery and the psychological stress we've been discussing leaves people like me drained at the end of the day. So the idea of finding fulfillment in hobbies doesn't work out in practice, because the energy just isn't there. Everything feels too hard, and not good enough.

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

#162

Post by dtech » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:37 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #148

mavhc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This was Bezos' reasoning for making as much of their internal software available to the public via AWS, a) now it's required to be documented, b) it's now subject to competition, you know it's not the best if no one's using it.

This meme needs to die. AWS was always built from the ground up to be a new product not an offshoot from Amazon retail. https://www.networkworld.com/article/2891297/the-myth-about-...

Jeff issued a famous memo early on that mandaded public interfaces even for internal usage [1].

GP was talking how this improves reward structure, not about AWS

[1] https://medium.com/slingr/what-year-did-bezos-issue-the-api-...

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

#163

Post by psim1 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:37 PM UTC

This makes me sad because I'm sure I am doing about ten times as much work as you of a similar nature and getting paid one half of what you are. And there is not much either of us can do about it.

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

#164

Post by bob33212 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:37 PM UTC

pyb wrote: post #95

ransom1538 wrote: post #75

I remember talking to a senior person at FB (wears a suit on friday). I asked "how is hiring?". Their response: terrible. People like this OP game systems, know how to test, understands what the boss wants, know ahead of time the questions they will be asked, etc. They have gamed the entire system. So! They tend to get through the interview with ease. The problem is... now what. What is the next thing they need to ga…

What you are trying to say sounds interesting, but not entirely clear. Was the FB exec complaining that when they hire, they are getting what they asked for ? Ie people who are very good at tests.

They hire people who can pass algorithm tests, those same people once employeed game the performance review process. You can't fire them because they "meet expectations" but they also have no interest in maximizing their impact towards helping the company succeed.

For example, if the company gives you a goal of contributing to OSS you could add some feature that no one asked for and contribute 200 lines of code quickly. Or you could debug and fix a bug that many people complained about and that may take much longer and may be just a one line change. But your manager doesn't have the time to drill down into the details of that on your performance review. So the bug fixers looks worse than the feature adder during performance review.

You could say the problem is management for having a bad review system but as soon as they update the review system it will be gamed by the people who don't care about the company.

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

#165

Post by awelkie » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:39 PM UTC

peacemaker wrote: post #146

jasode wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>So at least what I did is stop trying to put so much of an expectation on my job to fulfill me. I took responsibility to find and do things at and especially outside of my day job that did fulfill me. I'm not debating you but I just want to point out that your advice depends on the personality. It may even work for most workers but for some us, we cannot mentally "compartmentalize" the day job as the isolated 9-to-5…

Just wanted to let you know that I'm exactly the same way. In fact, I've even thought perhaps I was the one with the psychological defect where I simply can't stand the 9-5 grind, regardless of the pay, status or type of work. No amount of hobbies, travel or social efforts have made a dent in the deep, existential dread I feel after only a few days in a "normal" job. Unfortunately, while I have had some successes wor…

I'm in the same boat as well, and I'm also questioning whether this mindset is something that is best to fix (e.g. through therapy), deal with ("suck it up, work isn't meant to be enjoyable"), or work with (by finding a fulfilling job). I'd love to hear from someone with the same mindset who's found satisfaction in one way or another.

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

#166

Post by draw_down » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:39 PM UTC

It’s a bitch, ain’t it? But for me, my job pays far more than I’d make elsewhere. Whenever I think about leaving, I have to answer this question: would the other job be better enough to offset the huge loss in income? I haven’t been able to honestly answer in the affirmative.

Having a tech job (really, corporate America job) is pretty shitty all around, I’ve found. Some times it’s more enjoyable than others, but that doesn’t last, always reverts back to the mean. You can rearrange the deck chairs as you like but I think focusing on pay helps clarify things. Ultimately it is why we work, even though many seem to hate admitting that.

I’m thinking of it like how PG describes working in a startup: you can compress a lot of years of career into a short time. I think he meant it more in terms of experience, but I’m talking about money. I’ll be essentially able to retire off 4 years’ work. Seems worth it in the end.

Moving around within the company can be refreshing for a while. Things will eventually revert to the mean as I said, but moving around can help alleviate the feeling of being stuck for a time.

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

#167

Post by saalweachter » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:40 PM UTC

So the only answer I can give you is "maybe?" because I don't really know how all FAAMGs operate and I don't know exactly how much productivity you are actually seeing.

I will say a megacorp feels much less productive than a startup, because of the amount of overhead involved. Meetings on product design, meetings to coordinate development, meetings to talk about how many meetings we have, a month spent writing perf reviews, launch processes that require buy in from three different PAs to change the color of a widget.

If you've also worked at a smaller company or a startup where you are one of five or ten developers given vast authority and responsibility for broad swaths of a codebase and you spend all day pounding out code, it can feel very unproductive.

The problem is that you can only have something like 20 or 50 developers working on tangentially related projects like that before they stop being able to work effectively.

If you have a software project that needs, say, 10,000 developers to pull off, what you end up doing is hiring 20,000-40,000 developers and having them spend half their time or so coordinating the development. This feels unproductive to the individual developer, because you could be writing so much more code, but it really isn't -- if you had all these programmers programming indiscriminately, you'd be writing a lot of code twice, not writing some code that's needed, and writing a lot of the wrong code. It'd be a mess.

Of course, sometimes things are broken, globally or locally in a megacorp. Sometimes the planning goes out of control and too little actual work gets done even by megacorp standards. Sometimes a project is actually a small project and you have a team of 40 developing something that could actually be developed by a startup of ten. Sometimes things go wrong.

The point being: if you feel like a cog in a machine, well, you're always going to feel like that in a megacorp. But do you feel like a effective cog in a machine that's doing something important? If you don't like being such a relatively small fish, you might want to go back to a smaller company. If you don't feel like you're making a meaningful contribution, even accounting for the necessary overhead, or you don't like what you're contributing to, consider another job in a different or different part of a megacorp.

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

#168

Post by freeone3000 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:41 PM UTC

cliff_badger wrote: post #150

plafl wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I doubt proprietary tech is going to fade completely, but it's true that maybe there are forces that are pushing for big companies to make more and more projects open source. If you think about it it makes sense: the employees are happier…

I think you're incorrect, although I hope you're not. This idea will never become a reality for the vast majority of companies, for the exact same reason that companies fear piracy. If I open source my product then anyone who uses that open source code is a lost sale. A lost sale means I make less money, less money means the board is mad, on and on and on... The bottom line is money, and open sourcing their code mean…

A counterpoint is that companies making money through sale of software code alone is the lowest ever. Google loses nothing from open source, as they sell nothing. The biggest companies have moved to SaaS stacks or enterprise sales models. We're seeing less value in the code itself, so the release of it is getting easier every day.

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

#169

Post by ChuckNorris89 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:42 PM UTC

cyberdrunk wrote: post #158

foldr wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right about the underpayment, but you're underestimating the challenges of finding good remote working opportunities that pay more. For one thing, 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.

> 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…

If I may ask, how did you find those six figure remote jobs?

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

#170

Post by ninkendo » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 12:43 PM UTC

oliv__ wrote: post #126

chasd00 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bookmark this and come back in 20 years. your life should be fulfilling not your job.

I honestly don't see how a life could be fulfilling if you hate or even just don't care for what you spend most of your time on (work)

You're not always in control of whether your job is fulfilling. Maybe you've been lucky so far, but it's unlikely to last forever.

A piece of advice: The moment it stops being fulfilling for you, you may get the urge to change jobs to something that you think will make you happier. You may change jobs several times trying to rediscover that initial feeling that made you satisfied with your work. But it may never come back. And if it's anything like my situation, in the end, the first job you left may have been the best of the bunch, and you come to the realization that the original satisfaction you had was a fluke and you may never find it again.

There's two ways you could go about fixing this. One is to keep job hopping until you get something that was as good as the first job. The other is to accept that it's just a job, and to try and not derive too much of your happiness purely from work. (Or, more generally, try to not derive too much of your happiness from anything you can't control.)