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How to succeed at Meta

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Re: How to succeed at Meta

#181

Post by MikeTheRocker »

mejutoco wrote: post #67
laweijfmvo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This has its own problems. For example, it's easy to cheat and it disadvantages people who don't have a lot of time to do homework assignments, which is common for parents.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#182

Post by uoaei »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #177
uoaei wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting a higher TC does not take opportunities away from other people. Spending those earnings on things that do not improve the commonwealth is what is being discussed in this thread. It really is remarkable how, every time this subject comes up, reactionaries can swing only at straw men. It demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the arguments of their supposed opponents, which makes them seem naive at best. I…

Convenient excuse to claim your opponent doesn’t understand your argument. I do - you are advocating against people being able to spend as they see fit, by placing the “commonwealth” above the individual. It’s communism.

Communism is when the threat of violence is used to enforce such a rule. I see it as a culture problem but do not wish to use violence to correct it. I think your boogeyman radar is off.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#183

Post by Our_Benefactors »

uoaei wrote: post #182
Our_Benefactors wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convenient excuse to claim your opponent doesn’t understand your argument. I do - you are advocating against people being able to spend as they see fit, by placing the “commonwealth” above the individual. It’s communism.

Communism is when the threat of violence is used to enforce such a rule. I see it as a culture problem but do not wish to use violence to correct it. I think your boogeyman radar is off.

I think you’re falling right into the classic “that’s not real communism” no-true-Scotsman fallacy.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#184

Post by qwerpy »

ButterBiscuits wrote: post #128
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…

> There's nothing wrong in working at a FAANG for the money Sure, if you believe that making more money is the only thing that matters in this world. If you take this logic to its extreme you can justify anything if it makes you rich. You're simultaneously criticizing a system while defending your participation in it. There are lots of things wrong with working at a FAANG for the money. If you don't like how Amazon t…

Total comp and work life balance are all I care about for my job. I put in my 40 hours so that I have money to pay the bills, support my family, and have some fun hobbies. The only reason I wouldn’t work for FB is the poor work life balance.

At the end of the day my family loves me and they have a comfortable, happy life, so I’m fine with internet commenters calling me a shitty person because of my employer.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#185

Post by astrange »

autokad wrote: post #141
sleepybrett wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The work is your family if it's a family business. But that presents a whole set of different scenarios.

I disagree. even if you are the owner of the business, or working for someone in your family's business, its still business. full stop.

If you're the owner of the business none of your conditions above would apply; they can't fire you and you're not contracted to it. You can of course have disagreements with the other owners, and it's not good to put your whole life into your personal business as if you were a subsistence farmer.

On the other hand, telling employees they should own part of the business is bad investing advice; if you get shares of a company and you're not already a millionaire you should sell them and buy an index fund. Even if you work there.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#186

Post by klabb3 »

UncleMeat wrote: post #118
klabb3 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> literally in the text The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and – most importantly – is vague enough to be open to interpretation. For instance, the "fix something that you broke yourself" can be packaged as "quality assurance work that is part of a long term initiative to leverage force multipliers to increase developer velocity". The…

And yet, in promo reviews for L6 I've experienced, this discussion of "long time horizon" comes up basically every time. The OP advice of "ignore anything long term" will be almost a hard blocker here.

I'm saying that each criteria is open to interpretation, so you can very well satisfy any of them if you play your cards right and craft a good narrative. I've seen directors and VPs take on new projects, get praised, hold talks, get promoted and then the project is abandoned a year later. Failing upwards is very much a thing in FAANG. Not always, but it happens.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#187

Post by hnfong »

sfashset wrote: post #107
hnfong wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are income numbers for specialists (cf. GP's comment "Unless they specialize") The time to acquire a fellowship seems to be a couple years. During that the time it takes for a doctor to go through med school, residency and specialist training (after which they would have the income numbers you cited), the FAANG careerist would probably have risen through the ranks and have comparable income numbers anyway.

Again, you are just mistaken - I'm not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism, or what. General practitioners are in the above dataset, and make an amount comparable to an L5 Google SWE. If you want to make an argument that the overall career arc of a software engineer is better off than that of a physician, then that's a very different statement than GP made. (My personal view - strictly from a monetary st…

> General practitioners are in the above dataset

I don't see which row. Levels.fyi says L5 Google SWE is 350k. The left column in your link has a header saying specialty. "Family medicine" is 270k in your data set. Nothing in the 350k range vaguely resembles general practice.

> If you want to make an argument that

I'm not trying to make any argument, except to counter yours.

> not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism

Heh. I can't speak of the industry as a whole, but I don't think I'm coping in any way. I'd say in medicine you know the demand for your skills is going to be stable, worldwide. In tech, there's no way to project 20 years into the future.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#188

Post by cm42 »

ativzzz wrote: post #149
cm42 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since we're speaking loosely and broadly here, I want to throw in that "80-90% is just showing up" notion, which I've found to be more-or-less true. A while back, I estimated myself around 7-15%, based on an average of "average ___" searches (not remotely rigorous). I was shocked, given that I'm an essentially-average software developer in an essentially-average developer role. I would have been impressed with a "top…

> 80-90% is just showing up They key is, showing up consistently over time for years and years. That's the key, and that's the hard part > If you do it this weekend on just about any open source project, you'll officially, definitionally, be an open source contributor! Nobody cares if you made some 1 line change to some OSS project. Any meaningful change requires more work and effort

Yep and yep, but the latter just illustrates the point.

On the spectrum of unemployed fry cook to 6-figure tech job, "attracting recruiter spam bots" and "attracting overly-clever recruiters" isn't far from actually Getting There and/or Making It - so long as you keep showing up and making an effort. Definitely not a quick life hack.

Long-ish term career moves are really the only reason I check on that stuff anyway, and get more value from the relative rankings of, say, language popularity and jobs, than any number I come to. I work in a job I like, in an industry I like, in a language I like at a very fair rate, so I'm not too concerned about it, but part of that is from figuring out what were dead-ends/non-starters for me, identifying niches, etc. (+1 for the ikigai thing, too).

> Nobody cares if you made some 1 line change to some OSS project. Any meaningful change requires more work and effort

For sure, if you're presenting yourself as "a [project name here] developer", but the conversation in interviews I've had has tended to center around, say, how we used to use [that horrible old thing] until we found [shiny new thing].

I'm pretty sure I've never impressed anyone with my OSS contributions, save maybe one person who somehow remembered an exact bug and considered fixing it, but I think we were more impressed we both remembered the bug than the handful of lines of code it took to replace `insecureConnections: true` with `insecureConnections: $insecureConnections` and add a `caCerts` property to be passed in to a constructor somewhere.

So I guess again, it was the pattern of making minor fixes ("just showing up") rather than being some super l33t hax04 genius or major project maintainer or whatever that got me the credit that mattered.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#189

Post by cavisne »

Maybe I've been in big tech for too long but this actually seems like reasonable advice to me (delivered in a snarky way).

Big tech companies move slow technically, but move fast in organization structure. A "long term" project often means nothing ever gets done, a management chain change happens, and it all goes to nothing.

Metrics are never perfect, but it beats hand wavy claims of success, normally if a change is useful there is some metric that will show it. Honestly, the default "success" in big tech is the scope being reduced so many times that literally nothing happens and the PM's and management treat it like a win.

Finally testing... It's already easy enough to get nothing done in a big tech company but test code can take this to another level. You can join a team, write a big design document about some testing framework, spend 6 months implementing it, then leave the team just in time for the next reinvention of the test framework. And the whole time you were never at risk of deploying anything to production.

Re: How to succeed at Meta

#190

Post by jkoudys »

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…

I left big corporate tech a decade ago, and it was true then too. You'd get bonuses and stellar performance reviews for fixing big, high-visibility problems, or many small ones that amounted to little more than clients asking us to look things up in the docs for them. If you tried to help someone who was unhappy and at risk of leaving for another vendor, but not someone who plays golf with your boss's boss, you risk getting a DSAT from them, but no credit if you retain that client. If you fix the thing that prevents big problems, or many small questions, from coming in in the first place, you also get no credit. More likely, if you do something that brings 100 problems down to 5, you're blamed for those 5 that come in.
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