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Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

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Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#271

Post by lemming »

chrisweekly wrote: post #196
lemming wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great article about the promotion process and the employee dynamic at Google. It very accurately summarises much of why I quit there so quickly after coming in via an acquisition. That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money. I was very lucky to have a friend who taught me that very early (not about Google specifically, the same applies to any company). Wo…

I'm in a similar situation wrt self-employment / consulting after many years of trad. FT roles. Now making more $, and have way, way, way more control over how I spend my time. When you wrote > Freedom is really worth a lot of money, at least for me. it seemed to imply you took a paycut to gain your freedom. To a degree, I would make that trade-off too. But, your point about contractors making twice [it can easily be…

In my case I was mostly referring to the fact that I left a lot of acquisition money on the table at Google, but it was totally worth it. I've been lucky with what I'm doing now and it's worked out very well financially, and the freedom is priceless, especially now I have a kid.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#273

Post by mtlynch »

tmaly wrote: post #172
mtlynch wrote: post #23

Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…

Mike, I did not realize you moved. We should meet up one of these days. -Ty

Hey Tyson, yes definitely. I do plan to come back for IH NYC meetups on occasion.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#274

Post by brilee »

myWindoonn wrote: post #17

I served at Google as an SRE for 2+yrs. I burnt out and ragequit. Now I'm an SRE at a startup. I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true.

If a company doubles in size every 2 years, then mathematically, you cannot have a median tenure of more than 2 years.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#275

Post by rhymenoceros »

mtlynch wrote: post #109
ploggingdev wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently working on toy projects to sharpen my web development skills Could you talk about what those projects are about and what languages/frameworks you are using? What's next? Are you looking to start another business or taking some time to just learn and work on projects that you find interesting? Just wanted to say that I really enjoyed reading your blog posts and forum posts on IH. Good luck!

>Could you talk about what those projects are about and what languages/frameworks you are using? Sure, I'm working with Angular now. I might switch to Vue.js because I'm not crazy about Angular and I've heard very good things about Vue, but I'm also wondering if I'd like Angular more once I reached proficiency in it. >What's next? Are you looking to start another business or taking some time to just learn and work on…

> Sure, I'm working with Angular now. I might switch to Vue.js because I'm not crazy about Angular and I've heard very good things about Vue, but I'm also wondering if I'd like Angular more once I reached proficiency in it.

I am probably preaching to the choir here, but if you are looking to sharpen your skills, it's almost always better to stick with a single tech and learn it really, really well. That doesn't mean it's harmful to step through some Vue tutorials to get a feel for how it is different, however, if you're not careful you can end up losing a ton of time learning about the JS framework du jour and not actually making progress on anything. Especially if you are not in any hurry to build something useful.

Just about the only constant in JS frameworks is that any decision you make now on which one to use will probably be wrong in a year.

That's not to say optimizing for development speed isn't a good thing, especially if you are looking to bang out POCs as quickly as possible to vet startup ideas. But if you're not careful this can devolve into "funtime with tech" that could be a major distraction which might not even look or feel like one.

Speaking from experience :-)

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#276

Post by romed »

Bahamut wrote: post #256
romed wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe for some people it's a game? I have no idea. The pay isn't as progressive as their recruiters claim. A high-performing Senior SWE makes money pretty close to what a newly-promoted Staff SWE makes.

But a newly promoted staff engineer has more ability to move up in pay in annual reviews.

Not really. A newly promoted engineer is very likely to get Meets Expectations, since the criteria for promotion is nominally that the person has already been meeting expectations at the next level.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#277

Post by 7ewis »

apohn wrote: post #79
myWindoonn wrote: post #17

I served at Google as an SRE for 2+yrs. I burnt out and ragequit. Now I'm an SRE at a startup. I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true.

>I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true. I wouldn't read too much into this. I've worked at tech companies where 4 years of tenure was considered old and non-tech companies where 8 years was considered young. Anecdotal evidence or course, but IME people with strong skills in the tech industry (even if it's tech marketing or tech HR) have a lot more o…

I work for a tech company and like you said, I've almost been there for 4 years and apart from my own department I would genuinely struggle to name anyone else on my floor (~100 people). I could probably count the number of people I know on one hand.

Whereas three years ago, I knew everyone's name across three floors.

Tech turnover is just so high, even our C Suite have almost all changed twice since I've been here.

I'm easily one of the longest standing members of staff and we have over 1,000 tech employees.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#278

Post by dunpeal »

kevstev wrote: post #219
dunpeal wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't it be explained simply by relative sizes? Most estimates I've heard are that Google has over x10 times the number of software engineers than Facebook.

Looking at 10ks filed with the SEC for both from the end of 2017, FB reports 25k employees vs Google's 80k. There is no breakdown on how many of those are engineers, but I would assume that the ratios are similar. I was interested in looking, because that would be somewhat in line with the ratios I see in terms of resumes, though I don't have real numbers, it feels more like 15:1. I see resumes from google every week…

In addition to what Itaxpica said (which is very true), I believe I read somewhere that FB does have a lot of non-engineer employees. Can't provide a credible source or even a reason for why that is so.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#279

Post by frankida »

wpietri wrote: post #186
rburhum wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I built a business, I made the same mistake as the OP: "Then, it struck me: what if ingredient parsing was the business? If this was a problem for me, then surely other developers struggled with it as well. Hopefully, some of them made money and would give some of said money to me if I solved their problem. Thus, the idea was born for Zestful, my ingredient-parsing service." Before starting to write a…

100% agreed. As a coder, the comfortable thing for me is always writing code. But every unshipped line of code is a bet on what I believe users want. It's only when I have people try it that I find out it's useful. And really, one can learn so much about what people want without having them use anything. User context interviews are hugely helpful. But my favorite thing is real-world tests even before there's a produc…

Great conversation here. Sort of a mini-MBA in this thread.

Re: Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?

#280

Post by yazan94 »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #205
mtlynch wrote: post #23

Ex-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process ( https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ ). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue…

>Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts You have no idea how much the people of Vermont appreciate this. Be sure to tell all your friends who want out of NY how great Western MA is. ;)

Are there a lot of tech jobs in western Mass? I am working in NYC and really not feeling the whole big-city vibe.
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