Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

> The film suggests workers have become liabilities not assets. Workers are costs that can be cut when needed

Makes sense to me. Most of the value creation in big companies has already happened, so majority of current employees are cost centers.

It also seems like most companies are one-trick ponies, despite what they would have you believe (I.e. Google still heavily relies on ad revenue despite having a billion other products), so they could probably cut a lot of workers and retain most of the value of their company.

It's especially important at a big corporation to actively take responsibility for your career, and ask your manager about what will affect your career. For a talented young software engineer, this may seem fundamentally uninteresting, and you may moreover feel humbled by the sheer amount of money they are throwing at you, so it is easier to avoid this task — and in any case you may be able to coast for a long time if they recognize your talent. Eventually, though, you will run into a situation where your talent and their evaluation of your talent diverge, and you may be blindsided by this, and even if you aren't you will need to make a real effort to realign those.

No one seems to train for this sort of career-self-management explicitly, and most engineering managers are actually not all that experienced or good at managing people. Many will try to make things more comfortable for themselves by being less confrontational and downplaying the negative things which will come back to hurt you later. As such, you should work to combat these anti-patterns, asking your manager on a regular basis questions like these:

- What are the company's objectives and goals for me if I am to remain in my current position? Am I meeting these objectives?

- How about if I want to advance in the company? Am I making progress on these objectives?

- Is there any feedback which I need to take into account which will affect my performance review?

- I have responded to earlier feedback; has my response been satisfactory?

Go over all of these regularly, especially the question of feedback (feedback is much more actionable if it's timely). When you're done, summarize to your manager what you heard, and your sentiment analysis of that. "It sounds like everything is on track for now without the need to make major changes, and I can expect a timely promotion; is this right?"

Take notes every time, noting the date. (They don't have to be long.) Keep the notes organized in one location.

I worked for Amazon (like you:) but that was 5 years ago. Things were a lot more breakneck then - but I can see how things could’ve slowed down with the 3x dev count now.

As many have pointed out, it depends on teams. I have seen engineers in retail whose sole job was ensuring data entered the catalog correctly through the input system and fix any errant data. I also saw teams like mine (early kindle / early dynamodb) literally perform magic. We launched dynamo across the world with a In short I look at FAANG as flexibility. you have a major life event, you will probably have enough good will to work it out with lighter contributions. You want to build bleeding edge software, you can do that too.

I’d suggest finding the local legends now, see what they are working on, building deep knowledge about it, ask for an interview and join them. In a big place like that, there are always movers and shakers - they are also looking for motivated and talented devs for their team, so it is mutually beneficial. It will only work with your initiative and a bit of luck though.

FWIW - I still have some of my old contacts there. Message me if you want a referral. Good luck!

This is meant to be helpful, but it does not help.

And you cannot say to someone that is depressed - most out there are worse off than you. It will not help with the depression.

Seconded.

I've been quite miserable in my day job for the last 2-3 years.. At first it was allright, but the shit just kept coming. I even started looking for something new late last year, but when the lockdowns etc came, I gave up on the job hunt, since my anxiety of "nobody is going to hire me" now had two companions named "who in their right mind would be hiring now?" and "i don't want to meet any new people" XD

Since jan or feb I've been getting up everyday at 5am to work on an assortment of private projects until I have to leave for my day-job at 9am. I love working on these projects, I used to play Overwatch a lot, but now my favorite pasttime is my non-day-job work.

I still would love to get rid of my day-job but just to commit even more time to my own projects.

However, none of these pay any bills, and so I toil away...

Oh yeah, and to top it off I meditate for 15 minutes in the car before I get in the office. Helps me alot against "the shit" that just wont stop coming.