Ask HN: What did you think about working at a FAANG?

Yesterday I met a friend who finished his interviewing process at Google. It's hard to explain how excited he is for the results, which may arrive in a few weeks. For some people, like him, this is more than a job opportunity because it's also his way to move to London and run away from our messed up country.

I've started thinking if I should try it too. I have a solid competitive programming background, and I think I'd go well in behavioural interviews. But is it going to be worthy?

Every day I see thousands of posts of ex-FAANG saying why they left, but I also see thousands of people saying why it's fantastic. They love to say how intelligent people that work there are, and some love to say how you will never grow there because everyone is good and you are just another brick in the wall.

Let's be honest, what are the good and bad sides of FAANGs?

You might as well try interviewing, you have nothing to lose. Maybe you want to revisit the anecdotes with an offer in hand.

I think you have to come to terms with how you feel about the impact that company has on the world, and if you want to contribute to it. Certain letters in that acronym may be worse that others, and some may feel that all of them are bad.

Is your personal salary worth the impact it may have in others? That's something only you can decide. But all those companies are trying very hard to change the shape/fabric of societies. All of them have negative aspects. All of them have billionaires at the top, and that has is own baggage. You may only be a tiny, tiny cog in that machine, but you're a cog nonetheless.

Google was a good place to work as an SRE. I think the software devs (SWE) were also pretty happy. Most of the backend work at Google is designing, scaling, and running very large systems with a lot of requirements. Every product has to at least have a plan for serving billions of users around the world which means GDPR and local laws and the privacy and security requirements of being the biggest target for governments, hackers, and spammers. The tooling (build systems, linters, static analysis, profilers, tracing, deployment, monitoring, security, storage, and libraries) is fantastic.

From what I saw, everyone was quite intelligent and most were also very kind and well-rounded people. Every engineer you talk to will have a strong grasp of algorithms and data structures, usually strong math and statistics background, and plenty of language, kernel, and operating system authors and research scientists will be your (extended) coworkers. I felt like I was somewhere around the 40th percentile in ability/outcomes which is a big change coming from smaller software companies or IT where Google-level engineering skill is rare. Imposter syndrome is a thing when your best efforts fit neatly into median performance with a lot of other high-performers, so expect that and don't let it bother you.

Growth at Google means ability to grow in the global SWE/SRE market; you have to be in the top ~0.001% percent of engineers worldwide to get into very senior technical roles. There are still lots of rewarding roles as a L4 or L5 individual contributor.

I left because it's much easier to get promo by interview (with another company) than through the perf process and after 4 years the stock grant cliff without promo was a bit more stark than it is now, I hear.

If you can manage it, get hired in the U.S. or transfer once hired. London and other non-U.S. salaries are quite a bit lower, very unfortunately and unfairly in my opinion. Global labor markets are weird.