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How to succeed at Meta

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Re: How to succeed at Meta

#61

Post by ohgodplsno »

yodsanklai wrote: post #38
ohgodplsno wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For many devs, especially non SV people (or even non US people), a TC of 250k+ is more than life changing. It's "I never could have ever gotten this, and not only is my life set, the people around me are too". Needless to say, if I was offered these compensations (or higher), I'll gladly take even 10 years of incompetence around me to then be able to do fuck all for the rest of my life (or, well, things I actually en…

> a TC of 250k+ is more than life changing. It doesn't get you that far. Consider tax and cost of life in NYC/SF/London where you won't be able to buy a house anyway, and you're left with 50k to save a year. In other places, you're less likely to get such a TC. Sure, it's a lot of money, but not enough to change your social status. It adds up if you manage to stay long enough there, but considering ageism and burning…

lmfao

Alright, let's consider this: my current gross salary is at 47k €. With what my boss pays, let's say it would be the equivalent of 100k in the US (unemployment, social security, etc). And I'm from France, which is a pretty wealthy first world country. My salary puts me in about the top 20% in terms of salary.

If you think I wouldn't be able to commute for 2 hours every day for 2.5x salary so i could save up MY ENTIRE CURRENT SALARY IN A YEAR, you have massive blinders preventing you from realising how privileged of a status it'll be. The amount of people that can put 50k aside in a year is ridiculously small. And 50k is actually being awful at saving, you can easily reach 100k if you're not a dumbass.

Now consider this for an indian H1B, who can pretty much make an entire family live like kings off of that.

No, you don't realise just how much of a life changing amount 250k is.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#62

Post by sfashset »

za3faran wrote: post #41
yodsanklai wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a TC of 250k+ is more than life changing. It doesn't get you that far. Consider tax and cost of life in NYC/SF/London where you won't be able to buy a house anyway, and you're left with 50k to save a year. In other places, you're less likely to get such a TC. Sure, it's a lot of money, but not enough to change your social status. It adds up if you manage to stay long enough there, but considering ageism and burning…

How much do you think doctors make? Unless they specialize and spend another 5+ years pursuing it, they're in the 100K-250K range anyway depending on location.

Sorry but you’re completely wrong about both your 5 years comment and your income range. For a more realistic look at physician income see https://www.offerdx.com/

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#63

Post by woooooo »

endtime wrote: post #53
DethNinja wrote: post #42

I worked for large companies all my life and all of them are actually like this. I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs actually qualify for this?

No group of thousands of humans will be politics-free. But I do think Google rewards good engineering. There are a bunch of other caveats though; if you do great work on something for a year and then it gets canceled before launching, you won't get rewarded for that.

Google rewards engineering work in a vacuum, divorced from customer impact. This can lead to bad engineering incentives like valuing system complexity over the actual problem you're trying to solve.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#64

Post by lbotos »

mrandish wrote: post #59
y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #29

This person is getting a lot of snarky responses, but all of this is relatively true at Amazon also and it was true when I was at Intel 10 years ago. This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase, so it should be no surprise to anyone that's actually worked in a FAANG and doesn't pound down the kool-aid. Interesting how there's comments on this person being concerned solely with "TC" as i…

> This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase I heard someone smart (maybe Naval Ravikant) say on a podcast that this becomes prevalent in orgs which have two or more layers of management between real customer-facing work and business ownership (CEO, co-founder, CTO, etc). Having worked in several startups as well as F500 FAANG-ish valley tech companies, I agree. When a manager reports…

> If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8) direct reports, that's a bad sign.

A bad sign of what? A bad sign that the company is too large to be innovating?

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#65

Post by lbotos »

DethNinja wrote: post #42

I worked for large companies all my life and all of them are actually like this. I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs actually qualify for this?

The best example of why large organizations are like this was Engels writing on "the state":

“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state."

Replace state with "management". The answer for "reduced politics" and "real engineering" is smaller organizations. These are often early stage startups.

There are two types of startups:

- Those that will find product market fit and sell things

- Those that are pushing the vanguard of tech

Sometimes, a startup may do both, but it's rare. If you are financially stable and skilled, you can jump to a startup doing "tech advancement" but you won't have job stability. If you want reduced politics but are down to make your 5th a crud app, then a startup that is finding product market fit and selling things should give you less politics.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#66

Post by crazygringo »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #29

This person is getting a lot of snarky responses, but all of this is relatively true at Amazon also and it was true when I was at Intel 10 years ago. This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase, so it should be no surprise to anyone that's actually worked in a FAANG and doesn't pound down the kool-aid. Interesting how there's comments on this person being concerned solely with "TC" as i…

Yup, this is all big companies. And if the metrics are wrong, that's not your responsibility. The PM's and VP's that come up with them know that metrics are imperfect and have tradeoffs. Let them handle the tradeoffs. If you're impacting the metrics, then you're doing the job assigned to you.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#67

Post by mejutoco »

laweijfmvo wrote: post #11
jabroni_salad wrote: post #4

thats every big company. Eventually there will be someone who makes a spreadsheet, sorts by a column, and makes a decision based on what they see. Or, perhaps they will send it to a management consultant who has been in the workforce for all of 6 months to make a powerpoint about the columns. Make sure you have a good rank on as many columns as possible.

similar to leetcode-style interviews, no one likes it, but when pressed no one can really come up with a better method (that doesn't open the company up for discrimination lawsuits, which is sadly important)

A take home test is such an alternative. I have seen several companies offering either a technical challenge live or a take home test.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#68

Post by UncleMeat »

aantix wrote: post #13
randshift wrote: post #3

Blind is such a toxic place... I always come off shocked at how awful people are on there. Only focused on "TC", and nothing else.

If you're working for someone else's dream, what else is there? "TC" gives me and my family options to do other big things in the world. Yes, I want to take two big family vacations a year, live in a great neighborhood/ school district, and give my kids extra opportunities. Optimizing for "TC" makes sense.

A problem is that people are often optimizing to compensation literally right now. This leads to the following common scenario on blind or other similar communities:

Person 1. "I'm a junior engineer and two senior engineers just left my team, now I'm being asked to do do a bunch of work that they used to handle."

Person 2. "If they aren't bumping your pay immediately you should leave. Never do senior work for junior pay."

Now this person is missing out on a huge opportunity to get a ton of experience and prove themselves to be invaluable.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#69

Post by rr808 »

y-c-o-m-b wrote: post #29

This person is getting a lot of snarky responses, but all of this is relatively true at Amazon also and it was true when I was at Intel 10 years ago. This is how large companies operate once they surpass the innovation phase, so it should be no surprise to anyone that's actually worked in a FAANG and doesn't pound down the kool-aid. Interesting how there's comments on this person being concerned solely with "TC" as i…

The blind community is solely concerned with TC.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#70

Post by UncleMeat »

endtime wrote: post #52

People are grouping all FAANGs together in this thread. But this wasn't my experience at Google at all. It's impossible to get promoted past L5 (or even maybe past L4) with a short term-focused approach like this. And, at least at the lower levels (up to L5), you only need to be self-promotional every 6-12 months for perf.

In fact, "long time horizon" is literally in the text of the L6 expectations.
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