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Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

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Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#91

Post by xiphias2 »

tZqGafFdSbj5w34 wrote: post #78
laurieg wrote: post #14

"staffed with below-average IQ people" I'm not sure why your co-workers' IQ is your concern. To come out of the gate with a comment like this sounds like you have a strong disdain for them. Part of your reason for joining the company was the paycheck. I assume the checks aren't bouncing. My advice is the same advice I would give to many people: Learn from your coworkers. Understand the problems that the team and the…

I seem to be getting a lot of heat for this comment - fair enough, but I will expand on that. Before joining this company, I hired and managed teams across various startups. I don't think I would be speaking out of turn to say in every company we looked for aptitude and intelligence. I don't know what my previous or current colleagues literal IQs are, but you know a highly intelligent person when you meet and work wi…

Speak with your manager or manager's manager that your current team is not the best match for you (if you don't trust your manager). Your manager's manager is incentivized to keep you inside hes team even if you switch managers.

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#92

Post by duxup »

codegeek wrote: post #4

"A+ players solving hard problems" Is this really what people think when joining a large company such as FAANG ? I mean not everyone can be an A player in a company with 1000s of employees, correct ? Also not every team is going to be solving hard problems. Someone has to do the dirty things. Isn't that understood ? Not trying to shit on you OP but I would have tried to learn more about the team in interviews if poss…

Yeah I don't understand this idea that Google is all of that.

With any company of any size the scale of grunt work / tedious maintenance and troubleshooting old stuff is going to grow massively.

Being Google or anyone will not change that.

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#93

Post by softwaredoug »

Things will be very team dependent at large companies.

I worked at some seemingly boring defense contractors on paper, but had a really cool team, and worked on a hard problem set... We all gelled well and everyone was smart.

But I also know if really dysfunctional teams at large companies that would otherwise sound exciting and interesting on paper...

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#94

Post by creamytaco »

option_greek wrote: post #63
laurieg wrote: post #14

"staffed with below-average IQ people" I'm not sure why your co-workers' IQ is your concern. To come out of the gate with a comment like this sounds like you have a strong disdain for them. Part of your reason for joining the company was the paycheck. I assume the checks aren't bouncing. My advice is the same advice I would give to many people: Learn from your coworkers. Understand the problems that the team and the…

Not to mention "so what if the iq is actually low?". These folks have passed the same bar the OP has. Now they have to work together with existing team and achieve what progress can be achieved. Anecdotally, a lot of engineers (and especially managers) have this mentality where they don't treat the job as something that puts food on table and helps the company move their products forward in what ever pace the overall…

Not even close. Have you heard of acquihires? I spent 6 years at Google, and I'd say half the people I worked with over those years were definitely average or a little below in terms of skill and intelligence, certainly one couldn't describe them as "highly intelligent". Every time that I asked, they told me they didn't go through the interview process.

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#95

Post by duxup »

codegeek wrote: post #4

"A+ players solving hard problems" Is this really what people think when joining a large company such as FAANG ? I mean not everyone can be an A player in a company with 1000s of employees, correct ? Also not every team is going to be solving hard problems. Someone has to do the dirty things. Isn't that understood ? Not trying to shit on you OP but I would have tried to learn more about the team in interviews if poss…

Yeah I don't understand this idea that Google is all of that.

With any company of any size the scale of grunt work / tedious maintenance and troubleshooting old stuff is going to grow massively.

Being Google or anyone will not change that.

Perhaps that startup history with greenfield type situations blinded OP to that reality?

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#96

Post by lnxg33k1 »

option_greek wrote: post #63
laurieg wrote: post #14

"staffed with below-average IQ people" I'm not sure why your co-workers' IQ is your concern. To come out of the gate with a comment like this sounds like you have a strong disdain for them. Part of your reason for joining the company was the paycheck. I assume the checks aren't bouncing. My advice is the same advice I would give to many people: Learn from your coworkers. Understand the problems that the team and the…

Not to mention "so what if the iq is actually low?". These folks have passed the same bar the OP has. Now they have to work together with existing team and achieve what progress can be achieved. Anecdotally, a lot of engineers (and especially managers) have this mentality where they don't treat the job as something that puts food on table and helps the company move their products forward in what ever pace the overall…

> have this mentality where they don't treat the job as something that puts food on table

Boomer?

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#97

Post by mooreds »

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #72
codegeek wrote: post #4

"A+ players solving hard problems" Is this really what people think when joining a large company such as FAANG ? I mean not everyone can be an A player in a company with 1000s of employees, correct ? Also not every team is going to be solving hard problems. Someone has to do the dirty things. Isn't that understood ? Not trying to shit on you OP but I would have tried to learn more about the team in interviews if poss…

The "FAANG has A+ players solving hard problems" meme is a myth that people need to believe to support idea that working at a FAANG company is guaranteed to be the apex of your career. No one motivates themselves by saying, "I'm going to do the same work I'd do with the same caliber of colleagues as I have currently." This is the tech version of the American Dream, where we're not employed by Google yet , but will be…

> But there's also plenty of smaller companies that have difficult problems with very sharp coworkers. Of course, they don't have the same prestige.

Or money.

Or visibility.

Or value on your resume (in certain circles).

But what smaller companies have that I've found big companies don't: a distinct lack of places to hide.

Sure, you can get folks who don't work out (I've been one!) but at all the small companies I've worked out, everyone is pulling together and no one is really slacking. My theory is that it's too easy to see when someone is slacking at a smallco, so folks don't do it.

I find that delightful.

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#98

Post by Arainach »

mkleinstadt wrote: post #82

OP joined Amazon without a doubt. (Build everything in house, working nights and weekends, rigid team-switching rules.) I just interviewed there and the onsite presented more red flags than a Soviet military parade. Would definitely recommend treating them somewhat differently from the other FANG companies

When someone joins Google or Microsoft or Facebook, they say "I joined Google/Microsoft/Facebook". When they join Amazon, they say "I joined a FAANG company". It's amazingly how well it correlates.

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#99

Post by rectang »

jnwatson wrote: post #69
zamalek wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The hoops you have to jump through to snag one of these jobs This right here is exactly the problem. In the interview you are expected to write a fault tolerant k-way distributed sort and publish it to production, in 3 hours. Once you are embedded in your team they'll have you fixing typos on the landing page. "Our interview process is good at finding people who are good at interviewing, not good at their job." ~ S…

I just got 4 offers from 3 FAANG companies, and I agree completely. None of the interviews had any filter for finishing tasks on time, writing good tests, improving team cohesion, or any of the many important characteristics of a great software developer. But, gosh, I can definitely explain how Aho-Corasick works.

You'd think that interviewers would investigate "designing for testability", which is in some ways similar to algorithm design — it's an architectural and optimization problem. You could even present open-ended programming exercises such as "design tests for this system".

Similarly, you could test for ability to architect a Git commit history. Git uses some important algorithms (e.g. content addressable store, tree traversal) and people who demonstrate an understanding of how to leverage it well are likely to be more effective candidates.

Re: Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

#100

Post by duxup »

Has your experience been with startups entirely? I wonder if that is the thing here.

I think perhaps you maybe just weren't exposed to 'older' companies in the past and mostly worked in greenfield type situations?

>there's just too much to fix.

Welcome to any company that isn't a startup? Debt, tech, or otherwise (processes, etc) will exist if a company is old enough. That's just how it is, read up on Google enough and they've reworked their own systems numerous times when things didn't work anymore as they grew.

Smart companies, dumb companies, everyone accumulate debt as old systems don't do the thing right anymore. That's not wrong, that's just life. At those startups you worked at, everyone was laying the foundation for that and maybe just didn't know it ;)

Also I wouldn't assume that people are dumb because they don't want to fix it all... they maybe know, just also know it won't all get fixed / isn't worth it by pounding out weekends and nights all the time. I'd be wary of thinking 'these people are stupid / won't put in the work' when it might be just that they aren't going to kill themself fixing it all.

Lotta assumptions on my part here, just some food for thought.

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