Ask HN: What did you think about working at a FAANG?

A) Technical brilliance/mastery

B) Willingness to grind/endure

C) Political savvy/ruthlessness/schmoozing

Any combination of two of these is sufficient to progress in you career. All three is even better. I’ve met A+B’s, B+C’s and A+C’s and they all do pretty well. If you just have one of these, you’re not going to get very far.

Maybe this is also true for other “non-FAANG but big” companies, I don’t know.

Is your personal salary worth the impact it may have in others? That's something only you can decide. But all those companies are trying very hard to change the shape/fabric of societies. All of them have negative aspects. All of them have billionaires at the top, and that has is own baggage. You may only be a tiny, tiny cog in that machine, but you're a cog nonetheless.

From what I saw, everyone was quite intelligent and most were also very kind and well-rounded people. Every engineer you talk to will have a strong grasp of algorithms and data structures, usually strong math and statistics background, and plenty of language, kernel, and operating system authors and research scientists will be your (extended) coworkers. I felt like I was somewhere around the 40th percentile in ability/outcomes which is a big change coming from smaller software companies or IT where Google-level engineering skill is rare. Imposter syndrome is a thing when your best efforts fit neatly into median performance with a lot of other high-performers, so expect that and don't let it bother you.

Growth at Google means ability to grow in the global SWE/SRE market; you have to be in the top ~0.001% percent of engineers worldwide to get into very senior technical roles. There are still lots of rewarding roles as a L4 or L5 individual contributor.

I left because it's much easier to get promo by interview (with another company) than through the perf process and after 4 years the stock grant cliff without promo was a bit more stark than it is now, I hear.

If you can manage it, get hired in the U.S. or transfer once hired. London and other non-U.S. salaries are quite a bit lower, very unfortunately and unfairly in my opinion. Global labor markets are weird.

  1. Note that this is a news aggregator for tech startups.  Tech startups in large cities tend to hire most of their experienced engineers from FAANG companies.  So, it's in a tech startup's interest to critique FAANGs.
  2. You could want to be a great startup founder or early engineer as an ambition.  Probabilistically, your most straightforward path to this goal is to go to a FAANG next.  Golden handcuffs, most people come in with this ambition then don't leave because there's so many pleasant aspects.  Think about point #1 again.
  3. If you are trying to get into a more respected tech community and are limited by visa issues, which companies tend to solve more often than individuals, it's probably in your interest to find a company [1] that will clear this hurtle for you and [2] that has a brand you can leverage.  FAANG is a subset of companies that would provide that option.

You WILL comply with the group-think, or you will be eliminated. Independent thought or differences of opinion are simply not permitted. They pay well, but that's what it takes to make people put up with the miserably hostile work environments they create (rah-rah "we're such a great place to work!" programs only go so far....)

I left to join a small startup founded by friends, another experience I'd recommend to anyone.

In particular, I learned a ton. My prior job was a startup with a totally green team. At google, I found my team incredibly bright and motivated which was contagious -- You want to work hard an succeed because everyone else does. I can't speak to how this works for other teams.

I learned a ton about proper engineering, I got to see a larger, more well-written, more well-tested than I'll see in a long time. While I don't work with large-scale distributed systems written by thousands of people today, some of the lessons transfer.

For me, just access to the tribal knowledge was the most useful -- I was not an SRE but learned a lot about incident response by going to talks and reading threads. Seeing what is possible and what others have done is very inspiring.

I can't speak to FAAN or how G is today, but I'd recommend working there in 2013.

You certainly have less of an impact at such a huge company compared to a startup, but I've also found medium-sized companies to have that same blunting of impact, without any of the benefits.

- You make significantly more money at a FAANG than most of the rest of the industry

- The klout of a FAANG on your resume will open a lot of doors to more interesting, higher paying, or more prestigious jobs

- You will gain a professional network that will be useful for the entire rest of your career

- Most SWE teams at any FAANG are using state-of-the-art tech, tooling, and patterns, which will be very useful experience to draw from in future jobs, even if not applied in exactly the same way

There's plenty of downsides to working at a FAANG, which every blog post can tell you. But in my experience those downsides are exaggerated and it's rarely so intolerable you can't last at least a few years.

So even if you have a terrible time, those lasting benefits are worth a lot of trouble. It could be a life-changing career move, and if you hate it, you can always quit whenever you want.

A relevant Dan Luu post: https://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/

If you have experience and specialized skill, it can be worth it to go to Google / big tech. You can apply your skills (for considerable profit), and learn from others with different specialized skills. You can work on highly technical things that are difficult to find elsewhere.

If you're inexperienced or fresh out of college, I would say it's not worth it. You'll probably have a bad experience (and I've talked to multiple young people who this has happened to).

Google was good for inexperienced hires when I joined (2005), but it isn't anymore.

You'll learn more elsewhere in 2022. In fact, I'd strongly suggest that you'll learn the WRONG lessons at big tech. The real problem in those jobs is learning to navigate bureaucracy, rather than learning how to build things.

I talked to people who basically didn't get to build anything that anybody used for the first 5 years of their career, which IMO is basically a death sentence for an engineering career. They just shifted among cancelled projects and didn't learn anything. All their work was thrown away.

Good blog post about that:

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16483241

(and the author was apparently experienced, so these bad jobs aren't limited to fresh college hires)

Maybe it is because I am more senior now, FAANG or not reveals very little of your character or quality of work when looking at a particular someone. More like a baseline guarantee but that is about it

Ex-FAANG, now startup

I guess the most disappointing part for me was Google's culture, or at least what it's become. I was surrounded by coworkers with a tenure of 10-15 years hired straight from college who had no idea about life outside of campus and google3. Those poor folks got brainwashed by HR into believing that most non-work related conversations or, god forbid, a joke will undoubtedly be offending to someone. Honestly, I think I'd rather work with jerks than in such a sterile, dull environment.

On the bright side, the tech was pretty good. I wouldn't call it great, but they have everything you'd ever need. The code quality was above average despite over-engineering. The praised culture of openness is long gone but you can still somewhat feel its scent. The email-centric approach to communication was 100x better than anything else I'd seen. And there's a chance you can get on a team that actually does some good (but those are typically at DeepMind, Verily etc.)

If there's no better option, I'd say to give it a try. After all, it's just a job.