my experience in big tech is getting stellar performance reviews while slacking with 8 hour days and never being stressed. weird how different other experiences are
Mental health impacts of a big tech job
91–100 of 191 posts
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd bet that you're not on one of the profit center teams... And that you don't have an oncall rotation. I worked in one of the ads teams at Google. I quit a few weeks ago, with reasons similar to the ones described in the article. I was giving just way too much of my life away for that work...
Interesting… Out of curiosity, do people in profit centers get paid more to compensate for the stress? I’m thinking in terms of Wall Street banks, where for example traders might have very stressful jobs but receive huge bonuses that far outstrip what the more relaxed back office roles get.
I can't speak for Google, but, at my most recent employer, people on the ads team told me their on-call is pretty hellish. There's no pay differential for switching teams that I know of, either.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#93> This may seem outrageous to someone that hasn’t experienced this type of situation, but in the Big Tech world this expectation is normal. I work at a FAANG, and it's probably a team-by-team thing, but that is absolutely not normal in my experience. That's a particularly shitty circumstance, and it's a bummer your management didn't stick up for you.
I keep hearing people say this ("it's all team based"), and I don't doubt that it's true. Suppose I don't want to end up on one of those pressure cooker teams. How can you avoid that? I just don't see how it's possible, unless you know someone inside the company who can give you some insight as to which teams to avoid.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#94Big Tech is hundreds of thousands of employees across thousands of teams with a wide variety of work environments. The author's experience sounds really rough, but it also doesn't make sense to generalize from there to this whole piece of the industry. To give another data point, I've worked at a different Big Tech company since 2012, on two different teams, and haven't experienced anything like this. There's no pres…
Of course we should not generalize, but these experiences should not be brushed off either - I suspect a bias towards Apple due to their fanbase. 1. https://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/kpgs1x/my_experience... 2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25605211
I doubt it's a bias toward apple so much as Apple's a large company with a diverse set of teams. There are definitely some teams at Apple that I would never want to work for; there are also some teams at Apple that are pretty awesome.
I suspect it's the same at all of the FAANGs, frankly. (Setting aside companies you may not wish to work for because of general company policy/work reasons)
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#95Ironically enough, Apple had an employee assistance program that allowed me to have 15 therapy sessions per year. I used all 15 of them over a 16 week period. What I learned in therapy was a lot of coping mechanisms. If you use EAP, you give up your right to privacy (in practice if not in law) and damage any chances you have for finding legal recourse. “If a potential client called me and said: ‘I’m being harassed at…
Thanks for this. I have always suspected such was the case, but never had any proof. I've even had people tell me I'm paranoid. It's good to know I was right. Fortunately, if my work did this to me, I could just say "no thanks, I already have a therapist."
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#96Having been there and done that, I can safely state that it's not just Apple's fault. The entire culture is fucked.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#97Blog like this makes me wonder if I even want to work for FAANG companies anymore. I have never worked for a big corp and never for FAANG companies in particular. >What I found was that the decent salary and excellent benefits came at a much greater cost. I know you can get in with a big paycheck work your ass for 10 years and get out with lot of money in your bank. Maybe it my early 20s. Now I'm 35+ I don;t have the…
I work at Amazon and the work-life-balance is pretty chill. I do my 35 hours a week (7 hours a day--8 including lunch) and completely disconnect outside of that. Manager has been chill so far, expectations couldn't be clearer and are pretty reasonable.
A lot of my friends work at FAANG and finance in SWE roles too and their wlb is pretty good as well, with most working under 40 hours a week--some well under.
And we're all 1-2 years out of college. I really don't get the whole 22 year olds wanting to work a lot thing. Doesn't seem to hold true in my friend group (~10-20 samples).
You really wanna ask yourself if you wanna go thru the promo circus. What I get after a potential promo at Amazon 1.5 years from now is gonna be less than what I can get if I Leetcode hard and interview with some financial firms and unicorns so that's the route I'm planning on going. Knowing this, I don't even really need to meet expectations or try to go beyond them.
Point being: if you're willing to spend a couple hours a week keeping your interview skills sharp, you can afford to just meet expectations or even perform slightly under and stop worrying about promo and just jump ship when you get a better offer. If you go into every job with this mentality, you won't become attached to your job.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#98Not really my experience at Google tbh. I've been at Google for a little under 4 years and been promoted twice but only work about 4 hours a day. Sometimes I don't do shit for weeks at a time and things seem to pan out ok. I'm not trying to humble brag that I'm 10x or anything--im not, I'm a B grade engineer at best. Sure it can be stressful sometimes, but I'd say that 80% of the time it's really chill.
I think it depends on what division you’re in and what role you have. I was TL of a team in Cloud and I ran myself ragged. I was getting anxiety attacks every day and felt a literal weight sinking into me as the bus approached the building. I took a 6mo medical leave and still haven’t really recovered.
yeah cloud is a differnt beast. basically amazon within google
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps... but I think companies like FB also get (total guess) thousands of resumes per day. So, for every engineer that walks away, many more are knocking at the door. So, I think in management's eyes, very very very few people are irreplaceable.
Absolutely not true. Big Tech is struggling to hire - which is why the offer packages are so fat now.
Big tech is struggling to hire in a situation of its own making, by making the interview process so awful, and not caring about retention.
Re: Mental health impacts of a big tech job
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd bet that you're not on one of the profit center teams... And that you don't have an oncall rotation. I worked in one of the ads teams at Google. I quit a few weeks ago, with reasons similar to the ones described in the article. I was giving just way too much of my life away for that work...
Interesting… Out of curiosity, do people in profit centers get paid more to compensate for the stress? I’m thinking in terms of Wall Street banks, where for example traders might have very stressful jobs but receive huge bonuses that far outstrip what the more relaxed back office roles get.
there’s no difference in pay other than the fact that anyone with an oncall rotation gets a minor salary bump