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Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

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351–360 of 648 posts

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

#351
I'm not sure if it's the world's responsibility to entertain or engage you.

By cultivate becoming a naturally a curious, resourceful person on your own, you demonstrate the self-directed effort to learn to solve problems that are small will lead to bigger ones that are interesting and engaging.

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

#352

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…

Reminds me of Paul Graham’s essay: http://paulgraham.com/lesson.html

“I had avoided working for big companies. But if you'd asked why, I'd have said it was because they were bogus, or bureaucratic. Or just yuck. I never understood how much of my dislike of big companies was due to the fact that you win by hacking bad tests."

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

#353

This thread is seriously in need of some tough love. @faang0722, you're being a slacker, and not doing right by either your company or yourself. You're at one of the top companies in the world, and are safe from the jobs disaster that's gripping the entire country. Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facem…

OP is a freeloader at a rent seaker. Your simplistic morals fail to account for the bigger picture.

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

#355

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…

[deleted]

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

#357

This thread is seriously in need of some tough love. @faang0722, you're being a slacker, and not doing right by either your company or yourself. You're at one of the top companies in the world, and are safe from the jobs disaster that's gripping the entire country. Millions of people are desperate to receive $600-1600 from the government this month because they are unable to work. Millions are putting on shitty facem…

why are "tough love" people always douchebags?

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

#358
post #306

>If the market value of such incompetence if FAANG salary, how can I do good work and get paid preportionally? You're going to have to learn that, as a laborer at a firm, the quality of work you do is, at best, loosely correlated to your monetary compensation. Sometimes you can do good work, sometimes you can do bad work, but how much you're paid is going to depend greatly on a number of surrounding factors. So, acce…

This is the fallacy of modern tech-based capitalism and I hate it. The job that I enjoyed the least and where I also did the least amount of work was the best salary I ever had. The value that I added through that job was nominal at best. Other jobs that paid less felt more challenging and exponentially more interesting. Needless to say that happiness was proportional as well. I came to terms with the idea of lowerin…

> This is the fallacy of modern tech-based capitalism and I hate it

I hate to break it to you but no capitalism (and for that matter no non-capitalism) has ever been structured in a way that would satisfy you. For labor to be compensated for its "true worth" there needs to be a way to accurately judge what the "true worth" of the labor is, and honestly, the person to whom it matters the most is the laborer. This suffers from several problems: 1) most people don't know what they are worth, ofetn aiming too high (dunning-kruger) or aiming too low (impostor syndrome) and 2) even if they did, it's quite impossible to read the laborer's mind, because worth is tied up in different values, that are not necessarily in alignment with the values of the employer (or the state, in the case of non-capitalisms).

I think these days things might even be a bit worse because we have a strong narrative of "do what you love"/"do what makes you happy" in most western societies (not necessarily a bad thing). But there is no corresponding "though may not correlate to what other people want of you, be prepared to pay the difference in price" narrative.

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

#359

It's possible that your or your team's productivity is actually bad, and in general at the company you are expected to do more, but the team you are on is a puddle of low productivity within the overall org. How would you know if this is the case? There are a few signs. What degree of tenure do other people on the team have? If old-timers aren't on the team, or worse, if they leave the team for others within the comp…

These are very good points. I'm curious what the process is from the perspective of the manager. I'm new at the management side of things and was always a top performer as an IC (so didn't get a chance to learn how its down on the flip side). My biggest challenge is figuring out how to give negative feedback (and not destroy a weak player's morale). If someone is having not performing well, I act as a cheerleader and…

I thinking being transparent about it and highlighting how it could be a good thing for them down the line (Interview Question: "How do you handle challenges at work?") if they do improve the things you're noticing. Provide evidence of why you think that and say they aren't in trouble, but we want to improve the quality of your work in this one area.

- Hey X, I brought you into today to talk to you about something I noticed. There is an issue/errors with your work, when doing Y[provide evidence of common errors/average errors of others], I just want to say you're not in trouble, but we want you to improve this area and wanted to make sure you were aware of it.

- I want to extend any resources I have available for you to improve in this area, and of course I have some ideas, I wrote everything down on this paper/email.

- You can come with a plan of your own. Or we can collaborate on it--if you're not sure why issues are happening. Take some time and think about it, and when you're ready to talk about how we might ago about improving in this area, please schedule some time with me and we can work on this together.

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

#360
post #206

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…

> But it had 3 principals and 5 sde3s in a time when the whole company had I can only imagine what principal / SDE3s that deliver products as big as DynamoDB got paid in bonuses/salary. Total comp had to be $500k-$1m+, no?
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