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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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).
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.
I don't see which row. Levels.fyi says L5 Google SWE is 350k. The left column in your link has a header saying specialty. "Family medicine" is 270k in your data set. Nothing in the 350k range vaguely resembles general practice.
> If you want to make an argument that
I'm not trying to make any argument, except to counter yours.
> not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism
Heh. I can't speak of the industry as a whole, but I don't think I'm coping in any way. I'd say in medicine you know the demand for your skills is going to be stable, worldwide. In tech, there's no way to project 20 years into the future.
Alright, let's consider this: my current gross salary is at 47k €. 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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?".
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.
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.
If optimizing for TC is a nihilistic way to see the world, your take is naïve.
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.
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.
> 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”.
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.
Convenient excuse to claim your opponent doesn’t understand your argument. I do - you are advocating against people being able to spend as they see fit, by placing the “commonwealth” above the individual. It’s communism.
Communism is when the threat of violence is used to enforce such a rule. I see it as a culture problem but do not wish to use violence to correct it. I think your boogeyman radar is off.
There are many kinds of communism, but someone asking others "please consider spending your privately-held money on slightly different private property and services" doesn't meet any definitions that I know of.
Communism as a political organizational principle requires by definition the use of force (via government) to enforce its dicta. Where did I advocate using force? Where did I mention or even imply the involvement of a government at all?
The word you may be thinking of is collectivism, as a counterpart to individualism, the axis of which obviously aligns much closer with the discussion we've been having above than anything on the capitalism/communism axis. But "collectivism" isn't a 20th century dog-whistle boogeyman so I can see why it dodged your reactionary tendencies.
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
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.
Yep and yep, but the latter just illustrates the point.
On the spectrum of unemployed fry cook to 6-figure tech job, "attracting recruiter spam bots" and "attracting overly-clever recruiters" isn't far from actually Getting There and/or Making It - so long as you keep showing up and making an effort. Definitely not a quick life hack.
Long-ish term career moves are really the only reason I check on that stuff anyway, and get more value from the relative rankings of, say, language popularity and jobs, than any number I come to. I work in a job I like, in an industry I like, in a language I like at a very fair rate, so I'm not too concerned about it, but part of that is from figuring out what were dead-ends/non-starters for me, identifying niches, etc. (+1 for the ikigai thing, too).
> Nobody cares if you made some 1 line change to some OSS project. Any meaningful change requires more work and effort
For sure, if you're presenting yourself as "a [project name here] developer", but the conversation in interviews I've had has tended to center around, say, how we used to use [that horrible old thing] until we found [shiny new thing].
I'm pretty sure I've never impressed anyone with my OSS contributions, save maybe one person who somehow remembered an exact bug and considered fixing it, but I think we were more impressed we both remembered the bug than the handful of lines of code it took to replace `insecureConnections: true` with `insecureConnections: $insecureConnections` and add a `caCerts` property to be passed in to a constructor somewhere.
So I guess again, it was the pattern of making minor fixes ("just showing up") rather than being some super l33t hax04 genius or major project maintainer or whatever that got me the credit that mattered.
> 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.
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.
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.
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”
I doubt this will be seen as there is no notification in HN but this is kind of what I was saying in my comment. the problem is a bit subtle if you think about it, in order to get paid more (& I mean significantly more) you'd have to be much better than others or hit some kind of a niche. issue is that if you are good then you don't necessarily want to stop working (maybe just stop on somebody else's schedule). Now that is fine but our ability to enjoy life or even enjoy work goes down significantly with age almost akin to a 1/x curve. so you are really trading your best years for some money that you may enjoy in later years, because trust me unless you hit some startup jackpot you arn't early retiring under 40. Plus you'd want a family before that at some point.
So then I say a better strategy is to do work that pays above market but you still enjoy instead of something significantly higher paying job that you dont enjoy. Just 2c from a middle aged techie.
It's probably the youngish HN demographic, but I'm not sure where this idea comes from that old people don't enjoy life as much as young people do. It's kind of--insulting I guess, like my brain's ability to feel joy has gotten attenuated at some 1/x curve??? Who told you that's what happens?
The one thing you probably can't 100% count on having the ability to do when you get old is work, which is why it's so important to "make hay while the sun shines" as they say--max that salary while you can. Especially in the tech industry where there's already so much ageism. I am not counting on my ability to pass an interview or actual physical do work, beyond like 60 or so, but still need to financially prepare to live to 90. I think some people on HN just assume they'll be capable of working up until their final day, so why save?
> "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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
This has its own problems. For example, it's easy to cheat and it disadvantages people who don't have a lot of time to do homework assignments, which is common for parents.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You are hired to fulfil a job role based on your experience. Metrics are just a tool that tries to highlight your effectiveness for corpos too large to have oversight in the actual productivity of the workforce.
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.
"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.
> 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.
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.
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.
If you're the owner of the business none of your conditions above would apply; they can't fire you and you're not contracted to it. You can of course have disagreements with the other owners, and it's not good to put your whole life into your personal business as if you were a subsistence farmer.
On the other hand, telling employees they should own part of the business is bad investing advice; if you get shares of a company and you're not already a millionaire you should sell them and buy an index fund. Even if you work there.
when I say 'if you are the owner', I mean if you are the owner, the people who work for you (even if family) are employees, and anything you do in regards to the business should be with that scope. And that should be their scope as well. in terms of the business, its an employee company relationship.
Obviously if you own a business, you are much more vested in its success
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.
I wouldn’t say like a family but small teams and companies tend to generate a feeling of being part of an actual social group which is genuine. It’s more about knowing who you are working with and having the feeling you are going in the same direction in a way which is not ephemeral. Large companies tend to feel more disconnected unless you work for a small team.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
Separation of concerns also applies to organizations. You may see huge companies, but where business areas, divisions, product lines etc. work in isolation just fine. At the strategic level, things are steered like a mix of governmental and portfolio management, effectively abstracting the differences between the lower layers away.
To study single-mission mega projects, the classics are the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions and the first ICBM systems. The management of these projects were awe inspiring.
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?
In AWS, many orgs have manger to senior manager to director to VP to SVP to CEO. It looks AWS is really well managed if startups have the same structure.
I work for a company of ~200 total employees with ~30 in engineering and the org chart for an engineer goes Individual Contributor -> Manager -> VP Engineering -> CEO. 4 total layers, 2 of managers.
I think the difference is not in the amount of layers between an IC and the top - but the amount of layers between the customers and users and the top. As long as c-level still keeps on touch with reality outside the org and doesn't depend on truth being filtered through four layers you might have a chance
Startup with 6 levels of management? What kind of a startup is this? In my experience, working in startups for a couple of decades, this is nothing like normal.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Total comp and work life balance are all I care about for my job. I put in my 40 hours so that I have money to pay the bills, support my family, and have some fun hobbies. The only reason I wouldn’t work for FB is the poor work life balance.
At the end of the day my family loves me and they have a comfortable, happy life, so I’m fine with internet commenters calling me a shitty person because of my employer.
You're making a similar argument rich people make to defend their wealth: they earned it, they're comfortable, and they don't care what other people think. Not caring about anyone besides your immediate circle is the problem, so you bragging about it just means we'll never agree.
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.
aka the sum of salary, RSUs/Options, bonus, and other cash like benefits (such as 401k match).
Always remember to state TC as the offer/granted value (amortized per year, often divide by 4) not the present value of equity, that's how it stays relatively comparable across time.
I left big corporate tech a decade ago, and it was true then too. You'd get bonuses and stellar performance reviews for fixing big, high-visibility problems, or many small ones that amounted to little more than clients asking us to look things up in the docs for them. If you tried to help someone who was unhappy and at risk of leaving for another vendor, but not someone who plays golf with your boss's boss, you risk getting a DSAT from them, but no credit if you retain that client. If you fix the thing that prevents big problems, or many small questions, from coming in in the first place, you also get no credit. More likely, if you do something that brings 100 problems down to 5, you're blamed for those 5 that come in.
Worked at AMZ as EAM admin, this describes their metric fixation. You spent more time chasing metrics than actually performing work, it was exhausting. Metrics for everything too, many of which would require intervention in the relational database by other team members several states away that didn't reply to emails or wouldn't prioritize your requests.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't know about hard facts, but iOS has turned into a usability nightmare. Sedimentary layers of settings on layers of settings, unintuitive gestures that require perfect precision, and unstable behavior.
Try tapping the play button and guess what's going to happen. Try getting the passcode screen to actually appear when you want to get into your phone and your face/finger aren't working. You can feel the competing teams shoehorning their thing into a platform that's already overstuffed, with no top-down editor removing the bloat.
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
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).
Customer impact, business impact, some other subjective or objective measure.
The point is that there's a thing you're trying to accomplish with a project and the engineering techniques should be a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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...
That's an incredible paycut, I'm sorry. I definitely had to hunt, most small startups offered me about 60% of what I made. I finally found one which offered me 85% of what I made. While still significant for me, it wasn't a deal breaker.
No need to be sorry. The flip side is that Eastern Europe is actually cheaper than the West (though perhaps less cheap than the West might think). So while a local salary here is not great, getting a Big Tech salary in Eastern Europe is even more of a win than it is in Silicon Valley.
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.
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.
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.
I'm saying that each criteria is open to interpretation, so you can very well satisfy any of them if you play your cards right and craft a good narrative. I've seen directors and VPs take on new projects, get praised, hold talks, get promoted and then the project is abandoned a year later. Failing upwards is very much a thing in FAANG. Not always, but it happens.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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."
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.
I have worked at two big companies (8k+ and 500k+ Employees) in my life and it is sad, but I can confirm. If you want, you can get by amazingly with very little effort there. As long as you get attention for your work, you will stay.
In investment banking (my roommate works there) people call it 'face time'. They stay in the office late to get in facetime. I hate the concept of it, but sadly it is true.
2 ways to succeed at huge companies
- do work they can't ignore (at one of the companies I was, I was doing Business Dev work and I outperformed my peers by 200x - I was able to chill a lot visibly after a couple of big deals, but I still succeeded due to performance)
- do average or below average work, but communicate it great and get in 'face time' without actually doing something.
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.
But everyone looked so damned productive in the analytics captures we ran with KPIs, milestones, and reports! Too bad it is a forest for the trees situation where everything granular is lost and no one is making sure the "spirit" of the roles are being fulfilled. Just becomes a group effort to play the numbers instead of accomplishing the actual goals of the project.
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.
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.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadThere'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.
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.
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.
For comparaison, there are extremely few SWEs in FAANG over 50 years old.
You're mistaking the exponential growth of the SWE "profession" with Ageism.
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.
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).
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.
I don't see which row. Levels.fyi says L5 Google SWE is 350k. The left column in your link has a header saying specialty. "Family medicine" is 270k in your data set. Nothing in the 350k range vaguely resembles general practice.
> If you want to make an argument that
I'm not trying to make any argument, except to counter yours.
> not sure if this is a tech industry coping mechanism
Heh. I can't speak of the industry as a whole, but I don't think I'm coping in any way. I'd say in medicine you know the demand for your skills is going to be stable, worldwide. In tech, there's no way to project 20 years into the future.
Alright, let's consider this: my current gross salary is at 47k €. 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.
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.
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.
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?".
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
Communism as a political organizational principle requires by definition the use of force (via government) to enforce its dicta. Where did I advocate using force? Where did I mention or even imply the involvement of a government at all?
The word you may be thinking of is collectivism, as a counterpart to individualism, the axis of which obviously aligns much closer with the discussion we've been having above than anything on the capitalism/communism axis. But "collectivism" isn't a 20th century dog-whistle boogeyman so I can see why it dodged your reactionary tendencies.
> 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
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 gue...
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
On the spectrum of unemployed fry cook to 6-figure tech job, "attracting recruiter spam bots" and "attracting overly-clever recruiters" isn't far from actually Getting There and/or Making It - so long as you keep showing up and making an effort. Definitely not a quick life hack.
Long-ish term career moves are really the only reason I check on that stuff anyway, and get more value from the relative rankings of, say, language popularity and jobs, than any number I come to. I work in a job I like, in an industry I like, in a language I like at a very fair rate, so I'm not too concerned about it, but part of that is from figuring out what were dead-ends/non-starters for me, identifying niches, etc. (+1 for the ikigai thing, too).
> Nobody cares if you made some 1 line change to some OSS project. Any meaningful change requires more work and effort
For sure, if you're presenting yourself as "a [project name here] developer", but the conversation in interviews I've had has tended to center around, say, how we used to use [that horrible old thing] until we found [shiny new thing].
I'm pretty sure I've never impressed anyone with my OSS contributions, save maybe one person who somehow remembered an exact bug and considered fixing it, but I think we were more impressed we both remembered the bug than the handful of lines of code it took to replace `insecureConnections: true` with `insecureConnections: $insecureConnections` and add a `caCerts` property to be passed in to a constructor somewhere.
So I guess again, it was the pattern of making minor fixes ("just showing up") rather than being some super l33t hax04 genius or major project maintainer or whatever that got me the credit that mattered.
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.
Are you aware of other options, such as non-shit jobs?
So then I say a better strategy is to do work that pays above market but you still enjoy instead of something significantly higher paying job that you dont enjoy. Just 2c from a middle aged techie.
The one thing you probably can't 100% count on having the ability to do when you get old is work, which is why it's so important to "make hay while the sun shines" as they say--max that salary while you can. Especially in the tech industry where there's already so much ageism. I am not counting on my ability to pass an interview or actual physical do work, beyond like 60 or so, but still need to financially prepare to live to 90. I think some people on HN just assume they'll be capable of working up until their final day, so why save?
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.
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.
I pay my mortage with opportunities, exposure and experience too.
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.
if you're working on infra stuff, enterprise stuff, or longer term complex projects, not as important
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.
That person would make L5 at AWS easily, but L6 will be harder without a somewhat lenient manager/reviewer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think it's not so much company size as it is operating in a hot industry during a boom time.
On the other hand, telling employees they should own part of the business is bad investing advice; if you get shares of a company and you're not already a millionaire you should sell them and buy an index fund. Even if you work there.
Obviously if you own a business, you are much more vested in its success
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.
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.
A bad sign of what? A bad sign that the company is too large to be innovating?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_of_control
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.
To study single-mission mega projects, the classics are the Manhattan Project, the Apollo missions and the first ICBM systems. The management of these projects were awe inspiring.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What is the dirt on Meta? I'm guessing abuse content moderators in the Philippines or something?
ok, but... it is true that not everyone is in it for the money, or at least, not for the money primarily.
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.
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.
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.
At the end of the day my family loves me and they have a comfortable, happy life, so I’m fine with internet commenters calling me a shitty person because of my employer.
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.
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.
Anyway fb purposefully pushed people to addiction.
Did not take any actions against spreading missinformation
And for the people needing to check illegal stuff like snuff or pedo stuff, they are not good to them either.
Everything fb does is for making more money out of screentime and addiction.
Always remember to state TC as the offer/granted value (amortized per year, often divide by 4) not the present value of equity, that's how it stays relatively comparable across time.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
Try tapping the play button and guess what's going to happen. Try getting the passcode screen to actually appear when you want to get into your phone and your face/finger aren't working. You can feel the competing teams shoehorning their thing into a platform that's already overstuffed, with no top-down editor removing the bloat.
Yes I’m also worried of them getting cocky and lazy. But so far they have done good
The point is that there's a thing you're trying to accomplish with a project and the engineering techniques should be a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.
“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.
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.
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.
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...
No need to be sorry. The flip side is that Eastern Europe is actually cheaper than the West (though perhaps less cheap than the West might think). So while a local salary here is not great, getting a Big Tech salary in Eastern Europe is even more of a win than it is in Silicon Valley.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
2 ways to succeed at huge companies - do work they can't ignore (at one of the companies I was, I was doing Business Dev work and I outperformed my peers by 200x - I was able to chill a lot visibly after a couple of big deals, but I still succeeded due to performance) - do average or below average work, but communicate it great and get in 'face time' without actually doing something.
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.
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.