Ask HN: Joining Big Tech in One’s 40s

I started at my second 'FAANG' company when I was 48, two years ago, and it's been great. The previous 'FAANG' company was less great, but still fairly ok.

In between and before those, I have worked at two startups and three other in-between (in size) organizations, as well as two non-tech giants, over the course of about 27 years now. Kind of takes my breath away seeing that last number!

As others here have noted, no matter where you work, one of the most important things is your manager. I've had good managers and bad managers, and my less happy time at the previous 'FAANG' was largely due to a bad manager.

Having said that, the department/group you're in is also important. I had a great manager at one of the large (but not giant) companies but the department had big problems. It was a relatively comfortable but in the end unproductive couple of years. (And also why I decided to move on relatively quickly.)

Re: skills to brush up on: honestly, I suggest just start interviewing heavily and use that as a template to figure out what you need to learn.

The big tech companies have the luxury of having tons of talented, qualified people trying to work there, and so structure the interviewing process to be biased toward turning away qualified people rather than accepting unqualified people.

That means that the interview process can be pretty strenuous.

Re: trying for management: I was a manager briefly, early on in my career, and decided that I was never going to do that again. I was relatively good at it, but I didn't like it, so all of my roles have been technical, though of course a lot of the best things I've accomplished involved large quantities of 'soft', non-technical people work.

Re: fed up with uncertainty. Yup, I totally get that, and it's the main reason I haven't done more with startups. I value my personal/family time too much, and always have.

Feel free to contact me directly: diederich@gmail.com

Best of luck.

Not in my 40s yet but I'm in a similar position. I'm going to take some time off and prep for FAANG interviews. The benefit of the algo focused interview is it seems like there would be less ageism there as less of the criteria is based on behavior or fit type questions. Maybe I'm off here but that's what it appears like. I recently attended a Google recruiting event where a lot of the Googlers there were over 40 and recently joined the company, a couple of people even looked to be over 50.

YMMV, but in my non-FAANG experience in the mid-/south- eastern US, tech managers seem to make at least 1.25X for X=senior dev salary. Maybe keep that in mind?

My dev friends over the last 10+ years have included people who made a management/dev track career decision and anecdotally speaking, those who chose management have earned more and seemed to have more employment stability. In a couple of cases, I have friends in my personal network earning 3X a senior dev salary managing dev teams.

Personally, I decided to stick with the dev track and have been somewhat dismayed to find (after 10+years with one employer) that I am often pulled into decision/management-type situations but am consistently evaluated as a lower-level employee because "coder." It's even more annoying when I chat with my peer group who made the mgmt track choice and I find that the overlap between what I do and they do is actually very large.

I have very similar experience. I'm 42, spent most of my career in startups / small companies in CTO-level positions, but last year took an engineering position in big tech (at one of the companies you mention).

My suggestion for someone with a lot of experience is to focus more on networking your way in to the company than on skills brush up. Find contacts at the company(s) you are interested in and try to set up direct meetings (in person, video conference) to find out more about positions, responsibilities, etc. at that particular company. Each company has their own unique philosophies and growth paths for individual contributors vs. eng. managers, so I don't know that there would be one generic piece of advice to follow.

Feel free to reach out to me at @ gmail if you would like to talk more specifics.

>In both cases, the conclusion was that my results were good enough for an L4 position, but they wouldn't hire me for less than L5. (Why not, I'd be happy as an L4...).

Can you elaborate on this? Were you interviewing specifically for L5 roles? I wonder if years of experience or even achievements can be used against a candidate by raising the bar so to speak. Maybe one is a L5 at their current company but only a L4 elsewhere. As long as you can contribute at whatever level is appropriate for the given company I don't think it should be held against the candidate.