Ask HN: Quitting Big Tech, what is it like?
I've spent the last decade in two FANG companies, and I've got to a high level where my total compensation is ridiculous.
The problem is that it bores me to tears, and I don't want to do it anymore.
At first thought, maybe I am burned out? However, I can still come home and write code for a side-project, so I don't think this is "burn-out". I don't know to be honest. I think the best description is that I am cynical of the "mission", and I can't connect my work to people I care about. How do I know what the source of the problem is?
However, I wanted to pose two questions.
First, what is the environment like for exiting high-level former-FANG employees?
Second, what are some of the surprises post-FANG that I would be in for if I wanted to start a company?
Thank you for your time.
417 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 384 ms ] threadBut good luck to you. There are always game companies you can go work at for a lot less!
(Shameless plug for Tesla software engineering!)
It would be cool to work on Autopilot, but isn't it stressful when Elon promises that your feature will ship in 2 weeks and then you have to bust your ass for 6 months to get it out? Because it seems like that's how things work over there.
For whatever it's worth, I'm going through a similar dilemma. My compensation is high, but I don't feel fulfilled by the work and there are other things I'd rather do for less money. Unlike you I'm in a startup and leaving would really mess things up for them, so I'm holding out.
Unless this is all cash for a privately held startup in which case, where do I sign up?
For most employers, it will be a positive. There may be a handful of very small startups that see it as a negative, but the reality is a very small startup is so different from a giant tech firm that the hiring team is probably correct in assuming you've never had to do something incredibly arduous without enormous support (I once had to spend 6 months reverse engineering a video output because our customer refused to tell us what it was - I ended up finding a clue on a Russian blog and I translated it with Google - this is the sort of shit you will do at an actual hard-tech underfunded startup. And if you care, it turned out to be a proprietary video signal invented in the 80s that had long since been abandoned by almost everyone so I then had to build a fucking circuit to decode it).
> Second, what are some of the surprises post-FANG that I would be in for if I wanted to start a company?
Your reputation will help you with investors, but it will not help you with reality. Starting a company is much harder than you think it is - no matter how hard you think it is; it's harder. That thing I said above about reverse engineering a proprietary video signal because our customer was impossible? That was one of the most enjoyable parts of my job.
If you want to start a company, and you're able to do so (don't put your family savings into jeopardy over this), go for it! Just realize it's not going to be anything like a giant tech firm, where you don't realize they actually do 99% of the job for you. It will be far more rewarding. It will be far more stressful. There is an extraordinarily high chance of failure. You will likely make friends with new peers, and likely ruin some relationships in the process.
The best advice I can give anyone that wants to start a company: ask yourself why do you want to start a company? If the reason is anything other than "there is this huge problem that needs to be solved and I know a way to do it!" then you are chasing a bandwagon of the glory that comes from being a successful technology entrepreneur, and aren't actually building a company with any value behind it.
Someone who's left a big company and successfully gone to some other small company can be great -- let them make their mistakes and screen themselves out on someone else's dime. Or someone who worked already at a startup, went (perhaps through purchase) to a big company and wanted back into the fray.
* I'm a startup only guy and my gf has worked at most of the big guys (FB, Goog, msft, LinkedIn, Amazon). I would hate the idea of working for any of those companies and she would not really be comfortable with the uncertainty I face all the time, even when the startup is well funded. Neither of us is wrong.
The big O of a function matters when you have 100 million users, not so much when you are struggling to get 1 user.
It’s just the wrong mindset.
But I do know some one who single handled rescued a big snafu on a quarterly run for British telecom, your talking about hundreds on millions
I've done all of the above. I started at large companies (Sun, Raytheon), spent 15 years at early, mid, and late stage startups, ended back at a big company by acquisition, and am now at one of the mentioned "big guys."
Each environment had it's own advantages and disadvantages, each of which was weighted differently depending on where I was in my own life's journey. As I look back from the perspective of 20+ years (still a long ways to go!), each of those environments taught me invaluable lessons. Obviously the pay is fantastic, but that'll be less important once the kiddo is out of college and a big dent has been made in the mortgage and I'm less worried about my company running out of cash at the end of the month!
This. So much this.
All those teams of devops people, the SREs, the QA people, the network engineers and all the other unsung heroes don't exist in a startup yet the people who only ever worked at BigCo assume that they do and so forget about all of the problems involved in building a codebase that can scale in a meaningful way because it's always been someone else's job and they have been focused solely on their KPI or singular deliverable.
All that build infrastructure or coding standards or documentation or monitoring systems that you took for granted at Google or Facebook? None of it exists. Not only that - you won't be rewarded for building it, instead you'll be asked why the next person to come behind you got their work done faster than you did.
Not necessarily like that, but yes, almost. For instance, if someone sat down and spent a month writing documentation for shit we might pivot from in two, I must fire myself for having let it happen. Just wasting money and (perhaps more importantly) time.
I've definitely seen what you're saying happen, though. Lots of FAANG engineers not experienced in how things come to be.
- "Why don't we have blue/green deploys?"
- "Great idea. What will it help us with and how can we make it happen?"
That's likely to happen. Someone else speccing out a deploy system for you with canaries or b/g or whatever so you can go write some code isn't going to. You're hopefully independent enough to make the case, build the thing fast enough that it's worth it to the business, and have it running.
We work hard to normalize tech stacks and deploys as they come in, but it is always a cost/benefit tradeoff and very often "leave it alone" is the clients choice.
I was then told the new hire got up to speed faster than I had (no shit) and that this reflected negatively upon me.
And sure, doing so may be "easy" but it's yet another context to switch in and out of. The difficulty and time required also increases as the scale of the company, codebase, and infra grows.
I used to work for small companies where I was very hands-on with all of that infra/devops sort of stuff in addition to app/systems dev, but now at a not-quite-FAANG-but-you've-heard-of-them company realize how much I don't actually know is going on in our infra because I don't have to. In some ways I appreciate it, in other ways I feel disconnected.
This sounds like fun, tbh. Maybe I just have a weird sense of fun.
> it's not going to be anything like a giant tech firm, where you don't realize they actually do 99% of the job for you
100% true. I've gained a huge appreciation of all of the things that a company does for its employees that they don't even realise is happening.
I don't know about hard-tech, but it seems to me that most startups can't afford to have a person work on one project for 6 months.
I'd suggest working for an early-stage startup before starting your own (e.g., 5-10 people). Or step down gradually. Work at a company with 50-100 people, then 5-10. Companies and roles are very different at different orders of magnitude.
Couldn't agree more.
Go live abroad, make new friends, shake up your day-to-day, challenge yourself in non-tech ways.
Then after n months test how you feel about going back to work (and to your high salary).
If you're dreading it like it's torture, there's a strong indicator you should be thinking of alternatives.
When you’re off on your own, have to remember that you yourself are usually the main bottleneck. You have to figure out how to unblock yourself and context switch efficiently as you take on every facet of the thing you’re building, especially as it escapes purely technical work.
FANG companies do a great job of coddling you because it’s effective all around. You have to find your own lightweight substitutes for all of that.
Since that ended I landed in a very good job (huge Corp) with rediculous pay but I can't see any connection to any real customer and our projects aren't even mentioned in the business impact. I'm relied on to design and build tech and teams but I am not fulfilled. Same as yourself I guess.
I miss being plugged into the business and seeing my impact on customers lives. There is zero family like atmosphere, no joking around or healthy level of hanging-out at all.
I've only dealt with medium-low level post FANG people, but none of them expressed major downsides.
There is a certain "flatness" because being senior in a FANG is a unique experience.
One basically went back to schoool: Audits university courses out of interest only. Not a bad "gap year" approach to deciding what you really want to do.
Once maslow is out of the way, "have experiences" is good advice. It's not impossible the voluntarist sector, more than start-up is where your energies can be best applied: Start Ups are drowning in sources of competent FANG aware advice. Charities, help, the NGO sector is not so aware and can use you.
Think about board positions on small local NGO entities.
Think about standing for office in your county.
Think about mentoring people outside your core area.
And here’s the bad news: going to a small startup or mission-driven company probably won’t make you happy. You often have all of the same problems, with none of the support or validation from a big company.
I’ve hired and worked with many who were in your exact same position. Almost all of them quit after a year or less and went back to big tech.
In my eyes, hiring someone from big tech is risky for this exact reason. It rarely works out, and the guys I’ve worked with end up getting sour when they realize they traded a job with high salary, security and perks for what amounts to at the end of the day another job with lower salary, few perks and no security because they got restless or bored.
So what are your goals right now out of work? What is your workview and your lifeview. Find the intersection between those to get a good idea of what you want to accomplish in your life.
After coming up with those, try and tabulate the things you do at work where you have the most energy and the stuff you do at work that engages you the most. Hopefully, there are things in that list that give you some energy or engagement. If there is, do more of that and tell your manager to help you move towards doing more of that work. If there isn't, ask yourself what you want to learn. If you can't learn that on your current team, switch to a position/team where you can learn that. If your company can't provide you with those opportunities, then it might be time to find something new.
Startups are super rewarding but there are many unknowns and you have to do a lot of vetting to find the right ones. Even then, you could be wrong. If your goal is to start a company, then it might be the right route to go.
TLDR: Try and understand your goals in life and what you enjoy doing day to day before jumping ship to a startup. Your safety net will allow you to do that :)
If your goal is to achieve public acclaim And recognition, you will do things differently vs. say a goal of work on intellectually stimulating things vs. say controlling the decisions in a company. I have a colleague who once got a kick out being the one to sign the cheques of major celebrities who endorse our brands and you'll have a different kind of career path if that's your goal vs. say the kicks a financial trader gets.
Problems usually happen with job satisfaction when either goals aren't clear or you're optimizing towards conflicting goals.
The only thing I'd say that counts is get any promises/sweeteners said in the hiring phase in writing. Every C-level I've met to date has promised great things, and been a stingy, greedy bastard at the end of the day.
One reason I think it works is all of us are very autonomous in day to day tasks, and only meet occasionally to verify priority and align expectations.
It's not the type of job to find a 'mission' though, usually.
Most of the time, you make money consulting to people you worked with, directly or indirectly, previously. To make consulting work, you need to offer a specific, deep skill that is not widely available. This can include specific systems or toole, specific markets, specific deployments, and so on. This is specifically why Upwork and Fiverr don't make any sense - no one who hires someone to do consulting is going to look on either for highly skilled hires and likely wouldn't take seriously anyone who was on them.
Unfortunately, this does mean that doing consulting prior to getting career experience and building out your network is quite difficult and has a very different earnings profile than it would otherwise.
Being close to the customer helps in finding these gigs, especially vendor-side.
I joined it as my first job after graduating. I was expert in nothing but was billed as one straight from day 3. Excellent way to learn as a motivated junior, assuming the company cares and places you among seniors who know what they are doing. For senior people independent freelancing is way better deal monetarily.
There's freelancing and consulting. Freelancing is just you, by yourself, finding gigs, selling yourself, doing the work, invoicing clients etc. I guess freelancing is technically consulting.
Then there's contracting, where you go and find a contract job which is advertised for X months and $Z by an employer or 3rd party and you work that. That's what I'm doing now and it's pretty good money.
A consulting job (in my mind) is where you get a job at a firm which does all the client engagment, marketing, invoicing etc, and you just do the work. You could work at a consulting firm as a full time employee or a contractor, since their need for staff fluctuates.
If you have the skills and need some short term work, look out for short term contracting gigs being offered by consulting firms - they pay pretty well and they're on the market because there's a pertinent need to get a bum between a seat and a keyboard as soon as possible. For example - my current job is as a contractor working for a consulting firm which is engaged with a government agency. The firm promised the agency a warm body for X months, but for strategic reasons the firm wants to move that person elsewhere. That's where I come in. They hire me for three months so they can reallocate their employee while keeping their existing obligations. In circumstances like that, price isn't the main issue.
The other is to be a freelancer. Then you are dependent on contracts, and you lack a lot of benefits (no guaranteed salary, no extra benefits). On the other hand, you should make a lot more money. As a freelancer, you can either work with a firm that handles the sales and account management for you, or you can try to find clients on your own. The first one has the benefit that you work with (hopefully) experienced sales people that can do the sales and contract work for you, but they can take anywhere between 10% to 30% of your rate as a commission.
Doing sales yourself is the most flexible and you likely earn the most, but I would not recommend doing it unless you have a solid contact network already. Sales is often a difficult and tedious work, and that's not always fully understood or appreciated by consultants.
I have not worked with Fiverr or Upwork, but I don't see them as a serious alternative. Too short contracts that are not paid nearly well enough. They might be nice for students that want to make a bit of extra income though.
Source: I've been a consultant and a freelancer for nearly a decade
I think people conflate consulting, freelancing and contracting. In the context of "quitting your job" to go "work on your own", we can treat them as the same thing.
This is what I do, so it's merely anecdotal: there are many companies out there that cannot afford and/or do not have the need for a full-time, technology-savvy employee (data scientist, programmer). But they do have a need for tech solutions. I've had luck in finding small businesses that have $25k-$50k annual budgets for technology solutions; reporting, automation, small mobile apps, process streamlining. 4 or 5 of those in rotation, in a low cost of living part of the country (where skills are less abundant) and you're doing alright. The fact that you're equivalent to, essentially, a sub-$50k salaried person means timelines and expectations are utterly reasonable. After all, it's nigh impossible for these companies to find a substitute. Other bonuses include being able to define your workload and schedule, as well as seek out interesting work.
Is this consulting, contracting, or freelancing? I don't know, probably a bit of all 3.
> Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
Good luck!
Saved for later use, as I'm in a similar situation. :)
L7 & single? You can afford to pay the outside co-founder a bay area survivable amount (140-200 varies) and have that person work through some of the early situations and then skip out when things are moving along (eg. think A round). Risk-adjusted & safe but yet keeps a lot of the upside while allowing you to taste what it's actually like.
L8? Risk-reward ratio is skewed towards staying at a FAANG. Find and fund a few projects. See what happens. Get excitement outside of work (take all! possible vacations)
Either way, maybe find some time to talk with a proper counselor/therapist (and not HN...). Doesn't hurt and can help with the disconnected feel.
ps. funding env for form FANG, it's good assuming you are doing something sort of close to what you were responsible for. Don't expect risk-reward to be favorable though..
Regarding (1), I've seen a lot of sentiment about certain types of work being a literally bor-ing grind, but as someone who doesn't have much of a finger on the pulse of industry, I have zero access to anecdata about _what_ it is that makes it so boring. So, yeah. Open-ended question :)
All the recent media and controversy notwithstanding/aside, I get the idea that culture generally plays a huge (if not the biggest?) part in the sense of work feeling like an imposing burden instead of a sense of empowerment to the individual and others around them (liberated customers, similarly-empowered teammates, etc etc). I'm curious what the impact there is. (Open-ended question here too.)
Trying to be very general to raise the chance it's possible to answer without having to get really specific :)
Others here will provide far better (experience-backed) advice about what to do next, I'd just make myself look silly if I tried to do that too.
Appreciate your time!
TL'DR: Product is more than just code. It's building something that people love and would pay for. Learn marketing, sales, storytelling. Connect with folks who are not like you.
1. I should have built a network outside of my immediate circle. I am an engineer and my entire work network was engineers.
2. I should have identified some of the best folks in sales and marketing and learned from them. It is easier to know who are the best folks in your company and know them. It's easier when you are inside the company. They can also help you identify/interview other sales/marketing folks in their network when you need to hire them.
3. I should have learned how software products are evaluated, sold and bought in my company. Just a hint, the quality of the product has little to do with whether it will sell.
4. I should have learned the importance of UX design and why certain UX design decisions were made. I should have spent more time talking to designers and learn how to evaluate a good designer.
5. I should have talked with engineers outside my organization. It helps to broaden your horizons and understanding the challenges.
6. I should have understood how business development works and learn how they talk. Most of the sales decisions are made by folks who might not be using the product you are selling.
7. I should have identified who are the M&A folks in my company and understood how the process works. These folks are well connected and usually know others as well.
8. I should have learned storytelling from some of the amazing PM's that I worked with. Some of them were startup founders. I should have tried it internally and improvised.
9. I should have learned from their story, their mistakes and what they could have done differently.
10. I should have learned to talk less and listen more in discussions.
11. I should have spent more time, validating ideas when I had all the time and more money. Some of the groundwork can be done when you are already working as long as you are not building a product that competes with your day job.
12. I should have spent more time reading/writing. You'll spend a lot of time writing emails/ specs in addition to code.
13. I should have taken YC summer school when I was working. I learned a lot when I took it this year.
It reminds me of this old Spolsky article I read yesterday on "the development abstraction layer". Replace Microsoft with FANG and I suspect it still largely applies.
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/04/11/the-development-ab...
Management’s primary responsibility to create the illusion that a software company can be run by writing code, because that’s what programmers do. And while it would be great to have programmers who are also great at sales, graphic design, system administration, and cooking, it’s unrealistic. Like teaching a pig to sing, it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
Microsoft does such a good job at creating this abstraction that Microsoft alumni have a notoriously hard time starting companies. They simply can’t believe how much went on below decks and they have no idea how to reproduce it.
Basically your work environment at big tech companies is shaped by their network effects and the corresponding profits, which (almost) none of us had any hand in creating. So yes being on the outside is very different.
Though, in retrospect I worked in Big Tech when I was young, and before it was called "big tech" (e.g. before Joel even wrote that post). So just learning to code at that level was a challenge, let alone do all the other stuff.
I show up to work, try my best to work with my team and accomplish something.
You do have plenty of people who think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread since they are going to go work for Google or Facebook but can't seem to actually leave... which is weird because they're so damn good. Unfortunately, they don't leave and are not so good and make your day hell and make you yearn for the sweet release of going home and playing some Outer Worlds.
But yeah, less stressful.
Then serious family stuff happened and I was happy to have the time to deal with it. After the leave of absence was up, I still wasn't sure and asked about extending, but they didn't go for that so I left the company.
Since then I've learned to play the accordion and now I'm tinkering with electronics to come up with a new musical instrument. No real desire to get a job. After a while I decided I'm fine with simply being retired.
So I'd say try the leave of absence?
That at least gives you breathing room to do whatever for a few years.
Here is a reminder to everyone that a health incident is only a financial misfortune in the US.
Not being able to work and have hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt because of it is a whole other situation
Well, unless they have a pension. Which about half the countries in the world seems to provide, at least for government jobs.
Don’t know how a couple can afford to forego that, especially if they have assets that can be taken, the hospital will come for them.
I have a friend living in Berlin working 10h / week for a SF startup remotely and meanwhile he enjoys playing music and building stuff for fun.
And that means at least $70k to $150k in passive income per year.
With 70k passive I could retire in Hungary. Just by having $150k in your bank account would give you 5-8 years of runway in Budapest to live a very good life.
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
Kaiser is an exception and is only available on the West coast. And maybe a little bit in VA.
Either way, the point about needing a ton of money for healthcare is valid. It’s a race to get to Medicare age before you get hit with a medical problem.
Edit: Here's the data for nationwide for a 40 year old. Based on the NJ pdf above, you can double the premium to figure out the cost for someone in 50s to 60s.
https://www.kff.org/health-reform/state-indicator/average-ma...
Edit: I just noticed you were claiming someone earning $50k won't pay $25k in health insurance premiums, which is right. I did not know that premium tax credits only took into account annual income.
https://healthy.kaiserpermanente.org/doctors-locations
I was considering applying to remote jobs in SF but I think the time zone would mess with my family life.
Personally I paid about $30 per month working part time as a waiter in college making about $20k a year.
Here’s the source:
https://www.state.nj.us/dobi/division_insurance/ihcseh/ihcra...
A young person’s data points about healthcare costs are useless. It’s the 50s and 60s that get you, and when you actually need healthcare.
My brother in law is a low income 1099 earner and gets a special insurance for his kid that’s about $30, called PeachCare and it maxes out at $70 for 2 kids. Depending on income it’s $10-$35 dollar max per child.
My point is that there are significant healthcare costs, well into the tens of thousands of dollars, in one's 50s and 60s, and the data supports it. I don't know what the situation is if you earn $50k from investments every year, as I'm not familiar with the subsidy rules, but it would seem strange to me if the US government offered subsidies to someone drawing investment income from $3M.
Edit: It seems that you can get subsidies even if you are deriving your income from investments, so I guess you are correct that someone earning $50k doesn't pay the full premium price.
https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/individuals-and-fami...
Throw in a healthcare issue and there’s not much wiggle room.
If you've say spent $100k/yr and still saved up $2m (still easily doable), then you don't want to retire yet because you're gonna eventually run out of cash. Sure it'll last more than a few years, but it's going to deplete the longer you go.
Also figure your healthcare costs increase drastically without being employed.
Also half of my statement wasn't a financial one, just an assumption that after a few years you might get bored and want to do something for employment anyway.
It sounds like you're at a much higher level than me, but my biggest advice is to decide what is important to you and prioritize that. You are in a position to do whatever you want, so just decide what you want to do and go after it.
It takes at least your first year to get comfortable and to start being a useful employee even more so for a first job.
And you do need to realise that work is work and you need to approach it in a professional manner and not bail after9 months.
Although I do agree that "work is work" and the search for self-actualization through work leads to a lot of unhappiness.
If you aren't good at networking atleast put in work to know people who know people.
The advantage big orgs provide is basically a network of specialists you can count on to compensate for all your weaknesses and limitations.
If you have your own such network the transition isn't too bad.
I suggest you do some interviews and see how you feel about the opportunities that present themselves. Taking vacations to try doing your own thing is also a good idea.
FWIW I wish I had left my FANG job long before I did.
At one point, I realized that a career as a full-time employee in at a "high-stress" employer is not the ideal one for me. I'm working for myself right now, but if one day I needed to go get a full-time job again, I would almost certainly not go to big tech again. I'd rather get paid a fifth of what I was doing, but do something that leaves me with some energy after I put in a day's work. My compensation and status growth were not conducive to increased satisfaction. I wrote more about my reasoning here: https://medium.com/@dvassallo/only-intrinsic-motivation-last...
It’s unlikely you’d be just converting Jira tasks to code at these levels. (That would be my definition of a low-stress job).
Can happen at companies of any size.
-e- especially the necessarily stressful part of this role.
Impact (on others, on myself permanently) correlates very well to stress for me.
High impact decisions cause more stress: getting a project defunded, letting go of people, critical mistakes in execution that cause the company reputation or finance damages, etc..
At the very far end are life and death decisions that impact others and the very low end day-to-day decisions that only impact you (what tasks to complete, what shoes to wear).
With the above framework, it's unlikely highly paid Googlers made low impact and thus low stress decisions.
Then after still achieving nothing, you get nice ratings on your performance reviews, and then you realize that barely anyone is actually having any real impact. There is an enormous organ you are attached to that absorbs money to write fluffy annual performance reviews.
Then you eat ice cream in the nap pod hoping that you can feel content with your extreme comfort, but the most meaningful change in your mental state is a mild brain freeze.
That's probably an exaggeration, and they may have just had particularly easy jobs, but everything I know about these two companies tells me that Google would be much less stressful to work at than Amazon.
I can't work at a place where I am employee #8973235879 in a row of programmers who never really see any benefit to what they are doing and have to mindlessly fill tickets. I mean I literally can't, as in the same thing will happen as before (I will go crazy and no longer function in general).
Traveling solo during sabbatical would also help.
But I did eventually because the decision to trade time for money felt worth it. I felt that if you don't give yourself a break to try something besides big tech work it's hard to do so again at a later point in your life with a mortgage, kids, etc...
Now I'm surfing every morning, running a lifestyle business (https://www.interviewquery.com), and hanging out with friends.