If you're bored, why not just climb the ladder? Isn't that the logical conclusion of working for any large company? Not that working harder will correspond to promotions, but rather the higher you climb the harder you'll have to work. So if you want more things to do, make more "impact" (i.e. play the political game). Otherwise rest and vest like your colleagues.
Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
361–370 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#362Yea, big corp sucks. Few more points:
- Your performance does not correlate with your compensation, not to mention that there are huge disparities between competency levels. You have people who don’t know how to use git getting the same paycheck as 10 yr vets that could reimplement git in a single day. You have executives getting outrageous equity plans and salaries for running entire product lines into the ground before going on to the next company for even bigger paychecks. Welcome to capitalism, lol.
- There is tremendous waste in these organizations because humans haven’t yet figured out how to scale them properly while retaining individuality (i.e. it’s easy to create an organization comprised of 1,000 robots that do exactly what they are told). There is simply too much politics going around, too many conflicting interests and “market forces”. And so processes are invented and have to be followed, entire departments need to get involved in code reviews, design meetings and so on and on. It’s pretty depressing tbh.
- Don’t listen to people telling you your job should be your job. Work drains you mentally and precludes you from doing stuff you’d otherwise do. Don’t accept the moronic (sorry, stoic?) concept of “well, you have to pay the bills!”. These people trade more than half of their lives “just to pay the bills” and have an occasional vacation. It’s beyond depressing. Your job should be your passion, and the major provider of meaning in your life. Getting a hobby will not compensate for selling your soul.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#363This 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…
Don't listen to this guy. You don't have to change your own identity and your own personal compass to fit your company. You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given. This life has a billion paths you can take. Understand the tradeoffs and make a calculated decision but follow your own path. Granted you may end up homeless. But from experience there are way more people slogging it out at work doing the 9-5 putting in the bare minimum than people who find a passion and go for it. If your passion is basket weaving you are probably screwed but given that you are an engineer there are a million problems that need to be solved. Find one, might even be within your own company.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#364>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…
You know you are not a machine, right?
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#365This 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?
Why do so many people have thin skin?
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#366This 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…
I have a subtly different take on this; op is cheating themselves. They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job, but they aren't because they are living down to the expectations of others.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#367I contract for banks. I can’t speak to what your experience has been in at this FAANG but things at banks can be really slow because the environment is very controlled. Lots of documentation. Every deployment change assumes the change will break the application so things need to be rolled back at a moment’s notice. Hence the extensive docs and I consider that a good thing. It requires discipline that helps in the long run. Bad part is the number of L4 tickets generated not because we necessarily encounter L4 problems but there is dire need for L1-L3 staffing and tickets just automatically become L4 after being unattended for a while.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#368This 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…
Don't listen to this guy. You don't have to change your own identity and your own personal compass to fit your company. You also don't have to succumb to the "starving Ethiopians" fallacy and take whatever crap job is given. This life has a billion paths you can take. Understand the tradeoffs and make a calculated decision but follow your own path. Granted you may end up homeless. But from experience there are way mo…
Parent is not asking them to do that:
> So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better... or else accept that you're being a freeloader and pretending to do more work than you really are.
It's definitely a choice here, but the point is the OP needs to actually make some active choices and decide what they're ok with.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#369I have limited experience in bigcos but in terms of raw development/shipping speed by an individual dev my experience being in a small/startup like group in a bigco:
- average bigco team dev has speed X
- startup like team in bigco dev is ~5X, given lack of bullshit (but still some)
- actual startup dev is ~10X, given marginal bullshit difference between them and a fast bigco team
- small founding team dev at ~20-30X, given lack of bullshit from non-trivial company size
- individual solo bootstrapper moves at ~50X, given lack of any inter-personal communication/coordination needed (This is my current status, having jumped from the second point to here in a single step, and it's insane.)
Now, this doesn't mean these velocity speeds translate linearly to net impact on users. But there's some dynamic there worth understanding. It's also interesting how leverage changes here. In the last bullet point, if I stop working (and say, type an HN comment :)) dev velocity goes to zero. In the first bullet, half the company could take a day off and dev velocity probably would remain relatively unchanged.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#370I 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?
That’s not how software development works