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Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
401–410 of 648 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
Nope. There's no bonuses at Amazon (at PE/SDE levels at least), and there are compensation bands for each level. A top-ranked SDE3 that delivered DynamoDB should have similar compensation as a top-ranked SDE3 working on internal tools.
This isnt true. Top performers on top products always have larger compensation. Its not discussed openly, but guaranteed they are receiving bonuses in the seven figures. If you think this isnt happening, you are naive or havent been on an inner circle at a large corporation.
Whoever told you theres no bonuses at Amazon is not a top employee
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#403This is a common mind set to fall into. I fell into it at a previous company for a few months, and a top performer at my current company admitted to falling in the same trap. Here’s what I realized:
You can do excellent work AND work 40 hours.
You don’t need to work 5 hours or 100 hours. It’s not binary. In the short term do you see any benefit? Nope. Will you get promoted? Probably not. And if you do you won’t make that much extra money.
BUT! In the LONG TERM it’s TOTALLY worth it to be known as the proactive, friendly do-er who moves the project forward. That’s how you build those relationships to be the kind of person who gets brought along to a new opportunity when your coworker/boss quits. I’ve found myself at a startup FULL of ex-FAANGs who have this attitude and all worked with each other for 10+ years. It’s a great place to be.
People think ”networking” is going out drinking with new people. It’s not. It’s consistently showing up and finding opportunities to move your team and the project forward in a friendly, collaborative way.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#404Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 suff…
All you've said is that labor market is fundamentally flawed in terms of price efficiency.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#405This 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 wonder your background. Do you know how demoralizing it is to work in an organization where the people trying to lead have no power to effect change, and the leaders are incompetent and force bad decisions on a constant basis? Where there is no real vision for the company? The OP is describing being trapped in a tar pit, and you're saying "run faster".
He's not describing a tar pit, though. He says he works one day a week -- he could, in fact, be running faster.
The simplest thing to do would be to sign up for more tasks (his calendar is open, after all) and/or tell his manager he wants more challenging work.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#406This 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.
It's selection bias.
We're inundated with stories of how Person X changed the world with their software, or Person Y who solved this amazing issue, or Company Z is doing this cool thing- with out realizing that we're only seeing the people who broke through the mundane. Working at a FANNG means you might get a chance at being in the room where they're picking people for a new team that might do something cool.
Where I work, we have this amazing internal database system we're going to open source. It's amazing tech, but for the 10 developers who made it, we have 1000 doing grunt work solving problems like "We need to get Apple Sign In working, but to do that we need to add X to Service A, Y to Service B, and refactor how we store accounts to make it work." It's not exciting.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#407This 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…
To be fair, they didn't say they're working one day a week, they said it takes them only one day to provide equal value to what their teammates achieve in one week, a value that seems to meet their company's expectations.
FAANGS employees are salaried, and not paid by hour, because you are compensated for ROI. If it takes you one hour and you bring in lots of value, that's still a good deal. On the flip side, you could also work 60 hours week if that's what it took you to meet and exceed on the value expectations.
Still agree with much of your comment though. Since they're complaining about the situation, something does feel off.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#408Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're not always in control of whether your job is fulfilling. Maybe you've been lucky so far, but it's unlikely to last forever. A piece of advice: The moment it stops being fulfilling for you, you may get the urge to change jobs to something that you think will make you happier. You may change jobs several times trying to rediscover that initial feeling that made you satisfied with your work. But it may never come…
How about trying to get back into that first job? ;)
A man cannot step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.
The circumstances that made the first job great were no longer there even before I left it, and the role doesn't even exist any more at this point. I've looked at joining (roughly) the same team again but the responsibilities have changed so much that I can't really recreate the same magic.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#409I find that big companies are like the world - good and bad. I can guarantee that somewhere in your FAANG is a fascinating, demanding project led by a charismatic boss with a high bar for achievement. People are likely to know what the project is and who is leading it. Go there! Believe me, if you are deliberate about it you can be on that project within 3-6 months, hitching your career to that leader, who, I also guarantee, is going places you also want to go.
Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?
#410Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not there person you replied to, but I think I would probably stay at my current job if I was financially independent. I work for a small company. The company does foreign language training. Most of the business is one-on-one classes between real teachers and students. My job is basically R&D to figure out ways we might use software to improve the teaching/leaning process. My primary focus is on virtual reality,…
This is awesome man, truly happy for ya. Your comment isn't the first time I have heard this advice, "Find a small non tech company and get involved" however I have previously written this advice off for w/e reason. I now find myself in search of a new opportunity and am very much like many other commenters in this thread, highly unsatisfied with "rat race" type jobs, and if I'm not happy I don't perform up to my abi…
Stooooop using job applications. You're limiting yourself to an extremely tiny pool of jobs when you go through the front-door of posted jobs. The vast majority of jobs are filled through networking, not cold applications.
My last 10 years of jobs have all been gotten through networking. I've still applied to jobs through postings, but I've mostly not gotten any replies from them. And definitely stop using recruiters. They don't have any access to jobs you can't find on your own. They're just trying to move candidates as fast as possible into companies that can't find employees on their own.
Get out into your community. Get to know people. Be friendly and helpful to them, and eventually they start asking you if you're looking for a job.
The primary problem is that you just don't know what work is out there. Networking is like getting dozens of people looking for jobs for you, and you don't even have to ask them to (and seriously, don't ask them to, it hurts your ability to build relationships with them).
That was the biggest change for me. I grew up in a podunk town and had to get out of it to find people I could stand to hang out with long enough to build useful relationships. I didn't realize at the time that that was what I was doing. And maybe if I understood the importance of finding "the good people", I could have worked harder back there to find the types of people I wanted to work with, and been fine even there. But it's definitely easier in a major metro center.
If you can't, go to conferences. Go to conferences in industries other than tech. Go to enough of them in one industry and you'll end up meeting the same people. It takes a little more time, but actually not a lot. Something about seeing the same people at conferences tends to open people up to each other.
And there are a lot of online conferences these days (for the obvious reason, but there were a lot before, too). Definitely use this time to get out and start meeting people. Hell, I live in DC and one of the communities I'm more active in is actually centered in Austin, TX, and I've never even been there. The particulars of why it happened aren't important, just that it's very much possible to get involved in different groups without actually having to travel.
You might even volunteer at a local foodbank or some other community service type thing. On the surface it will sound unrelated to what you want to do, but you're also meeting other volunteers. Some of whom might be people you want to work with. My first major freelancing gig came from an engineer at a sensor manufacturer that I met because we were volunteering at the same place to teach kids STEM skills.
Hell, take up marathon running. I have never done it, but my wife used to do it, and she always ran and bumped into the same people (if you'll excuse the pun). Anything that gets you into a position to reliably meet people. That's it.
It's hard when you're in a miserable job. All you can think about is the misery you're going to experience next week. And then a year goes by and you've had 52 miserable weeks without even realizing it. "The future always gets here". Literally do anything that breaks you out of that routine (short of shooting heroin, I guess) and you'll probably be a lot better off in a year.