Ask HN: I joined a FAANG and it is awful

I’m with you. It’s really an annoyance that we need money to survive.

Untreated ADHD, depression etc. might also contribute to low performance. Beyond that, it is bold to claim "low IQ" without even demonstrating it. I don't think many people are interested in learning and thinking deeply regardless of intellect.

I work for a FAANG-like company right now, and used to work for Apple, and worked for startups too. Some thoughts.

• Engineers in large tech companies are neither better nor worse engineers than in startups on average. They just work on different things.

• Large tech companies are a lot more heterogeneous than it looks at first. I had a great experience with talented and respectful people at Apple, while a friend of mine was in another engineering division also at Apple, and… not so much. It’s so large, it can’t be the same throughout the company. It wouldn’t be surprising that your team is struggling to hire quality talent, but some others have an easier time, for all kinds of reasons.

• But each company does have some common cultural traits you’re likely to find throughout all its teams though. My current company takes a lot about the importance of work-life balance, while Apple told us at bootcamp on day 1 that we’d be working our asses off. In both cases, it turned out true.

So, one FAANG might be wrong for you, but another FAANG might be better. And one team in a FAANG might be wrong for you, but another team in the same FAANG might be better.

One reason I like larger companies is because once you’re in, they’re so large that it’s easy to switch to another role all the while having a lot of insider information about what you’re getting into, way more than if you were to switch companies. But yeah, a lot of the time they want to keep you on one team for a little bit first, so at least they’re getting some ROI on their efforts to find you.

> you would have asked questions about the team and the process

The standard recruiting process for FAANGs seems to be that you are just a replaceable "human resource", and your team will be decided later (decidedly after signing an offer) and may change every now and then.

You may get better treatment with seniority, but I see people reporting that as the typical experience.

> IQ is literally the strongest predictor of job performance across every category. ...This result has been replicated by industrial psychology resource again and again over decades.

Do you have source(s) for that?

edit: The top google scholar result for "IQ predict job performance" is Does IQ really predict job performance? (2015), a fascinating paper which discusses a lot of the relevant issues and their history.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/10888691.2014.98...

"To supporters of IQ testing...the picture seems crystal clear. Job performance must be a good test of individual differences in intelligence. IQ test scores (or their surrogates) correlate significantly with ratings of job performance. As a result, IQ tests must be a valid test of intelligence.

What we actually have are scores from a predictor of nebulous identity correlated with ratings for a seemingly discrete construct that is turning out to be equally slippery. In other words, very strong conclusions are seemingly being drawn from correlations between two under-specified constructs. This makes interpretation of the (modest) correlations extremely difficult. In primary studies such correlations have generally left over 95% of the variance unexplained. Even the typical meta-analytic correlation of 0.5 still leaves 75% of the variance unexplained. This does not seem to us to constitute grounds for asserting test validation so strongly."

Their "summary of the main points":

"1. Much in developmental theory, and psychology in general, depends upon the validity of IQ tests. 2. In the absence of agreed construct validity this has weighed heavily on indirect validity using correlations with criterion outcomes among which job performance has a special status. 3. Hundreds of studies prior to the 1970s reported low and/or inconsistent correlations between IQ and job performance. 4. These correlations have been approximately doubled using corrections for supposed errors in primary results and combining them in meta-analyses. Such corrections have many strengths, theoretically, but are compromised in these cases by the often uncertain quality of the primary studies. 5. The corrections to sampling errors, measurement errors, and to range restriction have required making a number of assumptions that may not be valid and have created a number of persistently contentious issues. 6. The claim that the IQ-job performance correlation increases with job complexity is not born out in more recent studies. 7. A range of other—including noncognitive—factors could explain a correlation between IQ and job performance, and even constitute part or all of the enigmatic "general factor." 8. There remains great uncertainty about the interpretation of IQ-job performance correlations and great caution needs to be exercised in using them as a basis for the validity of IQ tests and associated concepts."