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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?

#591

Post by neutronicus »

bumby wrote: post #580
neutronicus wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think "do what you love" and its cousin "shoot for the stars" get a lot of people in trouble. Personally, "doing" in all its myriad forms isn't something I'm really capable of "loving." Similarly, "dreams" are more of a crushing anxiety-burden than a source of joy. I think about this a lot because my younger sister, whose personality was similar to mine, but with more conscientiousness thrown in, took her own li…

I'm sorry to hear about your loss. I'm trying to make the connection to what happened and your comment: > I do think "do what you love" and its cousin "shoot for the stars" get a lot of people in trouble. Are you implying your sister was doing what she loved and it got her in trouble? Because the opposite comes to mind when I read stories like this, that perhaps people feel driven to follow the path they feel they ar…

In her suicide note, which I read six years ago and not since, she branded herself destined for failure and declared her intention to spare her family from the burden she was destined to be. She tried her hand at several careers and I think she didn't come close to loving any of them, and was conscientious enough for this to wrack her with guilt.

If you're told "do what you love" doing something you don't love is failure. But most people don't love work. That's why it's called fucking "work". If you're very ambitious, you do love work, because fulfilling your ambition makes up for, you know, working. If you are neither ambitious nor conscientious, you dismiss "love what you do" for bullshit and get on with your life.

If you are conscientious, but not ambitious - that's the dangerous combination. You can't bring yourself to dismiss people's expectations, so you blame yourself.

So, yeah. Maybe I'm full of shit. Maybe I'm just making up a narcissistic story where she wouldn't have killed herself if she were more of an amoral slacker, like me.

But I just wish there were more of a sense of permission to just shrug, say "it's a living" and live your life.

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

#592

Post by SeanBoocock »

bumby wrote: post #575
SeanBoocock wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a fellow game developer I really identify with this. I found a job that I am passionate about, even though it came at a significant tradeoff in terms of total compensation compared to FAANG. I would rather optimize for personal fulfillment and building something worthwhile, even if it comes at the expense of money.

Please don't take this as a disparaging comment because it's not meant to be, but...how to you define "worthwhile"? I had to read the OP's comment twice because it wasn't immediately apparent to me that coding in the gaming industry met my intuitive definition of a "worthwhile" endeavor. FWIW, I think it's awesome you found something that meets your personal goal, I'm just curious how you arrived at that definition o…

Worthwhile for me means that it has a net positive impact on the world. Specifically, that people who play games I've worked on derive meaning from their interaction with it or simply find an escape for a few minutes at a time. I make entertainment for a living; ultimately, the creative goal is to make people happy.

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

#593

Post by ryandrake »

logicslave wrote: post #581
ryandrake wrote: post #543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any actual evidence of this, though? Whenever software engineer salary comes up on HN, there are always one or two people who come out of the woodwork to share this oh-so-secret information. "Despite the pay bands that all big companies have and some even publish, there are secret squirrel individual contributor software engineers who make $600K and get million dollar bonuses! Trust us, it happens, guarantee…

You think the people inventing the critical algorithms behind amazon s3 and aws in general are line of business employees making what everyone else in their band makes? A trillion dollar corporation is going to let that guy walk out the door to save instead of chipping him an extra million? This isn't about people who get their work done fast and execute on projects well.

I have no idea--that's why I'm skeptical and would love to see evidence. In some of these companies, veteran outlier high-performers end up getting promoted several times to things like "Distinguished Engineer" and have enormous staffs of engineers reporting to them. They are executives in all but title, so I'd expect them to be in the executive pay bands and get executive salaries. Those aren't the people we're talking about. We are talking about regular "top performer" individual contributors (write code as their job, no direct reports). Why would a company artificially keep them at some low promotion level but pay them as if they were multiple levels higher?

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

#594

Post by walshemj »

codeviking wrote: post #556
walshemj wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The OP is of course the new guy/gal so your not going to being doing major things from day 1.

Being new doesn't mean you can't try to do things. If the OP takes that perspective then they're just limiting their own potential. Code is code, and can be changed. There's this weird inhibition in our industry to just trying things. Senior or not, there's no harm in opening a PR. If there's a clear reason for not applying a change it's just a learning exercise. The PR can be closed without any negative impact. Who…

Just opening a PR ? some time you have to step a way from a laser focus on JIRA and GitHub.

As a newbie at a FANG its going to take at least 9 months to a year to get that familiar with such a large code base.

And most of being a developer is not KLOC's or its modern eqvielent Fuature Points

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

#595

Post by yumraj »

ryandrake wrote: post #567
yumraj wrote: post #46

You have two options based on what you're describing: 1) if you're in CA, with liberal moonlighting laws, start working on something of your own, save money, and launch what you're working on for side income or full-time entrepreneurship. Of course, if that excites you. 2) Change job There is a 3rd option, you can move within the company to a different team, but that may or may not be better than your current situati…

> 1) if you're in CA, with liberal moonlighting laws, start working on something of your own, save money, and launch what you're working on for side income or full-time entrepreneurship. Of course, if that excites you. 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…

I'm glad you said that, since my comment above was not meant to be a legal advice either and everyone needs to do their own due dilligence.

Having said that, in the past a CA company had asked me to sign a non-compete. Interestingly I was joining with a bunch of people and one person knew about how non-compete's are illegal in CA and forced them to change it. If it had not been for him I would have signed it with the non-compete in place. But, it still would not have been enforceable. However, whether or not they would have gone to court and whether I would have been able to fight them is a whole different thing.

IMNAL, but I think the same is true for moonlighting. Companies can have you sign all kinds of shit, but whether or not it is legally enforceable is a whole different thing, and whether or not you can fight it is yet another..

But, without a liberal moonlighting clause, and people working on side projects before taking them mainstream, I doubt that CA's startup scene would have been what it is today.

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

#596

Post by jlj »

gajjanag wrote: post #314
jlj wrote: post #305

> I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week. The other days I only open my computer for standup and if I get an IM. There is a term for this called "sandbagging." > I don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong, because the company is evidently pleased with my current productivity, but I find it unsatisfying and like a waste of my time on earth. Sounds like you have a motivation and p…

> Those kids of work may even help get you promoted and open up more interesting projects. Do you have any anecdotes in support of this view? My general understanding is that working on such things (if it isn't part of your explicit job description) is usually met by at best gratitude from other people, but certainly not promotions. And there are definite risks: since it is time spent not on your "actual" job, it can…

OP said he's working at 20% capacity for one because the tools and documentation are bad. If fixing those problems increases the team productivity by some non-trivial amount it's a positive data point for a promotion.

At my current co, promotions and job levels are measured by increasing impact at an individual level, within a team, across teams, across orgs, etc. Cutting waste is everyone's job.

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

#597

Post by dnautics »

neutronicus wrote: post #424
dnautics wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I do think "do what you love" and its cousin "shoot for the stars" get a lot of people in trouble. Personally, "doing" in all its myriad forms isn't something I'm really capable of "loving." Similarly, "dreams" are more of a crushing anxiety-burden than a source of joy. I think about this a lot because my younger sister, whose personality was similar to mine, but with more conscientiousness thrown in, took her own li…

Thank you for sharing your story.

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

#598

Post by Domenic_S »

jreese wrote: post #481
bumby wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn’t fair, why did you accept the offer? Let’s not pretend that FAANG employees are like an underclass that has to accept a job out of desperation.

It can simultaneously be true that 1) FAANG employees (including myself) are compensated and rewarded well above the national average, and potentially better than any other stable option available, and 2) FAANG employees are not adequately compensated for the value and revenue they generate for the company. Amazon does not get the richest CEO in the world by truly compensating employees what they are worth to the com…

> but when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work, I don't consider my compensation "fair"

This is a failure in reasoning about how pay works.

Pay (salaried jobs, not commission) for a role is related to the difficulty in hiring (replacing) and retaining an employee for that role. A role's impact in terms of dollars changes over time. The safety in this is that if you don't happen to save $10mm this year, you still probably have a job. And your company can have roles like R&D (where many projects don't generate money at all), internal tools, etc.

> when I look at the tens of millions of dollars I've personally saved the company through my actions and work

I would hazard a guess that this work wasn't 100% yours. Ops, oncall, infosec, accounting, etc etc all participate. This is Obama's "you didn't build that alone" argument.

The question isn't how much did you save, the question is could your employer hire someone else to drive the same outcome for less (or more).

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

#599

Post by alrs »

bumby wrote: post #537
allenu wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I haven't done that type of work, but I feel like to make change at a large company you need to be okay with imperfection all around you first and then find one or two things that could actually make a huge impact. Trying to fix little things here and there is just an exercise in futility.

I can commiserate with this attitude but still find myself disagreeing. I have worked in the type of role where I was expected to lead a transformational change when it seems like the incentives at every level are aligned against it. I do personally feel an obligation to keep trying because if I didn't I'm not doing my job. Throwing up my hands in exasperation means I'm collecting a pay check just to keep the status…

> I have worked in the type of role where I was expected to lead a transformational change.

Most roles have nothing to do with leading transformational change. You can concede that much?

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

#600

Post by walshemj »

baq wrote: post #179
sneak wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> be glad you're not cleaning toilets for 20% of your pay Be advised: If you are programming computers in 2020 and making only 5x what a toilet cleaner makes, you are approximately 100% underpaid.

or maybe programmers are overpaid...

In what country in the UK id be doing very well to earn as much in London as the train driver - and they have a FS pension.
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