[HN Gopher] On Leaving Facebook
___________________________________________________________________
On Leaving Facebook
Author : earthboundkid
Score : 514 points
Date : 2022-01-22 01:45 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (frantic.im)
(TXT) w3m dump (frantic.im)
| mrobot wrote:
| Don't work for these people.
| endorphine wrote:
| Even though I have 10 years of experience writing, shipping,
| maintaining and operating production systems for 10k RPS scale
| and also having OSS contributions in some very popular projects,
| I'm still intimidated by the LeetCode-style problems.
|
| I'm planning to interview for a large company the coming weeks,
| and I'm truly disappointed that I struggle even on the Easy
| level. I guess I never needed to solve such issues in my previous
| jobs (backend, SRE).
| denysvitali wrote:
| Don't worry. 90% of the interview processes are broken. Don't
| take it too personally :)
| shric wrote:
| I'd like to hear more about the 10% that are not broken :)
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| Stripe asks some practical questions
| denysvitali wrote:
| I was just being conservative. From my personal experience
| 100% of them were.
|
| As an interviewer I try to be in the hypothetical 10%, but
| I'm pretty sure I'm not.
| jackblemming wrote:
| This man had 8+ years at Facebook and they still made him do
| programming questions? What is wrong with our industry?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Interviews are designed to be roughly the same experience for
| everyone. There's plenty of good legal reasons why, but
| separate from that, jobs, roles and so on are not standardized
| across various companies. While I personally know someone with
| 8 years experience at Facebook probably isn't a clown, the
| point of an interview is also to get a sense of how you'd work
| together and to ask eachother questions. A good interviewer
| will tailor their interview to the candidate, too.
| donsupreme wrote:
| I seriously doubt companies who have been coding interview
| for years now are for legal reasons.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Not coding interviews _specifically_ for legal reasons no,
| but consistency of interview. If you ask one person a
| coding question, you should probably do the same for
| everyone, otherwise you expose yourself to legal liability.
| This is especially true the larger the company you are
| interviewing at - and the more generic the role is
| internally.
| astura wrote:
| >If you ask one person a coding question, you should
| probably do the same for everyone, otherwise you expose
| yourself to legal liability.
|
| No! This does not mean you must interview Jr engineers
| and Sr engineers identically!
|
| You can drop the leet coding requirements for experienced
| candidates and have no legal worries as long as all
| similarly experienced candidates are interviewed and
| judged similarly. It's actually extremely common for
| companies to have different interviews for different
| experience levels.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You don't need to adopt this style to avoid
| discrimination.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Not to avoid discrimination, of course, but to avoid
| folks suing you for not getting the job - or at least
| making it easy if/when they do. These are two separate
| things. Folks tend to get touchy about being told 'no'
| again especially the bigger your company is. Frankly,
| interviews will always be imperfect because few will
| respond in that situation the way they do at the office.
| This tends to hurt egos.
| snoman wrote:
| That this is a sufficient but not necessary solution does
| not discredit it in the way your tone implies.
| andrew_ wrote:
| with respect, this is just lazy, following the herd because
| everybody else is doing it. Somewhere around 2010, a group of
| xooglers started selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview)
|
| They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire industry.
|
| Many of my peers have found success and homes with
| outstanding companies with wonderful culture that have
| abandoned this archaic interviewing process. cling to it if
| you must, but it is broken beyond repair and people are
| starting to trend away from it.
| moosedev wrote:
| > _Somewhere around 2010, a group of xooglers started
| selling CTCI (Cracking the Coding Interview)_
|
| > _They single-handedly fucked hiring for the entire
| industry._
|
| I'm not sure about single-handedly. I think you can blame
| the creators of LeetCode as well :-)
| arcticbull wrote:
| It definitely changed the game - or at least, made it
| something you can practice for easily in one place. But
| there's nothing particularly special about leetcode that
| you couldn't find in your college coursework. A lot of
| companies tend to optimize for college-level questions,
| but this isn't true across the industry. I used leetcode
| when interviewing for my most recent job too, by the way.
|
| Apologies if this comes off short, I'm actively involved
| in hiring now, and have been at a lot of tech companies.
| I do my best to help keep the process at minimum
| consistent. Bringing in the right people is never easy,
| but is incredibly critical to the success of your
| business.
|
| Happy to answer questions, though.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| I have 38 years in hardware design, most of that doing ASIC
| design in Verilog.
|
| I've been with my currently employer 19 years, but if I found
| myself in an interview I'd expect them to ask me technical
| questions. If they didn't ask them, it would be a red flag.
| What if they asked me an "offensively" basic question? Great, I
| can make quick work of it, no insult taken.
|
| It has happened to me only once that I interviewed someone far
| more senior (and was a PhD) who got offended when asked about
| some simple technical issues. He deflected my questions, and so
| was flushed immediately.
| tyre wrote:
| It depends on the type of questions and whether they were
| relevant. The thing with these little coding quizzes is they
| rarely have anything to do with what the person will do day-
| to-day. Design a problem that's relevant to the work and it's
| fine.
| wildrhythms wrote:
| 'Asking technical questions' is quite a bit different than
| shoving a code editor in front of a candidate's face, and the
| interviewer all but saying "The computer will decide your
| fate."
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| Asking an ASIC designer to create a 2-input XOR gate out of
| 2-input NAND gates is like asking a programmer to write a
| bubble sort. If someone asked me either one, despite being
| 38 years out of college, I'd do it without being offended.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| Anyone can put n+ years at Facebook on their resume regardless
| of whether they worked on Facebook or not. Maybe they're
| banking on a background check not being run. And if I know
| anything about people, I'm sure there are people out there
| doing this. Frauds abound.
|
| Check this out: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/yahoo-investor-
| ceo-lied-about-t...
| code_biologist wrote:
| I mean, writing code is a big part of the job? I bet they asked
| behavioral and system design questions too, even though I'm
| sure he solved business problems and designed systems in 8+
| years at FB. Why interview in the first place, why not just
| give him an offer up front?
|
| Interviews aren't fun, but there's not something "wrong with
| the industry" if the questions are relevant to the work. He
| even complimented their choice of programming questions.
| rcheu wrote:
| It's pretty easy to do almost no coding at larger companies as
| a more senior engineer and become quite rusty. It sounds like
| he was interviewing for a position which he's actually expected
| to ship things and code, so it's pretty reasonable to ask him
| to code in the interview.
| astura wrote:
| Where have you worked where senior engineers do hardly any
| coding? What else would they do all day?! Are you sure you
| aren't thinking of project managers?
|
| Everywhere I've worked (mostly large companies) the seniors
| write much more code than the juniors.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| Some senior engineers will be "coding machines" whereas
| others will be much closer to "architects" or "tech leads"
| where shipping a lot of code is not the most important
| aspect.
|
| To be fair, most senior engineers should be involved in
| code reviews regularly, so it's very unlikely they are
| incompetent coders.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I've seen enough experienced people who are great at system
| design and expect to be tech leads, but who are absolutely bad
| at coding. Do you want to hire someone for their ability to
| program or for their ability to think about the big picture
| only?
| Aperocky wrote:
| tbf it usually comes in a package.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| I was once asked a to present a bit-manipulation algorithm,
| during an interview for an NLP role. :-)
| jchonphoenix wrote:
| This reads as he's in the honeymoon phase of startup world. The
| politics he mentioned get so much worse in startup world the
| moment the startup hits a road bump
| yalogin wrote:
| I dread interviews. I am an engineering manager, a product guy
| and have a long track record of finding creative solutions to
| problems, convincing leadership at all levels and executing on
| it. However, I suck at coding and coming up with solutions on the
| fly. I need that extra time to think through because I don't have
| every possible tech solution in my TLB buffers, I need to page
| them from main memory or even disk sometimes. So I end up failing
| interviews by default, so much that I stopped trying to move. It
| helps that I am doing quite well in my current role and am happy,
| but missing out on growth up the ladder.
| onos wrote:
| Same here, in that I'm relatively good at slow thinking -
| pondering something over many days or weeks etc till I find a
| good solution.
|
| I see prep for interviews as table stakes, and accept it as
| such. but I still regret that my slow thinking strength can
| shine in these contexts.
| rr808 wrote:
| How many companies did he end up applying to? I'm really not sure
| what is normal. I just applied to 10 companies and did 5
| interviews, I heard other people have done hundreds. Or is it
| best to go 2-3 a month?
| pkdpic wrote:
| Glad to see this was about working at FB / Meta rather than being
| a user. Just for personal interest.
|
| Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview. Wondering
| if I should be trying for FaceBook as long as Im bothering to
| study. Had a very positive-feeling convo with a recruiter there
| ~6mo ago before "Meta". Sounds like it might be a negative thing
| to have on your resume now though?
|
| Any thoughts?
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Even if you have no interest in joining a company, an offer can
| be used as leverage when negotiating with a different company.
| [deleted]
| yongjik wrote:
| > Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your
| resume now though?
|
| Among all your potential future interviewers, the percentage of
| those who would judge you negatively for a Facebook work
| experience is vanishingly small - be mindful of the HN echo
| chamber. Besides, you probably don't want to work in those
| places anyway. (Not that it's necessarily bad to hate Facebook,
| but if your manager can't separate their political belief from
| reviewing candidates, would you want to work there?)
| jumelles wrote:
| On the other hand, being willing to work for a company like
| Facebook says something about a worker.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Thanks for the sincere response! :)
| davedx wrote:
| I do quite a lot of screening/hiring. I'm personally very
| critical of Meta the company but have no issues hiring people
| who've worked there. The malaise in Meta is obviously a product
| of its top leadership not the engineering people
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I would probably hesitate if someone was in a position of
| leadership at Meta in the past few years, had been leadership
| for a long time, or did their formative engineering years at
| Meta. I'd want to question to ensure they'll actually push
| back against unethical suggestions by product people if they
| suggest things without knowing that those features might rely
| on something unethical like scraping personal data.
| throwaway1269 wrote:
| From my FAANG experience they are strict policies for
| dealing with user data and you actually have to think about
| such things and get approvals.
| ptero wrote:
| I think while you _can_ hit an interviewer with a strong
| dislike of the FB and everything it means, including the people
| who work there, it is probably a rare thing. I guess a slightly
| more likely case is for your resume to get rejected as "we
| cannot match their FAANG salary, no point in an interview", but
| I would not worry about it too much.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Thats a good point. I've definitely heard of that but haven't
| thought about it in a while. You're right of course, its
| nothing to worry about. I'd be lucky to get to that point.
| vanusa wrote:
| _Sounds like it might be a negative thing to have on your
| resume now though?_
|
| Rather than focusing on how an association with FB would be
| _viewed_ on your resume -- you may want to ask yourself whether
| that company lives up to your _own_ moral standards, and
| whether (just to yourself) you would feel proud of yourself for
| working there.
|
| Many people have come to the conclusion that it is an extremely
| cynical and unethical company:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Criticisms_and_contro...
|
| And that even aside from the specific episodes of abusive
| behavior, that its core product is basically toxic:
|
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/10/05/1036519/facebook...
|
| Meanwhile, some of the founder's behavior in his early adult
| years can best be described as nakedly sociopathic:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Zuckerberg#Early_years
|
| Whether any of this matters to you is ... up to you. But it is
| definitely a question you may want to investigate before you
| start working there -- rather than after you've signed the
| dotted line.
|
| Being as asking your recruiter or your interviewers these
| questions -- isn't likely to get you very far.
| ipaddr wrote:
| So someone shouldn't take a job at one of the biggest
| companies because 16 years ago the founder acted like a
| sociopathic in some people's opinion?
|
| I can't see that affecting someone's employment.
|
| Your points are why someone shouldn't vote for Mark for
| president not why someone shouldn't take a job.
| vanusa wrote:
| The founder's destructive behavior wasn't the only factor
| mentioned - in fact it was the least of all factors
| mentioned.
|
| _... acted like a sociopathic in some people 's opinion?_
|
| What's with the attempt at dissimulation here? The issue is
| _what the guy did_. Not "some people's opinion" of what he
| did.
|
| _I can 't see that affecting someone's employment._
|
| I can't see how the founder's ethical standards (expressed
| not just through what they did 16 year ago, but in the
| present day) _wouldn 't_ affect your experience working at
| their company.
|
| The fish rots from the head, as the saying goes.
| ipaddr wrote:
| The issue is labeling and some people like yourself have
| label this as sociopathic. Others see your label and
| think less of anything you say for trying to find the
| most cutting label vs the more accurate.
|
| Why stop at facebook. Throwing chairs should make
| Microsoft a dead zone. Steve behaviour at Apple in the
| 80s should force you to return your iphone. Oracle,
| Amazon are not angels either.. Many of those small places
| are much worse..
| vanusa wrote:
| _Steve 's behavior at Apple in the 80s should force you
| to return your iPhone._
|
| So we're going in circles now.
|
| Any and all issues raised about a company's ethical
| behavior in the current day (for example, outsourcing to
| suppliers with deplorable labor practices) are equivalent
| to stories of a founder's poor interpersonal skills from
| decades ago, in your view.
| throwaway3137 wrote:
| (throwaway account for the obvious reason)
|
| I've been at Meta for 3+ years. I'm also interviewing. I have
| somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now (not a humblebrag,
| just the facts). Not a single interviewer (from junior
| engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me
| anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company
| like Facebook?"
|
| The plural of anecdote is not "fact", but that's my experience:
| for engineers, it's still seen as a positive, or at worst,
| neutral.
| asveikau wrote:
| They're probably not surprised you want to leave, however.
| ensan wrote:
| "somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now"
|
| How can the number of offers be indeterminate?
| Salgat wrote:
| He's waiting on responses or is entering the final rounds
| for some of these companies.
| throwaway31332 wrote:
| Bingo. Mix of "offer in hand", "offer coming Monday-ish",
| and "finishing interview loops"
|
| Also, who says I'm a "he"? FAANG companies have smart
| female engineers too (not nearly enough, but we're
| working on it)
| snovv_crash wrote:
| > Also, who says I'm a "he"?
|
| Assuming you're saying this as a way to effectively
| double the pool of people your throwaway comes from,
| adding a bit to the entropy. Adding more writing style
| sample, and on another topic, probably does more to
| identify you than the extra bit of entropy reduced.
| mercutio2 wrote:
| Well of course we won't say that to your face!
|
| But it's certainly a factor when I'm reviewing resumes.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| Taking you at your word that you do this, I'm very glad I
| don't work with you. I would never want to associate with
| the kind of person who holds the employees responsible for
| the decisions of management, and then punishes them for
| wanting to leave that same management. Seems pretty
| biblical, in the original sin sense.
|
| The whole "won't say it to your face" is the absolute
| cherry on top. If you don't talk about it, how do you know
| they didn't join the company out of an overly optimistic
| sense of being able to change things from within, then quit
| when reality struck?
| kortilla wrote:
| > I would never want to associate with the kind of person
| who holds the employees responsible for the decisions of
| management
|
| That excuse is maybe acceptable for someone who worked at
| Facebook 10 years ago, but someone who is still working
| there in the last couple of years? You might just be an
| employee but you're willfully helping well-known
| behaviors.
|
| This isn't like some revelation of fraud that employees
| don't know about. Countless articles have been written
| about the problems with Facebook and it has been in the
| crosshairs of national politicians several times.
|
| At this point taking a job at Facebook is not really any
| different than accepting a marketing job at a cigarette
| company.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| I don't disagree with this, and I've never worked at
| MAGMA for these reasons, but I'd be lying if I said I
| wasn't incredibly tempted. As an experienced dev
| (possibly not a great one though), I'm struggling to make
| ends meet with one dependent. Being able to eat out
| without having to update a spreadsheet to see what other
| things we're not going to be able to afford is a pretty
| big draw.
|
| And I'm above the median for software devs in my area,
| but in a high CoL city in Canada.
| sofixa wrote:
| code_biologist wrote:
| I'll match your anecdote with mine. I'm an engineering
| leader at a small company that has worked at FAANG. I have
| personal mixed feelings about working at FB, but it's a
| very strong positive signal about someone's engineering
| ability (and comp expectations lol). Send any good coders
| you toss out because they worked at FB my way!!
| zionic wrote:
| I'll match your anecdote with mine. I've been everything
| from CTO to lead engineer. I've made sure we always pay
| well above average for every role because I'd rather have
| one exceptional engineer than 10 regular ones.
|
| FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| With your remarks of you're in control now with all the
| power and such. Like the other commenter said, this
| sounds like Coping and grand standing.
| zionic wrote:
| You do you brother, I'm not here to prove myself to you.
| Just another non existent terminal.
| novok wrote:
| CTO and lead engineer of what size companies? How big was
| the tree of reports under you? What is the band of your
| total compensation recently? $100-200k? $500-1000k?
|
| Honestly sounds like a bit of cope, especially if you've
| tried hiring in the past 10 years.
| zionic wrote:
| I'm not going to dox myself so you're going to get some
| fuzz.
|
| Largest? 400-1500.
|
| Smallest? 30-70.
|
| Compensation was highly variable.
|
| FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in
| leadership positions knows it.
| novok wrote:
| You're not going to dox yourself with compensation bands
| or something more specific than 400-1500. There are way
| too many people like that, and comp is not very public
| info.
|
| Are you working in Europe as part of an old tech / non-
| tech company and the most you've ever made is $300k/yr or
| are you actually competing on the same level as big tech
| companies compensation wise where director+ who manages
| 300-500 makes $+1m/yr?
|
| There are highly paid small places that are not FANG that
| still pay FANG or better, but they have really high
| standards. I want to know if your one of those, or one of
| those who as part of an ego protection cope say FANG is
| bad.
|
| Now if you were a startup manager, yeah I can get why you
| might want to avoid FANG because you don't want people
| with big company habits in your small company that is
| trying to go fast, but usually those people say that out
| right, and they also tend to explicitly hire FANG types
| to scale their engineering org after a certain scale,
| because startup style stops working after your
| engineering org gets to a certain size.
| unmole wrote:
| Can you please name your company? I haven't worked at
| FAANG but I most definitely would not want to work for a
| company like yours.
| Godel_unicode wrote:
| I would like to know this as well. Anyone willing to
| write off literally millions of engineers because they
| happened to work at some huge companies is someone worth
| avoiding.
| zionic wrote:
| > literally millions of engineers
|
| It's tens of thousands, tops. And let's be honest, most
| of them are highly overrated.
|
| > because they happened to work at some huge companies
|
| Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly
| evil corporations. Give them some credit, they didn't
| sleepwalk into their roles. They did it for that fat
| cash, and they sold their morals out to do so.
|
| Jokes on them, I have the "fat cash" now and get to
| choose who I hire. Turns out I'm not a fan of the people
| who sold out.
| alexpetralia wrote:
| This comes off as rather petty, impetuous and
| dictatorial.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Sounds like raises would be a life and death struggle at
| your company.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| So what's the company?
| zionic wrote:
| Not going to dox myself.
|
| > I haven't worked at FAANG
|
| I doubt that.
|
| > but I most definitely would not want to work for a
| company like yours.
|
| You do you. But I make sure we pay way above average, I
| want the best people and the best people don't work for
| Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google.
| civilized wrote:
| So how do you hire the best people? Seems like most
| employers focus on name-brand resumes and leetcode. I've
| never met anyone who does an actual substantial
| interview.
| zionic wrote:
| I'm not perfect. I like to hire people slowly, and meet
| them in person where I can.
|
| But I've definitely made mistakes, and so far every hire
| I've honestly regretted worked for a megacorp prior to me
| hiring them.
| hiq wrote:
| What kind of mistakes did you make, what kind of bad
| hires did you have? I'm curious what kind of flaws would
| correlate with having worked for a big company before.
| ryandrake wrote:
| What about Microsoft? Do their employees get a pass
| because the company wasn't included in Jim Cramer's
| acronym? It seems odd to single Cramer's stock picks out
| specifically. What about Philip Morris ex-employees?
| Palantir? HSBC or any other evil investment bank? I think
| those three have done far more evil, but you'll consider
| their alumni because they are not specifically "FAANG"?
| So odd to single out five specific companies that are
| only associated with each other because a TV personality
| made an acronym out of them.
| ncmncm wrote:
| There is plenty of evil. FAANG has no lock on it.
| Microsoft, Oracle, ransom gangs, Goldman Sachs. Wanting
| to get out of them ought to be a mark in one's favor.
|
| Not sure what makes Netflix evil, though. Clue?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Where do you think the best people work, and how did you
| come to that conclusion?
| zionic wrote:
| Lots of places. See, the best people have a lot of
| options. That's implicit.
|
| Given the diversity of rewarding roles available to them,
| the best people aren't pressured to accept morally
| compromising positions.
| sockgrant wrote:
| What's the pay for someone with 10-15 years experience
| and is "the best people"?
| zionic wrote:
| It entirely depends on the role.
|
| My point is I make sure my companies pay well. I want
| every employee to feel like they're robbing me.
|
| But I also want to make sure that I have as few employees
| as possible.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I personally wouldn't hold it against someone for working
| at FB. Life and people are way more complicated (or not
| complicated, for that matter) than what you've reduced it
| down to. For one thing, consider that just because you
| exclude people who worked at FAANG, you're not actually
| accounting for all the other thousand ways people can
| behave immorally or amorally. Screening out FAANG
| employees doesn't actually get you very far in this
| regard. So it just looks like you're harping on this one
| thing. Do you screen candidates who you think associate
| with politics you think are immoral? Or who have worked
| at tobacco companies? Etc.
|
| That said I appreciate your attitude here. These
| companies are civilizationally damaging. It's good to
| keep repeating that. I'm just not sure your approach
| makes sense.
| hiq wrote:
| > FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.
|
| Is it only FAANG, or are there others that you
| blacklisted? E.g. is MS on the list as well? How long is
| the list? Genuinely curious.
| Shikadi wrote:
| If you're going to judge people for working at faang, you
| better never shop at Walmart or Amazon, never buy any
| foreign electronics because they're made with child
| labor, work for a non profit that doesn't shovel money
| away from those who produce it into the hands of
| shareholders that control the public policy allowing for
| atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in
| it, take the bus instead of owning a car, and boycotting
| cable and internet companies. We're all in the same
| exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and
| stop judging people for being employed. The workers
| aren't the evil, it's the people who call the shots and
| make the investments. If Jeff Bezos wants to go to space,
| he's going to space whether you help or not, so might as
| well take what you can get.
| zionic wrote:
| > If you're going to judge people for working at faang,
| you better never shop at Walmart or Amazon
|
| I do my best, but I fully admit I am not perfect in this
| regard.
|
| > allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything
| with Teflon in it,
|
| I completely agree with you here. The leadership of these
| corps should have faced serious jail time for C8
| contamination.
|
| > We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off
| your high horse and stop judging people for being
| employed.
|
| I get it, but look at it from my perspective. I have a
| lot of money. I can hire people based on X or Y. I have
| the luxury of selecting skilled, amazing people who _did
| not_ work for the system. Why would I see that as a bad
| thing?
| Shikadi wrote:
| From my perspective, your money came from the same
| system, and you're acting on blanket baseless prejudice.
| hnfong wrote:
| Yep
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28831227
| whatever_dude wrote:
| You're doing your company a great disservice if you think
| no great engineer had ever joined Meta.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Counterpoint appreciated. Any chance someone could expand
| on this? Not sure how serious the commenter was.
| duxup wrote:
| Generally you wouldn't want to speak poorly about a
| candidate's choices to their face.
| munchbunny wrote:
| Some hiring managers will care about your moral compass
| and your motivations more than others. (This isn't a
| moral judgement on my part, just stating the phenotypes
| of hiring managers that I've seen.)
|
| They might not ask you to your face to explain things
| like joining a company right after it got #metoo-ed, but
| if they care they'll absolutely be thinking the question.
| comp_throw7 wrote:
| I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring
| this in when scoring a candidate. I guess someone could
| lie and say a candidate performed worse than they did,
| but unless the candidate actually performed poorly on
| other rounds, that isn't an automatic rejection
| (sometimes we'll ask for a follow-up round). Candidate
| performance tends to be pretty strongly correlated across
| rounds (unsurprisingly), so sharp outliers are pretty
| rare.
| zionic wrote:
| > I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring
| this in
|
| Then it's entirely possible you work for an immoral mega
| corp and your judgment has been compromised by your
| paycheck.
|
| Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to
| understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a
| process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill.
| You'd probably feel gross hiring someone whose
| incompetence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico.
|
| They did a fraction of the damage that FAANG engineers do
| to our society on a daily basis.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| No I wouldn't. I'd feel gross being so judegemental and
| thinking so highly and self righteously about myself. I
| highly doubt the work your company does is blessing the
| earth with immense positivity.
|
| I highly doubt, just based on sheer numbers and basic
| data, that the people working at your company are amazing
| humble people who care so much about the world. I doubt
| they are concerned with the homeless population and other
| disenfranchised groups. Vs in your case being all gung ho
| about the evils of FAANG that you are so above. The
| number of people who are against the current status quo
| enough and willing to sacrifice the comforts of their
| lives to fix the issue are so small. It's not even a bad
| thing. That's a hard thing to do. It's much easier to
| point to a couple of big companies and say how evil they
| are and any one working for them.
| zionic wrote:
| > No I wouldn't. I'd feel gross being so judegemental and
| thinking so highly and self righteously about myself.
|
| Why is applying realistic negative values to behavior
| such as willful FAANG employment "judgmental"
|
| You made the choice to work for a morally bankrupt
| megacorp because they paid you a crap ton of money. They
| paid your bills. You sold out, just own it and be a human
| instead of coping.
|
| I didn't say I have some kind of employee utopia, but we
| build real things that help real people and honestly do
| make the world a better more honest place.
| mizzao wrote:
| Whoa, it seems like you might want to be careful with
| politics creeping into your decision making.
|
| I'm seeing several of your posts here and it seems like
| you are making the inference "worked at FAANG" ->
| "horrible person", and while I have never worked at FAANG
| I have many friends I respect who have, and eventually
| left though it took some time.
|
| It feels like you might be making an ad hominem attack
| here.
| throwaway2333 wrote:
| If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor of
| the year acronym, you can make it into most tech
| companies (and still make a salary that's more than
| enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and
| family if you have any).
|
| Working at Facebook as a software engineer is a choice;
| just like working at a bulge bracket investment bank is a
| choice.
|
| The type of people that choose to work at either of these
| two are (more likely than not) people who do not have
| morals or a sense of character and values.
|
| In my experience, being a good person only works when
| you're interacting with good people. If you're a good
| person interacting with a "bad" person, you tend to get a
| worse deal -- and if not alert, will unconsciously "sink"
| to their level, and start mirroring their behaviors in
| order to not get a bad deal.
|
| Sooner or later, you're surrounded by "bad" people and
| have become a "bad" person yourself, simply by moral
| "osmosis," all because a few "bad" eggs spoiled the
| quiche.
|
| I have been the type of person that naturally gravitated
| towards the "money money money" professions, because I
| did not have any strong role models to build a value
| system. Now that I'm out of that moral rut, I do not wish
| to go back. Just like an ex-addict who decides not to
| associate with other ex-addicts, because the chance of
| relapsing increases exponentially: I do not want people
| without any moral compass dragging me back down to their
| level.
|
| I like the way things are. Things are good. Associating
| with Facebookers will make things bad. I don't want
| things to be bad.
|
| I've tried very hard to express this viewpoint, without
| making value judgements, but it's moot: I have standards
| for what it means to be a good person, and Facebookers do
| not meet my standards -- so I won't associate with them.
| I won't hire them. And I will avoid collaborating with
| them.
| mizzao wrote:
| All I can say is, the more I gain life experience, the
| less judgmental I get of other people and the less I
| believe in the concept of "good" people and "bad" people.
|
| Everyone has good and bad in them, it's just the context
| you're interacting in and your own predispositions that
| brings out one or the other.
| zionic wrote:
| > The type of people that choose to work at either of
| these two are (more likely than not) people who do not
| have morals or a sense of character and values.
|
| Thank you, exactly this
| em500 wrote:
| It's hilarious reading these anonymous hiring managers
| discussing how they'd hypothetically snub people like Rob
| Pike, Ken Thompson, Andrew Morton, James Gosling or John
| Carmack for lack of morals and values.
| malka wrote:
| I lost A LOT of respect for Carmack the day he started
| working for Facebook.
| phillypham wrote:
| > If you can make it into a FAANG/MAMAA/whatever flavor
| of the year acronym, you can make it into most tech
| companies (and still make a salary that's more than
| enough to live a dignified life and support yourself, and
| family if you have any).
|
| Not actually true for early career SWEs, especially those
| that switched from a non-CS field. Because FAANG relies
| so much on coding puzzles, they are often the best option
| for someone that is self-taught without formal training.
| Since they often have a large recruiting pipeline, they
| are often the easiest places to get interviews without
| any connections, too.
|
| I would also add that their ability to sponsor H1Bs is
| unmatched.
| zionic wrote:
| It's an entirely rational decision. The kinds of people
| who take a fat salary from FAANG are the exact kinds of
| people I want to keep out of my companies at all costs.
|
| They are negative value add employees and I've yet to
| find a better way to filter them.
| comp_throw7 wrote:
| I mean, if you've been brainwormed by the idea that FAANG
| (what, literally all of them?) are _strongly net
| negative_ compared to the most realistic counterfactual
| that would spring up in their absence, and not only that,
| but that engineers working there are therefore morally
| tainted, then sure.
|
| But no, I don't work for FAANG. I could say the same
| about any of my previous places of employment, none of
| which were even tech companies (unlike the current
| place).
|
| But let's put all that aside - how does refusing to hire
| someone _leaving_ one of those companies improve the
| situation? Are you trying to establish an equilibrium
| where it becomes more costly in expectation to join one
| of those companies, because it might be harder to find
| another job afterwards? Good luck, I guess! I don't
| expect you'll move the needle much, especially given that
| there'll be quite a few people actively working against
| efforts like that.
| zionic wrote:
| > how does refusing to hire someone _leaving_ one of
| those companies improve the situation?
|
| It massively improves the situation. The kinds of people
| who work for these companies now are morally bankrupt.
| Everyone knows the score going in. They're smart enough
| to pass l33t code but dumb enough to not make their own
| startups.
|
| These are not the kinds of people you build
| groundbreaking companies with, they're opportunistic
| parasites you'd do well to avoid.
| tmule wrote:
| Make sure you're not violating your company's guidelines.
| If I were at a company and I knew of signals based on
| subjective morality being used for filtering, I'd summarily
| fire the offending employee.
| zionic wrote:
| I've written all of my companies guidelines.
|
| I explicitly codify that the hiring of former
| surveillance capitalism mercenaries is a fireable
| offense.
|
| "But the equity was great" is not an excuse.
| dc-programmer wrote:
| Does your company collect information about users?
| zionic wrote:
| Wherever possible we treat all data as a liability,
| removing it as quickly as we get it.
| typon wrote:
| Not sure if you're making things up, but I really like
| your attitude. The world only moves forward because of
| people with principles, not because of people who make
| 'tough compromises'
| jstx1 wrote:
| Believing strongly in something isn't a virtue if your
| belief is harmful/misguided/unfair/discriminating etc,
| quite the contrary.
| yongjik wrote:
| Clicked "favorite", because I have a feeling that a year
| later I'll be like "Dammit, what was that comment that
| made me think 'Now this is peak HN cringe'? Can't find it
| again..."
| oh_sigh wrote:
| So if an employee determines that they have a moral problem
| with Facebook, you will not let them escape?
| zionic wrote:
| How old are they?
|
| Anyone sub 40 was old enough to see the problems with
| Facebook and steer clear.
|
| Working for them and "seeing the light" after years of
| collecting the blood money doesn't give you any points
| with me.
| zionic wrote:
| > Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to
| directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely
| like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?"
|
| Sure, we disqualified you when you listed them on your
| resume. You never got callbacks and probably blamed it on
| XYZ. You don't understand, there's a growing group of us in
| Silicon Valley that will never hire you if you have FAANG on
| your CV.
| throwaway31332 wrote:
| After reading your many comments in this thread, I honestly
| hope you *did* come across my resume and silently
| "disqualify" me. Sounds like it saved me from a miserable
| job working for a toxic narcissist of a manager.
|
| You seem to have an enormous chip on your shoulder towards
| FAANG companies. Did you work for one and fail
| spectacularly, or did you just get rejected a bunch of
| times?
| stickfigure wrote:
| I really wish that people who let strong political opinions
| bleed into their professional careers would somehow flag
| that on their resumes, so I could likewise avoid them.
| zionic wrote:
| sofixa wrote:
| Having a moral/ethical compass isn't "political".
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| So there's only one true moral compass?
| sofixa wrote:
| No, but it's hard to see a person having one and seen
| Facebook on the "good side" of a moral compass.
| yumraj wrote:
| Exactly. I cannot trust folks who have spent more than 1-2
| years at FB to make _ethical_ decisions and I will not hire
| them.
|
| Similarly, I will not go to a company if people up the
| chain, including my immediate boss or the CEO are ex-FB.
|
| If the CxOs are ex-FB I cannot expect it to be an ethical
| company.
|
| But, that's me.
| zionic wrote:
| Thank you. A lot of mercenaries here are posting coopium
| all over this thread.
|
| They just don't get it, we don't want them. We believe
| they're evil. We see them, and their skills, as a
| liability and not employable asset.
| eclipxe wrote:
| lol.
| loeg wrote:
| Surely if your business has such a strong moral stand on
| hiring former Facebook employees, you can name it?
| zionic wrote:
| loeg wrote:
| My manager doesn't care about your company. My primary
| interest is in knowing what company I should avoid
| interviewing at.
| [deleted]
| kbrackbill wrote:
| If you can stomach it, you should absolutely do it. Having one
| of the tech giants on your resume has definitely been a strong
| positive in my experience and you can't beat the comp.
| zionic wrote:
| Counterpoint: if you can avoid it keep FAANG off your resume.
|
| I've always made sure to hit top-tier pay and a FAANG entry
| on your CV is an instant disqualification.
| jruroc wrote:
| The overwhelming majority of companies hiring SWE's do not
| think this way.
| cwalv wrote:
| And they won't mention the company they work for, so even
| if you want to go for the one in existence that does
| you'll never find it. Or maybe there is no such company,
| and we're just being trolled.
| zionic wrote:
| Sure, and the overwhelming majority of companies don't
| grow like mine do. Or sell for what I've exited for.
|
| Being mediocre is easy.
| twy_new_fb_hire wrote:
| Would you mind sharing what top-tier means?
| sockgrant wrote:
| Spoiler: it's not top tier.
| zionic wrote:
| Sure. What I mean by top-tier pay is essentially paying
| well above average to fewer, higher quality people.
|
| I'd rather have 2-3 expert engineers making 2x pay than
| 10 mediocre engineers making 1x pay.
|
| There is a sweet spot where you can scale with one expert
| in each domain, and if that "expert" is well compensated
| they can replace an entire engineering dept.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| What's the ballpark of 1x pay in this example?
| zionic wrote:
| 1x would be 1x market rate IMO.
|
| Let's say your skill is worth $125k avg.
|
| I'm not exactly interested in the people who can be that,
| and there's a lot of them. I want the people who can make
| me feel like $250k is a steal etc.
| ZephyrBlu wrote:
| The median salary for devs in the US is ~$110k, which is
| pretty close to your $125k. 200-250k TC doesn't seem like
| top-tier compared to the top of the market though.
| ahahahahah wrote:
| Considering how sheepish parent is being and how
| carefully they are saying it, seems likely that they're
| hiring people outside the US where market rates are
| significantly lower and trying to feel proud of
| themselves for paying some few peanuts extra.
| cantrememberpw8 wrote:
| I was previously at the top of the salary band for Sr.
| Software Engineer at a decent big company, making 1.7-2x
| mediocre engineers I know elsewhere. Joining FB, my total
| comp (400kish) is an ample 5x mediocre in my area, and I
| hear thats normal across FAANGs.
|
| I know 2x is still ridiculously high, even 1x is a very
| reasonable amount to live on, but 2x doesn't compare to
| 5x.
| zionic wrote:
| Sounds like you're making bank now.
|
| The problem is that, you sound like are expecting me to
| respect you.
|
| You sold out, sure you got some more cash for your
| trouble so congrats I guess. I just want you to be honest
| about what you did.
| ipaddr wrote:
| You sold out the minute you agreed to trade your time for
| money.
| throwaway014921 wrote:
| Maybe you live in a place where developers have the
| privilege of being able to pick the right employer among
| thousands.
|
| It's not like that in most of the world.
|
| In many places even senior software engineers have to
| choose between:
|
| - nasty companies (advertisement, finance and trading,
| faangs, real estate speculation, cryptocurrencies,
| gambling and worse) that provide a living salary and
| provide a decent working environment
|
| - few ok-ish companies that can offer a low salary, very
| unremarkable conditions and stability
|
| - start your company or consultancy and make 0 money
|
| - regret working in software and open a grocery store
|
| - be unemployed
| debt wrote:
| Yes absolutely go work at Meta. The person in the post had
| worked there for ten years; they're likely a millionaire.
|
| It's very challenging, but you should definitely get in and try
| it yourself. Move to the Bay if you haven't done so yet, it
| will keep your motivation up.
| cwalv wrote:
| > they're likely a millionaire.
|
| Almost certainly; if not, it's not because they didn't make
| enough to be one. Of course, "past performance is no
| guarantee of future returns."
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| I guess the counterpoint is, if they were any good they would
| have made the money elsewhere
| pkdpic wrote:
| It does seem like a challenge. And even though I only know a
| couple people there they have nothing but good things to say.
| [deleted]
| iamstupidsimple wrote:
| Unpopular opinion: Facebook is widely disliked by the loudest
| voices in the room (for good reason), but the vast majority of
| people still just treat it like a fancy forum. It's not going
| to stain your CV.
|
| Plus, Facebook-the-app is far more disliked than Meta-the-
| company especially now that's a formal distinction. I imagine
| it's still relatively cool to work on Instagram, for example.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > Facebook-the-app is far more disliked than Meta-the-company
|
| My impression is the opposite, not just in my technical
| circles. Facebook is boring. Meta is (arguably) malicious.
| zionic wrote:
| > It's not going to stain your CV.
|
| Not with that attitude. I refuse to hire anyone with FAANG on
| their resume and you can all do it too.
|
| Most of you on here are all woo woo Linux this and FSF that,
| but you won't put your money where your mouth is.
|
| I won't hire you if you work for these assholes, and I'd love
| for more of you to join me.
|
| To the rest of you: Sure, take that $300k total comp bro.
| Good luck working outside SV. Better be worth it.
| hungryhobo wrote:
| Dude you just sound salty at this point...
| zionic wrote:
| What do I have to be salty about? I'm honestly a very
| happy person.
|
| I've found some incredible people that fulfill me, and
| that's freed me.
|
| I used to be afraid of what people would think if I said
| what I felt. Now I can say what I believe with little
| consequence and to be honest? Not going back.
| dnissley wrote:
| I think it's worth reflecting on the fact that you took
| time out of your happy life to leave your original
| comment, which declared that you will use whatever small
| amount of professional power you have to enforce your
| personal grudge against a small set of companies you
| _hate_ by refusing to hire their former workers.
|
| Edit: Just realized you've left like 20 comments on this
| thread that are all grinding the same axe.
| zionic wrote:
| Sure. It was very low cost. Much in the same way
| discriminating against FAANG employees is a low cost high
| efficiency strategy.
| [deleted]
| anonred wrote:
| There's an art to conveying a position on a topic without
| alienating one's audience.
| zionic wrote:
| Sure. I admit I'm not artful on this subject.
|
| But I am honest.
| russelldjimmy wrote:
| It's one thing to state your values and non-negotiables,
| and it's another to seem arrogant and sanctimonious about
| it.
|
| To me, your comment appears to be firmly in the latter.
|
| If that truly is the case, hope you figure out what you are
| resentful about because, unbeknownst to you, it is
| alienating those who see such language.
|
| I agree with your values but I would still think twice
| about working with you based on the comments in your
| history.
| zionic wrote:
| > to seem arrogant and sanctimonious about it.
|
| I'm firm, firm in my belief that the people who have
| chosen of their own free will to work for FAANG have made
| moral compromises that disqualify them from my
| employment.
|
| I don't get how this is "sanctimonious".
|
| These people have made some absolutely terrible life
| choices, and alienation is a part of the consequence
| package that comes with those life choices.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| You think netflix is a moral compromise? What about the
| US government?
| zionic wrote:
| Netflix was pretty neutral until about 4 years ago. Their
| leadership jumped the shark and the entire platform has
| been trash since.
|
| Side personal note: Fuck you guys for getting rid of
| stargate.
| iliekcomputers wrote:
| How is the platform being trash (also arguable) related
| to employee's moral compromises?
| shric wrote:
| There are some people, especially say 10+ years ago, who
| thought e.g. Google wasn't evil.
| hiq wrote:
| > Most of you on here are all woo woo Linux this and FSF
| that, but you won't put your money where your mouth is.
|
| Some big companies are also big FOSS contributors. Some
| people even join these companies to do mostly FOSS (like
| Golang, AOSP, React, VSC). So if there's a contradiction
| there, I don't think it's that obvious for everyone.
|
| > I won't hire you if you work for these assholes
|
| Actually this might be a good strategy if you have too many
| applicants and you pay closer to the median of the market
| rather than the top 10%, since such applicants are less
| likely to accept your offer. So better stop the process
| early.
| throwaway1269 wrote:
| throwawai2021 wrote:
| Total comp at FAANG for a senior engineer who's been there
| a few years is more like $800k+.
| zionic wrote:
| If true, that just makes it worse in my opinion.
|
| Although maybe it's evidence in my favor? They have to
| pay people that much to keep doing what they know is
| wrong...
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Or the job is grueling and requires more time
| commitment/energy. Or it's a very niche technical
| problem. Or the person has an outsized impact on the
| company in other ways like bringing prestige and making
| it easier to hire more people.
|
| There's lots of reasons people get paid large sums.
| loeg wrote:
| That's really only L6+ with some good stock growth. Most
| senior eng are L5. 350-500k is still a lot.
| sockgrant wrote:
| Hi, I've worked for two of FAANG, it's super duper easy to
| work outside of SV.
|
| The reason you sound salty is because you evaluate
| candidates based on whatever perception you have about who
| they are instead of trying to understand who they are.
|
| I'm sure you don't care, sounds like it's working for you,
| so in any event congrats on finding what makes you happy!
| patja wrote:
| I firmly believe that actions speak louder than words.
| People will say all kinds of things to project an
| impression, and then you see what they actually do or
| did, and sometimes it's quite surprising with the
| inconsistency.
| zionic wrote:
| > The reason you sound salty is because you evaluate
| candidates based on whatever perception you have
|
| No, I'm making very real concrete moral judgements about
| you based on who you chose to associate with.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Shall we also start making moral judgements about the
| city or country you live/lived in? The products you
| choose to purchase? The schools you chose to attend? The
| political party you choose to support? The religion you
| are or aren't a part of? The sports teams you support?
|
| Shall we look down on NASA engineers because it's part of
| the US government and pulls heavily from the US
| military/has overlap with the intelligence services/some
| of its top secret projects maybe do things I'm morally
| opposed about?
|
| This kind of guilt by association is pretty bad and
| that's the pushback you're seeing in this thread. Humans
| are social animals. No social group will be without it's
| flaw and larger groups have more and larger problems.
| This same line of reasoning is what fuels religious and
| political persecution. It's barely acceptable in sports
| but that's because it's mostly harmless and in good fun
| until you hit riot levels of idiocy. Heck, the big tech
| companies are massive. They have so many individual teams
| that do totally unrelated stuff to the things you might
| have issues with.
|
| As for the bitterness someone else noted, it's not that
| you stated your values. You went further and made the
| claim that these engineers would have trouble finding
| jobs outside of SV because of the association. That part
| is blatantly false on its face. They may have trouble
| because of niche skills that aren't relevant elsewhere
| because the scale doesn't exist elsewhere. Are there some
| employers who won't hire us because of our association
| with some company? Sure. So? I'll not choose companies
| for myriad of arbitrary reasons too. That doesn't mean
| I'll struggle to find a job overall.
|
| As an aside, I find it a bit telling that you lump
| Netflix into it and then your primary complaint about the
| company was that they canceled a show you are attached
| to. That's not even about morals and is fairly arbitrary.
| This is why there's feedback that it looks like you're
| salty about something unrelated and note you've attached
| a larger reason behind it based on morals.
| [deleted]
| epgui wrote:
| Ah, yes, the "guilt by association fallacy".
| avalys wrote:
| I would have more respect for this comment (and your entire
| crusade in this thread) if you were complaining about
| Facebook for political reasons. I would disagree with you,
| but, I couuld understand your perspective.
|
| But, all FAANG, really? What business are you in that's so
| noble by comparison?
| refurb wrote:
| Ok, so _one_ employer won't hire me. I'll just have to go
| with one of the other tens of thousands.
| zionic wrote:
| You do you, and I wish you all the best.
|
| Doesn't change what I do however. You can also just
| remove FAANG from your CV.
| kooshball wrote:
| truly one of the most delusional comment of all time on hn.
| chillage wrote:
| Hey. I've never worked for a FAANG, but I am considering
| joining Facebook. They way I see it, Facebook is hugely
| impactful and there is real work to do there, ex: flagging
| disinformation, flagging external government influences,
| etc. It's challenging and extremely valuable work.
|
| If everyone who works at Facebook is blacklisted by people
| like you, it would just make the company a worse influence
| on the world because there would be noone left there to
| make it better. So I would prefer if good people had the
| freedom to try to make an impact according to their will
| without fear that people such as yourself will then work
| hard to tarnish their reputations. Thanks!
| pkdpic wrote:
| Thats an interesting distinction. I've heard nothing about
| working at IG specifically. Wonder how different it is.
| whatever_dude wrote:
| Not a negative thing at all despite the perception du jour in
| the media.
| zionic wrote:
| > Newish dev doing my first attempt at a FAANG interview.
|
| My thoughts? Screw 'em. They aren't worth your skill set. I'm
| not joking, fuck these people. The paycheck they give you won't
| make you happy, what will however is not working for these
| scumbags.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I know a bunch of highly skilled people who would never have
| trouble finding work at other companies who say they love
| working at Facebook. I also know a lot of people who use it
| and think it's a great tool for keeping in touch and
| communicating with friends and family and the social, hobby,
| interest and volunteer groups they're in.
|
| I don't personally like the company or Zuck or some of the
| things it does very much, but they aren't the devil. I could
| say the same about probably most corporations. Where do you
| work that's pure as the driven snow?
| deckard1 wrote:
| > I don't personally like the company or Zuck or some of
| the things it does very much, but they aren't the devil.
|
| What about Rupert Murdoch and Fox News? Anti-vaxxers are
| why we are still in this mess. Yet I constantly see Covid
| misinformation on Facebook. We could discuss the genocide
| in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica, Facebook's psyops campaign
| against their users, etc.
|
| Maybe Zuck isn't the devil. But he sure as hell is
| irresponsible at being the CEO of Facebook. If you can't
| tame the scale of your operation then you shouldn't be that
| size to begin with. The collateral damage is too
| significant.
|
| > pure as the driven snow
|
| There are degrees. There are literally thousands of places
| that are not Fox News, Exxon, Nestle, or Facebook.
| Especially in the tech world. You can't toss your resume
| out on the street in Silicon Valley without it landing in
| the lap of a recruiter. I'd start with "didn't contribute
| to genocide" or "didn't think a psyops campaign on our
| users was okay" is a good place to start. I've certainly
| never worked at such a place.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| > What about Rupert Murdoch and Fox News?
|
| I don't think he's the devil either. I do know the nature
| of their game though. It's to divide people. They're
| doing a great job of it.
|
| > Anti-vaxxers are why we are still in this mess. Yet I
| constantly see Covid misinformation on Facebook. We could
| discuss the genocide in Myanmar, Cambridge Analytica,
| Facebook's psyops campaign against their users, etc.
| shopkins wrote:
| "Most corporations" don't do global surveillance on the
| scale Facebook does. It's that simple.
|
| It's not about 100% purity. Just not doing this one little,
| tiny, fundamental-to-their-entire-business thing.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| > "Most corporations" don't do global surveillance on the
| scale Facebook does. It's that simple.
|
| It's never that simple.
|
| What corporations are okay to work for, in this
| unidimensional worldview? Exxon Mobil? Philip Morris?
| Pfizer? Dupont? Boeing? Nestle? BHP? Fox News?
| Volkswagen? Nike? HSBC? Is it okay if your employer's
| owners or executives have appeared in the panama papers?
| Are or have been on the boards of FAANG companies or own
| stock in those companies? Are you allowed to buy Google
| or Apple products and use their services?
|
| What about companies that collect and trade on the
| personal information and habits they collect about their
| customers, just not on the scale of Facebook or Google?
| Are they okay? Even if they would _like_ to be able to
| sell more personal information but don 't presently have
| the means to would that be okay?
|
| So where do you work? What products and services do you
| buy?
| sofixa wrote:
| Everybody decides where to draw their own line. For some
| it's Raytheon or Bayer or Boeing, for some it's HSBC, for
| some it's Facebook. Doesn't matter, you can't invalidate
| a person's moral compass with whataboutism. There are
| plenty of small and medium businesses that aren't
| terrible.
| chillacy wrote:
| I think this has to go both ways, many in this thread use
| phrases like "lack of morals" implying One True Morality
| scale, presumably one where surveillance capitalism is..
| most evil?
|
| I'd personally love to know what everyone actually works
| on. In real life I know people who work on guided
| missiles and ICBM-adjacent tech who manage to sleep well
| at night.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I wasn't invalidating it any more than they were
| invalidating my opinion that facebook isn't the devil
| with their response to telling me that is the
| dealbreaker. "It's that simple".
|
| Note this wasn't the poster I initially asked the
| question of. It was someone else just coming in and
| trying to tell me "it's that simple". My reply was not
| whataboutism, it was explaining why it's not "that
| simple".
|
| And it wasn't a rhetorical question, I really want to
| know, from someone who does have this very simple "line",
| whether it's okay to use Apple or Google or Facebook
| services or products, whether it's okay to work for
| companies whose owners or executives own stock? Whether
| it's okay to vote for politicians who take money from
| them or who themselves own the stock?
|
| This isn't whataboutism, it is exploring the consequences
| of this moral position.
| twy_new_fb_hire wrote:
| I view ad targeting as good for the world: they help make
| my life better by aiming me at products and services
| relevant to my interests and needs, sometimes when I
| didn't even know such a thing existed. It saves poor
| reinvention of the wheel in so many cases.
|
| And FB-the-social-network is also great in theory: groups
| help you make friends and go deep into very niche
| interests. Without it, I would be a more normal, less
| interesting person. Now, with the join of a group, you
| can immerse yourself in a hobby even if absolutely nobody
| in a hundred miles shares that interest. It helps people
| go deeper on what they care about, thus becoming
| 'weirder' or a more fulfilled version of themselves. And
| helps people get ads they care about.
| foepys wrote:
| > I view ad targeting as good for the world: they help
| make my life better by aiming me at products and services
| relevant to my interests and needs, sometimes when I
| didn't even know such a thing existed. It saves poor
| reinvention of the wheel in so many cases.
|
| Let me give you another point of view:
|
| Ads benefit the already wealthy corporations above small
| businesses that cannot pay billions for ads and add
| another lay on to inequality.
|
| "Reinventing the wheel" is sometimes necessary for
| innovation, often called disrupting the market.
|
| Also, I believe that endless consumerism is actually
| killing the planet and ads (no only banner ads but also
| product placements) play a huge part in making people
| feel insecure and less worthy just because they don't
| have the newest gadget.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| In case you weren't aware, the targeting tools provided
| by Google and Facebook have actually rebalanced the
| advertising market back towards smaller businesses.
|
| I kinda agree on the consumerism thing, but that's more a
| reflection of our society than evil genius advertisers.
| ncmncm wrote:
| I know a bunch of people who work at FB. They explain
| that Zuck would love to be as evil as Google or
| Microsoft, but is just nowhere near their league.
|
| Putin would love to be as evil as the US or even China,
| but hasn't got the scratch. Russia has its billionaire
| oligarchs, but the US has probably a hundred times as
| many. China murders more innocents every day than Putin
| does rabble rousers in a year.
|
| Zuck isn't Putin. He isn't Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs. He
| isn't even Bolsanaro, or Duterte. He would _like_ to be.
| distrill wrote:
| :(
| DitheringIdiot wrote:
| I'm not in a position to hire anyone, but I would immediately
| dismiss anyone who continued to work at facebook after the
| genocide in Myanmar. It shows either a lack of morals, massive
| ignorance, or both.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| No, it looks good on your resume. The type of clown who would
| get upset at you working for Facebook is not someone you want
| to work for anyway so consider that another plus.
|
| Some people get extremely sanctimonious about the latest thing
| their politics or corporate "news" media or the current popular
| trend on twitter gets them riled up about. Of course they will
| never face up to the fact that the companies _they_ work for
| and buy from are neck deep in politics, consumerism,
| advertising, influencing, the war industry, corruption, greed,
| etc., too.
|
| These people aren't nearly so brave or numerous in the real
| world as they would have you believe though. If you personally
| feel okay working for a company then I wouldn't bother worrying
| about the opinion of hypocrites.
| Wiseacre wrote:
| If they do face up to the fact, then that means they are not
| necessarily clowns. Some orgs do have ethical standards.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| I'm talking about the vast majority who are in fact
| hypocrites and are very happy to rile up hatred and anger
| towards others while never reflecting on their own behavior
| and situations.
|
| I do know one or two people who think and care very deeply
| about this stuff and they (to some degree) put their money
| where their mouth is by attempting to avoid and not support
| these things they disagree with. They are typically the
| last to point their finger at others.
| throwaway1269 wrote:
| dnissley wrote:
| The problem is that more and more orgs have "ethical
| standards" downloaded direct from the nytimes editorial
| section.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| And naturally those ethical standards only apply to
| others, not themselves.
| TrevorAustin wrote:
| I'm a hiring manager and while I despise Facebook/Meta (https:/
| /twitter.com/search?q=%40trevaustin%20facebook&src=ty...),
| there's no denying that it's a positive qualification on a
| resume.
|
| It's not what you want to do with your life, but I've had jobs
| at suspect places while I was getting established (Palantir)
| and lots and lots of others have too. It's better than having
| worked somewhere people haven't heard of (ie above replacement
| value) and much better than having worked somewhere with a
| reputation for doing poor technical work.
| kodah wrote:
| I don't know how informative my opinion is, but I'll do my best
| to lay it out.
|
| Some background:
|
| I'm quite pro-privacy. I go to great extents to marginalize
| cloud services in my life. I pay for services and am, by
| default, skeptical of free services. I consider this core to my
| ethos as a person. I was raised in a decently religious
| household, but went to a religious school, every day, for over
| a decade - I'm not a fan of "morals".
|
| I'm also a senior engineer who does most of our hiring
| filtering for a fairly large firm. I will interview and hire
| Facebookers, Googlers, Amazonians etc. They're skilled, usually
| in singular domains, and passionate people - thus useful. Do I
| agree with their ethical compasses or excuses they've made for
| such work as a person? Absolutely not. However, their life is
| not my life, and I'm sure there's judgements they could equally
| pass on to me about my life and experiences if I were so brazen
| to (publicly) pass my judgement on to them.
|
| There's some inevitable questions that come with my view:
|
| _How do you trust them given the orientation of their ethical
| compass?_ Simple. My company (and team!) has our own ethical
| frameworks and principles. If they don 't abide by them my
| judgement isn't needed - the company will terminate them.
|
| _How do you listen to talk about ethics or morals from them?_
| I don 't. The great thing about ethical frameworks is they're
| usually set by people far above me who have a much higher view
| of the landscape than I do. Morals are a cathartic replacement
| for ethical frameworks when someone needs to feel good about
| themselves; thus they're pretty irrelevant when ethical
| frameworks are abound.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I'll hire at $400k cash comp for 2 yrs experience and I won't
| skip you for Meta. The only problem is that, like most big tech
| companies, it has some people who are there as a retirement.
|
| Meta is better than Alphabet about that, though.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| You hire people with two years experience out of college for
| $400k/yr package? Is this in SV? What kind of job, what
| experience is needed?
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's in SF by the Embarcadero. You will write financial
| trading code. I pay salary plus bonus plus other stuff.
|
| Experience:
|
| - You spent those two years becoming very skillful at some
| language where you can express invariants/constraints
| neatly, and know how to structure programs in something
| like Java, or modern C++ (OCaml, Scala, Rust, whatever, is
| fine)
|
| - You are the kind of person who spent those two years with
| very little time road-blocked, i.e. every time you got
| stuck you found a way out.
|
| - You have a conceptual understanding of low-latency
|
| Lots of people do find the comp attractive, so I find that
| leading with it hits poor outcomes, so sadly I won't post a
| job link, but you can either email me and I promise to
| respond or you can stick something in your profile and I
| will look tomorrow.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Thank you for the answer, much appreciated -- a lot of
| people throw out comments like yours but won't back them
| up.
|
| I'm probably not the right fit for the job, I'm happily a
| lowly kernel developer with 20 years experience on half
| the salary and not in SV/SF. But I do appreciate the
| answer and maybe your post leads to a mutually beneficial
| arrangement with someone here.
| renewiltord wrote:
| I once aspired to be a kernel dev. As an aside, I once
| spoke to an engineer at a previous gig and told him that
| we don't get as low-level as what he was used to (wrote
| kernel code) and he was affronted. Had to calm him down
| and tell him that I meant "close to the metal" not
| "inferior software".
|
| Didn't work out for other reasons but I was embarrassed.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| Sounds like he needed some thicker skin or awareness of
| the terms of art in his own field! I don't think you had
| anything to be embarrassed about, that's what my pun was
| related to.
|
| Although as another aside, I know some kernel devs who do
| very low level work for HFT. You're not in Chicago or NYC
| so maybe you're not in that game. Or at least you're
| happy to keep a healthy distance from the coalface.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| I read that as "if you're coming from a FAANG/MAGMA
| company, we'll compensate you extra for the RSUs you'll be
| giving up when leaving".
| pkdpic wrote:
| Yeah seriously hire me. Ive never heard of 400k for two
| years exp but Im into it. Are you talking about coding
| roles or management or what?
| eclipxe wrote:
| levels.fyi
| hiq wrote:
| > it has some people who are there as a retirement.
|
| In which way does it transpire during interviews / once they
| join your company?
| cebert wrote:
| What planet / company do you work at?
| rr808 wrote:
| I think it is unfashionable right now, but doesn't really
| deserve it. I think twitter is more toxic and reddit has bigger
| echo chambers. Perhaps in a few years everyone will settle down
| a bit.
| pkdpic wrote:
| Thats a refreshing perspective to see in this thread. Thanks
| for the input :)
| vanusa wrote:
| _I opened up Leetcode and started chipping away at the problems
| in the "Hard" section. It took me days to solve some and I felt
| miserable. Self-doubt crept in, and I started to lose motivation.
| I hopped on 2 phone screens and failed both. It was humiliating
| and I felt like shit._
|
| As in, the same very same tests your company now expects new
| candidates to "solve" (pretending they haven't seen it before) in
| about 30 minutes tops. In order to, you know, keep out the riff-
| raff.
| float4 wrote:
| Are questions of the hard type really that common? Thought it
| was mainly medium.
| nvarsj wrote:
| Hard level are really rare in FAANG, based on my friend who
| recently went through Google interviews. More like
| easy/medium. It actually sounded fairly easy to me, he only
| prepped for a month without any prior leetcode experience. I
| think finance tend to ask the medium/hard questions more so.
| yongjik wrote:
| I recently changed jobs (also interviewed at FB, though I
| didn't do well) and none of the interview questions were at
| LeetCode hard level.
|
| There was maybe one question that I'd say was objectively
| hard (because it was completely unexpected and blew my mind -
| fortunately I did it OK) - but I don't think practicing
| LeetCode hard level would've helped there anyway. And then
| several questions were barely above LeetCode easy level and I
| had a brain fart. (Should have practiced binary trees a bit
| more, dammit.)
|
| IMHO LeetCode hard level is a waste of time, unless you
| _know_ for sure that the company you 're preparing for gives
| these questions.
| grp000 wrote:
| When my mentor was going through MANAMANA interviews a
| several months back for senior/staff DS/MLE positions, he was
| getting mostly mediums and a handful of hards.
| psyc wrote:
| With a few exceptions, I generally can't solve hard leetcode
| problems. It never even occurred to me to feel bad about it!
| I've been a working programmer for 25 years, including many
| years at Microsoft and Facebook. I'm certain I've never
| encountered a problem at work that needed a 'hard' style
| solution, and if I hypothetically had, I don't even know how
| it would pass code review.
|
| I've solved almost all of the easy and mediums, though.
| scollet wrote:
| I'm definitely nowhere near 25 years.
|
| My perspective of "hard" LC problems is that they are
| typically distributed over a system anyways, where the
| optimal parts make the whole. That, or they are domain-
| specific analogs, like complex solvers, or involve graduate
| graph theory, etc.
|
| What is your perception? I haven't done LC in about a year
| and a half.
| vanusa wrote:
| Don't know about FB specifically, but in Bezosland they
| apparently are, according to this proud Amazonian, at least:
|
| https://www.teamblind.com/post/I-always-ask-leetcode-
| hard-7S...
|
| Smells like a troll - but perhaps only "partially" so.
| packetslave wrote:
| Must be a challenge to find LeetCode Hard questions that
| you can somehow tie back to one of the Leadership
| Principles.
| [deleted]
| sharker8 wrote:
| This post is missing the key detail: is this person taking risks
| with 'the house's money' (high net worth, can generate passive
| income) or not? The answer is probably yes having spent that many
| years at fb, but I found the tone of 'I'll cut to the chase, I
| took a pay cut' disingenuous. The real questions is 'is this
| person already high net worth or not'.
| golondon wrote:
| I guess with 8 something years at Meta, if the RSUs were not
| spent stupidly, considering the stock appreciation and the
| refreshers, it would be safe to say this person's net worth is
| at least $2M.
| donsupreme wrote:
| "everyday life it's still very prestigious place to be working
| at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is easy, saying you work for
| Facebook gets you on the fast line."
|
| I once felt that way but after leaving FAANG years later, I
| realized how snobby something like this would sound.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Doesn't make it wrong, though.
| jumelles wrote:
| It is 100% wrong.
| dymk wrote:
| It is wrong. They care about the number on your paystub, not
| the company name.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Surely they take the stability of your job into account.
| dymk wrote:
| Credit scores are based on how good you are at paying off
| your debits, and how consistent your paycheck is. They
| care about the numbers, not the names.
| CapmCrackaWaka wrote:
| I'm not sure what this means. Getting a mortgage and a car loan
| was easy, a car loan approval took no time at all. Does working
| at FAANG speed this process up somehow?
| rsynnott wrote:
| I'm not sure how it would, at least these days. Mortgage
| underwriting is, I gather, pretty formulaic now. There was a
| time where it was an advantage if the branch manager approved
| of you, but particularly after the last crash, banks started
| getting a bit worried about that approach.
| mattnewton wrote:
| At my FAANG company / Bank, in addition to just the paystubs
| being nice, it also did come with actual benefits including a
| lower rate on mortgage offers. I have no idea if they would
| extend them to anyone if pressed, but these kinds of offers
| tied to the company do exist.
| bradly wrote:
| No. Nobody cares about the specific company when you are
| getting a loan.
| mattnewton wrote:
| That was not my experience - see my sister comment. Some
| companies advertise explicit perks to FAANG employees
| hoping to win their business, including things like waving
| fees. I don't know if they would have negotiated the rate
| down anyways but I was quoted at a better mortgage rate in
| part because of my employment.
| bradly wrote:
| Interesting. Different than my experience, but I was
| FAANG in Southern California, not the Bay Area.
|
| We did have partners with all sorts of companies for
| discounts, so I would be surprised that there were
| discounts available, but it wasn't like when you give
| your employee information when getting a loan they would
| do anything different. Now the travel perks were just
| being at FAANG we quite-nice and I miss those.
| hellotheremr wrote:
| Whenever I see a post talk about prestige, especially with a
| capital P, I can't help but think about Blind polls and
| prestigehunt. There's something about the word I can't take
| seriously...
| hiq wrote:
| > a car loan
|
| Is it normal for a software engineer (or anybody who could
| afford it after saving for a few months) to get a loan to buy a
| car in the US? Is it worth it financially? Or is it to improve
| credit scores, maybe?
| klohto wrote:
| Money's cheap. Why wouldn't you take a low interest loan and
| invest the leftover money yourself? Car is the worst
| investment you can do anyway.
| hiq wrote:
| Ok, so the interests are so low that it does make sense
| financially? I often see ads for such loans that seem less
| advantageous than just saving and buying it cash, so I
| thought it was mostly for people who could not save fast
| enough.
| SMAAART wrote:
| > Most recruiters are terrible. They send generic job
| descriptions if there's a matching word in your resume. I'm very
| surprised the market didn't push the recruiter game up. There's
| so much room for improvement!
|
| Yeah, why is that?
|
| Same for most Realtors.
| paulcole wrote:
| It's a bit of an exaggeration, but same for most people at most
| jobs.
|
| Most people aren't that great at what they do. They do enough
| to get by and don't make a ton of mistakes, but they rightfully
| don't give 100%.
|
| Source: Me. Am not great at what I do. Don't give 100%. Do make
| a number of mistakes. Do enough to get by but not much more.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Because to them it is a numbers game. They try hard to make the
| interactions seem personal but for the most part to them it is
| all business. It you're susceptible they'll have you relocate
| your family across country for an at-will contract knowing
| retention sucks. As long as they get paid they do not care for
| the most part. They will also spam the hell out of you for
| eternity no matter how much you tell them you don't want to do
| something.
| throwaway2333 wrote:
| Sales funnels.
|
| You can only nudge conversions to each successive "step" so
| much. Once you've reached diminishing returns, the only thing
| left to do is get more leads into the funnel -- grind the
| process out/pick up the phone and dial.
|
| Feast or famine jobs also don't lend themselves well to "long-
| term thinking." If something is working, don't break it, just
| keep on going and make that paper. If something isn't working,
| you don't have the time/soundness of mind to figure it out,
| just keep on going (or else you won't be able to pay your
| bills).
|
| Jobs are a commodity and the only selling point is price/pay --
| making it one of the worst things to "sell" (the "best"/easiest
| things to sell are the antithesis of this).
| throwaway_merig wrote:
| Here's what I've experienced over the past few years. I went to
| work as a SWE at a large tech company and was paid handsomely,
| think SWE L5 level at Google.
|
| For almost 2 years, I had almost nothing to do, no software to
| write, no green fields to explore, no products to develop. I'm in
| a large unit and there's unit level funding with silly goals that
| the whole unit (hundreds of people) has to achieve. I have
| consulted here and there for specific projects, but for the most
| part I am left alone.
|
| Which means I have a lot of free time in my days and my
| vacations, official and unofficial, have been of the "gap year"
| or late 19th century bon viveur type: visits to major Asian
| capitals, beach life in Turkey, adventures all over the world.
|
| My ratings have been more than good, but I often wonder if I
| should stop this grand experiment in paid time off and take a new
| step in my career. But where? There are few companies that pay as
| much and it's pretty (or very!) stressful living. Then, I'd have
| to go on the interview circuit, studying for a couple of months
| to prepare (wtf!) being judged by half-asleep people who couldn't
| care less if I get into the company or not. And why? I enjoy my
| free time and have lots of activities, hobbies and interests that
| I love. Certainly the current state of affairs could end, but the
| same could be said of any "experience".
|
| Contrary to what many others in the tech industry apparently
| think, if I didn't get paid, I would never work one second for
| someone else. It's all a transaction and I'm not particularly
| passionate about my job. I don't hate it, but if it were to
| disappear as a profession tomorrow, I wouldn't cry.
| iamsaitam wrote:
| Prestige in working for Facebook? I guess ethics isn't a thing
| for the op in their social circle.
| CincinnatiMan wrote:
| What does PSC stand for and what is it? I've seen it here and
| mentioned on Blind a few times.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Performance Summary Cycle. FB's semi-annual performance
| reviews.
| packetslave wrote:
| yup, at Google it's "perf". Same deal.
| CincinnatiMan wrote:
| Are they particularly stressful at FB? Capital One did these
| too when I worked there and I just assumed most companies did
| them, but maybe I'm wrong on that front.
| romanhn wrote:
| Yes, very stressful for both individual contributors and
| managers. IMO many of FB dysfunctions are attributable
| directly to PSC and its focus on impact. When promotions
| and even continued employment are on the line, short-term
| thinking takes over and every decision is optimized through
| the lens of the performance review. The great work life
| balance the author described is far and between in that
| company.
| notacoward wrote:
| 3.5 years at Facebook, and concur with everything you
| said. I'll add two things.
|
| (1) You allude to it with "even continued employment" but
| it deserves to be explicit: "up or out" makes everything
| about PSC twice as bad as it already is. I wasn't subject
| to it myself (I was hired at a "terminal" level) but I
| saw it cause much grief for more junior folks.
|
| (2) Mandatory oncall can be "meh" on some teams but
| absolute hell on others. On my first team (small service)
| I was in a rotation that had as few as two members at one
| point. Oncall every other week. On my second team (large
| service) I was on three rotations for a while. In both
| cases things could get _very_ intense. Not only no work
| /life balance either way, but also no time for "impact"
| on your PSC when you spend the whole time fighting fires,
| plus cleanup the next week, plus working on follow-up
| tasks after each SEV review.
|
| The combination of these two factors led to many people
| deferring everything they could from their own shift into
| the next, plus never working on cleanup or follow-up
| tasks, because that's the behavior PSC rewards. The
| intent behind PSC was good - to be quantitative and fair
| - but in effect I agree that it drove much of FB's
| internal dysfunction.
| romanhn wrote:
| Thank you for the extra detail. I will add that PSC
| exerts plenty of pressure at terminal levels as well,
| since two halves of Meets Most rating are likely to end
| your career there. Lots of weasel words from leadership
| about how it's not an official policy, but it's near
| impossible to recover from given that at that point your
| manager's PSC depends on getting the low performer off
| the team.
|
| Really curious how it works now with the cycle moving to
| annual cadence. I really doubt though that two years of
| Meets Most is going to be acceptable.
| influx wrote:
| They are changing to annual this year.
| deep_lol wrote:
| The author leaves so clearly work at FB sucks, yet he spends most
| of the article praising the company. There are leadership
| changes, reorgs and direction churn yet it is somehow very easy
| to follow the career ladder by "just executing the plan". People
| leave being burnt out and yet he somehow managed to only work
| "few hours" per day.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| A person that dedicates time to learning how to be efficient at
| their job can in some roles achieve more in less time.
| deep_lol wrote:
| I find it hard to believe. Learning also takes time and in
| software development you need to learn constantly. You can
| optimize some type of work, maybe you can code faster, but
| others are fast too! Remember, everyone around you passed the
| LeetCode test. How would you optimize meetings, communication
| with the team, reading/reviewing other peoples code?
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| > How would you optimize meetings, communication with the
| team, reading/reviewing other peoples code?
|
| 1. Having purposeful, moderated meetings with minutes and
| deliverables that can be evaluated. When you force people
| to deliver something, and when that something will be
| subject to open evaluation, meetings stop being "free" and
| people that see "meetings as a job" will quickly give their
| 2 weeks notice and go away to the next company that will
| sponsor their lazy lifestyle.
|
| Managers are employees too, and their performance is more
| important than the performance of the people they manage.
|
| 2. Communication with the team is solved by verifying
| communication. At the end of a meeting, ask a random person
| in the room if they understood the presentation. At the end
| of a standup meeting, ask a random team member what someone
| else was doing. You will be surprised with the results. And
| people will grow around this process by becoming better
| communicators, and by owning their responsibility as
| attendees.
|
| 3. For code reviews, you should start by automating as much
| as you can with static analysis, creating a coding standard
| and documenting good practices, then adding a human at the
| end to verify that humans are not cheating by suppresing
| rules. Also, make sure that the feedback is about the code,
| is fair and never gets personal.
|
| The main takeaway is: verify everything. Take nothing for
| granted.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| This is an amazing piece of writing. I'm grateful to the author
| for publishing it, and for the poster bringing it to HN. It's
| heartening to see high quality writing on a personal blog.
| Definitely subscribing.
| yob22 wrote:
| underwater wrote:
| I started at Facebook a little before Alex, but left five or so
| years ago. It remains a highlight of my working life. It's a
| little sad, but expected, to hear it's become just another tech
| co.
|
| I'm interested to know why you didn't use your network more when
| looking for new opportunities. Amjad of Replit is an ex Facebook
| employee, after all.
| ipaddr wrote:
| If it was so great why is everyone an ex-employee?
| underwater wrote:
| During my time there it grew massively and went public. A
| company with 1,000 engineers is always going to be different
| from one with 10,000.
|
| The scope of work narrowed a lot. There was a shift to focus
| on review cycles instead did shipping cool stuff and avoiding
| being crushed by competitors like Google. Towards the end I
| fell into the trap of fixating on perf reviews and came close
| to burning myself out after switching roles.
|
| Even in the era that I enjoyed, I met people who had a bad
| experience. Either due to projects that didn't pan out, bad
| managers, or just not being a good fit for the culture.
| ipaddr wrote:
| What are the attributes of a successful facebook employee
| or what type of person fits the culture? Is it a culture
| that accepts questioning of leadership?
| xixixao wrote:
| > Is it a culture that accepts questioning of leadership?
|
| Absolutely.
|
| I would say successful employees find an intersection
| between their interests+skills and what is needed. That
| might seem generic but it's important to realize and
| spend time focusing on.
| ur-whale wrote:
| I was expecting at the very least a little bit of self-
| introspection about the ethical problems of working for a company
| like FB and how that may have participated in the decision.
|
| Nope, article is 100% about author's own well-being and
| happiness.
| bigyellow wrote:
| Guy works at Facecrook for a decade and all he can muster is a
| selfish article about compensation and his precious "work life
| balance". Couldn't even say a few words about the ethical
| ramifications of this "contributions" to society by working
| there. No soul, no mindfulness, just pure ego.
| dahdum wrote:
| I didn't see retirement addressed, that would be among my top
| priorities personally. Unless he's already financially
| independent and can retire at will, taking a 30% paycut off FB's
| top 5% comp could mean delaying retirement by many years. Given
| fixed living costs, retirement savings could easily drop by much
| more than 30%.
|
| I'm not disagreeing with his choice, it's a personal one and he
| may not want early retirement, but I would find it extremely
| difficult.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| 9 years at facebook, maxing out 401k and Roth Megabackdoor ~=
| $450k in tax-sheltered retirement accounts. That is a hell of a
| good start for retirement.
|
| EDIT: forgot the employer match. More like $600k.
| doopy1 wrote:
| That won't carry you very far if you live in a major city.
| ojbyrne wrote:
| As I said, a hell of a good start.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| Matching is great, but the total limit on 401(k)
| contributions for the year ($61-67k) is the same whether it's
| withheld from your wages or matched by your employer.
|
| (This is not financial or tax advice; listen to me and I will
| definitely lose all your money and send you to club fed.)
| loeg wrote:
| You can save in ordinary taxable accounts, too. The sky is
| the limit.
| jjulius wrote:
| It's entirely circumstantial and boils down to, "Is it worth
| sacrificing my [mental health/happiness/whatever] just to
| retire a couple of years sooner"?
| dahdum wrote:
| If he had a $330k salary, 30% is roughly $100k. Take 50% for
| marginal income taxes and he's banking an extra $50k/year
| into retirement savings. That's almost enough to support a
| comfortable year of retirement for most FIRE people, even
| before compounded investment returns kick in.
|
| As someone mid career and planning on early retirement, I
| look at this situation as a choice between working X more
| years at Facebook being mildly fulfilled or 2*X years
| elsewhere for only a chance at being happier.
|
| Again that's my personal view based on my own retirement
| goals and savings rate. I'm sure he made the right choice for
| himself.
| eropple wrote:
| If you like what you do for a living, retirement is less of a
| factor. And "30% less" is still a _truckload of money_. I 've
| never worked for a FAANG and I don't live in a particularly
| cheap area, nor am I particularly budget-conscious, but a
| comfortable retirement isn't even close to being a problem at
| an early age.
| chii wrote:
| Retirement at early age doesn't mean you stop doing things -
| it means you get to do things without having to regard
| financial consideration.
| eropple wrote:
| Yes. So does a career where you make stupid money almost no
| matter what you do. I've made less money than most of my
| contemporaries. I've also taken much more time off to do
| other things and had much more fun along the way.
|
| Sustainability is a real thing. You don't have to wait
| until "FIRE status" or whatever the cool kids want to sell
| you podcasts about in order to have a life.
| [deleted]
| erobbins wrote:
| He was at Facebook since 2012... has got to be rich. I gotta
| wonder why not just retire completely at that point, or at
| least start your own company?
|
| For those of us not in that situation it's a lot harder,
| especially if you want to work now so you don't have to work
| later and can retire asap.
| okhobb wrote:
| Starting a company is not fun for most engineers. Way more
| fun to get paid (a smaller amount, but way above "average")
| to hack at a company that has already found product-market
| fit. Replit doesn't have a Facebook-size audience, but it's
| still millions of people who you can reach with your work.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I work at a place with a defined benefit pension that is sweet.
|
| But, I've watched colleagues who get and stay miserable because
| they just need another 15/10/5/3 years. Misery is tough and
| I've seen people really destroy themselves chasing the end
| goal.
|
| Point is, find your happiness first.
| [deleted]
| xmprt wrote:
| On the other hand, one could easily work at Facebook for 10
| years and have enough saved up to retire immediately depending
| on what their living expenses look like. So taking a 30% paycut
| to work on something that you find more interesting is less
| about being able to retire and more about working on something
| interesting until you decide that you'd rather retire.
| dahdum wrote:
| The kicker for me is based on my age, savings rates, and
| planned spending, a 30% drop from FB level comp could put
| retirement nearly twice as many years in the future.
|
| I'd have to really hate my job to give that up, especially
| since he noted it's easy to rest and vest with a few hours of
| work per day.
| gcampos wrote:
| "twice" is not that much when you are already close to
| retire (like 2 years).
| floodyberry- wrote:
| If a 30% drop from insanely overpaid to highly overpaid
| doubles how long you have to work until you "retire" _and_
| you feel the need to whine about this fact in public, the
| solution is simple: thank god every day that being an
| entitled asshole is not a crime
| daxfohl wrote:
| Do note that bonus and promotion are tied to performance, which
| is huge at senior level. So if you're not motivated to perform,
| you may actually be better off taking a pay cut to follow your
| passions, both emotionally and financially.
| rsynnott wrote:
| I find it kind of fascinating how into the idea of early
| retirement many people on this site are. I mean, there's
| nothing wrong with it as such, but... I don't really get it. I
| don't think I actually know anyone who has early-retired. What
| would you do with yourself? Is it not better to work for a
| longer time at a job you like than a shorter time at a higher
| paying one that you dislike?
| fermentation wrote:
| It's less about actually retiring and more about not working
| for "the man". I know of a couple of folks who have retired
| in their 30s to open up coffee shops or make games.
| Aperocky wrote:
| That's a good perspective, I'm fortunate enough at where I am
| that I have considerable say in determining what and how I am
| going to work. I still look forward to weekends but don't
| find this work as something I want to get away from.
|
| Able to work from home might have significantly sweetened the
| deal.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Travel, surf, garden, build and fly drones, make music, enjoy
| time at the beach, sculpt metal, write interesting programs
| that occur to me, write a novel, play poker... I could go on.
| You'd rather be working? You only have 40 or 50 years left on
| the planet and then that's...it.
| jakear wrote:
| I think the critique is that you should be perfectly able
| to do all those thing and more, while working, if you have
| a job that properly respects work/life balance. On the
| other hand, if you spend a decade or two constantly
| grinding on work at the expense of all else, so that when
| you're 40 you can do those things, you might find that your
| body isn't up for the task.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| No, you cannot do all those things and more while
| working. You can't even get a taste, it's more akin to
| looking through a store window.
|
| It's not possible to fully experience a foreign
| country/culture in a 1 week vacation.
|
| No idea about surfing, but it's not possible to even get
| a sense of what skiing has to offer in a couple of
| weekends a year.
|
| Maybe, for a few people, it's possible to find the
| motivation and energy to fully immerse yourself in
| working on your own software after already having put in
| a full day of work, but they are in a tiny minority.
| jakear wrote:
| I've known too many folks dead by 30 to take advice from
| someone advocating for "boring_twenties".
|
| This is the only life we've got. Don't spend it bored.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| You're responding to my username, instead of my comment?
| blocked_again wrote:
| I have friends who retired at age 25. Retiring early
| should be the number one focus you have in your life.
| Everything else is bullshit, noise and propoganda.
| jakear wrote:
| Then what? Three options: never work; work for yourself;
| work for someone else. Each has its costs and benefits.
| To assume that one path is the ideal state for absolutely
| everyone is naivete beyond belief.
| blocked_again wrote:
| Sure. But then you are making a decision based truely on
| what you want to do with your life. Not the same as
| people working for a company because they have to and
| that's their only way to survive.
| smallerfish wrote:
| Perhaps, but it's about tradeoffs. If you retire in your
| late 50s or 60s, your body is into decline at that point,
| however fit your lifestyle has been. The goal of early
| retirement is about being free of the need to put in time
| for somebody else's business while you're still in a
| condition to lead an active lifestyle doing things that
| you enjoy doing.
| closeparen wrote:
| I want to continue being a homeowner in a walkable
| neighborhood of a major city, without necessarily always
| making the astronomical wages that calls for.
|
| I won't stop working, but I might work the kind of jobs that
| would otherwise require sharing a rental or living in sprawl.
|
| In 3-4 more years at big corporates I think I could get my
| 1BR condo paid off with some passive income to offset
| property taxes. The HOA fee is basically a "normal" rent and
| I could pay that out of any job. I'm not sure what'll happen
| if I ever need a 2BR though.
| yla92 wrote:
| This is how I see it. It could also be more towards
| "financial freedom" instead of "early retirement". Financial
| freedom in a sense that you don't have to work for money
| anymore and can live on your investment/saving with some fix
| withdrawal every year. That also means that you can choose to
| work at the places of your interest but don't pay much and
| you will still be okay!
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| throwAway97557 wrote:
| I left FB a handful of years ago and the RSUs left me in
| this position (low 7-figs in investments/savings). I still
| work full time, but I only work on things I care about,
| which mostly involves non-profits and social work. I like
| getting a paycheck and knowing that I'm still growing my
| nest egg, but I care very little about getting promotions
| and raises since they're a borderline rounding error
| compared to what I've saved. If the salary can cover my
| monthly expenses and I like the mission, I'm happy to take
| the job. That's what I've found financial independence to
| bring.
| skort wrote:
| I'm looking to do something similar, leave behind the
| high stress and find something more meaningful to work on
| that covers the bills while my nest egg matures. I
| admittedly have not looked into what's next as much as I
| should have, but do you have any tips on how to make such
| a transition?
| [deleted]
| moneywoes wrote:
| volunteer, travel, hang out with friends, get in shape for a
| day that likely won't arrive
| gryn wrote:
| 'early retirement' doesn't mean sit down and do nothing.
|
| for me personally it mean getting the opportunity to not be
| shackled by money.
|
| you can spend the rest of your life working on whatever
| project/idea you want without it ever needing to be perverted
| by money in order to sustain yourself.
|
| a lot of problems/services solved by many business would be
| more effective for both sides if the business didn't have as
| a goal first generating profit and then solve stated problem
| second (or further down the list of priorities)
| 2sk21 wrote:
| This is exactly what I have been doing after I retired
| early. I spend a a lot of time studying math and physics
| and working on hobbies. There is simply so much to explore
| - I _never_ feel bored.
| analogdreams wrote:
| What would I do with myself? Anything but sit in another
| pointless meeting or pretend to care about the latest
| corporate policy. The focus should absolutely be getting out
| of the 9-5 as soon as possible.
|
| And I've found it gets worse once you realize you are
| financial independent or within spitting distance of the
| early-retirement. It magnifies the BS and makes it easier to
| mouth off. It also magnifies the concerns around inflation
| and stock market returns that could chain you to the 9-5
| longer than planned.
| xenihn wrote:
| i personally feel that there's a good chance that the choices
| for people with 30+ years until retirement age are either
| retiring early, or not retiring at all. i want to have
| retirement money, but also keep working. i want to be in a
| position where i would be able to retire if i was no longer
| able to continue working. if im not in that position, i might
| lose my current income trajectory, and never recover it, and
| then im stuck working for the rest of my life
| 2sk21 wrote:
| I had a similar attitude when I was younger - I thought I
| would work for ever since I enjoyed programming so much. I
| had a fairly successful career both financially and in terms
| of technical achievements but by the time I reached my mid
| 50s, I was feeling completely burnt out with software
| development. Thankfully by that time I was financially secure
| so I was able to retire (I don't know if you would call 50s
| early though). I am thoroughly enjoying retirement - I still
| spend my time studying a lot of math a physics and working on
| hobbies.
| moonshinefe wrote:
| It's definitely early in general.
|
| Most millennials or younger won't be retiring until they're
| 70+ if ever on average the way the world is going. I
| certainly hope I'm as lucky as you and glad to hear you're
| enjoying it and keeping your mind engaged.
| romanhn wrote:
| > At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day.
|
| A note of caution that this is not the common Facebook
| experience. I joined being fully aware of their reputation for
| poor work life balance, but even then it was soul-crushing. The
| pressure to perform is near constant, consequences of not
| performing are real, and the bar for meeting expectations is very
| high to start with, such that externally hired senior engineers
| are frequently overwhelmed by the sheer amount of expectations.
|
| I was a manager there and got the distinct impression that the
| expectations bar was also rising over time. FB/Meta tends to hire
| the overperforming types, who put extra pressure on themselves to
| get those Exceeds and Greatly Exceeds ratings that come with real
| monetary rewards. The problem is you can't have everyone
| exceeding, not at the macro level anyways. So there's a real
| pressure on the managers with too many of those Exceeds ratings.
| The goal is to prevent a manager that misunderstands the
| expectations from giving everyone Exceeds, but the side effect is
| that over time there is a drift of expectations from Exceeds to
| Meets side. Having been with the company for so many years, the
| author likely did not notice this drift and was able to adjust
| over time naturally. Newer hires (which, given FB's rate of
| growth, is the large majority) aren't so lucky.
| beering wrote:
| On the flip side the huge number of new hires will drag down
| the performance bar. They can't give bad ratings to too many
| people at once.
|
| The other thing is that for many people, getting a normal Meets
| All rating is totally fine. You don't need to push yourself to
| Exceeds level.
| erehweb wrote:
| Was interesting that the writer says little about FB's mission
| and impact on the world - seems like it was not really important
| to them as a positive or negative. Perhaps part of this is due to
| writer's spending more time in tools rather than something like
| NewsFeed?
| moonshinefe wrote:
| It's actually why the blog post bothered me, despite everyone
| heaping praise on it here.
|
| "Then there's the Prestige. Facebook gets a lot of blame in
| media lately, but in everyday life it's still very prestigious
| place to be working at. Getting a mortgage or a car loan is
| easy, saying you work for Facebook gets you on the fast line."
|
| That's the money quote, this person is only thinking about
| themself and really doesn't consider how their work impacts
| society or what company they're helping as a priority issue at
| all. I don't know why people like this are the way they are, it
| seems to border on sociopathy or greed or something to me
| ("screw you guys, I got mine.") At times they must have just
| buried their head in the sand over all the Facebook scandals
| including helping a freaking genocide. It's crazy, and reminds
| me a little of "American Psycho" to be honest.
| wanderer_ wrote:
| Yeah, I find this view to be pretty unfair to the author. He
| was not directly responsible for things like data policy or
| anything at Fb. As he said multiple times, he found
| fulfillment from working on projects with a small group, and
| from distancing himself from the higher corporate debacles.
|
| I don't think he is morally at any fault.
|
| Here's another way of looking at it: Fb is so damn big,
| there's no reason them looking bad to the public should
| condemn every software developer on their payroll.
| moonshinefe wrote:
| This person was helping Facebook make money while the news
| was filled with stories about them manipulating democracy,
| enabling genocide and ruining people's mental health.
| That's cool they were working on tools that weren't
| directly related on a small team, but the money all funnels
| to the top and enables this stuff. They knew full well from
| all the news unless they were completely burying their head
| in the sand.
|
| So no ethical responsibility? I strongly disagree. They
| could've quit at any time and found dozens of jobs
| elsewhere with a resume like that. Judging by the post they
| did after nearly a decade, and only because purely selfish
| reasons. I was maybe a bit harsh, but come on..
| Aperocky wrote:
| Sometimes Encapsulation is a good idea, even in life.
| andrew_ wrote:
| I just do not understand why somebody with 20 years of experience
| would invest that kind of time in leetcode. just say "no" and be
| done with the BS, and with the kind of financial success the
| author has enjoyed previously, wait for the right company to come
| along that doesn't require it. That's the only way the industry
| is going to fix itself; enough people start saying no.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| For me, it's either imposter's syndrome or I just suck.
| Regardless, I'm worried I won't be able to find a job.
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| It's the same for me. I'd like to have that kind of
| confidence, but the bottom line is that I'm extremely
| replaceable.
| mattnewton wrote:
| Personally I don't think it's a very high signal when hiring,
| mostly useful asking one in a phone screen to see if the person
| is faking having any programming experience and then leaning
| more heavily on systems design and behavioral questions.
|
| But, I also don't feel like it's some huge indignity? I have
| spent far longer on take home tests from companies than
| practicing leetcode most interview circuits. I wouldn't
| discount a company for asking these kinds of questions to try
| to get more signal from applicants.
| quest88 wrote:
| I don't like these questions either. But, I've come to accept
| that it's worth your time if the companies you're interested in
| ask the questions. Especially so if they have a big
| compensation package.
| draw_down wrote:
| alexeiz wrote:
| Several years ago, I've seen an opening where a company was
| looking for someone to "lead their engineering effort". When I
| applied, they asked me to pass a hackerrank test. I said,
| thanks, but no thanks. It's obvious that such mismatch of the
| role description and the methods of finding the right candidate
| can only mean they are either incompetent or lying. None of
| that says anything good about that company.
| ativzzz wrote:
| I am casually doing some leetcode in prep for a job search a
| few months down the line. I've never had to do these problems
| before, nor do I have a formal CS education (am a senior dev).
| While many of the hard problems are quite esoteric, IMO being
| able to easily power through most of the easy/mediums is 100% a
| sign of developer competency. Even if you don't remember the
| exact algorithm, being able to build it from the ground up
| quickly and accurately through reasonining seems like a pretty
| solid signifier of a quality developer to me.
| thebean11 wrote:
| But why? Sure it's boring, I certainly don't enjoy doing
| Leetcode, but if the job requires it I'm not above practicing.
| It's not like I'll have to do it once I get hired.
| nathanfig wrote:
| Some people are very good at BSing their way through
| interviews, even technical ones. Those people also end up being
| very difficult to fire and are generally poisonous to culture.
| Asking them to code is a great filter, it's hard to fool a
| compiler. It shouldn't be the only filter, but for coding roles
| a coding interview is pretty critical.
| didip wrote:
| Asking them to code is indeed a great filter. But is Dynamic
| Programming question necessary to perform the filter?
| ed_balls wrote:
| Facebook and other companies banned Dynamic Programming.
| didip wrote:
| Is this a recent thing? I still got them two years ago.
| stjo wrote:
| What?
| ruph123 wrote:
| How are people in the US difficult to fire?
| patja wrote:
| Because attorneys know how deep the employer's pockets are,
| which gives them a great incentive to pull out all the
| stops, which gives corp HR the incentive to make sure there
| is a long and painful performance management process before
| anyone can be fired without it exposing the company to too
| much risk.
| ncmncm wrote:
| In other words, firing people in the US just costs money.
| Not very much, usually.
| andrew_ wrote:
| This doesn't apply to right-to-work states. Nuance is
| required in an argument like this. For nealy half the
| country, "hard to fire" is bullshit FUD. It's another
| excuse to be lazy in interviewing and follow FAANG in
| lock step.
| elb0w wrote:
| It always blows my mind how most interview in our field. When I
| first started in tech I was afraid to talk about not knowing
| leetcode to my peers. 15 years in and I now can confidently say
| I've yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric.
|
| Why do we make this the gate keeper to our industry when we know
| (except for the very specific roles) we will rarely need leet
| code type problems. When we do we just google them.
|
| So silly to me.
| bitwize wrote:
| Leetcode is a first-order screen to find people of base-level
| minimum intelligence and problem solving ability. It's not a
| quiz of actual problems you'll solve on the job, it's a way to
| screen out the wannabes who couldn't program their way out of a
| wet paper bag.
|
| Grinding leetcode also shows you've got grit, and are willing
| to prepare for a task and do what it takes to succeed.
|
| Grind leetcode, show the companies that you can meet their
| minimum threshold of cognitive and executive capability for
| entry into their tech department... or don't work for them,
| it's that simple.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Gotta keep the gate somehow. You wanna pull in the big bucks
| like everybody else on the team? Well? Study those stupid
| leetcode questions and suffer a day long interview loop first.
|
| It's hazing. Nothing more.
|
| That being said I'd rather work for a shop that had at least
| some code tests. I've worked in places with none and the code
| quality is about as shifty as you'd expect.
| sockgrant wrote:
| I've heard plenty of horror stories about someone being hired
| that couldn't write simple code.
|
| It's easy to study leet code, and it's relevant because it
| shows the interviewer you can write code.
|
| I've had non-leet code interviews, like write some feature in
| 60minutes. It was fine. It tests code and knowledge as opposed
| to just algorithms and tricks.
|
| I dunno I've always felt that the people who can't leet code
| are the ones that complain about it. The ones that can just
| spend a bit of time to practice and ace the interview.
| bmitc wrote:
| > It's easy to study leet code, and it's relevant because it
| shows the interviewer you can write code.
|
| I have a million things I want to learn about. If a potential
| employer would rather I spend time on what amounts to trivia,
| then great, I don't want to work there.
|
| > I've had non-leet code interviews, like write some feature
| in 60minutes.
|
| This is also a problem because it's impossible to understand
| the constraints, context, specifications, etc. during this
| time. When I am asked to implement a feature in the real
| world, it takes time to understand the domain and context.
| Writing code is usually the last and easiest bit. It also
| never occurs that you need to understand and complete
| something in just an hour or two.
|
| So in leetcode interviews you're asked to turn on a bunch of
| knowledge you don't really need. And in implement this
| feature interviews, you need to turn off a bunch of important
| knowledge and experience.
|
| Both are irritating interviews.
|
| The best way to interview, in my experience, is to ask about
| a project or projects someone has worked on. Even better if
| there's time for them to present on it. That way you get a
| real world picture of their skills, they are comfortable, and
| you can ask detailed questions without jumping the shark.
| Further, it is perfectly reasonable for someone to be
| required to present and answer questions over something
| they've worked on in an hour or two. That does happen in the
| real world.
| hokumguru wrote:
| At this point, the leetcode interviews are as much of a
| behavior interview as they are a technical one, no? It
| makes sense that they're only hiring candidates willing to
| spend the time and effort studying.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| "Ask about a project" proves I understand the final
| implementation, but not whether I could or did choose that
| approach or design it myself, nor how long it took and how
| many false starts we had.
| xyzi2 wrote:
| I've conducted many interviews that starts off with asking
| questions about projects. Many candidates sound like
| rockstars. They even nail all sorts of technical follow-up
| questions. Then when I start asking coding questions, and
| I'm not talking leetcode here, more similar to fizzbuzz,
| they can barely write an if-statement. My conclusion is
| that some people are great at talking, but you really need
| to test the technical abilities too.
| jonwithoutanh wrote:
| Perhaps your technical questions are not adequate enough
| if someone can sound like a "rockstar" while not being
| able to program an if statement?
|
| I've interviewed hundreds of people over my career and
| I've never had an interview where I couldn't figure out
| their technical abilities through a conversation.
|
| I'll tell you what leetcode interviews do find you
| though, they find you people that have no idea how
| TCP/HTTP work, they have no idea how you would debug a
| distributed system. They've never deployed anything to a
| server. They probably have no idea how to even measure
| the amount of work being performed by a server. They've
| never thought about CI/CD/Deployment/Scalability. They've
| never used any cloud resources. They have potentially
| never been through a code review.
|
| etc, etc, etc, etc.
|
| Someone crushing a leetcode test tells me about 1% of the
| stuff I'd like to know about their knowledge and
| abilities.
| hiq wrote:
| > The best way to interview, in my experience, is to ask
| about a project or projects someone has worked on.
|
| This doesn't scale and introduces a bunch of biases on
| other dimensions. People who don't have time to prepare for
| leetcode interviews might be the same ones that don't have
| time to work on FOSS, and it could be that they can barely
| talk about their past work for IP issues. It's also way
| easier to fake your way through a high-level discussion of
| a software engineering project (that the candidate
| prepared) than through a leetcode interviews.
| [deleted]
| vmception wrote:
| > I dunno I've always felt that the people who can't leet
| code are the ones that complain about it.
|
| You mean the ones that randomly receive a random problem that
| they hadn't memorized before.
| sockgrant wrote:
| If you're struggling I don't think you should try to
| memorize leet code problems, you should try to understand
| how to apply algorithms.
| skydhash wrote:
| We know how to apply them, it just that algorithms are
| not fit all solutions for most type of problems you
| encounter in the real world. I had to write a frequency
| analysis code. What I did was search for existing
| methods, found a paper that provides a mathematical
| procedure, then convert it to code. The data structures
| came directly from the OS and thankfully, there were no
| need to convert them to something else.
|
| I'd say a lot of us learn about algorithms and data
| structures early in their career. But most of them are
| guidelines, not rules. So, you just remember how to
| google for them, not learning specific ones by heart. No
| one has ever told me: You need to work on this string
| manipulation and be done within 30mns.
| vmception wrote:
| And on the actual job you have two weeks on the sprint
| with barely any consequence, not time trial to beat the
| averages set by desperate college kids from Asia.
| geraldwhen wrote:
| I run feature code interviews. There are no tricks, just data
| modeling, simple logic, and automated tests.
|
| I am exceptionally good at algorithms problems and I
| recognize it is not a useful skill I want to filter on when
| hiring. A dev team of 20 may only need a few to really
| understand algorithms to look over relevant pull requests.
| and even then such situations may be rare
| ur-whale wrote:
| > Why do we make <leetcode> the gate keeper to our industry
|
| This is not about having to use leetcode type problems in day
| to day work.
|
| Knowing about those is about a state of mind and a culture:
| that you are passionate about tech and have what it takes
| intellectually to dig very deep into it and not just another
| drone that learnt Java just because you knew it would give you
| a decent-paying job.
| devoutsalsa wrote:
| This is probably a horrible strategy, but...
|
| If I ever do an on-site interview again, I've given thought to
| just bringing in a six pack of beer. If I get any bullshit
| questions, I break out the beer and say "how about we pretend
| that I did a good job on this question and talk shop about what
| you really need here, because that's what I'd like to talk
| about."
| sergiotapia wrote:
| When companies like Facebook get thousands of applicants per
| job there has to be _some_ way to unceremoniously cull the
| herd. Leetcode is it.
|
| I've interviewed at a lot of other places and it's mostly take-
| home assignments or just talking about past projects or my open
| source projects. I've never had to do leetcode for an interview
| in 14 years of working as a software engineer.
| dannyw wrote:
| At some point in your career, you have the ability to simply
| reject leetcode-like tests. Just politely decline.
| neilv wrote:
| Is this the point in your career when you have so much money
| that you don't actually need a job?
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| For every software engineering faang level company that
| requires leet code interviews, there are 100 others that do
| not. Your rhetorical question is patently absurd.
| dottedmag wrote:
| Do they pay the same salary?
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| By salary you mean total comp, and in my experience "not
| at all."
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| I mean how much money is enough money? You have FAANG tier
| people crying about TC - at some point it becomes clear
| that's their whole identity. Maybe they're just sad to be
| stuck in horrible cities (I'm also in one of them lmao)
| where no amount of TC buys them peace and happiness. It is
| pretty cringey, and honestly sad. I've been to so many
| meetups which basically turn into grieving sessions for
| highly paid engineers to cry about how their friend got an
| offer for xx amount while they make 6x the average US
| person in a year.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| And you have people making 6x less than you working at
| different jobs than yours. These kinds of complaints
| really lack perspective imo. Getting paid less at work is
| the same as over paying when buying something. Would you
| call it cringey if someone doesn't want to pay 30% more
| than all their neighbors for their house? They can
| "probably" afford it, can't they? Just be happy you have
| a house at all, right? What's a few dollars anyway?
| me_me_mu_mu wrote:
| What? I'm not the one complaining about comp. I'm in a
| peer group that's highly paid yet still cries over
| compensation.
| vanusa wrote:
| More like you gradually come to a realization that your
| time in this world is extremely, extremely precious.
|
| And that you just don't particularly see a need to cater to
| other people's made up (and sometimes downright farcical)
| rituals to such an excessive degree.
|
| No matter how much money they may dangle in front of you.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > More like you gradually come to a realization that your
| time in this world is extremely, extremely precious.
|
| > And that you just don't particularly see a need to
| cater to other people's made up (and sometimes downright
| farcical) rituals to such an excessive degree.
|
| > No matter how much money they may dangle in front of
| you.
|
| I confess to not understanding this take, money can
| purchase back a substantial portion of time. Working at
| big tech can fairly easily reduce your working life to 10
| years if you spend conservatively. Outside of big tech
| the norm seems to be more towards 20-30.
|
| The cost of those decades of saved time? About 100ish
| hours of prep for your first interview, 40-50 from there
| on (based on personal experience, conversations with my
| colleagues, and a friend who runs a FAANG interview
| class). Assuming 3 job hops in your 10 year working life,
| that's 200ish hours to save 20 years. Is there a reason
| you don't think that's worth it?
| vanusa wrote:
| I'd say it's a combination of factors, based on:
|
| (1) Most chiefly, the egregiously unethical behavior of
| nearly all of the "big" players (the rest being merely
| moderately unethical)
|
| (2) Reports from close friends of the day-to-day grind at
| these places (literally none have anything more than
| superficially positive to say about it; some have
| suffered significant health problems, include one full-
| scale nervous breakdown)
|
| (3) And the intellectual dishonesty implicit in the LC
| process also, but only as icing on the cake, as it were.
|
| And independent of all that - it is by no means a binary
| (either you work or for big tech, or you grind along at
| for an extra decade or two at middle range). There are
| high-paying opportunities out there, if that's what
| you're out for -- they just aren't as immediately obvious
| to find as FAANG.
| Hermitian909 wrote:
| > they just aren't as immediately obvious to find as
| FAANG
|
| Sounds like you'd need to spend some time to find these
| :)
|
| To your other points, I get feeling revulsion to Google
| or Facebook, but I feel there are other companies like
| Netflix or Stripe that are ethically _fine_. The idea
| that the employees are generally overworked doesn 't mesh
| with my lived experience the bay area, I have a fairly
| wide social circle and I don't know anyone putting in
| more than 40 hours a week at a big tech company unless
| they're trying to climb the ladder super fast. I think we
| also may have to agree to disagree on whether all
| leetcode is intellectually dishonest. 4 leetcode hard
| problems is a silly way to interview, but when working on
| problems at scale I appreciate a gut check problem on big
| O and an algorithmic workhorse like depth-first search or
| something.
| vanusa wrote:
| I'm glad you understand the gut revulsion aspect, at
| least (which in my view applies to the 'A' companies as
| well, but that's a side topic).
|
| Meanwhile your data points on 'N' and 'S' are appreciated
| and I will add them to my (mental) notes.
| [deleted]
| cooervo wrote:
| Exactly. Couldn't have said it better
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Finance jobs pay just as much as, or more, than FAANG and
| to my knowledge don't do any leetcode.
| evercast wrote:
| What finance jobs? The only companies in software
| engineering paying more than FAANG are trading companies
| like Jane Street. And AFAIK they have harder interview
| loops than Google.
| boring_twenties wrote:
| Yes, trading companies and even trading divisions at
| banks.
|
| I've interviewed at plenty of them (only one in recent
| years, though) and while I wouldn't say they were easy,
| they aren't doing completely irrelevant challenges like
| leetcode.
|
| I've certainly never studied for one, unless you count
| flipping through a book or two just to remind myself of
| things I may not have thought about in a while. Like 1-3
| hours tops.
| vitaflo wrote:
| I've been a dev for over 20 years and have never had to do
| leetcode to get a job. You either find a place that doesn't
| require it (more places than you think) or rely on your
| network to get jobs (which is probably what OP is referring
| to).
|
| No I won't get a job at a FAANG this way, but I'm not
| particularly fond of megacorps.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| i am not sure that this is doable, especially when you have
| to find a job in order to pay your bills.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| The most amazingly productive engineers I've worked with have
| all been incredible leetcoders.
|
| You're right though -- I might as well be saying they were also
| incredible bakers or skaters. If those were also high signal
| identifiers of good devs then we'd be kneading dough while
| doing ollies in the interview rooms.
|
| What irks our industry is that there are plenty of good
| developers out there that produce quality day to day plumbing
| and integration work that suck at leetcode. That's fine. We
| should hire them too, but if you are FAANG you don't need to if
| you have post grad leetcoders knocking down your door every day
| of the week to supplement your already burgeoning cadre of
| sensible staff engineers.
| kache_ wrote:
| thing is, it's really not that hard to get good at so whatever?
| (especially if you have a CS degree)
| dominotw wrote:
| > I've yet to meet someone who thinks these are a valid metric.
|
| It is a valid metric. It screens for "overachieving" types who
| have the will power to power through unpleasant drudgery for a
| pot of gold in the end. If they really want those kinds of
| people who am i say its 'silly'.
| voakbasda wrote:
| Somebody here on HN recently shared the notion that leetcode
| tests are a legal way to discriminate by age or lifestyle, as
| older and well-rounded developers do not have the time or
| inclination to grind on such things.
| throwaway_merig wrote:
| They are convenient and standardized ways of testing. These
| "legal ways to discriminate" that companies come up with are
| nonsense, that's not what is happening.
| IThoughtYouGNU wrote:
| I believe this hypothesis.
| ur-whale wrote:
| > a legal way to discriminate
|
| Interviews are _by definition_ a legal way to discriminate.
| chrismv48 wrote:
| This doesn't make sense to me. I work in a FAANG and we are
| desperate to hire senior engineers and it wouldn't make any
| sense for us to turn our nose up at older candidates.
| tofurocks wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean here - would a company not
| want a well rounded developer ?
| tclancy wrote:
| We are expensive, tend to tell the younger devs to tell
| each other their salaries and not put up with bad
| management.
| lolinder wrote:
| The large companies don't need tens of thousands of system
| architects. They need tens of thousands of coders who can
| do what they're told on small parts of a system without
| fussing too much about the bigger picture. I think that's
| what OP is referring to--leetcode filters for young
| developers who don't need to understand all the reasons why
| they're doing what they're doing.
| a10c wrote:
| Why would a well rounded senior developer be interviewing
| for a role that requires a code monkey?
| kodah wrote:
| No job is ever phrased as needing a code-monkey and no
| one wants to think of themselves as a primate doing a
| very specific task.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Why would you put out ads for senior engineers when
| you'll make them perform code monkey tasks?
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Every job has random overhead and your productivity is
| boosted quite a lot by already being familiar with some
| random bullshit problem like "don't configure your test
| environment this way or you'll run out of file handles
| after a day or two." Hiring more experienced people means
| fewer delays due to issues like that, even for boring
| "code-monkey" work.
| scollet wrote:
| Harder to exploit experience.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| As a successful developer well past middle age, I find this
| to be nonsense. The most common complaint I hear around this
| is "yeah, that discriminates against people who don't have
| time to grind to do the preparation."
|
| Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing for
| ask for a new job? I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much
| time they put into preparing for auditions, or how much time
| many degreed professionals put into passing a certification
| (e.g. the bar exam or medical boards).
|
| If you don't want to spend time preparing for job interviews,
| then fine, don't. But don't claim "discrimination" when there
| are those of us willing to sacrifice to put in the hours to
| prepare.
| nhoughto wrote:
| Was going to disagree but ended up coming around to the
| argument. I guess the difference is at a certain point
| preparation turns into a wasteful arms race, it's not just
| a reasonable amount of effort put into your next gig but
| too much effort on things that don't really represent real
| day to day / reality. Not sure where the line is, but there
| is definitely waste and it definitely favors those with
| spare time.
|
| Does seem like there is a growing movement to explicitly
| not do leetcode style reviews at many places which is good.
| nickjj wrote:
| > Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing
| for ask for a new job? I mean, ask an orchestra musician
| how much time they put into preparing for auditions, or how
| much time many degreed professionals put into passing a
| certification (e.g. the bar exam or medical boards).
|
| It's weird because the preparation is often the thing we're
| not doing in our day to day.
|
| I'd also go as far as saying if you need to cram crazy
| hours shortly beforehand to pass any exam or test then
| you're not really qualified to pass. If you were qualified
| you wouldn't have to do this because you'd already
| comfortably know the answers. I get wanting to casually
| review the finer details which is fine, but if you're in
| "oh crap, it's Tuesday and the test is in 3 days, time to
| drop my life and cram 10 hours a day to prepare" mode,
| maybe you're not ready?
|
| I also think you can't compare software development to
| musicians or sports. I do play the guitar and there's a
| massive amount of muscle memory involved. I've gone a few
| years without playing in the past but within a few minutes
| of picking it up somehow my brain can resume where it left
| off and my hands just move to the right places almost on
| their own.
|
| The same can be said for sports, there's a lot of practice
| and warming up to burn in muscle memory and literally get
| your physical body in an optimal state. Also the stuff
| you're practicing is directly applied to what you're
| "really" doing in your professional day to day.
| doix wrote:
| > I'd also go as far as saying if you need to cram crazy
| hours shortly beforehand to pass any exam or test then
| you're not really qualified to pass.
|
| Tests are different because you are on a timer and they
| are balanced around it. I almost got straight A's in
| university, apart from a single B in a course I was
| confident I actually understood. I got A's in shit I
| couldn't even begin to explain. But signals and systems,
| which I genuinely understood at the time, I got a B
| because I didn't bother studying and memorising shit. I
| had to work stuff from first principles and ran out of
| time.
|
| I feel like it's the same in programming interviews.
| There's no time to actually work out anything from first
| principles or any original thoughts. Either you know the
| answer immediately and you spew some shit to make the
| interviewer happy, or you fail.
|
| Like you say, it's very different for physical activities
| (can't comment on music), because you cannot drastically
| increase performance by cramming for a few hours. I was
| an amateur powerlifter, I stopped training when covid
| started. There's no way I can get my strength back in 3
| days. But I bet I can get an A in some random exam after
| cramming for 3 days in some random university course I
| did however many years ago.
| [deleted]
| SamoyedFurFluff wrote:
| I think some of the weirdness is that orchestra musicians
| at the very least demonstrate skill reflective of the job,
| and doctors and lawyers only have to get the license once.
| Software is in this weird category of interviewing being
| it's own technical domain that needs dedicated study, of
| which no amount of experience or prior success graduates
| you from.
|
| Additionally, I find the logic behind this strange. It
| implies that just because some people can afford to
| sacrifice that this setup isn't discriminatory. But the
| criticism is that some demographics are disproportionately
| unable to sacrifice. Discriminatory doesn't mean no on in
| that demographic is able to afford to dedicate whatever
| resources towards the thing. In fact systems of
| discrimination often work better when there's a model
| minority or "one of the good ones" that can be pointed to
| as an example as to why a discriminatory system isn't
| really a problem.
| krallja wrote:
| > doctors and lawyers only have to get the license once
|
| Doctors have to recredential over their whole career.
| Used to be every ten years, but some specialties are
| moving to annual "quiz-sized" credentialing over once-a-
| decade cramfests.
| tuyiown wrote:
| > ask an orchestra musician how much time they put into
| preparing for auditions
|
| Training is basically the main work performer has to do to
| earn his life, and all training is valuable. You could
| compare with professional athlete and see how it's absurd.
|
| > If you don't want to spend time preparing for job
| interviews, then fine, don't.
|
| The idea is that you have to understand the process. If you
| don't see the point of certain exercise, you search for a
| rationalization, and discrimination looks like a good one.
| Also, the discrimination is not against people that won't
| train for interview, but to give a bias to people that
| don't evaluate returns on their invested time
| randcraw wrote:
| Actually, the pro athlete metaphor seems pretty apt. Only
| rookies are assessed primarily for leetcode metrics like
| their 40 yard sprint or bench strength. Pros are judged
| entirely by their game play, both individual and
| ensemble. So it should be for pro SWEs. And the better
| employers understand this, finding ways to assess
| candidate facility by working with staff or the design of
| solutions to representative problems, where incapability
| does the most damage.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| > Why is it weird that people should spend time preparing
| for ask for a new job?
|
| Because that preparation, by and large, is not related to
| the actual job.
|
| > I mean, ask an orchestra musician how much time they put
| into preparing for auditions, or how much time many degreed
| professionals put into passing a certification (e.g. the
| bar exam or medical boards).
|
| Those are all instances of people being asked to do/know
| things that they will need to do/know for their actual
| jobs. An actual comparison would be if the orchestra
| musician was asked to perform blindfolded on a random piece
| of music, and have to spend 6 months training to memorize
| the most often requested pieces to be ready for the
| interview, only to play for the rest of their career with
| the sheet in front of them. (Not trying to compare
| difficulty, but absurdity. I don't doubt orchestra
| musician's auditions are harder)
|
| Also, bar exam and certifications are not job interview.
| You also have exams and certifications in CS and no one is
| complaining about having to train for those. A
| lawyer/doctor certainly doesn't have to pass the equivalent
| of the bar/medical exam every time they want to change
| firm/clinics. They just talk about their past experiences.
| Barely any prep required beside being able to give a good
| sales pitch about you.
|
| Meanwhile, as a dev, you are expected to do it all over
| again every time you will change job. Even for internal
| moves, many of the GAFAMs expect you to go through this
| again.
| maxwell86 wrote:
| > Because that preparation, by and large, is not related
| to the actual job.
|
| TBH, depends on the job.
|
| I think the problem is hiring people with these skills to
| do jobs that don't require them. That's bad for both
| parties. The employer is going to be paying for a skill
| it is not required, and the employee will get bored and
| switch jobs, costing everyone time and money.
| jmorag wrote:
| I'd push back a bit on the orchestra musician preparation
| relevance. Playing at an audition alone is very different
| from playing in a section. The hyper critical attention
| to minute details that wins you a job at, say, the New
| York Philharmonic, isn't what makes you good at blending
| with your section. Also, no one is ever practicing
| concert repertoire as much as they practice audition
| excerpts so what you hear at the audition is not
| necessarily representative of what you hear every week.
|
| Granted, it's more representative than leetcode
| performance but still far from a perfect system.
| skydhash wrote:
| A musician put it in time for an audition because that will
| be the piece he will be performing. But doing leetcode when
| the job definition is: You will be working on this
| e-commerce site is not the most motivating things. While
| algorithms and data structure knowledge are important, most
| of the time is spent writing code gluing data sources to
| interfaces. I'm perfectly fine doing an interview on the
| technologies I'm expected to master, but knowing by heart
| how to sort strings doesn't help anyone, IMO.
| erik_seaberg wrote:
| > most of the time is spent writing code gluing data
| sources to interfaces
|
| Pretty much anyone can do that. We're looking for someone
| who can do the other 20% of the job that's novel and
| difficult. Ideally someone who recognizes that rereading
| glue code is a waste of human effort, and automates it
| away instead.
| purplehoodie wrote:
| Minor bikeshedding, but orchestra auditions are more
| about measuring musicianship at various time constraints:
| sight reading - O(minutes) of prep, audition excerpts -
| O(days) of prep, and personal repertoire - O(months to
| years of prep).
|
| By and large, professional musicians are paid for a
| standard level of performance competence and a strong
| level of versatility. The small handful of remainders are
| the famous ones renown for exceptional levels of
| performance.
|
| Plenty of professionals are paid to play the musical
| equivalent of e-commerce site.
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| It feels more like auditions for tech involved being
| assigned a random instrument, even though you've been
| playing flute for ten years and they are hiring because
| they need a flautist.
| randcraw wrote:
| Pushing the metaphor further is surely silly, but I'd
| compare s/w dev to jazz improv or the ability to deftly
| adopt the musical expressive style of a new ensemble, and
| s/w design to musical composition or arranging. Switching
| instruments is more like switching programming languages
| or stacks. Presumably appropriate auditions should assess
| these complex skills and not rudimentary fare like scales
| or key transposition, AKA leetcode.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Seems like this could cut either way.
|
| Yeah, older people are more likely to have other priorities,
| but they're also more likely to be financially secure and
| thus able to trade money for time to study. Also, they're
| more likely to have gained time management/prioritization
| skills and discipline that they could apply toward studying.
|
| Ultimately it seems like arguing that older people lack time
| or inclination depends on ageist stereotypes.
| zerr wrote:
| It's more about the lack of desperation.
| [deleted]
| foldr wrote:
| Anecdotally, I am one of the older people in our dev team,
| and also once of the only people who cares even slightly
| about big O. I'm talking simple stuff, like knowing whether
| indexing a given list data type is constant time or O(n).
| To be fair, it's not particularly relevant to what we do.
| ericbarrett wrote:
| I think asking a candidate some basic big-O notation
| questions in an interview is great. Asking a DevOps
| candidate if a search algorithm developed and published
| in 2018 is O(n log(n)) or O(n log(n) K^(log n)), and then
| dinging them for not getting a perfectly correct answer,
| is over the top the kind of stuff that's used for age
| discrimination. Not because the young candidate will know
| it, but rather they will be excused for "almost getting
| it" and "having a good attitude" etc. in the hiring
| committee.
| nosianu wrote:
| I think the argument is that more experienced people are
| less willing to do useless things just because somebody
| wants them to.
|
| I could never go back to university for that reason -
| studying, fine, I did a ton of courses on edX and Coursera,
| but I pick what interests me and a lot of test problems you
| are given (at least in my experience, at university and
| later online) too often are more about understanding the
| intent of the person creating the problem rather than
| anything useful. I could also never go back to the army
| (Germany, mandatory service, battle tank mechanic) and take
| commands from some guy who just wants to posture.
|
| I'm not any less willing to study than I was at university
| - but now I refuse to do what I think is useless or
| meaningless. Studying for tests is high on that anti-list.
| Not all tests, I had no issues with tests I took for things
| that needed certification, e.g. sailing or for the pilot
| license, but that stuff was useful in practice and not
| nearly as over the top because those tests were not
| designed to "weed out weaklings".
|
| EDIT: _An anecdote for that last phrase_
|
| After writing the comment I got curious and googled that
| exact phrase. I found this in
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Smythe_(physicist)
|
| > _He authored a textbook on electromagnetism called Static
| and Dynamic Electricity, which was a widely used reference
| in the field during the 20th century. His electromagnetism
| course was modeled after the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos
| examinations and designed to "weed out weaklings." Smythe's
| course was so infamous that future Nobel Prize in Economics
| laureate Vernon Smith switched to electrical engineering
| from physics to avoid it._
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| The thought crossed my mind, that they are doing it on purpose:
| to make the whole experience of switching jobs as unpleasant
| and traumatic as possible, so that people will stick to their
| jobs. However a conspiracy is highly unlikely, given that there
| are so many players involved.
|
| More realistic explanation: they try to make an 'American Idol'
| like process, this gives them the feeling of having chosen 'the
| best'. Now it probably takes some standardized task to do that
| kind of competition, as it is necessary to maintain the claim
| of having an objective hiring process.
|
| I was once told, that in the olden days there was a different
| kind of hiring process (that was not about programming jobs,
| actually, they didn't have that job at the time). It would go
| as following: the owner would invite the candidate to join the
| crew for lunch, if the candidate eats a lot, then he would
| count as a good worker. Actually that would make a good test
| for 'culture fit'...
|
| BTW, the article has a link to a free course on hiring
| practices, thanks for the link!
| https://course.jobsearch.dev/01_introductions/01_course_intr...
| deckard1 wrote:
| > make the whole experience of switching jobs as unpleasant
| and traumatic as possible, so that people will stick to their
| jobs. However a conspiracy is highly unlikely
|
| I've thought this too. Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit,
| Pixar, and Lucasfilm were hit with antitrust litigation
| starting around 2010 because they were all involved in
| colluding to reduce the ability of devs to switch jobs. Since
| then we've only seen the rise of leetcode style interviews.
| We're way _way_ past the days of tree traversing and
| FizzBuzz. We 're asking candidates to recite Dijkstra's but
| pretend they've never seen it before. It's just way more
| convenient for tech companies if people don't leave in the
| first place. I know I've stayed at my job much longer than I
| should because I hate interviews.
|
| > as it is necessary to maintain the claim of having an
| objective hiring process
|
| Yeah no one wants to admit they don't know what they are
| doing. It's bad for FAANG myth-making. A company the size of
| Google or Facebook is never _not_ hiring. They are a big boat
| that can 't just stop moving like that. They have a constant
| churn rate, the need to keep interviewers sharp, and a
| certain target rate they need to hit of applicants in, new
| employees out. All the process between the in side and out
| side is Scientology. It's just complete fabricated cultish
| nonsense. The owners of LeetCode must be enjoying it though.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| >were hit with antitrust litigation starting around 2010
| because they were all involved in colluding to reduce the
| ability of devs to switch jobs
|
| I didn't know that, really interesting detail.
|
| >no one wants to admit they don't know what they are doing.
|
| Interesting perspective, though I don't know about the
| vodoo part. They seem to be taking the matter quite
| seriously, at least google does. Take the matter of
| competitive programming: Peter Norvig says they were
| checking, if taking part in programming contests would
| correlate with good performance at the job [1]; I think
| having read somewhere that Norvig revised his negative
| judgement later on, as they had examined more data [2].
| (actually that would mean that they didn't act on the data
| to begin with, well well).
|
| These companies are good at data processing, any data that
| is, at least they seem to be taking it dead seriously
| (disclaimer: I never worked at google, though I have
| managed to fail at interviewing there, however i am not
| sure if i would have accepted an offer ;-)
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmyUZCl75s
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_programming#B
| enefi...
| deckard1 wrote:
| Oh, definitely. I'm sure they do take it seriously. I
| just don't believe taking it seriously to be the same as
| actually producing results. Managers still take OKRs/KPIs
| seriously. There are still people that believe in the
| healing power of Agile.
|
| If any of these companies knew what they were doing then
| they wouldn't require multiple interview rounds. I expect
| the correlation between one's ability to perform at
| Google with their ability to pass the interview gauntlet
| to be no better than a coin toss.
| MichaelMoser123 wrote:
| Well, i have worked at Amazon, for less than a year; My
| rather limited impression was, that this is a very
| dysfunctional organization. Now if this impression is
| correct, then the leetcode appoach has some merrit; the
| leetcode approach would select for people, who stick to
| the technical part in the narrow sense of the word, and
| who would not question the state of things too much.
|
| But I guess, that this is all speculation..
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| Working like that, at least at Google, will only suffice
| up to about L4. If you're good at leetcode, you might be
| hired at L4 directly, but if you're a normal person then
| it means you have one promotion before you need to learn
| completely different skills to advance.
|
| I do nothing that looks anything like leetcode
| whatsoever.
| gzer0 wrote:
| The issue is the sheer number of fradulent and stuffed
| credentials people have begun using, and applying, en masse to
| job positions.
|
| To be clear, I dislike the current way interviewing is, but do
| you have a better solution to screen out 7,000 applicants? The
| vast majority will be knocked out by the leetcode style
| interview, and sure, some brilliant minds might fail because
| they can't remember linked lists in the moment, but atleast you
| screened down from 7,000 -> 70. If there is a better way, we'd
| all love to know.
|
| I am prepared for this to be voted down, but I am genuinely
| wondering the answer to this.
| badlucklottery wrote:
| Yeah, having an entire _day_ of 4-5 leetcode-esque interviews
| seems excessive (looking at you Google) but having none also
| seems irresponsible IME (looking at you government
| contractors).
|
| I've been in organizations that were spawned by both of the
| above extremes. The former is definitely more pleasant to
| work in (everyone is at least competent) even if the
| interview was much less pleasant to do. I do feel like more
| orgs should try to target the middle ground instead of just
| aping Google and going ham on the leetcode shit.
| ipnon wrote:
| I think the distinction to be made is between the process of
| finding the best out of 7,000 and finding someone sufficient
| out 7,000. The first is surely extremely expensive for
| companies. The second can be done in a week or two. I think
| the anecdotal evidence shows though that no company can
| accurately do the first, and the gamification of this process
| is a deeply researched topic, so it's likely that a company
| that believes they're accomplishing the first is really doing
| the second in practice, all the while spending unnecessary
| money and time, and deluding themself into thinking they
| found the needle in the haystack.
|
| My belief is that if you aren't doing Ph.D. level research,
| all you need to do is get the candidate to prove they can
| write themselves out of a bag with React/Python. Anything
| else is overkill, and a real cost loss to the business in
| terms of money and time.
|
| I will admit that for most businesses there will be times to
| do the first, and time to do the second. But I imagine this
| distribution is something like 20/80, whereas most companies
| are doing 80/20.
|
| Coding is hard, but so is marketing, accounting, management
| ... But are your marketing candidates being put through the
| ringer too? I suspect software engineers are being uniquely
| hazed.
|
| Peace & Love
| higeorge13 wrote:
| I worked in ATS company and 7k seems like an exaggeration.
| Most companies would only get tens of candidates, some of
| them hundreds and only a tiny minority would get thousands.
| I would also confidently say that the vast majority have
| sourcing issues, and that's why they ask recruiters,
| agencies, etc to fill more applicants to their open
| positions.
|
| And yet, all these companies would have complicated hiring
| pipelines to hire. I have seen examples which made me
| laugh; like receiving tens of cvs and asking almost all of
| them for take home exams (felt sorry for the reviewers and
| the candidates who lost their time), multi stage technical
| reviews for companies with less than 10-20 employees, final
| executive level interviews with more than 5 candidates in
| parallel, time to hire times of 3-6 months, etc.
| ravenstine wrote:
| That's a false choice. The number of applicants is mostly a
| function of time, so if 7000 applicants is too overwhelming
| then just throw out 6900 and focus on evaluating 100 of
| them. To weed through thousands of candidates is to believe
| that you can find the one that's exceptional, yet if the
| position being advertised doesn't need to be filled by a
| genius then it's strange to scour the earth for the right
| person. If you are at the point where a genius is needed
| then hiring through personal connections is probably the
| better approach.
|
| But if I must write code as an applicant, it better be
| similar to real world tasks and not some bullshit,
| especially if my chances of getting hired are still slim.
| Having to do work in order to get hired is literally
| sucking the lifeforce out of me, so don't suck even more
| out of my via the agony of glorified brain teasers.
| Swizec wrote:
| > Coding is hard, but so is marketing, accounting,
| management ... But are your marketing candidates being put
| through the ringer too? I suspect software engineers are
| being uniquely hazed.
|
| My girlfriend works on the business strategy side of
| Fortune500's. Our interviews look like a joke compared to
| theirs.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| What are they like? Are they asked tangentially pertinent
| brainteasers and riddles?
| boppo1 wrote:
| Also interested in top strategy interviews. Not that they
| aren't hard, just that "strategy" has always seemed so
| ephemeral to me. My business profs failed to impart any
| real criteria to define it. Seems like something people
| either have or they don't and all you can do is hire
| based on past success.
| Swizec wrote:
| > all you can do is hire based on past success
|
| That's kinda what they do.
|
| You are put through an initial ringer to vet for basic
| fit and competence. Then you get a take-home exercise
| that consists of several business case studies. You have
| to detail a strategy for what you would do in that
| situation, support your argument with research, etc. My
| girlfriend said it's a lot like writing a term paper in
| college.
|
| Last time she interviewed it took her I think 2 or 3 days
| of full-time work to do the case studies.
|
| Then you go back and defend/present/discuss your work at
| an interview.
|
| Her job consists of doing basically that, but with a
| team, larger consequences, more direct ownership, and
| loooooonger processes because so many people get involved
| in everything. Her team is strategizing what could become
| a trillion dollar product (in like 10 years) if they get
| it right. It's pretty cool.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| My developer friend stopped working as an engineer
| because he found out he can pass those interviews with no
| preparation and the job takes way less effort compared to
| software.
|
| He's now doing two jobs at the same time and the
| companies don't notice he's barely doing anything but
| appearing in meetings.
|
| YMMV
|
| Big corporations are incredibly wasteful, so I'm not
| surprised.
|
| I also know plenty of developers who do little at work,
| but at least they need to produce a substantial amount of
| code, at the end of the day.
| Swizec wrote:
| > he can pass those interviews with no preparation
|
| I've never had to prepare for an engineering interview in
| some 15 years of doing this professionally.
|
| > the job takes way less effort compared to software
|
| The easiest part of my job these days is writing code.
|
| The challenging fun part is setting a technical strategy
| that aligns with the business and gardening the team
| around me with soft influence towards that strategy.
| Super challenging. Would've been easier to just do it
| myself, but there's only so much I can do on my own.
|
| Ultimately, you should go do whatever comes to you
| easiest and/or is most fun. No sense grinding away at
| something you're not good at. Maybe your friend has an
| immense talent for business and strategy.
| xeromal wrote:
| I agree with you. It's just not going to work to trust
| peoples credentials especially now that people from across
| the states can apply to our jobs. I'm a fan of take-home
| projects though. You still need to find a way to reduce the
| number to something meaningful but a take home gives them
| time to think about the task, but also gives me an
| opportunity to hear them walk through their code when we
| talk.
|
| If they "cheat" by having stack overflow do their work for
| them, but they can explain it well enough, they probably
| understand the concepts at least.
| vanusa wrote:
| _from 7,000 - > 70_
|
| Do you have any hard data behind that ratio?
|
| Or are you just kind of ... making those numbers up?
|
| Because they, you know, "feel right"?
| em500 wrote:
| Google receives about 3 million applications per year, and
| hires less than 1% of them. Not all of them for dev
| positions, but still probably at least a million. Google is
| probably the most popular, but even the maligned Facebook
| gets a few hundred thousand applications per year.
|
| I concur with the parent's point. HN is perpetually
| complaining about tech interviews, but nobody ever suggests
| a viable alternative that can cope with such application
| volumes.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/17/heres-how-many-google-job-
| in...
| Beltalowda wrote:
| Companies like Google (and similar) are kind of the
| exception; I'm starting a job next week, and I had an
| initial video call for almost all jobs I applied for when
| searching. Sometimes I wrote a cover letter, often I
| don't. My CV is decent enough, but not uniquely "oh
| wow!"-type of impressive. I don't think I was filtered
| out of thousands of applicants in ~90% of the cases.
|
| While remote positions can certainly receive a lot of
| "noise applicants", as I discovered in my last job, you
| can filter out half, if not more, on just a quick pass.
| Most companies are dealing with dozens of candidates _at
| the most_ , often less. Certainly not thousands of them.
| vanusa wrote:
| Google (and all the other companies with similar net
| hiring ratios) use multiple factors to narrow their pre-
| interview pool; including standard techniques such as
| resume and phone screening. And then there's in-person
| interview itself, which involves broader cognitive and
| personality assessments (apart from in-person LC
| recitation).
|
| The parent poster was literally saying that LC screening
| by itself will get you your 99 percent reduction.
| em500 wrote:
| Of course, LC-only won't get you there, and all companies
| with LC use the whole arsenal. But I don't doubt that LC
| will filter out a very large fraction of applicants
| (hence the incessant whining on HN). The point is though,
| with Google-like application volumes, if they drop LC
| they'll need to substitute it with something that also
| filters out a very large fraction.
|
| The actual hiring ratio at google is something like 0.2%.
| They pass over 998 out of 1000 applicants, so no matter
| what they do, they'll pass over a substantial number of
| qualified people, and no matter what they do there will
| be complaints on HN.
| vanusa wrote:
| I'll go with a "very large fraction".
|
| It was this resorting to made-up numbers that I found to
| be kind of weird.
| baby wrote:
| Sure if you have a lot of noise, now if you know the people?
| If you've been working with them for years akready? Even
| engineers who want to change role within the org have to re-
| interview and do these silly exercises. I actually find
| leetcode things more valuable than system design interviews
| which are more like "let's see how you can pretend you've
| built things at scale eventhough you've never done it"
| Aperocky wrote:
| > a valid metric
|
| Not a great metric, but is there a replacement? Not everyone
| has github side projects to see how their code actually looks.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Imagine a job, say "Professional Football Player", where the
| only criterion for getting the job was "In three weeks, show us
| your six-pack, do 20 chin-ups, and do the 40M sprint in under
| 6s".
|
| You don't have to dribble the ball, you don't have to answer a
| quiz about the rules of the game, you don't have to tackle
| anyone, you don't have to kick the ball, you don't have to be
| good at positioning yourself.
|
| Clearly the test seems pretty odd as a way to pick players. But
| it has benefits as well. The expectations are clear. People who
| can't do it won't try. People who are in the ballpark and pass
| will feel special.
| akshat_h wrote:
| So why do we ask them? AFAIK, it is engineers asking these
| questions and also criticizing the same metric.
|
| I think it is a case of this being the least worst option.
| shroompasta wrote:
| the reason why FAANG/M companies do ds/algo interviews is
| because they get an ocean of applicants and it's necessary for
| these questions to be the immediate filter.
|
| Most startups I have applied to previously rarely asked ds/algo
| interview questions.
|
| It's not that they want to, it's that they have to.
| em500 wrote:
| Indeed, all those complainers about the process should maybe
| try to answer this as their first business case interview
| question:
|
| You have 10 dev positions in your team. You receive 5000
| applications, where 3000 look like a suitable match based on
| the CV. How do you proceed?
| jacobr wrote:
| Do you still ultimately do product engineering, picking tickets
| of a backlog, after 10 years at a FAANG if you're not in
| management? Are the promotion levels mostly salary bumps?
|
| I spend some but far from most of my time writing code, I write
| RFCs, documentation, code reviews and emails, but don't really
| know how this compares to positions at other companies. At some
| places a staff engineer seems to simply be a senior engineer
| who's been around for a while.
| pm90 wrote:
| Why would you need several offers if the new job will be paying
| less than your current position? Can't you just tell them how
| much you make and ask them to match that in equity?
| ec109685 wrote:
| I wonder how he valued that equity when determine total comp.
| localcrisis wrote:
| You can, but when you're making that much above what a series A
| or B company pays, it's not a useful number. Having multiple
| offers that are comparable is what matters. A company can go
| +-5% but it's not like they offer you $180k and you give them
| your $800k Facebook total comp then they're like, "oh, I guess
| we'll give you $800k then."
| ptero wrote:
| I doubt many (any?) startups would match FB's 10-year senior
| engineer's total comp. That would burn up the startup's cash
| (and/or ownership) very quickly.
|
| I think the main draws at a startup for a post-FAANG senior
| engineer are feeling good about the product they build (more
| useful to the world than FB's ads) or the role/environment
| (less bureaucracy and org process). I am sure there are many
| exceptions, but I suspect that after 10 years in a senior role
| at a FAANG money stops being the most important thing you need
| from a job. My 2c.
| trangon wrote:
| I'd assume after ten years at FAANG, you'd have a decent
| amount of money saved up as well.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| A very kind and insightful post. PSC = Performance Summary Cycle
| . At Google/Alphabet we call this Perf , performance reviews,
| every 6 months. Mobility at different parts of Alphabet is more
| difficult, you may even have to interview again, switching from X
| or Waymo or DeepMind to Google.
| didip wrote:
| oh, I heard mobility at Google is trivial? I guess that's just
| a myth.
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Switching teams within Google is usually easier, but between
| different Alphabet bets may be more involving.
| vl wrote:
| It's trivial to switch to the place nobody wants to go to.
| But interesting positions on the good teams are immediately
| filled, and there is a line of very strong people waiting for
| headcount or schmoozing with director trying to get there.
| moneywoes wrote:
| Hope you saw this about Replit OP
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195
| sofixa wrote:
| As if someone with 10 years at Facebook would concern
| themselves with such trivialities.
| anonimamente wrote:
| Wow; it's all about you: what you have to gain or lose if you
| leave or stay. Not a single mention of conscience about
| contributing to an enterprise that has and continues to do so
| much damage to the human psyche. That's really sad.
| logifail wrote:
| > [on health insurance] It's very comfortable to know that you
| are likely not going to receive a huge bill for doing an ultra
| sound for a routine checkup.
|
| Just as a comparative data point from the other side of the pond
| (we're mainland 'yurp): our eldest is currently fighting off some
| kind of infection with swollen glands and abdominal pain and
| within the last 10 days I have visited:
|
| - our regular doctor twice - [the first time] was referred for
| ultrasound at another doctor, where he was seen immediately
| [then] - referral to a paediatrician, where he was seen the next
| day [and] - he eventually ended up having a complete check-up in
| the paediatrics department of our nearest hospital, including
| blood tests.
|
| None of that was much fun at all, as any parent will know,
| thankfully so far none of it uncovered anything bad (thank
| $deity), but happily _all of it_ was funded from general taxation
| and deductions that everyone here contributes to.
|
| Which is a relief.
|
| Next time I'm tempted to whinge about how high the tax rates are
| here, I need to remember not to.
| ncr100 wrote:
| I like this. Evolving a pragmatic view of one's relationship to
| work, and applying that to the next job, does help avoid early
| burn-out.
| localcrisis wrote:
| > I also talked to a few fintech companies. I entered the
| discussions with pre-existing biases that these places are
| stressfull, not innovative but well paying. The conversations
| confirmed these biases (except the salaries, which were lower
| than I expected).
|
| That's interesting. I wonder which companies these are?
| albemuth wrote:
| It was comforting to hear about a fb veteran struggling with LC
| hards
| hiptobecubic wrote:
| I think if you don't specifically train for competitive
| programming, an average LC hard is going to take you many days,
| assuming you solve it at all. A lot of them depend on knowledge
| of algorithms that most people will literally never use for
| anything professionally, ever.
|
| As much as we like to talk about algorithms, it's pretty rare
| that anything more interesting than DP comes up at work unless
| you are doing optimization research or work in a niche domain
| like bioinformatics.
|
| Interviewing someone with an LC hard is a colossal waste of
| time unless the position you are filling is like "senior staff
| swe: performance and optimization"
| fallmonkey wrote:
| "A common question I get is about work/life balance. And I view
| it a little different too now. At Facebook I could get by barely
| working a few hours a day. But the job was so unsatisfying that
| it spilled the frustration in the "life" part"
|
| This is the golden piece for me. I too recently left a big corp
| to a smaller place, expecting to sacrifice WLB and my free time -
| yet I ended up feeling happier and spending less time consuming
| short-form online contents, to the point that I even have more
| free time now! It never occurred to me that my self-indulging
| online addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the
| unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a day.
| But the job was so unsatisfying
|
| This is a little too first world. if the work were too sparse
| and wants more work, why not join interview loops or take
| classes/training, attend talks? Does Meta not have those
| options?
|
| The frustration feels almost artificial, if one does not want
| to get more work, then maybe just go boating or mountain
| biking. Watch some sports and play video games.
| goodlinks wrote:
| Any job ive had regardless of pay, regardless of how good its
| been for how long, what the job market is like... after about
| 5-10 minutes wondering if I am adding value I will look for
| another.
|
| I have one life, I need to have money to live but thats easy,
| actually having a positive impact is a reason to do something
| for someone else.
|
| I dont necessarily apply but its its all i am thinking about
| untill I have value to add again: what am I doing here?
| Barrin92 wrote:
| > if the work were too sparse and wants more work, why not
| join interview loops or take classes/training, attend talks?
|
| because it's never that easy. If you try to get work from
| somewhere else maybe your manager starts to think you're
| bored or not interested, you definitely can't just leave and
| go mountain biking because then you look even lazier. So at
| the end of the day in every gigantic organization a
| substantial amount of people sits around and does nothing,
| that's just how it goes.
|
| it's not first world, it's just that in bug business you're
| just a salaryman.
| scollet wrote:
| > bug business
|
| Ship it
| erwincoumans wrote:
| Move fast, bug things.
| granshaw wrote:
| It's probably that he has to "be available" and so can't make
| good use of the working hours where he's not doing active
| work
|
| It's a common obstacle to making good use of your time even
| when underworked and working remotely. Ideally one could find
| non-team settings where this wouldn't be an issue
| seemaze wrote:
| Or contribute to your favorite flavor of open source!
| amelius wrote:
| I imagine React was created by Facebook slackers.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Try reading Graeber's Bullshit Jobs for more perspective on
| this
| 2457013579 wrote:
| As someone who worked remote at a large company and spent the
| last year or so doing this, I don't think it's a viable long
| term solution, at least for me. I've been traveling every
| month (7 times in other countries), spent countless hours
| gaming, got some certificates, etc, etc.. all the while still
| looked at as a "top performer" on my team. Due to the nature
| of bigger organizations (or at least mine), there isn't an
| option for me to take on more responsibility or extra work (I
| can't help but ask for these things too often and get general
| feedback of "slow your roll, that's not how it works here").
| I played around with the idea taking on a part time job or
| consulting or something, but I've come to the conclusion that
| I would find greater purpose/meaning spending my full
| headspace in a single job I was passionate about. This is
| definitely a first world problem, and I'm lucky to have the
| opportunity to be in this type of situation. It's also not
| the same way everyone feels, since there are a lot of people
| that are at big organizations for long periods of time, but I
| share sentiment with the article and parent comment.
| boppo1 wrote:
| What do you do for a living/ what was that job? Current
| job?
| srcreigh wrote:
| The point is getting a few hours of productive work in some
| enviroments takes more and more and more effort that it seems
| impossible to even keep trying.
| tjr225 wrote:
| Sure, maybe it is "first world." That doesn't change
| anything. If I'm stuck at home making 80$ an hour and I hate
| it, then it doesn't matter how "first world" it is- I'm still
| going to figure out how to change the situation.
|
| Are you saying that people who are dissatisfied with
| privileged situations shouldn't have opinions or write about
| them? Everything is relative.
| pawsforthought wrote:
| Absolutely. I dislike the offhand dismissal of things as
| first world problems, most especially because, if we can
| find a way to a future where the rest of the world catches
| up in living standards, these will be everyone's problems.
| stepanhruda wrote:
| Definitely there, but author probably didn't find those
| fulfilling. The rest are leisure activities, which might
| again not work when a problem solver is looking to apply
| themselves.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _[Why not] join interview loops or take classes /training,
| attend talks [...] go boating or mountain biking. Watch some
| sports and play video games[?]_
|
| (A) Because there's a fundamental cognitive dissonance to
| being able to say both "My job is important enough to stay
| in" and "My job is unimportant enough that I should spend a
| lot of time doing unrelated things."
|
| (B) Because author doesn't want to pursue alternative hobbies
| with his work chunk of time. He wants to write exciting code.
|
| (C) Because while employed, there's an expectation that
| you're doing the work well. If you feel like you aren't, even
| if you're doing as decent of a job as the system allows you
| to, it eats at you. Badly.
| tippytippytango wrote:
| It doesn't work like that. You have to be "on" even if you
| aren't working. That means you feel like you can't commit to
| anything substantial since you feel like you should be
| working. Fucking off on the internet is a coping mechanism to
| numb the pain of being in this limbo where you aren't
| working; but, feel like you should be working because you are
| getting paid a lot. In retrospect it's easy to see that
| there's this spare time available to do other things; but,
| when you are in it, it's not obvious where the boundary is
| between this extra time and where the work time should be. I
| know it sounds like a first world problem; but, it actually
| feels really awful to be in this spot because you can't even
| admit you are there to anyone without feeling like a
| slacker/loser/failure/time-thief, a torturous trap.
| thematrixturtle wrote:
| Bingo. Working from home also exacerbates this, since there
| is no longer a physical division between "work" and "home",
| plus there is virtually no social pressure _not_ to slack
| off.
| pdimitar wrote:
| ...And the problem is, what exactly?
| chasd00 wrote:
| Lack of self discipline. If you're going to wfh you have
| to be disciplined enough to work during work hours and
| not work during non work hours.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Well, it pays off to be aware of the issue at least,
| right?
|
| I too have grappled with this for a while but I believe
| this struggle was for the better and it eventually led to
| reduced stress. Nowadays when I mentally proclaim "I am
| done for the day!" I know that I did my best and that I
| have put enough hours / effort to not feel guilty about
| not putting more.
|
| So yeah, you are right. I just think people should go
| through this fight for discipline because it's ultimately
| better for their mental health when they learn to put
| boundaries.
| osigurdson wrote:
| I think that works both ways. If you want to work more,
| it is easier to do from home as there is less social
| (i.e. family) pressure to come home from the office. The
| key is to find a workable balance.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Last two years of my life was this. Sitting at home with
| nothing meaningful to do but still having to park my butt
| in my kids bedroom.
| pdimitar wrote:
| So why didn't you use your time better and invest in
| other skills you want to have?
| Damogran6 wrote:
| "Why don't you just not be sad?"
| pdimitar wrote:
| I didn't say or even imply that and it's unfair to
| interpret it that way.
|
| Distract yourself in a positive manner. Don't dwell on
| meaningless thoughts that you'll never defeat. Only way
| to win is to do something else with your time.
|
| It's fine if you don't think that's the solution but
| straight up misrepresenting what has been said to you is
| not cool.
| SwSwinger wrote:
| I think the point is that this negative pitfall happens
| to people and multiple people concur. It's easy to say
| "fight this with positivity", most people on HN started
| with this philosophy. In practice, it's hard to do that
| consistently after the first 10 years, especially when
| you don't notice the slide until you're in a pit.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Hm, didn't occur to me to look at it that way so you're
| likely correct.
|
| I am personally 41 and I've fought tooth and nail to not
| just sit at the computer for the sake of it, neither in
| an office nor at home. Nowadays when I sit at my desk, I
| have goals in mind and if I catch myself not working
| towards any of them in an hour, I just get up and go do
| something else and someplace else.
|
| But I maintain that nowhere did I imply something as
| dismissive and shallow as "just don't be sad" or, not
| shallow but still far from what I meant, "fight this with
| positivity". It's not that at all, it was much more along
| the lines of: "find your own purpose and don't wait for
| others to impose theirs on you".
|
| In my current job I am one of 3 recent hires (just
| recently hit the 4 months mark) and since we come from
| very different backgrounds compared to the company's
| culture, we often have 5 PRs just waiting on reviews and
| we find ourselves completely blocked on any further
| progress (can't even open other PRs since we still
| haven't received feedback on the current ones and that
| would severely change what code we should put in the new
| ones).
|
| I have raised the problem multiple times, from squad
| leaders all the way to the CEO, but it seems that the
| people are cool with it and don't mind if you just
| twiddle your thumbs every now and then. So I started
| picking up more and more sysadmin skills which I need for
| my home NAS management and potentially other home servers
| in the future. -\\_(tsu)_/-
|
| But maybe my comment up-thread was way too short and open
| for negative interpretation?
| [deleted]
| granshaw wrote:
| I'd like to find contracts that are purely delivery based
| and not part of a team setting. And do value based pricing
| so if I finish quickly, I'm truly off the hook and have my
| own time back
| anothernewdude wrote:
| I just got a second job. Keeps me busy rather than just
| spending time waiting all day.
| heurist wrote:
| Side gig/project is the answer here. If you're not doing
| 6-8 hours of active work per workday and no one is
| complaining you might as well use the rest for yourself.
| Make sure it's something where you can exercise
| creativity and/or learn.
| pdimitar wrote:
| So don't admit it to anyone. Work on it by yourself or by
| sharing it on HN / Reddit / etc.
|
| It still reads too much as a very first world of a problem
| to me, admittedly. I recognize that us the people need to
| have a goal and a direction, otherwise we start feeling
| like aimless leaves on the wind -- but you can still do a
| ton of things at home (if you work remotely which you
| should) while checking your Slack and email every 15
| minutes, no?
|
| But if it really bothers you so much then you have to make
| a choice between (a) prestige / a lot of money / boredom
| and (b) enjoyment / medium money / purpose. Apparently in
| big corps you can't have both. Being stuck in a FOMO
| feedback loop and being unable to choose between either
| path is very toxic and produces a lot of internal pressure.
| At _some point_ you have to choose for the sake of your
| mental well-being.
|
| ...Or, as other commenters alluded to, find a job that
| allows you to combine them. I do doubt that many other
| companies can give salaries in the $250K - $500K annual
| range though. But who knows.
|
| As a general observation throughout my life, us the Homo
| Sapiens seem to suck super bad at picking a side and/or to
| leave a toxic relationship before it starts to poison us
| long-term. We must proactively work hard to periodically
| challenge our priorities and reassess our situation. So if
| you are up for an advice from a stranger: do that and do it
| often, something like 2-3 times a month, for whatever
| period of time, until you feel you finally are where you
| belong. We the people hold on to things for way too long.
| It seems to be our default mode of operation.
|
| It also doesn't help at all that our current civilization
| seems to thrive on bombarding people with FOMO, sigh. But
| we gotta adapt and find our own way through it all
| regardless.
| granshaw wrote:
| You can take on a little more risk, esp if you have a
| spouse with employer health insurance, and be a
| contractor. Hitting the $300k annual ballpark is pretty
| doable even with giving yourself about 20 days off a
| year, even while working at startups and places where
| their employees don't get near that
| [deleted]
| ravenstine wrote:
| And even if you can manage to find things to do to occupy
| the time and appear busy, you'll be lucky if management
| considers the importance of your work and schedule it with
| the rest of your workload. One too many times have I had to
| find something to do and spend weeks or months on that
| thing only to have management tell me to immediately stop
| working on it even though that thing was actually
| important. This may not seem different from just being
| "on", but I find that having real work be tossed in the
| garbage is even more demoralizing than milling around and
| not really doing anything.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| Ideally the thing you spend time on should be something
| you can use outside the org. E.g. learn k8s.
| Juliate wrote:
| That's if you're not already frozen regarding the field.
|
| I'm exactly in this spot right now. And yes, self-
| training on side quests like k8s or anything related to
| the field looks nice on the paper.
|
| The problem comes from when 1/ you already associated all
| these training with the field you're working in, and it
| feels helpless and boring, 2/ you still feel somehow
| disloyal to use your time like that.
| orzig wrote:
| Yeah, a good manager can fix that in 30 seconds (by
| giving you explicit permission to learn), but a
| surprising portion don't think too.
| RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote:
| > [...] having real work be tossed in the garbage is
| [...] demoralizing [...]
|
| This happened to me a few years ago. I got assigned to
| work on a small greenfield project solo. I had virtually
| full creative control, and it would solve a real imminent
| problem for the team. Sounds like a dream project, right?
| And it was for the ~1 month or so I worked on it, got
| positive feedback from the team, etc. However, with a
| stroke of a (figurative) pen, the project's no longer
| needed and was scrapped. The manager found more money in
| the team's budget.
|
| I can't say I disagreed with the decision: often it _is_
| better to just throw money to make a problem go away. I
| felt bummed out nonetheless. _That_ I could live with,
| but getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month"
| during performance review, now that really stung.
|
| My story might have a happy ending though. A few months
| ago the same problem resurfaced, this time due to a
| different, company-wide constraint. The lead dev
| solicited solutions, and I couldn't help but feel a bit
| smug inside when I said "um, remember that project I
| worked on a few years ago? I basically have your solution
| on a platter." We'll see: who knows maybe the manager
| will somehow carve out an exception for our team.
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| delgaudm wrote:
| I find it helps to be cynical in these situations.
|
| > I felt bummed out nonetheless.
|
| Why? Don't get emotionally involved with work done for
| the company. They want to toss it? Why give moments care.
| Your time wasn't wasted. It was done doing what they
| asked in exchange for pay. That's it.
|
| >_That_ I could live with, but getting dinged for "being
| unproductive for a month" during performance review, now
| that really stung.
|
| And that's why, you shouldn't care or get emotionally
| involved in the work you create for the company. The
| company _clearly_ , demonstrably doesn't care about you.
| They _do not care about you_. Why should you care deeply
| about work you create for them?
| stank345 wrote:
| What you're saying makes sense, but sentiment like this
| makes me long for a post-capitalist conception of work
| where everything's not purely transactional and we can do
| meaningful work that we feel proud of. I think artisans
| or craftspeople had that historically and it's something
| we require to feel fulfilled.
| ravenstine wrote:
| It's ultimately not good for the spirit. Yes, some people
| can tolerate the bullshit. Likewise, there are people who
| are willing to be poop divers for sewage treatment plants
| (though this is an imperfect analogy I want not to offend
| those who are fine doing far less meaningful work). This
| doesn't mean everyone can or should be poop divers.
|
| Sure, everyone should be prepared to tolerate a level of
| meaningless and nonsense in the corporate world. I fully
| agree that one should not become too invested in work
| that ultimately serves the company.
|
| Nevertheless, if humans were meant to live as sysipheans,
| by now we would have found more straight-forward ways of
| doing so, and we might even take pride in doing pointless
| work. Yet few if anyone is openly proud of _doing nothing
| and still getting paid_ even when there 's no social
| recourse. Naturally, when enough time passes and a person
| has yet to be able to actually contribute to the system,
| they are liable to be _alienated_. And why shouldn 't
| they? If they can sit around for months or years being
| practically useless while still having to trade one's
| finite time for the privilege of food and shelter, there
| may be a breaking point where they can't make logical
| sense of the situation anymore. Where's the excitement?
| For many, we spend more hours at work than at home,
| especially if you discount sleep, and those hours are
| usually tired. That time at work had better mean at least
| something at some point; how is one then supposed to feel
| when they've reached senior status and... the situation
| is exactly the same or quite possibly _worse_?
|
| It would be nice if humans could get more fulfillment out
| of their personal lives, but that usually doesn't come by
| default and rather requires considerable work on top of
| one's day job; family, friends, and social status all
| require _work_ , and may of us don't even have adequate
| time for those. Is it reasonable to put a sapient mind
| through the anguish of being _irrelevant_ in nearly every
| aspect of their lives for the promise of a distant
| retirement and expect them to _not_ feel a sense of
| disengagement because the world is constructed in such a
| ridiculous fashion?
|
| This isn't to say that you are entirely wrong, but I have
| to wonder if you believe that in every fiber of your
| being, because otherwise you could have been a burger
| flipper or a circus clown instead of the occupation that
| brings you to HN. I assume that you have a set of skills
| that came to you at least somewhat naturally, and that if
| you were unable to ever properly execute those skills
| that those skills (and thereby _you_ ) would seem
| worthless to yourself.
|
| In my personal opinion, life is way too short to deal
| with meaninglessness for extended periods. If your job
| continues to be meaningless after years of experience,
| chances are you are doing the wrong thing and can benefit
| from a course correction.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > getting dinged for "being unproductive for a month"
| during performance review
|
| I don't think I could have lived with that if that was
| done to me. I'd either resign on the spot or shortly
| after.
| RJIb8RBYxzAMX9u wrote:
| Without divulging specifics, around the same time
| something happened in my personal life. I needed, and
| family members who depended on me needed, the money and
| stability.
|
| A bruised ego is a small price to pay for the safety of
| my family and dependents, so I will learn to live with
| it. Because I can live with it. I can live with it. dang,
| erase that GP.[0]
|
| [0] With apologies to _In The Pale Moonlight_
| Damogran6 wrote:
| I'm on the part of my career journey where I've realized
| you're _JUST_ exchanging time for money. They want you to
| work on something that gets thrown away? It paid for the
| mortgage, it made a car payment, it's thrown away JUST
| like 99.9% of the stuff I did for the first 10 years of
| my career.
|
| It's GOING to happen, best not to get too caught up in
| it.
|
| Going into SIEM build #8 in my life....it's just another
| SIEM. I take my enjoyment in the people, the compensation
| is adequate, it's contributing to a retirement that's
| getting nearer and more comfortable all the time. I try
| not to get too hung up on the work product.
| wreath wrote:
| Someone here on HN once mentioned that they cleaned or
| worked on their deck or whatever while working and nobody
| cared. I did the same (well, no deck but other stuff)
| when i had long stretches of downtime or notice that
| nobody else cares as much as I do about the project. Same
| result, nobody gave a fuck really. I don't think it's
| sustainable, but whatever.
| fhrow4484 wrote:
| >> At Facebook I could get by barely working a few hours a
| day. But the job was so unsatisfying
|
| > This is a little too first world. if the work were too
| sparse and wants more work, why not join interview loops or
| take classes/training, attend talks?
|
| Where did he mention wanting more work? He mentioned
| unsatisfying work, I doubt doing interview loop recruiting
| people when you find your own work unsatisfying is gonna make
| you a good interviewer (and I'd hate to be the interviewee
| there). And take classes/training to what end? At 9 years in,
| I doubt there's many relevant trainings, and learning the
| intricate details of yet another internal proprietary system
| has limited returns.
|
| > just go boating or mountain biking. Watch some sports and
| play video games.
|
| None of these activities leads to finding satisfying,
| purposeful work, nor are they really good at negating the
| effects of the unsatisfying work.
| pdimitar wrote:
| Or you can not tie your identity to work as much as you do,
| and feel instant relief?
| ravenstine wrote:
| Right. "Just learn k8s, bruh." It's like ok, maybe, but if
| the problem isn't so much a lack of work then you're really
| juat apinning your wheels learning for the sake of it.
|
| Another issue is evaluating whether the juice is worth the
| squeeze. It's easy to say "learn a new skill bruh", but
| what happens when you spend the time learning something,
| you get hired at a new job relevant to that skill only to
| run into your original problem all over again? The risk of
| that is significant, and in the world of tech it's
| extremely difficult to know what a position at a company is
| really like because so many of us are kissing ass, and we
| are avoidant of any real criticism or confrontation.
|
| None of the argumenta here are necessarily wrong, but
| speaking as if there are clear solutions that those
| complaining aren't seeing and calling this a first world
| problem is pretty dismissive.
| ignoramous wrote:
| > TFA: Facebook has changed a lot since 2012. The types of
| projects that I thrive in were harder to come by. The magic was
| gone. Things I care a lot about, like quality, craft and focus,
| weren't as important as scale, metrics and PSC. None of this
| happened suddenly, just a very slow process. That was one of
| the reason it was hard to leave.
|
| > GP: It never occurred to me that my self-indulging online
| addiction is actually a coping mechanism towards the
| unsatisfying and meaningless daily job.
|
| _The worker no longer trusts that they won 't be a replaced by
| a machine. The investor no longer trusts that they will get a
| return on capital. The manager no longer trusts that they will
| have employment for life after more than a bad quarter or two._
|
| _With so much of our trust eroding, management is left with
| little else to hold on to, and so they grasp the false hope of
| blunt instruments like forced rankings and quarterly
| forecasting -- no matter how illusory it all may be._
|
| _...We seem to have a false sense of joining something when we
| enter companies these days, just as Rousseau stipulated society
| had entered into a false social contract. This may be what 's
| driving newer generations to look for "purposeful work" as they
| launch their careers: They are looking to take control by
| demanding meaning from work right from day one..._
|
| _But Rousseau also had the idea that humans can remake
| themselves via their institutions, and Deming appears to share
| this belief._
|
| _This is what 's so interesting about companies like Facebook,
| Google, and Apple. These rare birds tend to operate outside of
| our norms and customs: They educate their employees
| differently; they collaborate differently across silos and
| divisions; they incentivize people in different ways. Because
| of their overwhelming ability to make cash (either initially
| through giddy investors and eventually via customers) these
| companies appear to start out more like communes. They are
| Gardens of Eden where there is little fighting for resources
| and oftentimes even the core customers freely partake._
|
| _Moreover, these companies almost appear to be for the common
| good, and the management appears to instinctively follow Deming
| 's philosophy. But what's even more striking is that efficiency
| and performance naturally improves inside of these companies
| without the standard methods that more established firms
| pursue. Sadly, there's often also a fall from grace that
| typically happens as these corporations become "normalized" and
| a more traditional battle for resources sets in._
|
| _Perhaps the answer lies deeper in what Deming was trying to
| say about "profound knowledge." As Deming implied, we work in
| complex systems with forces of good and evil always in play,
| and it may just be that the single most important
| responsibility of our top leaders is to artfully mold and shape
| this dynamic in a way that best suits their organizations --
| and produces a self-selecting ecosystem of workers, partners,
| customers, and shareholders who naturally align._
|
| _All of this implies a more-progressive approach to
| leadership. And yet we all too easily succumb to our Taylor-
| like impulses that assume the worst about workers -- using
| automation to track productivity down to the nanosecond, if
| possible. Unfortunately, this tends to exacerbate the growing
| trust gap between workers that festers between our corporate
| silos and stymies the very productivity that we seek to
| enhance._
|
| _None of this is easy. And many of us will surely struggle
| with these issues throughout our entire lives. But in a world
| where the stakes appear to be getting higher by the minute,
| building lasting trust and cooperation across companies and
| communities -- binding together people and long-calcified silos
| -- may be the only way for the corporation to survive._
|
| hbr.org, The management thinker we should never have forgotten
| (2016), https://hbr.org/2016/06/the-management-thinker-we-
| should-nev...
| 2457013579 wrote:
| This hit home for me as well. I'm currently at a large company
| and looking for a smaller one where I can work more hours Thor
| the same money doing something more meaningful. I have a
| min/max mindset, probably like most people here, so it took me
| a long time to come to the realization that working longer
| hours for the same pay was a good thing.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| If there's one underappreciated metric today, it's "quality
| of hour worked." I.e. how productive did you feel about an
| hour of your work, today?
|
| Track that over time. Make radical changes if it starts
| plummeting, because otherwise you're going to be backfilling
| entire teams' worth of vacated roles.
| fy20 wrote:
| The grass is not always greener. Plenty of small companies
| are also meaningless and have their own set of problems in
| different ways. Beuracracy is often replaced with toxic
| management.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Eventually you'll figure out it's all meaningless, no matter
| if it's big or small.
|
| Find something that you enjoy doing, like you would enjoy a
| nice puzzle.
|
| Purpose is all in your head.
| zebraflask wrote:
| I think these kinds of complaints are interesting compared to
| other HN posts about - take your pick - startups trying to keep
| the lights on, startups closing their doors, bootcamp attendees
| looking for their first job, etc.
|
| Whether intentional or not, the tenor of this blog comes across
| as fairly sheltered and not particularly sympathetic.
| lolinder wrote:
| It probably depends a lot on where you're at in your career,
| but it's pretty obvious that the blog resonates with a lot of
| people here. For many it probably resonates better than the
| struggles of a bootcamp grad.
|
| It's not really fair to belittle stories like this with a
| "you know nothing of pain" mentality. Your startup founders
| and bootcamp attendees would sound similarly sheltered if set
| against stories of starving children in Africa. Should we all
| refrain from talking about our pains because someone else's
| pains are worse?
|
| Humans struggle everywhere, with different things, and it's
| helpful for us to learn from people who've been through
| similar.
| bipendulum wrote:
| Definitely for me too.
|
| I currently work at a large fintech company and have a decent
| salary. I have been there for quite some time now so I have the
| reputation and trust in the organization however, I am having
| the worst time of my career. I can also barely work a few hours
| a day and I feel horribly burnout. Hence I made the opposite
| decision - to move to one of the FAANGs where I will massively
| shift my current WLB. I am confident that I made the right
| decision.
| [deleted]
| yourapostasy wrote:
| This kind of context is very difficult for me to wrap my head
| around. So much so that it strikes me as a kind of artificial
| ennui, maybe even a kind of humblebragging. I'm open to
| changing my mind though, so I'd really like to hear
| explanations/clarifications that would help me understand this
| sentiment more.
|
| In even my most over-resourced client, there is never a paucity
| of improvements to make. Ever.
|
| My current working conclusion after seeing this many times and
| doing what I can to informally coach the ones expressing this
| kind of sentiment, is that there isn't a lack of
| meaningfulness, or purpose, or other lofty language. There is a
| lack of will to go outside of their comfort zone, very often
| due to non-technical factors. Or a lack of a sense of joy in
| the craft in even the smallest details and accomplishments. And
| that's okay. It's the reason we use specialization.
|
| But let's not kid ourselves. I've yet to walk into a client
| that is so on top of their to do list much less wish list that
| there is nothing to improve. We also need to recognize there is
| also a substantial subset of people expressing this sentiment
| who dislike implementing some improvement without significant
| recognition, praise, and advancement; these are the ones who
| seek the big, splashy wins over the steady, incremental
| attention to craft that accumulate into the 20-year overnight
| successes.
| lolinder wrote:
| I don't work for an FAANG, so if someone who does comes along
| I'll defer to them.
|
| What I have gathered from those who _do_ is that it 's not
| that there's a shortage of problems to solve in the
| organization, it's that the bureaucracy is so thick that they
| couldn't solve extra problems even if they tried.
|
| From your references to "clients" I assume that you work as a
| consultant of some description. Obviously, no one brings in a
| consultant without having a lot for them to do. Additionally,
| few orgs bring in a consultant with the intention of them
| doing only what they're told.
|
| But if you're just one coder among tens of thousands, that's
| exactly what your organization expects of you. And that's
| what the people who tell these stories find so draining.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to fill
| seats more for the purpose of starving their competition of
| brains than actually using the brains they hire.
|
| The work is primarily organizational/drudgery and moves at a
| slow pace because of all the red tape and walls they've built
| around their projects in order to manage all the people.
| Endless incremental code reviews for small changes that get
| pondered for days and days. Design docs for trivial features
| written up and then basically entirely reworked by comments
| from people higher up who have more information but no time to
| do it because they're too busy being higher up and writing
| design doc comments all day. Horribly inefficient, painful to
| get anything done, and demoralizing.
|
| Just left Google after 10 years. I found in that time I spent
| more time trying to find where I fit in and what work I could
| even _do_ than actually doing any work. In some parts of the
| company, any interesting project was like a piece of red meat
| thrown into a pack of hungry wolves looking for "impact". Any
| project "given" to you quickly got competed with or downgraded
| in importance unless you got super self-promotional. There'd be
| talk about some new exciting thing coming down the pipe and
| you'd eagerly wait months for it to find out the work was
| either already parceled out or it didn't really exist.
|
| I ended up seeking our "boring" organizations and projects
| within the company, in order to avoid the frustration and
| drama. But then motivation suffered.
|
| Oh, and remote work has made them even more terrible because
| it's even more asynchronous and ponderous now. Can't tap
| someone on the shoulder and run something by them really
| anymore, it's just more "fork many threads of work and then
| spin on all the blocking issues waiting to make progress on any
| of them". Which sucks if you are the kind of person who is
| better at picking one thing at a time and sinking your
| attention into it, like me. So yeah, at some point you just
| start to lose focus out of sheer annoyance/frustration/boredom.
| And you're just there to collect the paycheck.
|
| And maybe you feel guilty about it, but then, that was kind of
| the point. Maybe in your previous job you were a top
| contributor, potentially competing with BigCorp in some domain.
| Now you're not. They can push wheelbarrows full of money around
| to do the thing you were doing before, but at way higher scale
| and precision... but at the cost of way lower velocity because
| they've employed PhDs to nitpick over the comments in a
| protobuf description. (And if you leave and start your own
| thing and compete, they'll probably just come and buy it and
| bury it, too.)
|
| They're bad for our industry and not so great for our brains...
| but good for our wallets. 10 years at Google messed up my
| passion and skills.... but it sure was good for my mortgage.
|
| (FWIW, I thought in that time that I had lost my passion for
| coding. But two weeks after leaving to take some time for
| myself, I found myself firing up CLion and writing a
| synthesizer from scratch and loving it. Writing code is great.)
| davemp wrote:
| Very well put, your comment resonates with my frustrations at
| a BigCorp.
|
| > These BigCorps are hiring like mad and paying big $$ to
| fill seats more for the purpose of starving their competition
| of brains than actually using the brains they hire.
|
| I used to apply Hanlon's Razor to these types of hypothesis.
| After spending more time with the decision making class, the
| amount of psychopathic behavior and analysis I've seen has
| let me to reconsider.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I don't think it's psychopathic or malevolent beyond what's
| normal for capitalism. It's how you win at making money. In
| any market you're either disrupting or at risk of being
| disrupted. There's multiple strategies you could take for
| the latter. And it certainly helps if you have a firehose
| of money (ads revenue).
|
| Not speaking from any inside knowledge, BTW. Just my
| philosophizing.
| bschne wrote:
| I once had a job where I somehow didn't get assigned much work
| for a long period of time right after starting -- something
| about no projects having open staff positions, and them not
| being able to use me anyway because they were using up all the
| budget with the existing staffing already and didn't want to do
| "free work" for the clients.
|
| For a while, I spent my days mostly doing tutorials, reading
| ebooks and papers, watching lectures, ...
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's an incredible luxury to get a
| consistent salary and be able to do that! But the thing is, you
| can't help but feel utterly useless after a while. It's
| especially bad if everyone else has their projects, so you also
| don't really feel like part of a team.
| hamburglar wrote:
| Been there too. It felt a little paradoxical at first. It's
| like a gift! But you really do start feeling really shitty
| about yourself because you know you're useless.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs has a good analysis of this.
| Standard capitalist theory is that people are lazy and will
| not work unless force to do so by threat of immiseration. But
| in reality people HATE bullshit jobs where you spend the day
| playing solitaire or whatever. People don't want to burn
| themselves out but they do want to feel helpful. Good
| management is about helping people realize their natural
| desire to help out.
| orzig wrote:
| I went through a period like that, I wish my manager had put
| some boundary (even admittedly artificial) around how long it
| would be, that it was going to be OK, and help me set some
| soft goal for that time. It would've made the exact same
| activities feel dramatically nicer.
| steelframe wrote:
| I joined a FAANG during the pendemic, and for the entire year
| I was there, I never got assigned a single task. Of course I
| kept myself busy trying to identify and solve problems around
| me, but I never had a deadline or anything associated with
| what I had chosen to work on. After a year I just couldn't do
| it anymore. A few acquaintances thought I was out of my mind
| and that I should continue milking that for all it's worth,
| but there's just something that makes me need to feel like
| someone else actually cares about what I do (or don't) do.
| JGM_io wrote:
| What you feel is the "Competence" part of core motivation
| according to deci & ryan "self determination theory". Their
| original paper is from 2008 i believe and states people
| need the perceived Autonomy to choose their life, perceived
| Competence over that choice and the perceived Relatedness
| that others respect and encourage your activity of choice.
|
| So it's very understandable that if 1 of 3 is missing your
| psyche becomes strained.
|
| I used to study this theory as part of my game design
| interests and found it extremely useful to analyse a lot of
| stuff from your own situation to a game or even customer
| experience. Just be aware of the word perceived here...
| allowing the theory to be used for dark patterns.
| [deleted]
| hutzlibu wrote:
| "self-indulging online addiction is actually a coping mechanism
| towards the unsatisfying and meaningless daily job. "
|
| Allmost every addiction is like this. A shallow replacement for
| the real desires unfulfiled.
| dom96 wrote:
| > To cut the chase, the best offer I got was roughly 70% of what
| I was making at Facebook.
|
| I've been there and refused offers because of that. How do you
| get past this feeling of a company screwing you over unless their
| offer is higher than your current comp?
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| What's PSC?
| cryptoslug wrote:
| Performance Summary Cycle- performance reviews every 6 months.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Thanks.
| ncmncm wrote:
| NB, Replit is the outfit that did this:
|
| https://intuitiveexplanations.com/tech/replit/
| dragosmocrii wrote:
| hmm, those emails are cringey
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Replit's position there seems reasonable to me. Companies would
| be a lot less enthusiastic about hiring developers if it came
| with the risk that someone could take internal designs and open
| source them with no repercussions.
| ncmncm wrote:
| If your company's value proposition can be replicated by an
| intern in a weekend, you have a much bigger problem than
| interns.
|
| Companies' enthusiasm for hiring developers worries me not
| even a little. Of much greater moment, IStM, is the
| character, or lack of, demonstrated by company officers. That
| CEO's final e-mail lays him all out. I will certainly not be
| applying to work at Replit.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > The salary is high. Facebook aims to pay top 5% compensation in
| the market (we'll get back to that). This makes a lot of other
| things very comfortable: you can go to a restaurant without
| worrying too much about the bill, get a nicer car, a nicer house,
| better stuff.
|
| That's very normal, and I don't want to condemn the author for
| this, but this is a trap. If you get used to the consumption that
| a 5% salary offers you, then you will have an extremely hard time
| finding a job that's not at the 5% or better compensation. And
| those other jobs might come with other tradeoffs that make them
| unpalatable in other ways.
|
| Avoiding the hedonic treadmill[0] is a good habit to get into if
| your compensation goes up. It increases your financial stability,
| and means that you can take a lower paying job if you decide that
| it'll make you happier in other ways.
|
| 0 - Technical term for how increased spending sets your
| expectations higher, and quickly stop bringing the rush that they
| first brought.
| notreallyserio wrote:
| Every time I get a raise I make a one time splurge purchase and
| then look at ways to reduce my periodic spending. Cancel
| subscriptions, re-play old games, that sort of thing. I figure
| my spending will naturally rise again (always has, anyway) but
| not as high as it would have if I let it if I wasn't so
| cautious.
| dom96 wrote:
| I feel this but from a different perspective. As somebody that
| comes from a working class background, I cannot help but feel
| like taking any pay cut is a mistake in my life. It's not that
| I consume a top 5% salary, it's that I feel like any offer that
| isn't an increase of my current comp is the company trying to
| screw me over.
| Researcherry wrote:
| I wonder whether author uses facebook.
| notacoward wrote:
| Funny thing: very few of the people I know from working at
| Facebook actually use the public site to any significant
| degree. I always found that odd.
| astrea wrote:
| packetslave wrote:
| It's on his personal blog. Who are you to police what he writes
| about there?
|
| Blame the person who submitted it to HN, or the 25 people who
| upvoted it to the home page. Or, you know, just shut up and get
| over it.
| astrea wrote:
| mfringel wrote:
| Making an assertion and sticking a question mark at the end
| isn't questioning anything.
| astrea wrote:
| wanderer_ wrote:
| Plot twist: it was the Zucc
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Was wondering that too.
| downut wrote:
| Super successful people at Facebook need Facebook "prestige" to
| get... car loans?
|
| Huh.
|
| And you can get that prestige and success working a couple of
| hours a day.
|
| Huh.
|
| What a weird world.
| jonmb wrote:
| The car loan line was a little odd. Anyone with a decent income
| and a high credit score can easily get a car loan.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Out of all the sites I visit on a daily basis, facebook clearly
| has the worst user experience out of them all, and that's
| counting the ad-infested local news that have jumping elements
| before click. Not sure if I'm the victim of some test group, but
| the page loads so slowly, and stories become pretty much
| unresponsive. If I click exit on the first story, it just keeps
| playing at least 4-5 more stories before it eventually closes the
| page. I wonder if this is actually intended to make people look
| at more stories. Marketplace is another abomination which feels
| like it was thrown together by an intern. Useless filters,
| categorization of items super-bad, and again slow, slow, slow.
| vogt wrote:
| I found a lot of value in this. I rarely find the desire to
| comment on threads with input that amounts just to "great job!",
| but to the author: I took a lot of tips and inspiration from
| this. Thank you for sharing.
| trangon wrote:
| I'm curious what the author will do if they encounter the same
| issues at their new company.
| danuker wrote:
| I would guess, move back to Facebook. People are paid for a
| reason: coding is dull.
| mFixman wrote:
| > I do miss a bunch of Facebook internal tools. Phabricator,
| Workplace, Scuba, Deltoid and a bunch of others.
|
| I had the opposite experience leaving Facebook for a company that
| uses externally-available tools.
|
| I do miss 2017 Scuba, Workplace, and Deltoid, since they worked
| well in Facebook's ecosystem. I do not miss the 2021 versions of
| those tools (and of most other internal tools in Facebook), which
| are bloated messes with less functionality and also somehow being
| slower and more resource-heavy.
|
| One of my positive impressions when moving companies are how much
| better Grafana, Prometheus, JIRA, Slack, and many other external
| tools are from internal Facebook tools.
|
| It makes sense if you see it from an influence perspective:
| external tools need to improve to get new users and retain
| current ones, but Facebook's tools need to constantly add new
| features to get PSC performance points and they always keeping a
| guaranteed audience of the entire company.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Workplace is definitely better than Google chat in my
| experience.
|
| Phabricator is miles ahead of anything.
|
| Automatic flaky test detection works like a charm and I miss it
| every day.
|
| However, the organizational culture... I agree with a lot of
| what he noted about reorgs and that it feels like walking
| through molasses trying to get anything done quickly.
| kyrra wrote:
| Googler, opinions are my own.
|
| If the Chat team is ever able to get inline-threads out the
| door: https://chromeunboxed.com/google-chat-rooms-become-
| spaces, it should make rooms/spaces a much better experience.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| How about opening a room and not having it scroll forever
| out from under me? How about clicking on a chat link to a
| long thread (or scrolling up to it) and having that scroll
| away randomly out from under me?
|
| There's very basic usability and performance things that
| frustrate me on a fundamental level. The rest is at the
| margins.
|
| Also, the builtin @silent way to chat a thread without
| notifying anyone is gold. Same goes for reminders. Also
| it's chat + a consistent way to communicate out for a team.
| Workplace solves actual problems working with other people.
| Google Chat simply does slack-like chat, and poorly at
| that.
|
| Edit: also all those things are drastically simpler than
| inline threads but not as sexy which tells you something
| about what the incentive structure looks like here.
| Disclaimer. I'm an ex googler. Thought chat was good when
| it came out but it's regressed since then.
| mFixman wrote:
| I agree with you on Workplace, and I had an equally good time
| using Github than Phabricator. Still, current Workplace is
| very slow and its amount of whitespace-to-information grew a
| lot on the last years.
|
| Most other tools are just unambiguously worse than their
| public counterparts though.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-22 23:01 UTC)