[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What did you think about working at a FAANG?
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Ask HN: What did you think about working at a FAANG?
Yesterday I met a friend who finished his interviewing process at
Google. It's hard to explain how excited he is for the results,
which may arrive in a few weeks. For some people, like him, this is
more than a job opportunity because it's also his way to move to
London and run away from our messed up country. I've started
thinking if I should try it too. I have a solid competitive
programming background, and I think I'd go well in behavioural
interviews. But is it going to be worthy? Every day I see
thousands of posts of ex-FAANG saying why they left, but I also see
thousands of people saying why it's fantastic. They love to say how
intelligent people that work there are, and some love to say how
you will never grow there because everyone is good and you are just
another brick in the wall. Let's be honest, what are the good and
bad sides of FAANGs?
Author : vitorfhc
Score : 13 points
Date : 2022-07-27 20:34 UTC (2 hours ago)
| [deleted]
| m0llusk wrote:
| It sucked. Constant gaming for perceived power by people who have
| been the smartest one in the room all their lives. Empathy
| occasionally happens, but it tends to get squashed. A lot, well
| pretty much everything, depends on the teams and projects you get
| directly involved with.
| Gortal278 wrote:
| You might as well try interviewing, you have nothing to lose.
| Maybe you want to revisit the anecdotes with an offer in hand.
| dublin wrote:
| If you are not _fully_ on-board with the latest current tenets of
| wokeism (keeping up with this is itself a full-time job), and the
| cancel culture it creates (remember, the slightest slight is
| cause for _you_ to get cancelled!), then you should avoid ever
| even considering working for any FAANG (or many other large)
| "tech" (really advertising) companies.
|
| You WILL comply with the group-think, or you will be eliminated.
| Independent thought or differences of opinion are simply not
| permitted. They pay well, but that's what it takes to make people
| put up with the miserably hostile work environments they create
| (rah-rah "we're such a great place to work!" programs only go so
| far....)
| jewayne wrote:
| In other words, you had opinions outside your job description,
| and couldn't be a professional and keep them to yourself. It
| comes as a shock to some people that a corporation is not a
| democracy, and that yes, that applies to THEM.
|
| We all need to know what we are being paid to do and just keep
| our mouths shut about things outside of the area that we're
| being paid for.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| If work is neutral ground, one might argue then, that all
| personal (political) opinions should be kept private and not
| discussed in the work place. Regardless of if they are left
| or right leaning ...
| benlivengood wrote:
| Google was a good place to work as an SRE. I think the software
| devs (SWE) were also pretty happy. Most of the backend work at
| Google is designing, scaling, and running very large systems with
| a lot of requirements. Every product has to at least have a plan
| for serving billions of users around the world which means GDPR
| and local laws and the privacy and security requirements of being
| the biggest target for governments, hackers, and spammers. The
| tooling (build systems, linters, static analysis, profilers,
| tracing, deployment, monitoring, security, storage, and
| libraries) is fantastic.
|
| From what I saw, everyone was quite intelligent and most were
| also very kind and well-rounded people. Every engineer you talk
| to will have a strong grasp of algorithms and data structures,
| usually strong math and statistics background, and plenty of
| language, kernel, and operating system authors and research
| scientists will be your (extended) coworkers. I felt like I was
| somewhere around the 40th percentile in ability/outcomes which is
| a big change coming from smaller software companies or IT where
| Google-level engineering skill is rare. Imposter syndrome is a
| thing when your best efforts fit neatly into median performance
| with a lot of other high-performers, so expect that and don't let
| it bother you.
|
| Growth at Google means ability to grow in the global SWE/SRE
| market; you have to be in the top ~0.001% percent of engineers
| worldwide to get into very senior technical roles. There are
| still lots of rewarding roles as a L4 or L5 individual
| contributor.
|
| I left because it's much easier to get promo by interview (with
| another company) than through the perf process and after 4 years
| the stock grant cliff without promo was a bit more stark than it
| is now, I hear.
|
| If you can manage it, get hired in the U.S. or transfer once
| hired. London and other non-U.S. salaries are quite a bit lower,
| very unfortunately and unfairly in my opinion. Global labor
| markets are weird.
| ryandrake wrote:
| The way it was once explained to me: there are three broad skills
| that are relevant to succeeding at a FAANG:
|
| A) Technical brilliance/mastery
|
| B) Willingness to grind/endure
|
| C) Political savvy/ruthlessness/schmoozing
|
| Any combination of _two_ of these is sufficient to progress in
| you career. All three is even better. I've met A+B's, B+C's and
| A+C's and they all do pretty well. If you just have one of these,
| you're not going to get very far.
|
| Maybe this is also true for other "non-FAANG but big" companies,
| I don't know.
| spearingthehead wrote:
| However, if you can't get far, there should be some way outside
| of work to build up your broad skills. "A" you can build up on
| free time, but it's also mostly isolating. "C" is harder to
| come by outside of work especially as an introvert. I think we
| have enough bootcamps and such for A. Workshops for how to be
| influential in professional settings would be beneficial,
| because reading books about the subject is still no substitute
| for face-to-face office interactions.
| dustingetz wrote:
| at big corporations (not bay area) i'd say brilliance is worth
| zero because the playbook mgmt is running is to basically cargo
| cult what more successful companies are visibly doing. AWS
| worked for X leader in space? sheep follow. creativity and
| individual thought is punished
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| These skills will get you far at any company. But there are a
| lot of places where the bar to hop is lower.
| UmYeahNo wrote:
| I think you have to come to terms with how you feel about the
| impact that company has on the world, and if you want to
| contribute to it. Certain letters in that acronym may be worse
| that others, and some may feel that all of them are bad.
|
| Is your personal salary worth the impact it may have in others?
| That's something only you can decide. But all those companies are
| trying very hard to change the shape/fabric of societies. All of
| them have negative aspects. All of them have billionaires at the
| top, and that has is own baggage. You may only be a tiny, tiny
| cog in that machine, but you're a cog nonetheless.
| draw_down wrote:
| [deleted]
| SwSwinger wrote:
| 1. Note that this is a news aggregator for tech startups. Tech
| startups in large cities tend to hire most of their experienced
| engineers from FAANG companies. So, it's in a tech startup's
| interest to critique FAANGs. 2. You could want to be a
| great startup founder or early engineer as an ambition.
| Probabilistically, your most straightforward path to this goal is
| to go to a FAANG next. Golden handcuffs, most people come in
| with this ambition then don't leave because there's so many
| pleasant aspects. Think about point #1 again. 3. If you
| are trying to get into a more respected tech community and are
| limited by visa issues, which companies tend to solve more often
| than individuals, it's probably in your interest to find a
| company [1] that will clear this hurtle for you and [2] that has
| a brand you can leverage. FAANG is a subset of companies that
| would provide that option.
| tester756 wrote:
| Indeed.
|
| For example my experience with big corpos was totally different
| from what I've been reading on the internet.
| throw149102 wrote:
| FWIW I did not feel like everyone was super smart at my FAANG
| job. I didn't even feel that anyone was particularly curious.
| Obviously, YMMV depending on the company and the team.
| omgbear wrote:
| I was a SWE at google for a few years around 2013. I totally
| recommend the experience to anyone.
|
| I left to join a small startup founded by friends, another
| experience I'd recommend to anyone.
|
| In particular, I learned a ton. My prior job was a startup with a
| totally green team. At google, I found my team incredibly bright
| and motivated which was contagious -- You want to work hard an
| succeed because everyone else does. I can't speak to how this
| works for other teams.
|
| I learned a ton about proper engineering, I got to see a larger,
| more well-written, more well-tested than I'll see in a long time.
| While I don't work with large-scale distributed systems written
| by thousands of people today, some of the lessons transfer.
|
| For me, just access to the tribal knowledge was the most useful
| -- I was not an SRE but learned a lot about incident response by
| going to talks and reading threads. Seeing what is possible and
| what others have done is very inspiring.
|
| I can't speak to FAAN or how G is today, but I'd recommend
| working there in 2013.
|
| You certainly have less of an impact at such a huge company
| compared to a startup, but I've also found medium-sized companies
| to have that same blunting of impact, without any of the
| benefits.
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