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

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

#241

Post by blaser-waffle » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:40 PM UTC

abhv wrote: post #111

At apple, you cannot browse internal resources. At fb and google, it is called SWE instead of SDE. Amazon has SDEs. (perhaps netflix too?) Although you might be smart enough to know that and misdirect. Even at the best universities, best tech companies, best startups, you will find pools of miserable and unmotivated people. Don't get stuck. There are brilliant people everywhere and certainly at faang. Find them, lear…

> There are brilliant people everywhere and certainly at faang. Find them, learn, and seize your opportunity to have an interesting life.

You mean interesting career. That may impact your life -- may. I've known a lot of STEM types who made good money, worked 60 hours a week, hated their lives -- but they had a good career! -- and eventually moved on to something else.

Don't lose sight of that career/life divergence. Being at a FAANG gives you access to a lot of good opportunities, but they're only good if they can get you the lifestyle you want.

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

#242

Post by blaser-waffle » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

blaser-waffle wrote: post #241

abhv wrote: post #111

At apple, you cannot browse internal resources. At fb and google, it is called SWE instead of SDE. Amazon has SDEs. (perhaps netflix too?) Although you might be smart enough to know that and misdirect. Even at the best universities, best tech companies, best startups, you will find pools of miserable and unmotivated people. Don't get stuck. There are brilliant people everywhere and certainly at faang. Find them, lear…

> There are brilliant people everywhere and certainly at faang. Find them, learn, and seize your opportunity to have an interesting life. You mean interesting career. That may impact your life -- may . I've known a lot of STEM types who made good money, worked 60 hours a week, hated their lives -- but they had a good career! -- and eventually moved on to something else. Don't lose sight of that career/life divergence…

edit: see jupiter90000's post, which does a far better job explaining my points :/

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

#243

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

Sodman wrote: post #205

EForEndeavour wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At apple, you cannot browse internal resources. What does this mean? Aren't there resources for onboarding, training, project wikis, repos, etc. which are accessible to employees but not the general public?

I believe he means you can't just arbitrarily browse the source code for any Apple software you're curious about.

[deleted]

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

#244

Post by site-packages1 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:46 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #212

caust1c wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No 'M' in FAANG ;-) (Sorry, couldn't help myself! Many people still refer to it as a FAANG company)

FAAMG is so much more appropriate to describe the dominant tech players. People just like the sound of "FAANG". Netflix doesn't come close to matching Microsoft or the others.

I keep hearing FAMGAN to describe these, Facebook Apple Microsoft Google Amazon Netflix.

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

#245

Post by x0x0 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #215

x0x0 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not particularly strongly. Salary is correlated with market demand and alternatives, both for the company and the employee. For example, I know engineers who are some of the most valuable people in the company, and some engineers who are borderline useless. You can be borderline useless but good at self promotion / good at negotiation and be paid a lot more than very valuable eng. fwiw, I'm on the business side of th…

I agree salary is correlated with demand, but I also believe there's a reason for that demand. CSMs have no leverage. Engineers are powerful because their work can have an org-wide impact. If we're talking about business value I think that sales (B2B), marketing (B2C/DTC) and engineers are the largest generators of business value in companies because of the leverage they have.

I have worked in b2b selling to enterprise or midmarket for my whole career, so individual customers are generally noticeable amounts of revenue. And our lowest end customers have CLVs in the 250k+ range. So that obviously influences my view of whether CSMs have org-wide impact.

I can see how that differs with a different business model, but I don't see how you can simultaneously believe CSMs don't have leverage, but salespeople do. In a business -- particularly in a saas model -- where you have CSMs and AEs, CSMs have more leverage, because you probably barely break even on year one of a customer.

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

#246

Post by eternalban » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

Gradually improving a long standing codebase subject to stringent production SLAs is actually quite an accomplishment.

You are not looking at the bigger picture and your dismissing the development regime as incompetent reflects your lack of experience.

Would you accept a LOC standard as a measure of 'competence'? How about this: significant continual development of running distributed system with xxx bugs per xxx commits with minimal surprises, as base expectation.

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

#247

Post by kirubakaran » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

dimitrios1 wrote: post #230

echelon wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAAMG is so much more appropriate to describe the dominant tech players. People just like the sound of "FAANG". Netflix doesn't come close to matching Microsoft or the others.

In terms of what? Money and power? Certainly not. Engineering chops? Well-run organizations? Doing interesting and fun work? Absolutely. Probably even more so.

Market Cap

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

#248

Post by mring33621 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

Welcome to life at a BigCo! To a BigCo, change = risk; risk = bad. So, BigCos develop 'internal immune systems' that slow the rate of change.

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

#249

Post by mavhc » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #171

dtech wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

Which has nothing to do with This was Bezos' reasoning for making as much of their internal software available to the public via AWS Those APIs had nothing to do with AWS. So how was the original poster not talking about AWS when they mentioned AWS? Also a clean public interface says nothing about how badly written and documented the underlying code is.

I'm using AWS to mean the 212 different cloudy services they offer, not the original compute and storage products

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

#250

Post by raldi » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

Have you taken a Myers-Briggs test? I'm guessing you're a strong P and you feel alienated because you're surrounded by J's.

The cure is to join a startup, or find one of the P teams at the big company.