Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

If that'd been my first tech job, I might have just ragequit the whole industry.

Fortunately, I'd already been around the block a couple of times, so I knew that I just had a particularly bad team at a mediocre company. I hopped ship, and everything was great at the next company.

*A bad job:

My teammates were annoyed any time I asked them any questions. "Just read the code! It's in the code!" Yeah, OK, I'll spend 8 hours digging through this fucking code when you could have spent 10 minutes explaining it. I think this is probably the worst thing for productivity I've come across in my career. Any time someone asks you for help at work, DROP EVERYTHING AND FUCKING HELP THEM. Teach them how to fish, too, don't just walk them through things. Show them where you're finding documentation, show them the local equivalent of a man page, introduce them to the people with the tribal knowledge. If they spent an honest 10 minutes trying to figure something out on their own, it's part of your job to go help them out.

I'd fix a bug, then have to go to meeting after meeting after meeting to try and get permission to check in my fix. It'd often be either rejected, or I'd have to redo the same handful of lines of code a dozen times before I could get it in.

I'd have to set up some internally-developed test infrastructure, but it was a 40 step procedure to get the tool running and if any one of those steps went wrong, you'd have to go back to the start and start over. Nobody who was familiar with it was willing to walk me through it, so it took an incredible amount of willpower to force myself to get that shit set up.

There was another team working on the exact same thing as my team in another org, but we weren't "tented" (AKA: "disclosed") on each other's super secret projects, so we weren't allowed to work together at all or share any information. My team hated the other team, and they in turn hated our team. (I knew this because I had a close personal friend on the other team)

The development environment was almost completely paralyzed by company-wide bugs. The company was sharing a single insanely gigantic codebase across thousand and thousands of engineers, and there'd be month+ long stretches where the build and tools were broken. Since things were broken so long, people would check in new build breaks without realizing it, and it ended up in a vicious circle of badness.

And of course, the product we were building was a useless piece of crap that everybody hated.

I seriously can't believe Delaware allows Facebook's voting structure. Corporate law has evolved in a really strange direction over the past few decades.

There are a large number of programmers in this world, there's room for there to both be tons of people who love their jobs and tons of people who hate them.

You should ask yourself, though: why are you arguing so hard against other people, who you don't know, enjoying their jobs? Why is it so important to you that this myth of happiness be debunked?

Be careful with this. All FAANG companies and many more include broad IP-assignment clauses in their employment agreements that allow them to claim any IP you make with or without company equipment, at home or at work. While CA law is generally favorable to moonlighting, there is an exception for any work that is similar to work your employer does or may do. For FAANG companies, that could be everything, so they have wide latitude to claim your IP. Just my personal experience: All employers I've ever worked for in CA have been very clear right up front: They will own any of my side projects so just don't do it. This is the opinion of a non-lawyer so take it for what it's worth.