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Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

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

#261
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> be glad you're not cleaning toilets for 20% of your pay Be advised: If you are programming computers in 2020 and making only 5x what a toilet cleaner makes, you are approximately 100% underpaid.

Depending where you're based this isn't true. At my country in Europe I could earn 1000€ / month cleaning offices and common Programmer salaries' are 1200 - 1500€ / month

My point is that if those are your options, start being “based” on the internet instead of wherever you consider yourself “based” now, because good programmers on the internet are paid €10k+ per month.

If you have a lot of experience and a good network, you can easily double that (€20k/mo, €125/hr) as well. Triple that is not out of the question, either.

High end specialty researchers are billed at >=$400/hr by large firms.

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

#262
I only have experience at one FAANG (and the culture varies from one to the next, so not knowing which one you're at, it's hard to say).

Couple of things about them that can differ from other firms:

1) The one I was at heavily rewarded self-motivation. If no work is getting done, the work for the engineer to do is identify why that is and either overcome the obstacle or build support and service tooling so that when the obstacle is removed, the team is ready to hit the ground at full speed. Think like water; if you hit a wall, don't freeze... flow around or over it, and fill the space you occupy.

2) Software engineering at the FAANGs differs from other places (especially startups) because, to be blunt, there are stakes. The only thing startups are out if they fail is money. FAANGs make software relied upon by billions of people, trade hundreds of millions to billions of dollars, and have sweeping cultural (and in some cases physical) impact. I don't know what project you're on, but some projects cannot allow for error in software development; it translates to lost dollars, lost goodwill, or possibly lost lives. I've never seen practice at a FAANG that rises quite to the level of industrial / physical infrastructure or aerospace engineering for quality control, but it gets up there. To that end, the processes are wildly different from ones a person may be accustom to at a smaller company, because there are systems in place designed to minimize the risk of engineer error. Sometimes, that means the engineer can't make progress until they learn enough to know why the system is stopping them, and that is by design; it's how the company encodes decades of hard-learned failure lessons into the process itself. It's more taxing than a startup's process, but that's because startups tend to create, in contrast, teetering edifices of fragility (consider Twitter's early years when they unexpectedly got popular; Facebook, Google, and Amazon can't afford to just have a service not work because of the failure mode "people actually want to use it"). And sometimes, progress at FAANGs gets slowed because unlike smaller companies, they have to consider whether what they're doing is good for society in some sense (either from a moral stance or, far more often, the practical stance of "We need an internationally-scoped legal review on this feature so we don't get sued out of a tenth of a quarter's worth of profits").

3) Some FAANGs are much better at software than management. They assume individual engineers will know when things aren't going well for them and will self-correct. To my mind, that's an error (not a lot of engineers I've met are comfortable with emotional self-direction, and it's certainly not taught in software engineering curricula), but it's what I've observed. It may be helpful to talk over your concerns with a trusted coworker (ideally on another team, to minimize the odds of any promotion jealousies creeping in) and see if they experienced something similar and what they did about it. In my experience, most engineers at the FAANGs went through a period of feeling like this wasn't for them at some point.

4) There is absolutely such a thing as a sucky dead-end project in FAANGs. My first project was one. I didn't do anything like find my footing until I got off of it. It eventually disintegrated under the weight of its own bad engineering decisions, but I lacked the perspective at the time to realize I was standing on a sinking ship. It was a ship that made an awful lot of money though, so the company was extremely willing to throw careers at it to keep it afloat, if the engineers doing the bailing were willing to hold the buckets.

All of that having been said... Even after I found projects that resonated with me and I could make real contributions to, I left because I felt like my career was stalling out working on projects at a glacial pace with mixed chance of success, even knowing why we did it that way. If the work isn't fulfilling, and if you can't see a clear path from the value of the product to benefits for real people... Maybe it's not worth you're time.

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

#263
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or maybe programmers are overpaid...

In the U.S., it's much more likely that the custodians/janitors are getting underpaid.

If they were underpaid, they’d go work somewhere else they are not.

There is a near unlimited supply of mop-pushers in the world.

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't say they were hiring smart people, he said they were hiring people who could pass the interviews.

But there's literally nothing to indicate this person isn't smart. There's evidence that they are smart- they passed the interview, which let's face it, might not be perfect but certainly requires some level of intelligence. There's nothing int he Op post that indicates they're not capable of doing good work, only that they're in a situation where they and their colleagues aren't.

Smart enough to know yourself > smart enough to pass interview.

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

#265
post #81

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…

"isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slog"

jupiter90000 said not to bank on finding your "dream job" that fulfills you; you jumped to talking about "isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slog".

There is an in-between. Rather a lot of it, actually.

My job does not on its own fulfill my self-actualization needs on the Maslow hierarchy. I don't think any job could. That's rather a lot to put on a job. But I am satisfied with what I am doing, satisfied with the effect it has on the world (I'm not even remotely working to make advertising more effective), and I don't see it as a "isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slog". Sometimes I have to do some less-than-fun stuff, but then again, that is why they're paying me.

Does your mental models of jobs encompass this in-between? While you can continue to search for the "dream job", it may well not exist, whereas the "good enough jobs that are not isolated 9-to-5 soul-sucking slogs" do.

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

#266

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…

Hysterically this usually "turns" for a company right around the point where someone successfully pitches they really need someone coming to the office in a suit on a Friday to signal seriousness.

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

#267
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I get why it's important, it just feels poopy. 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 bri…

> be glad you're not cleaning toilets for 20% of your pay Be advised: If you are programming computers in 2020 and making only 5x what a toilet cleaner makes, you are approximately 100% underpaid.

You're only underpaid if the company couldn't replace you for the same pay.

In many parts of the world it's not a problem to find good and experienced engineers/devs for 5x the minimum salary.

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

#268
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Question: shouldn't G actually be another A? Or are we actually referring to Google entity of Alphabet corporation?

FA*M. Or we could add SFDC, Uber, and Palantir to form

SUP FAM.

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

#269
post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Live close to work or remote. This reduces commute times and frees up time during your day. Take vacations and do things that excite you. If not remote, take advantage of days you can work from home and go for a long weekend somewhere. Or work from home for a week and go somewhere. Work to live not the other way around. Clock out and do things.

I'm not sure that's quite the scenario the parent posited. But there is something of a middle ground where you don't necessarily love/are energized by every hour of every working day but you like it well enough on net and you have the flexibility and financial freedom to do things outside of or adjacent to your day to day job that you want to do.

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

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm struggling with the purpose of my job too.

I’ve been struggling with just purpose in general for years. I’m a husband and father - those are supposed to be my purpose. But sometimes I don’t feel very good at them. Hang in there. We’ll figure this all out.

Feeling like you're not doing well at something is a key motivator towards growth & getting better. And yet through growth you have to grapple with the truth -- you're not doing as well at something as you could be. Some days I really struggle because the more you're growing the more you'll deal with intrusive thoughts that originate in that growth. Like you said -- keep going :).
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