Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#291

Post by Balgair » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

rvn1045 wrote: post #277

Yes. I worked at amazon from 2015-2018. I worked pretty hard the first 6 months. It was my first job out of college. There was a lot to learn in the beginning. 8-12 months in I was barely doing any work and I knew several people who hadn’t done any work in months and sometime even a year or longer. The thing is a lot of projects get over staffed and work gets split up with too many people. It’s also not an environmen…

FWIW, big DOD and BioPharma companies can be like this too. It's more like this is just how large companies are.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#292

Post by 2muchcoffeeman » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:30 PM UTC

oliv__ wrote: post #129

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you telling me that if you had the financial freedom to work on any project you wanted, you’d choose what you’re doing right now?

I enjoy doing what I do. I think it's possible to combine financial success with personal satisfaction. In fact I believe the greatest financial successes are the ones that are most intimately tied to their creator's personal satisfaction, enjoyment and alignment with what they do

You don’t need the money. You’ve been given the financial freedom to do whatever you want. And you seriously will just plug away at your job? You can’t think of a better way to spend your time and talents? That’s a bit sad.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#293

Post by tixocloud » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:31 PM UTC

SubuSS wrote: post #206

I worked for Amazon (like you:) but that was 5 years ago. Things were a lot more breakneck then - but I can see how things could’ve slowed down with the 3x dev count now. As many have pointed out, it depends on teams. I have seen engineers in retail whose sole job was ensuring data entered the catalog correctly through the input system and fix any errant data. I also saw teams like mine (early kindle / early dynamodb…

Would love to connect to those engineers in retail :) We're looking at solving data quality issues and would be useful to understand how they are doing it.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#294

Post by hartator » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

> I normally work about one day trickle out my changes during the the week [...] don't feel what I'm doing is ethnically wrong, because the company is evidently pleased

Well, it is ethically wrong. If it was not, you weren't trying to mislead the rest of the team by artificially spreading out your work.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#295

Post by benatkin » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

echelon wrote: post #212

caust1c wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No 'M' in FAANG ;-) (Sorry, couldn't help myself! Many people still refer to it as a FAANG company)

FAAMG is so much more appropriate to describe the dominant tech players. People just like the sound of "FAANG". Netflix doesn't come close to matching Microsoft or the others.

Thanks to cheems I now prefer the sound of FAAMG :) https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/cheems

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#296

Post by 2muchcoffeeman » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:32 PM UTC

moron4hire wrote: post #147

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you telling me that if you had the financial freedom to work on any project you wanted, you’d choose what you’re doing right now?

I'm not there person you replied to, but I think I would probably stay at my current job if I was financially independent. I work for a small company. The company does foreign language training. Most of the business is one-on-one classes between real teachers and students. My job is basically R&D to figure out ways we might use software to improve the teaching/leaning process. My primary focus is on virtual reality,…

I’m genuinely happy for you! Few people will ever get this level of satisfaction.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#297

Post by Balgair » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

Aside: A reminder to HN to re-read The Gervias Principle by Venkatesh Rao. It is a deeply cynical look at corporate structures, everyone is flayed and ridiculed. But, there are many good lessons to be learned in it. Think of it more as another pair of lenses with which to view the world.

> The Gervias Principle: Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing Losers into middle-management, groom under-performing Losers into Sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort Losers to fend for themselves. >

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#298

Post by benatkin » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

Jommi wrote: post #271

echelon wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FAAMG is so much more appropriate to describe the dominant tech players. People just like the sound of "FAANG". Netflix doesn't come close to matching Microsoft or the others.

ive heard FANMAG mulitple times nowadays.

I think that for it to make sense, Netflix needs to be removed just as much as Microsoft needs to be added.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#299

Post by dekhn » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:35 PM UTC

if you have a job that you can do in 1 day a week, and your employer is happy, why complain (other than the fact many people derive satisfaction from achieving things)?

It sounds like a great deal to me- in the past, I certainly would have felt personally guilty, but at this point, I understand the value I provide to my employer and how much work is required to achieve it.

A lot of my time is spent paying down technical debt that other eng have introduced, so we can get back to reasonable velocity. In the past, my company didn't really see that as valuable, but I articulated it in terms of potential revenue gained and they immediately let me get back to what I knew was the right thing to work on.

Re: Ask HN: Is all of FAANG like this?

#300

Post by mywittyname » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 2:36 PM UTC

yetanta wrote: post #190

plafl wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why I'm convinced places that use proprietary tech are going to fail in the future since the natural forces of competition will cause the internal technology to stagnate. I doubt proprietary tech is going to fade completely, but it's true that maybe there are forces that are pushing for big companies to make more and more projects open source. If you think about it it makes sense: the employees are happier…

Open source is going to be used to co-opt people into service contracts. For example one product I use right now. If you use it in a very particular way you do not have to pay much if at all to use it. But if you get out of that lane you need to goto the 'service contract' route. I am not talking 10 dollars a month either. I am talking 1-3k per machine. These things almost all want clusters. So usually at least 3. If…

Elasticsearch was (is?) like that with AWS. The managed version lacked a lot of important enterprise features (LDAP integration) and was "optimized" to require several times as many machines for the same storage, since you had a ~1.5TB disk limit per node.

But I went from needing technical support from elastic 4-5 times a year, to zero and found work arounds for the other limitations, like cognito for authorization and storing less data in the cluster. The end result was a six-figure savings on licensing and less weekend work for me at the cost of a five-figure increase in AWS costs.

I'd say it was worth it.