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On Leaving Facebook

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Re: On Leaving Facebook

#571

Post by novok »

zionic wrote: post #178
novok wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CTO and lead engineer of what size companies? How big was the tree of reports under you? What is the band of your total compensation recently? $100-200k? $500-1000k? Honestly sounds like a bit of cope, especially if you've tried hiring in the past 10 years.

I’m not going to dox myself so you’re going to get some fuzz. Largest? 400-1500. Smallest? 30-70. Compensation was highly variable. FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in leadership positions knows it.

You're not going to dox yourself with compensation bands or something more specific than 400-1500. There are way too many people like that, and comp is not very public info.

Are you working in Europe as part of an old tech / non-tech company and the most you've ever made is $300k/yr or are you actually competing on the same level as big tech companies compensation wise where director+ who manages 300-500 makes $+1m/yr?

There are highly paid small places that are not FANG that still pay FANG or better, but they have really high standards. I want to know if your one of those, or one of those who as part of an ego protection cope say FANG is bad.

Now if you were a startup manager, yeah I can get why you might want to avoid FANG because you don't want people with big company habits in your small company that is trying to go fast, but usually those people say that out right, and they also tend to explicitly hire FANG types to scale their engineering org after a certain scale, because startup style stops working after your engineering org gets to a certain size.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#572

Post by mizzao »

throwaway2333 wrote: post #190
mizzao wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whoa, it seems like you might want to be careful with politics creeping into your decision making. I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" -> "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually left though it took some time. It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack here.

If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech companies (and still make a salary that's more than enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and family if you have any). Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice; just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a choice. The type of people that choose to work at either of these…

All I can say is, the more I gain life experience, the less judgmental I get of other people and the less I believe in the concept of "good" people and "bad" people.

Everyone has good and bad in them, it's just the context you're interacting in and your own predispositions that brings out one or the other.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#573

Post by ahahahahah »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #322
zionic wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1x would be 1x market rate IMO. Let’s say your skill is worth $125k avg. I’m not exactly interested in the people who can be that, and there’s a lot of them. I want the people who can make me feel like $250k is a steal etc.

The median salary for devs in the US is ~$110k, which is pretty close to your $125k. 200-250k TC doesn't seem like top-tier compared to the top of the market though.

Considering how sheepish parent is being and how carefully they are saying it, seems likely that they're hiring people outside the US where market rates are significantly lower and trying to feel proud of themselves for paying some few peanuts extra.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#574

Post by dominotw »

elb0w wrote: post #79

It always blows my mind how most interview in our field. When I first started in tech I was afraid to talk about not knowing leetcode to my peers. 15 years in and I now can confidently say I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric. Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just goo…

> I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric.

It is a valid metric. It screens for "overachieving" types who have the will power to power through unpleasant drudgery for a pot of gold in the end. If they really want those kinds of people who am i say its 'silly'.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#575

Post by steelframe »

bschne wrote: post #360
fallmonkey wrote: post #94

"A common question I get is about work/life balance. And I view it a little different too now. At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying that it spilled the frustration in the “life” part" This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time - yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less t…

I once had a job where I somehow didn't get assigned much work for a long period of time right after starting — something about no projects having open staff positions, and them not being able to use me anyway because they were using up all the budget with the existing staffing already and didn't want to do "free work" for the clients. For a while, I spent my days mostly doing tutorials, reading ebooks and papers, wa…

I joined a FAANG during the pendemic, and for the entire year I was there, I never got assigned a single task. Of course I kept myself busy trying to identify and solve problems around me, but I never had a deadline or anything associated with what I had chosen to work on. After a year I just couldn't do it anymore. A few acquaintances thought I was out of my mind and that I should continue milking that for all it's worth, but there's just something that makes me need to feel like someone else actually cares about what I do (or don't) do.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#576

Post by boring_twenties »

jakear wrote: post #559
boring_twenties wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you cannot do all those things and more while working. You can't even get a taste, it's more akin to looking through a store window. It's not possible to fully experience a foreign country/culture in a 1 week vacation. No idea about surfing, but it's not possible to even get a sense of what skiing has to offer in a couple of weekends a year. Maybe, for a few people, it's possible to find the motivation and energy…

I’ve known too many folks dead by 30 to take advice from someone advocating for “boring_twenties”. This is the only life we’ve got. Don’t spend it bored.

You're responding to my username, instead of my comment?

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#577

Post by akshat_h »

elb0w wrote: post #79

It always blows my mind how most interview in our field. When I first started in tech I was afraid to talk about not knowing leetcode to my peers. 15 years in and I now can confidently say I’ve yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric. Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet code type problems. When we do we just goo…

So why do we ask them? AFAIK, it is engineers asking these questions and also criticizing the same metric.

I think it is a case of this being the least worst option.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#578

Post by jonwithoutanh »

xyzi2 wrote: post #457
bmitc wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s easy to study leet code, and it’s relevant because it shows the interviewer you can write code. I have a million things I want to learn about. If a potential employer would rather I spend time on what amounts to trivia, then great, I don’t want to work there. > I’ve had non-leet code interviews, like write some feature in 60minutes. This is also a problem because it’s impossible to understand the constraints,…

I’ve conducted many interviews that starts off with asking questions about projects. Many candidates sound like rockstars. They even nail all sorts of technical follow-up questions. Then when I start asking coding questions, and I’m not talking leetcode here, more similar to fizzbuzz, they can barely write an if-statement. My conclusion is that some people are great at talking, but you really need to test the technic…

Perhaps your technical questions are not adequate enough if someone can sound like a "rockstar" while not being able to program an if statement?

I've interviewed hundreds of people over my career and I've never had an interview where I couldn't figure out their technical abilities through a conversation.

I'll tell you what leetcode interviews do find you though, they find you people that have no idea how TCP/HTTP work, they have no idea how you would debug a distributed system. They've never deployed anything to a server. They probably have no idea how to even measure the amount of work being performed by a server. They've never thought about CI/CD/Deployment/Scalability. They've never used any cloud resources. They have potentially never been through a code review.

etc, etc, etc, etc.

Someone crushing a leetcode test tells me about 1% of the stuff I'd like to know about their knowledge and abilities.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#579

Post by JGM_io »

steelframe wrote: post #575
bschne wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once had a job where I somehow didn't get assigned much work for a long period of time right after starting — something about no projects having open staff positions, and them not being able to use me anyway because they were using up all the budget with the existing staffing already and didn't want to do "free work" for the clients. For a while, I spent my days mostly doing tutorials, reading ebooks and papers, wa…

I joined a FAANG during the pendemic, and for the entire year I was there, I never got assigned a single task. Of course I kept myself busy trying to identify and solve problems around me, but I never had a deadline or anything associated with what I had chosen to work on. After a year I just couldn't do it anymore. A few acquaintances thought I was out of my mind and that I should continue milking that for all it's…

What you feel is the "Competence" part of core motivation according to deci & ryan "self determination theory". Their original paper is from 2008 i believe and states people need the perceived Autonomy to choose their life, perceived Competence over that choice and the perceived Relatedness that others respect and encourage your activity of choice.

So it's very understandable that if 1 of 3 is missing your psyche becomes strained.

I used to study this theory as part of my game design interests and found it extremely useful to analyse a lot of stuff from your own situation to a game or even customer experience. Just be aware of the word perceived here... allowing the theory to be used for dark patterns.

Re: On Leaving Facebook

#580

Post by jacobr »

Do you still ultimately do product engineering, picking tickets of a backlog, after 10 years at a FAANG if you’re not in management? Are the promotion levels mostly salary bumps?

I spend some but far from most of my time writing code, I write RFCs, documentation, code reviews and emails, but don’t really know how this compares to positions at other companies. At some places a staff engineer seems to simply be a senior engineer who’s been around for a while.

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