[HN Gopher] How to succeed at Meta
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How to succeed at Meta
Author : donsupreme
Score : 193 points
Date : 2022-10-13 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.teamblind.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.teamblind.com)
| endtime wrote:
| People are grouping all FAANGs together in this thread. But this
| wasn't my experience at Google at all. It's impossible to get
| promoted past L5 (or even maybe past L4) with a short term-
| focused approach like this. And, at least at the lower levels (up
| to L5), you only need to be self-promotional every 6-12 months
| for perf.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| In fact, "long time horizon" is literally in the text of the L6
| expectations.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > literally in the text
|
| The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which
| is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and
| - most importantly - is vague enough to be open to
| interpretation.
|
| For instance, the "fix something that you broke yourself" can
| be packaged as "quality assurance work that is part of a long
| term initiative to leverage force multipliers to increase
| developer velocity". The promo committee and even your
| manager won't see through it, unless you make it stupidly
| obvious. Peers won't complain openly to avoid bad vibes (why
| should they care), so even if there was time for scrutiny
| (there isn't), there's virtually no paper trail.
|
| In reality, you are seen as proactive, a fixer, someone who
| takes care of problems when they come up. A good citizen.
| Some even do this unconsciously, because they overestimate
| their abilities and over-engineer things that break because
| it's infeasible to reason about complexity monsters in the
| first place.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| And yet, in promo reviews for L6 I've experienced, this
| discussion of "long time horizon" comes up basically every
| time. The OP advice of "ignore anything long term" will be
| almost a hard blocker here.
| me_again wrote:
| Ah, the unassailable confidence required to work in one lower-
| level position at a company for 5 months and believe you know
| "How To Succeed" there.
| eclipxe wrote:
| m1117 wrote:
| That's not a very supportive response and doesn't match Hacker
| News values.
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Ops post is a sarcastic take not a true guide (at least to my
| read)
| jmk123 wrote:
| Having worked there for a while, I'm not sure I agree with
| your take.
| eclipxe wrote:
| It's clearly sarcastic. See the point where he says "this
| is actually good advice" indicating that the rest is not.
| theIV wrote:
| That was not my read from OP.
|
| I took it to mean that they realize that most of this
| advice is not universally good/not applicable everywhere,
| but that single point is.
| me_again wrote:
| That seems possible, but satirically posting self-
| aggrandizing BS on Blind is like satirically posting Pepe
| memes on 4Chan.
| lovich wrote:
| I haven't used blind but that sounds contextually
| appropriate for 4chan
| [deleted]
| yodsanklai wrote:
| After 5 months, there was 5-6 weeks of bootcamp, 3-4 months in
| actual team, no formal evaluation yet.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| thats every big company.
|
| Eventually there will be someone who makes a spreadsheet, sorts
| by a column, and makes a decision based on what they see. Or,
| perhaps they will send it to a management consultant who has been
| in the workforce for all of 6 months to make a powerpoint about
| the columns.
|
| Make sure you have a good rank on as many columns as possible.
| zffr wrote:
| In my experience, Apple was not like this. I was on a user-
| facing team, and we hardly looked at metrics related to our
| product's usage. In some cases we didn't even have meaningful
| metrics to look at.
| TimSchumann wrote:
| Might I point out that this may be too far in the 'opposite
| direction'?
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| similar to leetcode-style interviews, no one likes it, but when
| pressed no one can really come up with a better method (that
| doesn't open the company up for discrimination lawsuits, which
| is sadly important)
| mejutoco wrote:
| A take home test is such an alternative. I have seen several
| companies offering either a technical challenge live or a
| take home test.
| binarycrusader wrote:
| For what it's worth, I've worked for three large tech companies
| (Sun, Oracle, and currently Microsoft) as a developer and none
| have been like this. I'm sure someone was tracking metrics but
| I never had to worry about metrics and have just focused on my
| development role.
| 121789 wrote:
| I think it's relevant for consumer products where changes are
| easily measurable, and especially relevant for data-focused
| teams (growth teams, ML teams)
|
| if you're working on infra stuff, enterprise stuff, or longer
| term complex projects, not as important
| ConSeannery wrote:
| The post is flippant but a decent strategy. Your goal (whether
| you're a total comp+promo seeker or just looking to float) is to
| arm your manager with as much ammunition as possible to argue on
| your behalf during calibrations. Project impact can be easily
| argued against, especially when your area of work is difficult or
| not well understood by other engineering teams, not to mention
| that coming up with undeniably impactful projects every 6-12
| months is not possible on many teams. Lines of code and moving
| efficiency or cost metrics cannot be argued against. It's not the
| only way to "succeed" at Meta but it's certainly the easiest way
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| This person is getting a lot of snarky responses, but all of this
| is relatively true at Amazon also and it was true when I was at
| Intel 10 years ago. This is how large companies operate once they
| surpass the innovation phase, so it should be no surprise to
| anyone that's actually worked in a FAANG and doesn't pound down
| the kool-aid.
|
| Interesting how there's comments on this person being concerned
| solely with "TC" as if the company itself is not solely concerned
| with profit. To top it off, most of these companies are on some
| shitlist for abusing their work-force or slave labor in
| developing countries. There's nothing wrong in working at a FAANG
| for the money and I'm surprised to see the current attitude in
| this thread around that. I thought we were past the employer
| loyalty era and more accepting of the harsh reality that
| everything is profit-driven these days.
|
| BTW the person is not literally saying to do these things. They
| are using humor as a means to illustrate how ridiculous it is
| working under those conditions.
| sopooneo wrote:
| If you have a moment, what is "TC" here? Technical
| Contributions?
| bskap wrote:
| Total compensation
| GCA10 wrote:
| "This is how large companies operate once they surpass the
| innovation phase"
|
| So true. Family members have seen it in pharma. It's endemic in
| retail banking. Large parts of media/entertainment have gone
| this way, too. The core ideas of being your own PR department
| -- and hopping from one short-horizon metric to another are
| just how these places hand out recognition, promotions, etc. At
| the better ones, innovative work will be tolerated, too. But
| the easiest path is pretty much what OP describes.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > I thought we were past the employer loyalty era and more
| accepting of the harsh reality that everything is profit-driven
| these days
|
| I think this is my biggest disappointment working for a big
| tech company. I don't feel I'm "part of the family" at all.
| Very high turnover, people come and go, some are fired, burn
| out, or move to another job. I'd love to feel I'm part of
| something, but it's not the case. Plus most products are very
| questionable. Very few people do work on something meaningful
| anyway.
|
| It's all about optimising some metrics. The same way you need
| to leetcode to get recruited, you're expected to check some
| boxes once you're in if you want to stay.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Having worked at a few mid-sized (50-120) startups for a
| while, the disappointment there is that many of those same
| problems exist, just in smaller contexts, and is more
| personal.
|
| I think it's not so much company size as it is operating in a
| hot industry during a boom time.
| analyst74 wrote:
| If you feel like a family working for a company, but does not
| have significant ownership stake, you're being conned.
| zh3 wrote:
| I'd disagree with that - what's wrong with working for a
| company that has a good culture, even if you don't have
| shares?
|
| i.e. shares or not, I'd prefer to work for a company where
| I felt I was part of it as opposed to one that's just time
| served.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I think parent is alluding to the fact that "part of the
| family" is a framing that often serves the interests of
| the employer. No matter how close you _feel_ to the
| people managing you, chances are they will not hesitate
| to lay you off for financial /profitabilty reasons. This
| is in contrast to how an actual family (whether
| biological or "found") works where support and belonging
| is to some extent unconditional.
| twelve40 wrote:
| a half-decent startup will get rid of low performers faster
| than a bad habit. You are a part of the family only as long
| as you keep up, how else can it be?
| autokad wrote:
| your work is never your family, the sooner in life you figure
| that out the better off you will be. No matter what employer
| you have, they will fire you the first instance it is
| profitable for them to do so. Its a contract, you can take
| pride in your work, but at the end of the day its a business
| deal and its about money.
| sleepybrett wrote:
| The work is your family if it's a family business. But that
| presents a whole set of different scenarios.
| autokad wrote:
| I disagree. even if you are the owner of the business, or
| working for someone in your family's business, its still
| business. full stop.
| twelve40 wrote:
| yeah, probably more of the "not everyone is in it for the
| money" bs. A good excuse to short-change and lowball nerdy
| people. TC matters more than HR like us to believe, even more
| so going into a recession!
| marssaxman wrote:
| > not everyone is in it for the money
|
| ok, but... it is _true_ that not everyone is in it for the
| money, or at least, not for the money primarily.
| twelve40 wrote:
| so, people join meta in droves to selflessly pursue Zuck's
| legless pipe dream? or maybe libra, the future of
| blockchain? oh wait, that got canned. Or what's The mission
| du jour? of course it's the money, what else.
| ben_w wrote:
| I bet people have joined in droves for all of those
| things. I used to be that kind of person, thinking all
| the ideas the business types talked about were amazing
| and world-changing. Not so much now that I've seen so
| many fail, but I used to be.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Yup, this is all big companies. And if the metrics are wrong,
| _that 's not your responsibility_. The PM's and VP's that come
| up with them know that metrics are imperfect and have
| tradeoffs. Let them handle the tradeoffs. If you're impacting
| the metrics, then you're doing the job assigned to you.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I'm pretty convinced that there's no set of metrics that can
| effectively capture productivity and business goals without
| being gamed. It seems to me that the only effective
| management system is a "web of trust" style system where
| middle managers have a lot more autonomy to make decisions
| based on their own judgement. Unfortunately it's hard to
| legally CYA if something goes wrong with that kind of setup
| and it has other vulnerabilities like being manipulated by
| sociopaths.
|
| Overall, managing people at scale is always going to be a
| hard problem and it seems unlikely that technology will ever
| offer a satisfactory solution.
| fhsm wrote:
| Self destructing measurement:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| All else equal, easy to capture proxies make good metrics;
| however, the point is that all else will not be equal.
|
| Also, the CYAed version of web of trust is a "360 review".
| Going all in on 360s is a good way to unleashing reality tv
| dynamics in a previously banal workplace.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| They 'know they are imperfect' if you bring it up, but they
| act like they are perfect. That is why it's better to move
| metrics than do anything actually beneficial, everyone is
| justifying their high performance review. If you hit your
| metrics your manager looks good, that means their manager is
| hitting their metrics, and so on. The people that suffer are
| the shareholders and users, but management is always
| optimizing to transfer as much wealth as possible from
| shareholders to themselves and you ride the coattails of that
| if you just chase metrics.
| mrandish wrote:
| > This is how large companies operate once they surpass the
| innovation phase
|
| I heard someone smart (maybe Naval Ravikant) say on a podcast
| that this becomes prevalent in orgs which have two or more
| layers of management between real customer-facing work and
| business ownership (CEO, co-founder, CTO, etc). Having worked
| in several startups as well as F500 FAANG-ish valley tech
| companies, I agree. When a manager reports to a manager who's
| reporting to someone else degradation begins to occur. Another
| tip is to look at the org chart. If your manager's manager has
| more than six ( _maybe_ up to 8) direct reports, that 's a bad
| sign.
|
| However, there are exceptions to be found in specific sub-
| groups in some orgs. I've been witness to it more than once.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| I don't understand. Literally every company I've ever worked
| for, successful startup included, had at least an engineering
| manager reporting to a director reporting to a VP reporting
| to a senior VP reporting to a CTO. Is this not a normal or
| good way of doing things?
| lbotos wrote:
| > If your manager's manager has more than six (maybe up to 8)
| direct reports, that's a bad sign.
|
| A bad sign of what? A bad sign that the company is too large
| to be innovating?
| sjsdaiuasgdia wrote:
| Span of control. As you get above that number of reports,
| the manager is splitting their attention to the point that
| hot/cold spots are inevitable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control
| sooyoo wrote:
| So, many layers are bad, but large span is also. This
| means you are limiting both width and depth of the
| management tree, effectively limiting the total size of
| the workforce to ... a few hundred? That doesn't sound
| right.
| mrandish wrote:
| > That doesn't sound right.
|
| IMHO, it's correct but that doesn't mean it's good or
| desirable that things tend to bog down in wider / deeper
| org structures. Maintaining high efficiency and
| effectiveness in large org structures is _hard_ to do and
| that 's why the exceptions are notable and worth
| studying.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > This is how large companies operate once they surpass the
| innovation phase
|
| I just call that the "monopoly phase." There is no natural
| post-innovation phase, you either have to compete for business,
| or you don't.
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean more charitably it's the "maintenance" phase except
| that our fucked up economic system punishes companies that
| are happy at their current size and so must do ever more
| ridiculous or desperate things to make the numbers keep going
| up.
|
| A bakery that's been happily serving its community for 25
| years isn't a monopoly just because it doesn't feel pressure
| to grow.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > except that our fucked up economic system
|
| A company decides whether it's publicly traded or not. It
| also decides whether it makes an offer to buy the
| competition or not. I think people forget just how many
| entities Google has purchased over the years, and how often
| the FTC has just let them get away with it.
|
| > A bakery that's been happily serving its community for 25
| years isn't a monopoly just because it doesn't feel
| pressure to grow.
|
| Are we really going to compare a single locally owned
| bakery with a naturally limited consumer market to a
| corporation like Google?
|
| Wouldn't you agree that bakery would be a monopoly if it
| let it's standards slip for a few years, and an ex-employee
| of that bakery opened a new shop, and the existing bakery
| just decided to buy them out and then close their business
| instead of starting to compete with them for customers?
|
| Now multiply that by like 250 times. I hardly think it's
| uncharitable to call this "strategy" out for what it is.
| Fendii wrote:
| Sounds stupid to you but I really have ethics.
|
| I will not work for a company like Facebook.
|
| And I don't throw Facebook in the same bucket as companies like
| Google, Microsoft.
|
| And sure Amazon and apple are more evil than the others but
| they are also so far away from Facebook.
| robswc wrote:
| What makes FB exceptionally bad? Jw.
|
| For me, TikTok even though they probably don't hire SDEs like
| FB and there's prob enough people to fill those roles
| anyways.
|
| I truly think its an awful invention. It's bad for the same
| reason I feel most social media is bad... just turned all up
| to 10. You thought people doom scrolling mindless posts in
| 2014 was bad? Here, have 10 second bits of unscrubbable
| nonsense for 5 hours a day.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > To top it off, most of these companies are on some shitlist
| for abusing their work-force or slave labor in developing
| countries.
|
| What is the dirt on Meta? I'm guessing abuse content moderators
| in the Philippines or something?
| rr808 wrote:
| The blind community is solely concerned with TC.
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| > There's nothing wrong in working at a FAANG for the money....
|
| That's assuming you have no problem working for FAANG period. I
| have serious ethical concerns with 4 of the 5 and probably
| would never work for them for that reason alone.
| ButterBiscuits wrote:
| > There's nothing wrong in working at a FAANG for the money
|
| Sure, if you believe that making more money is the only thing
| that matters in this world. If you take this logic to its
| extreme you can justify anything if it makes you rich. You're
| simultaneously criticizing a system while defending your
| participation in it.
|
| There are lots of things wrong with working at a FAANG for the
| money. If you don't like how Amazon treats their warehouse
| workers, don't work at Amazon. If you don't like how Facebook
| perpetuates fake news, don't work at Facebook. If you don't
| like Google's search monopoly, don't work at Google. Just
| because the world is a shitty place doesn't mean you can excuse
| yourself for being a shitty person.
| alecb wrote:
| If you believe Facebook is terrible, isn't taking a high-paid
| position there and gamifying their internal processes in your
| favor while not helping a floundering business plug the holes
| in its sinking ship the real way to take direct action? If
| several hundred people independently did this on their own
| (and perhaps not even intentionally), it could have a
| meaningful impact in taking down one of the worst
| corporations in human history.
| winphone1974 wrote:
| You're essentially promoting the old "bringing them down
| from the inside" defense, which next to "I was only
| following orders" is the biggest lie we tell ourselves in
| order to sleep better
| ben_w wrote:
| That feels like the wrong model to me.
|
| I don't want to work for FAANG for various reasons, but
| their negative externalities are either things I'd have
| no connection with or be in a position to push back
| against.
|
| Sure, the bosses may say "do it anyway" and my only
| counter would then be to leave, but I expect most people
| in FAANG aren't actually connected to
| $relevant_controversy.
|
| At least, that's my impression from (mostly) the outside.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| That sounds like a rather depressing, unfulfilled existence
| to me. It's like someone getting a job with a military
| defence contractor, then sitting at their desk doing
| crossword puzzles for a decade.
| y-c-o-m-b wrote:
| You're touching on a very complex topic spanning across areas
| of social life, ethics and morality, economy, family, etc.
| Lumping that all into "well they're evil and if you work for
| them so are you" is an easy out. Believe me, I know where
| you're coming from, but that's not how it is in the real
| world. It should be, but it's not.
|
| There are too many variables and that line between right and
| wrong is not well-defined in this matter. Using an extreme
| version of your logic, you should strip yourself of all
| currency and material possessions. Yet you're on here,
| possibly even while you're supposed to be working. Do you
| think the companies hosting ycombinator.com are clean? Maybe
| they're using AWS resources. You're using devices from those
| very companies you despise right? You're probably using
| electricity from a power company that is exploiting people in
| some way or maybe you bought solar panels from a company that
| exploited people to fabricate those panels. You see, that
| moral line can be shifted all over the place.
|
| I grew up on food-stamps and I was in debt for a very very
| long time in my adult life. Poverty can be very traumatic
| (and very motivating to never go into it again). Money is
| certainly not the only thing that matters in this world and
| that's not what I said in my post. It _is_ very important in
| living a sustainable life in America (and elsewhere). A
| single ER visit can ruin your life-savings for example. I
| work for a FAANG because I 'm uncertain about the future and
| that scares the hell out of me. I have a family. I have
| several chronic medical problems. There's a realistic
| possibility I might be too disabled to work next year or the
| following year. Layoffs are starting to ramp up. I don't want
| that money, I _need_ it to ensure my family can survive the
| problems that are surely to come in the not too distant
| future. I don 't want them to endure the hell that I went
| through. I don't think I can bare it mentally. So yeah, I'm
| working at a FAANG for the "TC". I don't give a shit about
| innovating some new UI library or whatever else people think
| is cool in tech. I'm not even sure I have that ability if
| we're being honest. Even if I did, this whole thread is about
| a post that highlights exactly why it's hard to do that now.
| I work here so I can survive and that's it.
| zh3 wrote:
| Not only don't work for them, but surely also don't even use
| their product/services.
| DethNinja wrote:
| I worked for large companies all my life and all of them are
| actually like this.
|
| I wonder how one can find companies with no office politics, and
| one that rewards real engineering work. Do any of the FAANGs
| actually qualify for this?
| joshstrange wrote:
| Smaller companies are the answer. I know people worry about
| things like "what if it goes under?" but honestly you should
| always be worried about that, even if the whole company doesn't
| go under they will jettison people to save the company without
| a second thought. Might as well work somewhere where your work
| is appreciated and actually moves the needle. Someplace where
| your voice matters and you get real work done.
| endtime wrote:
| No group of thousands of humans will be politics-free.
|
| But I do think Google rewards good engineering. There are a
| bunch of other caveats though; if you do great work on
| something for a year and then it gets canceled before
| launching, you won't get rewarded for that.
| woooooo wrote:
| Google rewards engineering work in a vacuum, divorced from
| customer impact. This can lead to bad engineering incentives
| like valuing system complexity over the actual problem you're
| trying to solve.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| How would they go about associating engineering effort with
| customer impact when they have a bunch of sales people,
| product managers, project managers, UX designers, and so
| on, in between them? Heck, any large company where there is
| a division of labor will begin running into the problem of
| relating individual performance to overall customer impact,
| and if you begin measuring everyone by that singular
| metric, you will lose all of your good engineers very
| quickly (they will switch companies or move to non-
| engineering roles that have direct customer impact).
| potatolicious wrote:
| Agreed, having been on the inside at Google - they are
| _not_ good at producing customer impact. The orgs are so
| large, so diffuse, and upper management so disconnected
| from on-the-ground execution that it 's really all about
| gaming metrics. Even people who still want to produce
| customer impact have to play the game of stuffing their
| feature into a metrics-shaped-box so their projects don't
| get shut down.
|
| Google is obsessive about engineering quality - and IMO is
| a good example of why that _shouldn 't_ be the core
| principle of a tech company, even though as engineers we're
| biased towards it. Google excels at producing a lot of
| well-designed, scale-hardened, well-tested code... that
| _doesn 't do anything useful for the business and is a net
| drag on the company_.
|
| re: customer impact, and if you want to define "real
| engineering work" as "real engineering work that your users
| actually use/love", IMO Apple is the way to go in the realm
| of BigTech. It's the only one of the FAANGs where simply
| juking metrics isn't enough to get ahead, and you have to
| deliver customer impact in a reasonably robust way to
| succeed.
|
| I've been at 3 FAANGs now, and Apple is the only one where
| a conversation has gone something like "wait, the metrics
| you're proposing are bad at measuring the actual quality of
| the user experience and does not account for hard-to-
| measure factors like (a), (b), or (c)", and that
| conversation is coming from an executive.
| sebhook wrote:
| I listened to Kara Swisher interview some top Apple execs
| who used to work closely with Steve Jobs recently.
| Unfortunately I think we're now in an era where design
| and user experience is a lower priority when shipping new
| products.
|
| I'm not sure what the path to fixing this is, or if it
| even needs to be fixed, but I do think that Steve Jobs
| created a cult of innovation and a beacon to aspire
| towards creativity-wise, even if he wasn't the most
| pleasant person to interact with. This aspirational
| figure forced individuals and companies to be better.
| mousetree wrote:
| Are there hard facts to support this view? I've heard
| such an opinion so many times that I'm always skeptical
| on whether this is just the popular thing to say.
| hnaccount_rng wrote:
| They just delivered on the biggest customer facing
| improvement of any single piece of technology in the last
| 5 years with their switch to Apple Silicon. In an
| environment where it really wasn't absolutely necessary.
| Yes people were crumbling. But nobody was switching away
| when they started the transition. This was a _completely_
| proactive move.
|
| Yes I'm also worried of them getting cocky and lazy. But
| so far they have done good
| jedberg wrote:
| Netflix of eight years ago rewarded real engineering work (I
| left then so I don't know how it is now). Metrics didn't really
| play a part in anything other than providing information to
| guide business decisions (like direction and success, not
| comp). Or more specifically, they used a lot of metrics to
| determine comp but they weren't individual, they were market
| metrics of how much it cost to get new people on board.
| glomgril wrote:
| let me know if you find out
| feifan wrote:
| You'd probably want to look for small companies making
| something that impresses you (which may or may not be public).
| Hopefully they stay small for a while and preserve that
| culture.
| pcurve wrote:
| I just resigned last week having worked at a big company for 18
| years. They dangled sr. director title, but it was just not
| worth it in the end.
|
| I did so without any job lined up. I wanted a break.
|
| My former colleagues are reaching out to see if I'd be
| interested in their gigs.
|
| But they're all large companies, and all large companies have
| the same big company bullshit.
|
| I do think smaller paycheck and smaller company helps, but I'm
| sure the grass isn't always greener.
| nosequel wrote:
| Left what _I_ would consider a big company for a < 10 person
| startup. I couldn't be happier. I honestly don't care that I
| had to take a paycut for it.
| pcurve wrote:
| That's great. Frankly I have enough buffer that I want my
| next job to be interesting and fun even if it just pays
| half.
| tasuki wrote:
| > I honestly don't care that I had to take a paycut for it.
|
| Good for you. Here in Eastern Europe, the difference
| between working for big tech versus working for a local
| small business appears to be a factor of 5 to 20. I'm not
| saying money is the most important, but gee an 80% to 95%
| paycut does seem like a lot...
| lbotos wrote:
| The best example of why large organizations are like this was
| Engels writing on "the state":
|
| "The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society
| from without; just as little is it 'the reality of the ethical
| idea', 'the image and reality of reason', as Hegel maintains.
| Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of
| development; it is the admission that this society has become
| entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it
| has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless
| to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes
| with conflicting economic interests, might not consume
| themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became
| necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society,
| that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds
| of 'order'; and this power, arisen out of society but placing
| itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it,
| is the state."
|
| Replace state with "management". The answer for "reduced
| politics" and "real engineering" is smaller organizations.
| These are often early stage startups.
|
| There are two types of startups:
|
| - Those that will find product market fit and sell things
|
| - Those that are pushing the vanguard of tech
|
| Sometimes, a startup may do both, but it's rare. If you are
| financially stable and skilled, you can jump to a startup doing
| "tech advancement" but you won't have job stability. If you
| want reduced politics but are down to make your 5th a crud app,
| then a startup that is finding product market fit and selling
| things should give you less politics.
| karamanolev wrote:
| I've seen many a "startup within a corporation", but the
| benefits of that are almost never, what what I've seen,
| realized. I wonder what gives. Why can't anyone figure out
| how to make that work?
| jjav wrote:
| > Why can't anyone figure out how to make that work?
|
| A "startup within a corporation" can never work because
| it's not legally a startup. You're still an employee of
| BigCo, so they can't grant you tons of shares for a penny
| so the culture will never be the same. And even if they
| manage to keep the group outside of most corporate
| politics, you're still ultimately employees so you'll be
| bound by HR and security policies because they have to.
|
| The way to make it work which is fairly common is for the
| BigCo to fund a new startup which is a completely separate
| corporation and let it go its own way. If it fails let it
| fail or if it succeeds then they can acquihire it back in
| some future.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| When I've heard of this kind of thing working it's almost
| always informal and not pushed down from upper management.
| That also makes it very fragile as losing a few key people
| means the "startup" just gets absorbed into the larger
| culture.
| scottyah wrote:
| In my experience, they just get absorbed quickly and the
| label of "startup within a corporation" gets dropped,
| becoming so-and-so's org/team
| aaron_m04 wrote:
| I wonder how many people at Meta are like this person.
| shaftway wrote:
| This was basically how my manager laid it out for me on day 1.
| danbrooks wrote:
| Former Meta employee here - only slightly exaggerated.
| google234123 wrote:
| There's a chance this is just some intern trolling.
| Move37 wrote:
| grocer-eyewear wrote:
| The sad part is it may very well be true, at least I don't know.
| The issue is, if you put in effort to make valuable
| contributions, and your manager doesn't care at all about them,
| and harp on the fact that your metrics aren't met so you'll get 0
| RSU, 1% Bonus, and 2% hike, well then things like this will
| happen. Which is not wrong, but is eternally sad.
|
| The smart people which solved problems and made
| Meta/Amazon/MS/Apple such giants, that kind of generation might
| never reach these companies due to these things.
|
| I maybe wrong, but who knows.
|
| Blind = TC or GTFO :D Kids these days.
| strulovich wrote:
| You're correct, but there's a less cynical look at it.
|
| If you want to work on long term stuff, and have no metrics or
| data to show for it - then you need to get your manager (and
| team, and others) on board with it.
|
| If you can't convince people around you this is important, then
| the company can't figure out how to differentiate you from
| someone doing useless long term work.
|
| This is what a lot of people call politics (especially if
| they're not succeeding in it), but for me it's just part of the
| system barring any better alternatives that will allow
| organizing a big company.
| grocer-eyewear wrote:
| That is a very interesting take, I haven't thought about
| things from that perspective. Thank you very much, for such a
| POV.
| belval wrote:
| Can't speak about Meta, but my team at AWS does incentivize
| more complex longer-term projects. Improving metrics and
| getting short-term wins is pretty good if you want to get the
| L4 (entry) to L5 promotion, but you will most likely not make
| senior SDE without having some more complex projects that shows
| you know how to collaborate with other teams and juggle
| requirements.
|
| That person would make L5 at AWS easily, but L6 will be harder
| without a somewhat lenient manager/reviewer.
| dehrmann wrote:
| > Write small diffs (pull requests) (this one is actually good
| advice)
|
| I work at Meta, my opinions are my own, and I'm speaking to this
| point in general, not specific to my time at Meta.
|
| Small, incremental changes are great because they're easier to
| review, easier to verify, and safer to roll out. What's important
| during the review is seeing the whole picture. It's possible for
| changes that are locally sane to produce something globally
| goofy. I've also seen changes for larger projects with multiple
| reviewers miss an important piece because each reviewer assumed
| it was a change the other person looked at.
| vsareto wrote:
| I think it comes down to team/company preference.
|
| I would really prefer a culture that allowed (at least) 2-8
| hours for a larger code review of features. That way you can
| block time out for it and digest things. A company culture has
| to allow that. People get reluctant to review the large PRs
| because they know they have to other work to do.
|
| A bunch of small model/service/repository PRs seems tedious to
| me. If I want the consider the whole picture, I also have to go
| back to each PR.
| dnissley wrote:
| What I've really taken to heart is telling a story of my
| changes using a stack of diffs. A random one line change to
| some sketchy function is a whole diff so that you can call it
| out as something to be aware of, etc.
| [deleted]
| 121789 wrote:
| this would work for like 3 months. the real advice is more
| nuanced and probably not Meta-specific
|
| 1. aggressively fend off low impact commitments or projects
| (there are always a million ideas and requests for help floating
| around)
|
| 2. make sure you have a good relationship with your manager, your
| team, and other teams that you need to work closely with
|
| 3. work in an area that either clearly makes the company money,
| or is critical to the business in some other way
|
| 4. make sure your work is publicly shared, but you don't have to
| go overboard. if your team does something valuable or
| interesting, write about it
| mi_lk wrote:
| real answer right here based on my experience
| undoware wrote:
| Also true at MSFT
| mathgladiator wrote:
| A lot of this depends on management, so this can be a good
| strategy especially for product engineers.
|
| For infrastructure engineers, this is a recipe for disaster which
| is fantastic because it always explodes in your face which
| attracts long term thinkers who work well with stake holders to
| build a long term strategy.
|
| I say this as I led two multi-year complete re-architectures and
| took from E6 to E8. My final architecture before trying out
| Oculus was published at
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3477132.3483572
|
| I'm retired now and building my own lifestyle company.
| mooreds wrote:
| Sounds pretty dystopian to me.
| amelius wrote:
| Sounds like China's social credit system.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| There are ALWAYS either hidden or visible metrics and as soon
| as you figure them out, you can game them. Sometimes the metric
| is "how much does my manager like me", other times its stack-
| ranking and other times again its "business value that was
| assigned to stories you finished".
| Move37 wrote:
| hodornah wrote:
| > Joined about 5 months ago as E5 and I think I've cracked the
| meta culture.
|
| I would not put any faith in this. Companies typically operate at
| a year cycle and are different depending upon level. The author
| sounds overly arrogant and just gonna lead people down the wrong
| path.
|
| > This is the only way to succeed here.
|
| Complete bullshit. This is the red flag that says "ignore
| everything this guy is saying, you're wasting your time."
| Move37 wrote:
| eh9 wrote:
| Leave
| pcurve wrote:
| Hey, he/she figured it out. No need to lead :-)
| jlarocco wrote:
| Hate to burst the ego bubble, but hitting metrics is what you
| were hired to do.
| uoaei wrote:
| Put differently: if you were hired for a certain job, and your
| personal convictions don't align with that job such that you
| don't identify as someone who wants to "hit those metrics",
| find another job.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| The managers could've been more upfront about that and what
| those metrics are during the hiring process!
| jlarocco wrote:
| On the other hand, as a potential employee it doesn't hurt
| to ask during the hiring process if it matters to you.
|
| For a large enough company, it's a given that there will be
| metrics, and a lot of people don't care much what they are,
| so it's not always something to spend time on in the
| interview.
| randshift wrote:
| Blind is such a toxic place... I always come off shocked at how
| awful people are on there. Only focused on "TC", and nothing
| else.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| It's the anti LinkedIn where everybody is kissing asses.
| wiseowise wrote:
| You're shocked that people who work for money care only about
| money?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| What is "TC" ?
| dvirsky wrote:
| Total Compensation
| LaffertyDev wrote:
| Total Compensation. It lets people compare compensation
| across companies and normally includes Salary + Options +
| Bonuses. Different companies offer different mixes, so just
| relying on salary alone is not a good metric for comparison.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Well, it's not like people join Meta to "make the world a
| better place" lol.
| dvirsky wrote:
| I avoid it at all costs most of the time. Whenever I do break
| and go there I usually get so depressed.
| carabiner wrote:
| Search "thank you blind." It's incredible how much additional
| TC has improved people's lives. They can cover their kids'
| tuition and take care of ailing parents. Even wellness programs
| at the better companies have helped people lose weight and
| avoid chronic illness. The advice to get there is toxic for a
| toxic world. This is why the hyper politically correct LinkedIn
| is so useless in comparison.
| 22SAS wrote:
| Blind is mostly Indian and some Chinese. Two cultures that care
| a shit load about money and prestige. I would know, I am from
| one of those cultures.
| aantix wrote:
| If you're working for someone else's dream, what else is there?
|
| "TC" gives me and my family options to do other big things in
| the world.
|
| Yes, I want to take two big family vacations a year, live in a
| great neighborhood/ school district, and give my kids extra
| opportunities.
|
| Optimizing for "TC" makes sense.
| KallDrexx wrote:
| > "TC" gives me and my family options to do other big things
| in the world.
|
| TC is tangential to all of that. If getting a higher TC
| decreases work life balance, then it actually doesn't give
| you and your family options to do other things in the world,
| it literally detracts from it. If a higher TC means a longer
| commute, you are losing out on time that you could be doing
| things with your family. Having more stress for more TC
| lowers your health (mental and physical) and can
| significantly strain family life.
|
| TC is literally only one dimension that should be optimized
| for. There are _many_ other factors that should be taken into
| consideration with a job, because burning yourself out before
| you are 50 just so you can maybe hope to retire early isn 't
| always worth it, and isn't guaranteed to even actually work
| out.
| karamanolev wrote:
| Being an IC doesn't inherently conflict with enjoying your
| work. Yes, TC is important and as you pointed out, it gives
| you options to do other things. OTOH, thinking that "someone
| else's dream" must necessarily be an awful daily grind is a
| folly - many people enjoy software engineering and it doesn't
| bother them that it's "someone else's dream". Being
| technically challenged brings them joy. Going one step
| further, you can actually enjoy the mission and the impact of
| your work, so not only is the process nice, but the result as
| well.
| davewritescode wrote:
| This is nihilistic and short sighted way to see the world.
|
| Being highly visible inside and outside my company has opened
| up more opportunity long term in terms of being offered
| consulting roles and opportunities in early stage startups
| then being a worker bee at Amazon for 2 years until you
| burnout. I know many people who have taken that route and
| it's one of many paths.
|
| If you're a good engineer and can sell your work, contribute
| visibly to open source projects in your area of expertise and
| can present at conferences you'll have more opportunities
| than a worker bee at FAANG.
|
| Someone out there is building the next big thing and if
| you're focusing just on getting the biggest paycheck you'll
| be watching from the outside.
| mataug wrote:
| If optimizing for TC is a nihilistic way to see the world,
| your take is naive.
|
| The reality is that even if someone is a good engineer,
| they may not always have the right opportunities, they may
| struggle to sell their work, or they may have other
| challenges that we cannot foresee.
|
| With such unpredictability in mind, all advice here on HN
| is anecdotal, and everyone has to optimize for their
| specific situation. Optimizing for TC isn't necessarily
| bad, it may be the only option at a better life for some
| people.
| ativzzz wrote:
| The reality is most of us do not have the skills, talent,
| drive or whichever other attributes needed to identify the
| next big thing or meaningfully contribute.
|
| > If you're a good engineer and can sell your work,
| contribute visibly to open source projects in your area of
| expertise and can present at conferences
|
| You are describing the top 1-5% of engineers here. Yes if
| you are in the top, you can literally do anything you want.
| For the rest of us who are writing software to make a
| living, we might as well maximize the money we earn as
| easily as we can
| cm42 wrote:
| Since we're speaking loosely and broadly here, I want to
| throw in that "80-90% is just showing up" notion, which
| I've found to be more-or-less true.
|
| A while back, I estimated myself around 7-15%, based on
| an average of "average ___" searches (not remotely
| rigorous). I was shocked, given that I'm an essentially-
| average software developer in an essentially-average
| developer role. I would have been impressed with a "top
| 30%", given all the talented people in the industry who
| are paid much more than I. I tried a few more things, and
| eventually felt pretty confident in a "top 10%", but it
| still didn't feel right.
|
| To me (and I'm not disagreeing with you here), a "top
| 1-5%" engineer is one of those mysterious dragons that
| codes with toggle switches in octal deep inside of a lair
| of some kind, has invented or described an entire domain
| of knowledge, language, and/or operating system, etc. -
| and I certainly don't feel 2-5% away from that, lemme
| tell ya.
|
| It was kind of like waking up to find out that my name
| and email address had been entered into an archive of
| humanity's most important code - all the critical stuff
| we would need to start over if a meteor struck and
| brought the dinosaurs back or whatever. It was burned,
| IIRC, into a golden USB drive, a platinum LaserDisc, and
| that special paper librarians like, stored forever in a
| super-sekret vault deep in the Arctic, next to the seeds,
| I assume.
|
| Certainly, the handful of miscellaneous patches, like un-
| hard-coding a variable here-and-there, in relatively
| minor projects, and on features nobody was really using
| anyway, doesn't make me or my code that important (or
| even necessary, in most cases). And yet, when the future
| archeologists knock over a seed pot and discover the
| Ancient Golden USB Drive of GitHub Commits, I'll be on
| that list.
|
| I especially like the thought of it being displayed,
| context-free, in some alien museum, a la Linear B, with a
| note that says "We have no idea what this means", or
| maybe "developer complains about security vs. business
| priorities in comment about encryption". Anyone else get
| the Arctic Code Vault Contributor badge?
|
| Anyway, as I rationalize it, the Top 20% are the ones
| already here, _doing it_ , making my Top 7% more in line
| with my gut feeling of "a little above average sometimes,
| but by no means exceptional". The 80% are those people
| merely thinking about learning to code, only considering
| contributing to open source, abandoning starter kits and
| tutorials 3/4s of the way through, etc. Maybe they'll
| join us one day soon.
|
| This also demystifies the dragon: we're making that same
| error that saw Bernie Sanders' "Top 1% of The 1%" (The
| 0.01%, or 0.0001) diluted into Bill O'Reilly and Tucker
| Carlson's "Top 1%" and, eventually, "Top 10%" (a thing I
| especially resent as a self-described 7%-er).
|
| These errors are so common - hopefully I didn't do it in
| that parenthetical - that Google's on-site prep material
| included a handout specifically on this topic.
|
| Google, I said! Have you heard it's 10x harder to get
| into Google than Harvard? They only accept something like
| 0.2 (or was it 0.2%?) of candidates.
|
| Harvard! That most selective of institutions, whose
| discrimination is only surpassed by the most exclusive of
| exclusive organizations, like Google and Wal-Mart.
|
| Only some exceedingly-small percentage of candidates,
| with the denominator being every half-assed application
| of every entirely-unqualified candidate ever submitted,
| even get invited to an on-site interview. What an
| exclusive club!
|
| I haven't been admitted to any of them, of course - I
| blame it on answering the steal-the-pen question wrong on
| the WalMart kiosk when I was 17 and it ending up on my
| Permanent Record - but it might also be because I never
| even applied to Harvard. Carlin was right: it's a big
| club, and [we] ain't in it.
|
| So, by some metrics, I guess I _am_ in the top 1-5% of
| developers, but those metrics are sketch.
|
| So, as one of humanity's most important top 1-5%
| developers, I can say with great authority that, if
| you're already out here reading this and have typed "git
| push" at any point in the past week, you're much closer
| to that "top 1-5%" than you think. You _CAN_ do anything*
| you want! (Including enjoying your weekends!) The Magic,
| I 'm told, is in the work one has been avoiding.
|
| P.S. If you do it this weekend on just about any open
| source project, you'll officially, definitionally, be an
| open source contributor! (And I _promise_ the recruiter
| bots will find your email and you 'll have more
| (interview) offers than gift card scams in your inbox in
| no time)
| ativzzz wrote:
| > 80-90% is just showing up
|
| They key is, showing up consistently over time for years
| and years. That's the key, and that's the hard part
|
| > If you do it this weekend on just about any open source
| project, you'll officially, definitionally, be an open
| source contributor!
|
| Nobody cares if you made some 1 line change to some OSS
| project. Any meaningful change requires more work and
| effort
| ng12 wrote:
| > If you're a good engineer and can sell your work,
| contribute visibly to open source projects in your area of
| expertise and can present at conferences you'll have more
| opportunities than a worker bee at FAANG.
|
| That's way more work, though. It's really TC over time
| investment that they talk about on Blind. Nothing will beat
| FAANG or the hedge funds in that respect.
| tayo42 wrote:
| there is no way most people do anything that is worth being
| visible. most work i did was unrelatable to anyone
| uoaei wrote:
| My concern is also the social dynamics that "TC or bust"
| people engender around them. There is an obvious mentality
| that goes along with that approach, and more often than not
| this turns what should be a collective, holistic approach
| to social well-being into a quasi-zero-sum game where
| everyone is just trying to extract value from everyone
| else.
|
| It is deleterious to community _per se_. Islands of nuclear
| families does not a community make.
|
| It's true there are people who straddle both worlds --
| those who use TC to improve and embolden their community.
| But I would bet a lot of money that it's mostly people who
| spend frivolously and selfishly so that _their_ kids go to
| good schools and have good opportunities, but that _others
| '_ kids don't get access to the same kinds of on-ramps to
| success.
| [deleted]
| Our_Benefactors wrote:
| > But I would bet a lot of money that it's mostly people
| who spend frivolously and selfishly so that their kids go
| to good schools and have good opportunities, but that
| others' kids don't get access to the same kinds of on-
| ramps to success.
|
| Getting a higher TC does not take opportunities away from
| other people. What kind of communist thought is this?
| Line employees at these companies aren't the ones
| appealed to in "The Gospel of Wealth".
| uoaei wrote:
| Getting a higher TC does not take opportunities away from
| other people. Spending those earnings on things that do
| not improve the commonwealth is what is being discussed
| in this thread.
|
| It really is remarkable how, every time this subject
| comes up, reactionaries can swing only at straw men. It
| demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the arguments
| of their supposed opponents, which makes them seem naive
| at best.
|
| In fact, seeing opposition where there is room for
| discussion is part and parcel of the same phenomenon of
| self-centeredness that I discuss above.
| trasz wrote:
| If you have no problem knowingly wasting 30% of your life
| making useless shit in exchange for money then... well,
| enjoy, I'm not judging, but please realize many people don't
| feel this way.
| DesiLurker wrote:
| btw its not 30% its close to 50% if you count waking hours.
| I have never understood this single minded drive for Moar
| money. I mean I get upto a point but after that it sort of
| becomes a game in itself. OTOH you have basically
| extinguished your own 'signal' for resources that may have
| some dubious utility in future.
| ryandrake wrote:
| To me it's about gaining back time at the end, when I may
| be unable to work. Every additional $N/yr translates into
| one less year I need to work before I can retire. Even
| once all your needs are met, it still makes sense to
| further optimize TC because you save it and that
| translates into earlier retirement. I have a sign above
| my monitor that reads "The Goal Is To Not Have To Work"
| UncleMeat wrote:
| A problem is that people are often optimizing to compensation
| literally right now. This leads to the following common
| scenario on blind or other similar communities:
|
| Person 1. "I'm a junior engineer and two senior engineers
| just left my team, now I'm being asked to do do a bunch of
| work that they used to handle."
|
| Person 2. "If they aren't bumping your pay immediately you
| should leave. Never do senior work for junior pay."
|
| Now this person is missing out on a huge opportunity to get a
| ton of experience _and_ prove themselves to be invaluable.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Now this person is missing out on a huge opportunity to
| get a ton of experience and prove themselves to be
| invaluable.
|
| I pay my mortage with opportunities, exposure and
| experience too.
| UncleMeat wrote:
| I'm not saying work for nothing. I'm saying that
| immediately fleeing every time you are asked to stretch
| because it isn't in your current job role is going to
| limit your career growth rather than enable it.
| krisoft wrote:
| Obviously don't flee. Negotiate a rise. And if they don't
| take you seriously get a better job, because they don't
| appreciate you at your current place.
| davewritescode wrote:
| Blind self selects for people who want to brag about how much
| they're paid and people who think they're underpaid who want to
| validate those assumptions. It leads to a toxic community.
|
| There's so much more to work than compensation and this post
| proves it. Being on a good team is 100x more important than
| what you're paid. Good teams elevate engineers and give you a
| better career path in your future. I make SL level compensation
| and non-SL level companies because my value is high, not
| because my employer can overpay for mediocrity.
|
| There's too many engineers who think the secret to success is
| to get hired at the right company and then they just sail on to
| a dream career. I've worked with enough people from those big
| companies who left, some after long careers, to know that it's
| simply not true.
|
| A lot of people see the impactful work that happens at these
| big companies and assume that's the impact they'll make as
| well. What they don't get is those big companies literally
| poach PhDs or buy smaller companies to get that kind of talent.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| For many devs, especially non SV people (or even non US
| people), a TC of 250k+ is more than life changing. It's "I
| never could have ever gotten this, and not only is my life
| set, the people around me are too".
|
| Needless to say, if I was offered these compensations (or
| higher), I'll gladly take even 10 years of incompetence
| around me to then be able to do fuck all for the rest of my
| life (or, well, things I actually enjoy doing, not for a
| megacorporation). Being an elevated engineer doesn't pay the
| bills.
| morelandjs wrote:
| Very true. Golden handcuffs is an option, but you can also
| just liberate yourself from financial stress and help the
| people around you who need it. Not everyone is chasing a
| BMW or bragging rights.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > a TC of 250k+ is more than life changing.
|
| It doesn't get you _that_ far.
|
| Consider tax and cost of life in NYC/SF/London where you
| won't be able to buy a house anyway, and you're left with
| 50k to save a year. In other places, you're less likely to
| get such a TC.
|
| Sure, it's a lot of money, but not enough to change your
| social status. It adds up if you manage to stay long enough
| there, but considering ageism and burning out, you're not
| in the same leagues as let say doctors, or people who
| inherited 1 million after selling their parents house.
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| lmfao
|
| Alright, let's consider this: my current gross salary is
| at 47k EUR. With what my boss pays, let's say it would be
| the equivalent of 100k in the US (unemployment, social
| security, etc). And I'm from France, which is a pretty
| wealthy first world country. My salary puts me in about
| the top 20% in terms of salary.
|
| If you think I wouldn't be able to commute for 2 hours
| every day for 2.5x salary so i could save up MY ENTIRE
| CURRENT SALARY IN A YEAR, you have massive blinders
| preventing you from realising how privileged of a status
| it'll be. The amount of people that can put 50k aside in
| a year is ridiculously small. And 50k is actually being
| awful at saving, you can easily reach 100k if you're not
| a dumbass.
|
| Now consider this for an indian H1B, who can pretty much
| make an entire family live like kings off of that.
|
| No, you don't realise just how much of a life changing
| amount 250k is.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| I actually went from 50k in a median city to 200k in an
| expensive megalopolis so I know exactly whether it's life
| changing or not. Consider $3000 rent for a 2br apartment.
|
| My lifestyle hasn't changed to the slightest, except I
| work more. I won't be able to sustain that lifestyle for
| many years, because ageism + stressful job. For
| comparison, in France, 10% of people inherit more than
| 500K without doing nothing. I'll probably never reach
| that level of savings, won't ever be able to live in a
| house and so on...
|
| I'm not complaining as I'm in a privileged situation. But
| in countries like France, inequalities come primarily
| from inheritance. It's hard to lift yourself from middle
| class with salary alone.
| anameen21 wrote:
| Sometimes I feel like people here mistakenly or
| purposefully obfuscate TC info for one reason or another
| (uninformed, can't/doesn't want to get into FAANG, etc..)
| but even with the current market downturn, I'm safely at
| around the ~500k mark as a 'senior' engineer at a FAANG
| (levels.fyi is your friend). I'm under 30 and have been
| doing this job at a comfortable pace for over 5 years now
| so no risk of burnout hopefully. I save much more than
| 50k a year, and yes it's social status changing money and
| no I don't feel out of league with my friends who are
| doctors.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > Sometimes I feel like people here mistakenly or
| purposefully obfuscate TC info for one reason or another
|
| So you're at least E6 and less than 30 or/and you join
| the companies when stocks were low. Don't think your
| particular case is the same as everyone else. Some people
| go to FAANG at E5 in their late 30s in Europe/Asia. 200K
| is more the norm for them, and it's not sure they'll be
| cruising until 50 in an IC position.
| za3faran wrote:
| How much do you think doctors make? Unless they
| specialize and spend another 5+ years pursuing it,
| they're in the 100K-250K range anyway depending on
| location.
| sfashset wrote:
| Sorry but you're completely wrong about both your 5 years
| comment and your income range. For a more realistic look
| at physician income see https://www.offerdx.com/
| djkivi wrote:
| Family medicine $270k. Doesn't seem that far off.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| There are two big differences. Family doctor can work
| easily until 65. And they don't need to live in the most
| expensive cities in the world.
|
| For comparaison, there are extremely few SWEs in FAANG
| over 50 years old.
| hnfong wrote:
| Extremely few? If the company only existed for less than
| 20 years and founded by a bunch of college dropouts, you
| wouldn't have many workers over 50.
|
| You're mistaking the exponential growth of the SWE
| "profession" with Ageism.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| The company exists for less than 20 years and since then,
| they have hired 10000s of SWE. Their selection process is
| heavily biased toward younger people, and so is their
| performance evaluation process. Their demographic is
| totally not representative or the workforce, and it's not
| just a coincidence.
| hnfong wrote:
| Those are income numbers for specialists (cf. GP's
| comment "Unless they specialize")
|
| The time to acquire a fellowship seems to be a couple
| years.
|
| During that the time it takes for a doctor to go through
| med school, residency and specialist training (after
| which they would have the income numbers you cited), the
| FAANG careerist would probably have risen through the
| ranks and have comparable income numbers anyway.
| sfashset wrote:
| Again, you are just mistaken - I'm not sure if this is a
| tech industry coping mechanism, or what. General
| practitioners are in the above dataset, and make an
| amount comparable to an L5 Google SWE.
|
| If you want to make an argument that the overall career
| arc of a software engineer is better off than that of a
| physician, then that's a very different statement than GP
| made. (My personal view - strictly from a monetary
| standpoint, medicine in the US is more lucrative than big
| tech over the course of a ~40 year career, when you take
| into account lifestyle and personal flexibility, tech
| comes out looking better).
| yodsanklai wrote:
| > over the course of a ~40 year career
|
| To me this is an important difference between these two
| careers. Ageism is a thing in tech and in corporations in
| general. Of course, a few winners can climb the ladder
| and have a lucrative corporate career or earn enough
| money to retire early. But lots of SWEs get pushed out in
| their 50s or don't manage to work in fast pace / high pay
| environments for decades.
| wobbly_bush wrote:
| That TC might be life changing if they earned that much in
| their current cities/towns. That TC would involve moving to
| SV and the associated costs of living in SV - specially
| housing.
| 22SAS wrote:
| >Blind self selects for people who want to brag about how
| much they're paid
|
| Spot on! It's a race for them to keep moving up the TC ladder
| and then show off within their social circles. Their all now
| on to the new fad i.e working at HFT firms. I work at one and
| the questions I see on Blind, regarding HFT's, is a source of
| constant laughter for those of us in the industry.
|
| Some great examples: "I have never written a line of
| production C++. If I do leetcode in C++ will that get me a
| job working on ultra low-latency systems?".
| p0pcult wrote:
| srvmshr wrote:
| If everybody follows this recipe, then it will fail at the
| author's currently desired idea of acceptable performance.
|
| Goodhart's law states the target shouldn't be a metric ideally
| but this is sort of a meta-metric to succeed at Meta. (Pun was
| unintentional)
| joshstrange wrote:
| This is why I don't work for large companies. I don't want the
| stress or to play the bullshit games.
|
| My last company tried to pretend it was larger than it was and
| introduced KPIs. I pushed back hard but had little control over
| it. I argued that if we were going to be judged on KPIs then
| that's all we would spend our time on. Commits matter? Guess I'm
| committing every few lines. Bugs found matter? Guess I better
| backchannel with QA to prevent a real bug getting logged since
| I'll get dinged. Story points uncompleted matter? Guess I'll drop
| the points I take so I never worry about not finishing
| everything.
|
| It gamifies everything and not in a good way. Just like this post
| says, it doesn't matter what is best long-term or what is good
| for company/customer, all that matters is what you are graded on.
| SilverBirch wrote:
| I've worked for a number of large companies, and it doesn't
| have to be like this. It absolutely _can_ be like this, but it
| depends what you want. You can plough your own furrow and be
| nicely rewarded for it and be in a very secure situation. What
| is described in this article is the sort of behaviour that 'll
| get you through 1-2 years, but fairly quickly people will spot
| what kind of person you are. This post sort of implicitly views
| management as NPCs, they're not. They have their own things
| going on, but they do pick up on things eventually and it gets
| difficult to change their mind, it's pretty hard to shake that
| reputation so you'd better move on quick. You can do something
| similar - build more long term reputation, influence across
| teams etc. and that'll pay off in the longer term. Or you can
| say "I'm going to do it my way" and put your priorities first,
| work on what you think is valuable, and if you really succeed
| generally you will be recognised - these hacks are _easy_ ways
| to advance, not the only way. All of these are different games
| you can play at Big Corp. But you don 't _have_ to play them,
| and you can choose your own strategy, but the basline is high
| pay, low risk, and you can always walk away with 0 guilt, and
| that 's not a terrible place to be.
| Balgair wrote:
| Perhaps the Gervias Principle can show insights into the script
| here.
|
| Per Rao's analysis, the poster isn't the sociopath (Rao's term)
| that they make themselves out to be. I'd say they would fit
| better as one of the clueless (Rao's term, again); thinking that
| they are making an impact and gaming the system. They seem, per
| my reading of Rao, to just be mercilessly hitting metrics that
| their sociopath bosses have set out; being the nice little carbon
| control rods in the nuclear reactor of capitalism. To Zuck, this
| is great news (again, using Rao's lens)
|
| Personally, it reads as tongue in cheek. But trying to use the
| lenses of the Gervais Principle is always a dark and fun little
| exercise.
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...
| trenning wrote:
| This is the SDE equivalent of an Amazon warehouse worker.
| cm42 wrote:
| The Real Tragedy Nobody Wants To Talk About was the unfortunate
| decision to buy a flavored soda water machine to cut down on
| plastic water bottle waste.
| proc0 wrote:
| While this may be true, it's also the problem with large software
| companies. This is why often they create products that don't meet
| user expectations despite a large effort.
|
| This is prioritizing appearance over substance, something that is
| common for business minded people like sales or managers, and is
| no surprise large companies are taken over by this mentality. In
| my opinion roles have to reflect their area of expertise when it
| comes to career success. Engineers should be rewarded for the
| solutioning and technical knowledge (for the most part). That
| list should look very different for each role.
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