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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?

#451

Post by sophacles »

khazhoux wrote: post #346

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…

No - the company appears satisfied with OP's performance. Therefore they're not freeloading, rather they are selling the company services at the price point the company set. If someone comes to my business and we agree that I'll provide a widget for $10k, if it costs me only $1k to make it, we call that profit - i don't give them 10 widgets or a refund. A salaried job is an agreement that i will provide X KPIs, if it takes me more than 40hrs I don't get extra money, so if it takes me less an 40hrs I shouldn't give back money.

Now there may be laws or authoritarian morals around how I should lick the boots of my boss and give away more hours or outperform the KPIs, but basic capitalism says that's just a thing for suckers.

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

#452

Post by heavyset_go »

oliv__ wrote: post #72
jupiter90000 wrote: post #49

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…

I'm sorry if I'm taking this the wrong way but that sounds like settling for mediocrity to me. Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?

> Who said jobs can't be fulfilling?

As a worker, a job will always have elements that are inherently stacked against you and are unfair, and those elements are enforced by the same laws that force you to accept such an arrangement otherwise you won't eat and your kid will never be able to see a doctor.

You give part a part of yourself you cannot get back, your time, a limited resource that you can't regain once spent. You often do this for little to no equity in the business you spend the majority of your waking time advancing, and you often have little to no say in how or where your time is spent. For the vast majority of people, they will never be paid enough to be able to live off of their assets, and their time will be spent building wealth for those whose income is derived from their assets.

Unsurprisingly, there are some people who aren't happy with such arrangements and have a lot to say about them.

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

#453

Post by elijahwright »

sneak wrote: post #263
bdavisx wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I learned at a previous job that one of the biggest challenges in janitorial-services is the insane rate of turnover and difficulty in guaranteeing that a particular floor of a building has been serviced on a particular night...

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

#454

Post by danjac »

saalweachter wrote: post #344
danjac wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meetings on product design, meetings to coordinate development, meetings to talk about how many meetings we have, a month spent writing perf reviews, launch processes that require buy in from three different PAs to change the color of a widget. This starts to happen to small and medium sized companies once they start hiring from the megacorps.

Yeah, the worst thing of all is when you have a small company that doesn't actually need that much coordination overhead aping it from the larger companies. Spending 2 hours a day in meetings and complicated performance calibration processes is an unfortunate necessity of working with a few thousand other people; you eat the cost because it's the only way to actually get thousands of person-years of useful work done…

Tinfoil hat opinion: maybe FAANGs and other megacorps are happy to lose a few managers to these small companies, so they bring their big corp culture to these companies and bury them with process, risk aversion and meetings before they become a serious competitor?

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

#455

Post by mssngpnt1 »

khazhoux wrote: post #346

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…

Oh ok, Superman

It’s so easy turning over corporate culture, and the real peer pressure to avoid making others look like slackers.

Perhaps if you know how to do even better than your industry of peers, you’d be off doing so much more you’d not have time for babysitting others on social media.

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

#456

Post by pantaloony »

Kapura wrote: 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…

> 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.

This has been one of the most disorienting and most important realizations of my career. Hard work, or even effectiveness, are only loosely correlated with comp. Often it’s even inverted, and that sense you get that your higher-paid betters aren’t very good and are barely even working is actually true when you get there yourself. It’s very weird but you must not tie expectations of effort or difficulty to compensation. Remember, we’re operating in an economic system where some of the best-compensated and richest people do essentially no work at all. It’s a topsy-turvy world out there. Your hardest work, highest stress, and most abusive job can easily be the one you’re paid the worst for.

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

#457

Post by neutronicus »

moron4hire wrote: post #332
2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m genuinely happy for you! Few people will ever get this level of satisfaction.

Yes, it's not easy to find, but it exists out there. I think a lot of people's dissatisfaction comes from the narrative surrounding "financial freedom". We get bombarded with the idea that financial freedom is the one, true path to working on your passions. For a variety of reasons, I think that's bullshit. It creates a false hope that there is some state one can achieve that is free of misery. There is no perfect jo…

I work at a company that's very much not FAANG (more of a small, niche CAD-flavored Adobe), and I do a lot of what you describe.

Namely, a lot of "whatever the hell I want," almost never asking permission, and I don't recall ever needing to beg forgiveness. The end result seems to be that I now know lots of trivia about dusty corners of our massive, legacy code-base and my manager seems to be consulting me on a bunch of architecture-level decisions. Granted, I ... exercise savvy about playing in a leaf-node sandbox vs. a trunk-node jenga tower, and I'm a fluent English speaker with a PhD-level math background so maybe I get a little more latitude than other people.

Still, I find that I feel a lot more free working here, under considerably less pressure to ship, than I did in the PhD program.

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

#458

Post by coolspot »

sokoloff wrote: post #435
icedchai wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously? I don't know anyone in this field who derives immense satisfaction from their job. Maybe if they're less than 5 years out of school and reality still hasn't hit yet...

I loved every week (though not every hour) of my computer programming jobs. I literally do it for free in my spare time and here some fools are willing to pay me handsomely to do it at their little glass and concrete spreadsheet/Powerpoint mine. The only "catch" is I have to work on problems they pick instead of ones I pick. Sounds fair enough to me; where do I sign?!

Yeah, I think lots of engineers feel the same.

We just love to solve puzzles, coincidentally this is also well paid.

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

#459

Post by cvlasdkv »

bumby wrote: post #420
smattiso wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you are saying. The "tough-love" message is usually to "suck it up" and stay where you are. "Life sucks, get over it." My point is if you are smart enough to be in a FAANG you are smart enough to do great work and make an impact on this world. You don't have to settle for fixing tiny bugs in some admin page for an ad company. I know there are people that are 100% cool with doing that for $$$. If you…

> If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it > So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better. You and the OP are essentially saying the same thing, except they are adding that an honest days wage deserves an honest days work

You are assuming that FAANG companies are offering "fair" compensation for the output of their engineers. How would anyone ever make a profit doing that?

Employees are very rarely the exploiters and almost always the exploited.

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

#460

Post by mssngpnt1 »

bumby wrote: post #420
smattiso wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with what you are saying. The "tough-love" message is usually to "suck it up" and stay where you are. "Life sucks, get over it." My point is if you are smart enough to be in a FAANG you are smart enough to do great work and make an impact on this world. You don't have to settle for fixing tiny bugs in some admin page for an ad company. I know there are people that are 100% cool with doing that for $$$. If you…

> If you are not cool with it, then figure out a way to change it > So either start putting in your best work, or switch teams or company and see if it suits you better. You and the OP are essentially saying the same thing, except they are adding that an honest days wage deserves an honest days work

Romantic nonsense.

Let’s see billionaires stay rich without laws and political favors enabling their grift on the masses agency.

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