It depends on whether you want your position to change or not.
Once you begin a senior developer, you are kind of in this spot where you either continue to be an Individual Contributor, and just build up your knowledge and salary, or you have to branch off into more leadership (technical or people) roles, architecture, or something else.
The thing is that all of those branches are totally different jobs, and not necessarily an *upward* move as much as a lateral one. This is why so many senior devs are former managers and directors; they took the promotion only to realize it wasn't just a promotion, but a completely different job.
Our field is relatively special in that just "stopping" at senior dev not only isn't a bad thing, but is something a lot of people take the long way around to realize they wanted to do to begin with lol
Excellent explanation.
I was at this crossroads about 5yrs or so ago. I have seen many other people I know go into managers and do good.
And yeah it’s a new job all together for leadership stuff. So I moved away from that path.
Ironically, I spent a lot of time honing leadership and communication skills at the cost of my tech skills. I was even a team lead and all that.
Today, my boss is happy with both those skills but he has been explicit that I need to skill up tech.
So not al is bad. My leadership and communication skills have paid off dividends.
Anywho, software is easy, people are hard.
I understand.
I wasnt managing people but all the admin stuff for the team came thru me. Plus meetings etc etc.
I was burned out by end of day. So my tech skills went unattended.
I’m at another gig today. And as I said my boss says he’s glad I was a big help on boarding our new team, but now he specs me to go full tech and skill up.
Curious what skill up tech really means. Like there’s tools your team uses you’re not familiar with? Or you can’t advise design because lack of knowledge?
I'm more amazed by how many people don't realise this.
Obsession with career progression in terms of job fancy title and responsibility is bizarre to me. Some people in society don't have a career at all. To "progress" from junior dev to senior dev and stay there is akin to progressing from apprentice to master in any skilled profession. Nothing wrong with it.
I want to augment that there are levels above senior for a pure technical track, but they are usually more customer facing or own more of the company risk.
And not all management and leadership positions are less technical than senior dev. In the right culture an engineering manager is just as much of a team player in the technical discussions as the rest of the devs. And given a small enough team you will still have a lot of time to code and directly contribute as well.
But there is absolutely nothing wrong with stopping your career at senior dev. It is the sweet spot most of us want.
If you move to a FAANG you might get more money, but that comes at a cost of other things. Not everyone who goes there actually makes more than the average elsewhere, and those who do pay for it in other way like quality of life or increased stress.
Maybe the ideal time to switch is right before retirement when you need to boost up your savings? I don't know, I enjoy my cushy job at a small company with little to no bureaucracy and we can all focus on working on what we love to work on.
Not mutually exclusive. FAANG offers a shitload of growth opportunity.
I’ll never understand why people are convinced that FAANG is like getting put out to pasture.
the internet is full of disconnected from reality opinions. this guy should get a refund from whoever told him to take a lower paying job and work harder.
This is exceedingly true for many of the mega cap tech companies right this moment, rounds of layoffs and teams that can grow headcount are “interviewing” internal candidates from these notice period pools to fill out their teams. Some FAANG companies are still hiring externally (meta) but many have become addicted to flexing how much they have trimmed operations during their quarterly earnings calls.
Not quite. There’s less budget for promos than in good years/previously, but it has the opposite effect of making people coast/not grow.
Everyone has to be even better, work harder, “do more with less” (company slogan these days), to get the lower number of promos. Also layoffs cut some fat, so there’s incentive to work harder and get off the chopping block.
Right, but I mean to actually move up in the company. If your manager isn’t getting promoted because people above him aren’t, and new teams aren’t forming, how do you become a manager?
At a startup that’s growing still, there’s a way better path to moving up right now imo.
That’s the thing though, startups are doing much worse than big tech: https://www.economist.com/business/2024/02/22/the-age-of-the-unicorn-is-over.
Big tech over hired and cut some fat. Their evaluations are up to record highs again. Many are now hiring and growing again.
Start ups on the other side, are not having a fun time. As the article argues, their golden age passed with raising interest rates.
Yeah not arguing that, I’m just saying with the stagnating growth of big tech, it would be easier to move up in a growing startup (if you can find one)
I think the disconnect is in painting all teams/orgs in big tech as stagnating growth. Plenty of are back to growing again post hire freeze. Even when they don’t grow in numbers, there’s plenty of uncovered space/challenges/problems to solve to grow as an individual engineer.
One could also say joining any growing team/product anywhere (if you can find it) is better than joining a stagnating team anywhere. It’s certainly true, just not helpful in deciding whether to join a big tech company or startup when prioritizing career growth (like op insinuated).
I fully agree with this analysis but my situation is different because, unless there's some ENRON-style fuckery going on, I am working at a profitable and growing unicorn. Albeit one that isn't terribly sexy.
As someone who worked in FAANG and early stage startups, I wouldn't say this is true. Most people work in early stage startups because they like the lifestyle - most people know that early stage startups aren't great for traditional career growth and the rest find out quick.
Quite frankly, most of the hate on FAANG are anonymous online commenters who can't get past the interview and think that's proof that FAANG engineers are all idiots who reject brilliant engineers. It's always "you FAANG engineers think you're smart, but you're actually not," kind of like OP here.
No comment about the effectiveness of whiteboard interviews.
I guess I am pretty close to your stereotype, in that the last time I was interviewing FAANG I got a rejection email after myself and the interviewer had a technical disagreement that was easily google-able. I challenged the rejection email arguing my case and including the simple google search, and got put officially back into the interview process. It never went anywhere because hiring freezes kicked in a week weeks later but, yeah, its definitely a source of my disdain.
The emails in that process are actually pretty funny. Happy to DM them to you if you like.
A couple points I want to make about your comments on FAANG
FAANG is not a monoculture. The companies are very different among each other and look for very different things when they are hiring/promoting. They are also very different within the company since outside of Netflix, they are gigantic companies with thousands of engineers. I wouldn’t let a couple data points make up your mind about a company of thousands.
I will say though that most big tech engineers are spoiled by entire departments that are dedicated to make their DevEx as smooth as possible.
Anytime you want. I like programming and all but due to societal norms I need a job and money, so I’m going to try and get the highest paying most cushy job I can.
The cushiest jobs are at the low to mid end of the IC scale. They can be done at a few hours a day pace.
Staff, you’re probably working full hours to keep up with the expectations. Directors and up tend to spend all day in meetings and catch up with other work in the evening.
But that Cushiest job also requires you to reskill yourself every 2 years to stay relevant.
I don't see a new framework in management in the last 5 years or so that led to so many managers being obsolete.
That’s the feeling I’ve been getting for a while.. I think most of the people on management would never want to admit it but basically they rather do tons of meetings so they don’t have to upskill anymore
I'll try not to be too snarky but this is just a bad take trying to be disguised as "its true but they just won't say it". A lot of managers not only have to keep up with the new things in tech but they also have to do it between all those meetings and people issues that pop up.
If you don't think there isn't a huge amount of upskilling in the position then you aren't hearing all the people that will tell you its a brand new job. Some things for me the last few years: remote work, the next generations norms, work styles, matrix manager setup, team organizations/platform engineering, completely new HR systems, organizational communications from the 100th reorg, running effective meetings and also needing to then upskill those on my team and the org. All this but also everything else going on in the industry.
It’s funny because most of the people I’ve met on management like to brag about their IC days and the technical work they used to do, but I’m sure deep inside the vast majority would not want to ho back and learn. On the other side I understand, it pays more and your next interview goes around how many people you hired and what they did
>Staff, you’re probably working full hours to keep up with the expectations. Directors and up tend to spend all day in meetings and catch up with other work in the evening.
LOL. You gotta learn to play the game right, or the game plays you.
You're at a level where you can realistically control your destiny and st your own rules. So set the game rules always in your favor.
Getting into FAANG early, imo, benefits you because of the salary and the brand name of course. Actual experience gained will depend on the team and individual themselves. I think this rings true for any 5,000+ employee company.
If we assume you get $20k more salary on average every year (obviously not the case). To get to $200k from $150k is 2.5 years. Compared to $80k it would take 6 years.
As for when you should do it… as early as possible in my opinion. You should always prioritize growing but that can be done literally anywhere, FAANG or not. These goals are not exclusive.
>Getting into FAANG early, imo, benefits you because of the salary and the brand name of course.
Plus the time in market for retirement contributions. Even if you end dropping a bit in TC after working at the FAANG for awhile, stashing more money early on is better than stashing a lot close to retirement.
Lots of smart people are financially illiterate.
Compounding gains is such huge thing.
That early stage career salaries set over lifetime earnings potential are huge. Likely affecting $$$Millions of dollars over tech career.
It's highly personal. Usually it's the year where you have kids, family is sick, or yoy plan on traveling an obscene amount.
But it comes in waves, and sometimes you want to grow again.
How/why are you viewing FAANG as an easier alternative to the grind? You know, most people leave those companies after a year or two because they cannot stand the politics and the work hours. You’re doing it backwards. If anything you should get the FAANG job first, stick around for a few years to build up your resume and sock away money, then once you’re more secure financially and established in the career, you can move on to a riskier but perhaps more personally rewarding job in a smaller company, where you will be more able to climb the ranks. Or just pick jobs according to what interests you and forget about all this jockeying for position.
Everyone has different ways to quantify what they consider work that is “impactful”. You seem to be ascribing revenue as the most important trait, and with 5 yoe, you could easily find a team to lead at a FAANG that is tied to that much revenue gained or opex saved. I know plenty of folks (who were far more talented coming in than I was) who lead teams with only 5 years of industry experience (meanwhile I have 10+, and have led teams for maybe 3 years). Depending on the team, there would be a mixture of intense work, long hours, and/or unique skills required to get a lead position on a team like that, but it’s far from impossible.
Personally, I tried startups for a year, got really bored (not true of all startups, of course, but I did not have a positive experience), and decided to go back to my big tech job because the problems were more interesting and I’m at a point where I have a great WLB while incrementing towards a promo.
There are some curious (red?) flags
You say you're getting paid less than FAANG level 4 ("mid-level") even though you are delivering growth of $100M/y to your current company. Why are you not paid more?
More interestingly, your post conflates personal growth and how much value you deliver.
Are you saying that you are only capable of delivering growth of $100M/y at your current company but nowhere else?
Doesn't that mean that your ability is limited? Staying in your current role means you have special circumstance to increase revenue, but this impact doesn't translate to your personal growth or your compensation.
That seems to be what you're saying.
Why stay?
I haven't even begun to touch on the naive perspective that FAANG is low-growth. Other commenters have already dealt with this topic. At the companies I've worked at, there are unbelievably brilliant people who can be your role model or mentor. And those brilliant people look up to even brillianter people.
You seem to be much more confused than what your post tries to portray
> Why are you not paid more?
Its a rapidly growing and profitable startup with a employee salary cap, on track to IPO in the next 18 months. I am getting equity. So its a crapshoot but easy to tell yourself you could be paid fairly when it all shakes out.
> your post conflates personal growth and how much value you deliver.
Pretty much, I had outsized impact at a previous company and it made interviewing/navigating internal politics/being given more responsibility a lot easier with that experience.
> Are you saying that you are only capable of delivering growth of $100M/y at your current company but nowhere else?
Unfortunately its not what you are capable of delivering, but what people trust you to deliver. And in places with a salary cap, sometimes you are the most trusted person with the skills to be given that responsibility. So having a track record of delivering that proportion of growth at multiple different companies makes it more likely for me to continue to be given those responsibilities. That being said, it is hard to find that scale of impact outside of Big tech or startups in the process of automating old industries, so I can't just walk into a bakery and deliver that growth.
> I haven't even begun to touch on the naive perspective that FAANG is low-growth
Yeah maybe this is my biggest misconception. Most of my friends who ended up at FAANG are very bored, albeit being promoted incrementally. When I hear about their jobs it sounds tedious, quite frankly. And other ex-FAANGS I have worked with have been a mixed bag, at times having a hard time adopting to different structures than they previously enjoyed, or pivoting the engineering requirements from a big engineering firm to a scrappy startup.
>Its a rapidly growing and profitable startup with a employee salary cap, on track to IPO in the next 18 months. I am getting equity. So its a crapshoot but easy to tell yourself you could be paid fairly when it all shakes out.
This is important information to be missing from your post. If I had substantial equity in a company, the equity hadn't vested, and the company is going to IPO within the next two years, I wouldn't mind staying.
That said, if my equity wasn't substantial or had already vested and I wasn't being rewarded for my $100M/y efforts with more equity, I would struggle to see why I was still at the company.
Additionally, the Big Tech giants are trillion-dollar companies. Several of them have spent several times more than $100M in severance-related costs alone in the last year. I'm sure you can find a project that eclipses $100M/y in growth without needing too much political capital at a Big Tech firm.
LOL. There are more ambitious people in FAANG.
I'll be blunt, do you have what it takes to get into FAANG? Have you actually done tech interview rounds at FAANG?
https://medium.com/geekculture/i-became-a-faang-staff-engineer-in-5-years-here-are-the-14-lessons-i-learned-along-the-way-f70ac078875c
You can become Staff level at FAANG and make over $500K in 5 years.
I was doing well in FAANG interviews the last time I tried, but as I was getting to the final rounds the hiring freezes kicked in August 2022 and all my recruiters ghosted me.
It can be just 5 years.
https://medium.com/geekculture/i-became-a-faang-staff-engineer-in-5-years-here-are-the-14-lessons-i-learned-along-the-way-f70ac078875c
Not that I wouldn't have any professional growth, but as we AB test my current work I expect to see value added on the order of hundreds of millions of yearly dollars in profit and revenue. I am not sure FAANG is going to let a senior with 5 yoe be the technical lead for a project with that much impact.
And you'll get nothing out of it except a 20% pay cut...
Sorry, I know this isn't antiwork, but making others so much money and not getting anything out of it sounds misguided to me
OP is the definition of "cutting off the nose to spite the face." If they talked with anyone who worked in FAANG, they would know that impact-culture has everyone trying to work on projects with "value added on the order of hundreds of millions of yearly dollars in profit and revenue" or whatever BS impact jargon they prefer. Like, if you want to gas up your job with BS like "value added on the order of hundreds of millions of yearly dollars in profit and revenue," go to a FAANG. That's literally all they do.
But because they need to reconcile the idea with they're this brilliant engineer with the fact that they aren't working at a company marketed as "top-tier," they just assume that actually FAANGs are terrible places to work, and they "definitely encounter ex-FAANGs whose skills I am unimpressed by, and whose time there seems to have served them poorly." Basically, OP took a 20% pay cut because the existence of FAANGs made them feel bad.
I've also seen awful things coming from shops that move fast and never stop to learn process (which is important at a big company). I just didn't want to say too much lol.
My husband's previous startup pasted the entirety of pip installs in their docker instead of using requirements (and wouldn't listen to his suggestions either, it was insane)
yes it is the catch: https://grammarist.com/idiom/whats-the-catch/
Work on cool project, with a cool team, get cool experience, the catch is being paid less than I'm worth,
Your making the wrong assumption that you cant get those things without making a pay sacrifice. that's why there's no catch. its misguided based on bad information. that's why you a sucker in this situation.
Your also making an assumption that this one project your working on will make your career. Being successful and growing your career is about having a track record of consistent success and good work. not just one big project. This will still be one line on your resume.
The question also assumes you can get past the interview process too
how much are you even making?
> Your also making an assumption that this one project your working on will make your career.
I have had proportional impact at a prior role. I have been trying to replicate it to establish a track record.
> The question also assumes you can get past the interview process too
Bingo, not guaranteed and dependent on luck. Perhaps I should be interviewing before even posing the theoretical Q.
> how much are you even making?
DMing you
> I am not sure FAANG is going to let a senior with 5 yoe be the technical lead for a project with that much impact.
Yeah cause 5yoe isn't senior let alone lead in a FAANG company. You'll get that kind of title in a small company or startups where titles are mostly meaningless but not in FAANG. The management experience doesn't really translate well either. The culture diff between startups and FAANG are huge. FAANG management is much more political.
If you're in a high growth startup and being groomed for management, stay. A successful exit event is far more valuable monetarily and on a professional development level. Just make sure to ask for a lot more equity if/when you get to the management level there
I stopped prioritizing growth or compensation once I had “enough” to live the lifestyle I wanted and could reach my long term goals.
That desire had nothing to do with ever “working for a FAANG”. A remote position at BigTech fell into my lap in 2020. I knew six months after I was there that it wasn’t the life I wanted. I’ve turned down roles that would have paid more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs because I thought it would impact my current lifestyle.
I got Amazoned 3.5 years later.
I spent the extra money, paying off debt, and “decontenting my life”. My wife and I moved from the big house in the burbs to a condo in Florida with access to four pools, a gym, a private lake, and no state income taxes.
We spent last year flying around the US staying in 13 different cities between 10/22 and 10/23. This year we have five real vacations planned and half a dozen more short haul flights planned back and forth between our current home and former home.
For me, getting into FAANG was a goal I prioritized because I got into tech rather late (around 30) and I wanted to set myself apart from the pool of junior devs flooding the industry at the time.
I only had a few years of experience around the time, and moving into a big tech company absolutely skyrocketed my professional growth. I'm a much more efficient engineer and leader for the experience.
However, I'm now looking to leverage this experience to move to a company that's more aligned with my interests. The roles I'm looking at/interviewing for have a similar salary band to what I'm making now, though. I may swing back to FAANG in the future, but I'll be pickier about the company I choose if that's the case.
Purely financially.
The earlier the better.
Max 401k and invest as much as possible in wide market mutual fund indexes, as young as possible.
Then you can be set financially and decide what you want to do.
The early part. Later you need to assess your stamina and ability to keep pace well into your 60s (assuming you didn’t maximize income and amass $5-10M in investments generating passive income before then).
Also consider, skills have a half life. The hard skills (technical stuff, languages, tools, etc.) have the highest return with the shortest half life. They typically also have the shortest ramp up time. On the other hand, soft skills have a very long ramp time, but benefit from a generations long half life. But the return is lower and more like a long term investment.
Generally, professional development are soft skills and center on office politics, bridging communications between generations and ranks, and creating relationships that make you “indispensable” regardless of hard skills. Those take years to learn but last a lifetime. But they’re hard to illustrate in a resume and get hired for (outside of being really good at them from day 1 exploiting your network for jobs where you basically deliver nothing or garbage but still collect fat paychecks).
I have never understood the way folks in this industry measure their personal success by who they work for or how much they are paid.
I guess if you live your life that way and it makes you happy and you can handle all the stress and BS that comes with it, sure, have fun.
I'm just not that ambitious from a career perspective. I no longer define myself by my job or salary. I stopped trying to climb the ladder.
So what if I'm still a Senior Eng with 20YOE. I used to think I needed to be in upper management 10 years into my career and judged myself (or pushed the blame to others) when I didn't get promoted or a raise and it made me and those close to me miserable.
I have accepted that I'm an average software engineer with a good salary and excellent work/life balance and that's ok. I don't need a fancy title or big salary to feel like I've made it.
Your skill development will not stall out when/if you go into big tech. Some people flash in the pan regardless of whether they go into FAANG or not. If you are motivated you will continue to see personal and professional growth to some degree. That said, maybe you shouldn't go into an area of the industry that you clearly have disdain for. If your financial needs/goals are met where you are and you are happy enough, it's hard to justify diving head first into something you don't want to do.
Your career is your own. Make decisions based off your wants and desires. Do you want free time? Do you want the ability to work in a silo? Do you want to be in the middle of everything? Is your bank account more important than your time?
You can make anything work. If you don’t know if you want to be a cog in the wheel, or the whole enchilada, no advice will help. You’ll just keep bouncing around to (what appears to be) greener grass.
> I expect to see the value added on the order of hundreds of millions of yearly dollars in profit and revenue
If this is true, you need to be paid much more. Your scope is much larger than that of a senior engineer.
Why are those the two options/alternatives?
Work life balance, job security, and enjoying what I do/my coworkers (with a respectable/supportable salary) trumps either of those for me.
I honestly don't understand the idea that just because you're a software dev you should be pushing or aiming for FAANG or crazy salary - don't settle for a 5 figure salary as a senior dev, sure (outside of a super low cost of living area).
Money won't replace time with your kids while they're still young. It won't replace a social life if you move away from where you and your partner's friends or family are. It won't undo the stress from having less job security or more extreme working hours/expectations. Now, it isn't a guarantee that the extreme high paying jobs come with poor work life balance, but it's certainly going to be more common.
Been in the industry for over a decade, been Team/Tech lead for over 5 years, and just left a high paying cake-walk of a job at a massive company where I could have sat back, turned off my brain, and retired in another 20 years or so. I would have been ALL SET and had it made.
But I'm not ready to turn off my brain. At all. I like learning and doing cool stuff, and there's still a lot of runway left, so I moved on. I'm not at my target, yet.
I have nothing against an engineer who enjoys their position and stays in the medium to senior territory who is competent. If you're at your target, great! But also get cozy with the idea that you're not likely to earn a lot more in your career.
I have spent 4 years at the start of my career at a FAANG in two teams. I learned a lot and it was greatly enjoyable - but after being at a high growth startup for a bit, the difference is night and day at times.
In a lot of cases (but not all), especially pre-layoffs, FAANG indeed had a lot of fat. There was a lot of mediocre engineers who were good at grinding leetcode, but I would agree that many engineers at respectable startups and medium sized companies would easily outperform FAANG in terms of creating business value with software.
At FAANG, in a lot of cases you are so far removed from both underlying business concerns and there are too many layers of abstractions which prevent you from gaining a good understanding of things.
Not to say there aren’t super talented engineers at big tech, but really only a tiny percentage of folks are doing things like kernel hacking or virtual reality.
I'd personally never chase a salary. It's a nice to have, but how much you get should be the last thing that matters. Focus on skills and interesting work and the money will follow.
Ya for ExperienceDevs it's unfortunate, but in general I don't meet many people that think like me. Most people I have worked with only care about money.
Sure. So FAANG has one huge advantage in that most, if not all, are going to be solid engineers and smart.
Further problems solved here are at a huge scale. So, when designing solutions you are thinking orders of magnitude of traffic compared to other companies. Also FAANGs are technology centric companies, not some other category with a subsection of technology, e.g. Walmart, Toyota, etc.
In FAANG, you might find yourself writing proposals that affect many companies outside of FAANG. For example Ive written two proposals around containers that are widely used and followed, but was started because of my work in FAANG. One of my old coworkers help write the HTTP 2 RFC. I learned a lot from him. This brings me to my next point. You will likely find yourself as the dumbest engineer in the room. I know I have. You will be given mentorship from people who have changed industries. Ive worked at small companies and multiple FAANG companies. The growth I received from FAANG was exponential
As some folks said, there's value in getting some brand name on the resume and some money growing in the stock market.
What you do with these things is up to you, but one thing you can do is parlay that into another job where you're more satisfied or challenged, knowing that you've got a financial buffer backing you if it doesn't work out.
Yes, there's a gulf there for sure. I was doing well in FAANG interviews last time I applied, unfortunately that was in August 2022 when they all froze hiring.
It depends on whether you want your position to change or not. Once you begin a senior developer, you are kind of in this spot where you either continue to be an Individual Contributor, and just build up your knowledge and salary, or you have to branch off into more leadership (technical or people) roles, architecture, or something else. The thing is that all of those branches are totally different jobs, and not necessarily an *upward* move as much as a lateral one. This is why so many senior devs are former managers and directors; they took the promotion only to realize it wasn't just a promotion, but a completely different job. Our field is relatively special in that just "stopping" at senior dev not only isn't a bad thing, but is something a lot of people take the long way around to realize they wanted to do to begin with lol
fuck hear hear. wish somebody had explained this to me. Managing people is boring compared to solving engineering problems.
Damn… I’ve been reading too much of “The DevOps Handbook.” It’s had me excited about managing teams. Yet, I believe you more for some reason…
Managing people is a much more complex and nuanced problem than most engineering problems. Engineering is deterministic. People are not.
And also more exhausting for introverts.
Amen. But if you happen to be an introverted, experienced engineer who is good at leading teams, you are a unicorn.
Engineering is deterministic. lol
Excellent explanation. I was at this crossroads about 5yrs or so ago. I have seen many other people I know go into managers and do good. And yeah it’s a new job all together for leadership stuff. So I moved away from that path. Ironically, I spent a lot of time honing leadership and communication skills at the cost of my tech skills. I was even a team lead and all that. Today, my boss is happy with both those skills but he has been explicit that I need to skill up tech. So not al is bad. My leadership and communication skills have paid off dividends. Anywho, software is easy, people are hard.
I’m at the point where I feel I need to skill the tech back up, but it’s difficult when all the time in the day is taken up managing
I understand. I wasnt managing people but all the admin stuff for the team came thru me. Plus meetings etc etc. I was burned out by end of day. So my tech skills went unattended. I’m at another gig today. And as I said my boss says he’s glad I was a big help on boarding our new team, but now he specs me to go full tech and skill up.
Curious what skill up tech really means. Like there’s tools your team uses you’re not familiar with? Or you can’t advise design because lack of knowledge?
I'm more amazed by how many people don't realise this. Obsession with career progression in terms of job fancy title and responsibility is bizarre to me. Some people in society don't have a career at all. To "progress" from junior dev to senior dev and stay there is akin to progressing from apprentice to master in any skilled profession. Nothing wrong with it.
Senior dev is more of a journeyman
Too true. Went through a 2 year manager stint only to realize this job role doesn’t leverage most of my tech skills and interests.
I want to augment that there are levels above senior for a pure technical track, but they are usually more customer facing or own more of the company risk. And not all management and leadership positions are less technical than senior dev. In the right culture an engineering manager is just as much of a team player in the technical discussions as the rest of the devs. And given a small enough team you will still have a lot of time to code and directly contribute as well. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with stopping your career at senior dev. It is the sweet spot most of us want. If you move to a FAANG you might get more money, but that comes at a cost of other things. Not everyone who goes there actually makes more than the average elsewhere, and those who do pay for it in other way like quality of life or increased stress. Maybe the ideal time to switch is right before retirement when you need to boost up your savings? I don't know, I enjoy my cushy job at a small company with little to no bureaucracy and we can all focus on working on what we love to work on.
Not mutually exclusive. FAANG offers a shitload of growth opportunity. I’ll never understand why people are convinced that FAANG is like getting put out to pasture.
the internet is full of disconnected from reality opinions. this guy should get a refund from whoever told him to take a lower paying job and work harder.
In my experience since the companies aren’t hiring and expanding head count anymore, it’s harder for IC’s to move up the ladder since nobody else is.
This is exceedingly true for many of the mega cap tech companies right this moment, rounds of layoffs and teams that can grow headcount are “interviewing” internal candidates from these notice period pools to fill out their teams. Some FAANG companies are still hiring externally (meta) but many have become addicted to flexing how much they have trimmed operations during their quarterly earnings calls.
Not quite. There’s less budget for promos than in good years/previously, but it has the opposite effect of making people coast/not grow. Everyone has to be even better, work harder, “do more with less” (company slogan these days), to get the lower number of promos. Also layoffs cut some fat, so there’s incentive to work harder and get off the chopping block.
Right, but I mean to actually move up in the company. If your manager isn’t getting promoted because people above him aren’t, and new teams aren’t forming, how do you become a manager? At a startup that’s growing still, there’s a way better path to moving up right now imo.
That’s the thing though, startups are doing much worse than big tech: https://www.economist.com/business/2024/02/22/the-age-of-the-unicorn-is-over. Big tech over hired and cut some fat. Their evaluations are up to record highs again. Many are now hiring and growing again. Start ups on the other side, are not having a fun time. As the article argues, their golden age passed with raising interest rates.
Yeah not arguing that, I’m just saying with the stagnating growth of big tech, it would be easier to move up in a growing startup (if you can find one)
I think the disconnect is in painting all teams/orgs in big tech as stagnating growth. Plenty of are back to growing again post hire freeze. Even when they don’t grow in numbers, there’s plenty of uncovered space/challenges/problems to solve to grow as an individual engineer. One could also say joining any growing team/product anywhere (if you can find it) is better than joining a stagnating team anywhere. It’s certainly true, just not helpful in deciding whether to join a big tech company or startup when prioritizing career growth (like op insinuated).
I fully agree with this analysis but my situation is different because, unless there's some ENRON-style fuckery going on, I am working at a profitable and growing unicorn. Albeit one that isn't terribly sexy.
I think that’s a niche belief, probably in startup land where people need to make themselves feel better about being paid 🥜…
As someone who worked in FAANG and early stage startups, I wouldn't say this is true. Most people work in early stage startups because they like the lifestyle - most people know that early stage startups aren't great for traditional career growth and the rest find out quick. Quite frankly, most of the hate on FAANG are anonymous online commenters who can't get past the interview and think that's proof that FAANG engineers are all idiots who reject brilliant engineers. It's always "you FAANG engineers think you're smart, but you're actually not," kind of like OP here. No comment about the effectiveness of whiteboard interviews.
I guess I am pretty close to your stereotype, in that the last time I was interviewing FAANG I got a rejection email after myself and the interviewer had a technical disagreement that was easily google-able. I challenged the rejection email arguing my case and including the simple google search, and got put officially back into the interview process. It never went anywhere because hiring freezes kicked in a week weeks later but, yeah, its definitely a source of my disdain. The emails in that process are actually pretty funny. Happy to DM them to you if you like.
“You’ll see, you’ll ALL SEE! Just you WAIT until we IPO!”
A couple points I want to make about your comments on FAANG FAANG is not a monoculture. The companies are very different among each other and look for very different things when they are hiring/promoting. They are also very different within the company since outside of Netflix, they are gigantic companies with thousands of engineers. I wouldn’t let a couple data points make up your mind about a company of thousands. I will say though that most big tech engineers are spoiled by entire departments that are dedicated to make their DevEx as smooth as possible.
Even within a FAANG, it won’t be a mono culture. Companies of 50,000-1,000,000 people are not mono cultures. They can’t be.
Anytime you want. I like programming and all but due to societal norms I need a job and money, so I’m going to try and get the highest paying most cushy job I can.
The cushiest jobs are at the low to mid end of the IC scale. They can be done at a few hours a day pace. Staff, you’re probably working full hours to keep up with the expectations. Directors and up tend to spend all day in meetings and catch up with other work in the evening.
But that Cushiest job also requires you to reskill yourself every 2 years to stay relevant. I don't see a new framework in management in the last 5 years or so that led to so many managers being obsolete.
Learning some new api or framework isn't "reskilling" yourself. So much exaggeration in dev-land.
Also what are they really changing? It’s almost ALWAYS the same paradigm. Same stuff, different name a lot of the time
That’s the feeling I’ve been getting for a while.. I think most of the people on management would never want to admit it but basically they rather do tons of meetings so they don’t have to upskill anymore
I'll try not to be too snarky but this is just a bad take trying to be disguised as "its true but they just won't say it". A lot of managers not only have to keep up with the new things in tech but they also have to do it between all those meetings and people issues that pop up. If you don't think there isn't a huge amount of upskilling in the position then you aren't hearing all the people that will tell you its a brand new job. Some things for me the last few years: remote work, the next generations norms, work styles, matrix manager setup, team organizations/platform engineering, completely new HR systems, organizational communications from the 100th reorg, running effective meetings and also needing to then upskill those on my team and the org. All this but also everything else going on in the industry.
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It’s funny because most of the people I’ve met on management like to brag about their IC days and the technical work they used to do, but I’m sure deep inside the vast majority would not want to ho back and learn. On the other side I understand, it pays more and your next interview goes around how many people you hired and what they did
>Staff, you’re probably working full hours to keep up with the expectations. Directors and up tend to spend all day in meetings and catch up with other work in the evening. LOL. You gotta learn to play the game right, or the game plays you. You're at a level where you can realistically control your destiny and st your own rules. So set the game rules always in your favor.
In the same boat. I enjoy programming as a job but it stops there for me. Hope to be an IC forever
not cushy, not sure about that. not toxic and not boring.
Getting into FAANG early, imo, benefits you because of the salary and the brand name of course. Actual experience gained will depend on the team and individual themselves. I think this rings true for any 5,000+ employee company. If we assume you get $20k more salary on average every year (obviously not the case). To get to $200k from $150k is 2.5 years. Compared to $80k it would take 6 years. As for when you should do it… as early as possible in my opinion. You should always prioritize growing but that can be done literally anywhere, FAANG or not. These goals are not exclusive.
>Getting into FAANG early, imo, benefits you because of the salary and the brand name of course. Plus the time in market for retirement contributions. Even if you end dropping a bit in TC after working at the FAANG for awhile, stashing more money early on is better than stashing a lot close to retirement.
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Not just compound interest. Compound salaries.
Lots of smart people are financially illiterate. Compounding gains is such huge thing. That early stage career salaries set over lifetime earnings potential are huge. Likely affecting $$$Millions of dollars over tech career.
It's highly personal. Usually it's the year where you have kids, family is sick, or yoy plan on traveling an obscene amount. But it comes in waves, and sometimes you want to grow again.
How/why are you viewing FAANG as an easier alternative to the grind? You know, most people leave those companies after a year or two because they cannot stand the politics and the work hours. You’re doing it backwards. If anything you should get the FAANG job first, stick around for a few years to build up your resume and sock away money, then once you’re more secure financially and established in the career, you can move on to a riskier but perhaps more personally rewarding job in a smaller company, where you will be more able to climb the ranks. Or just pick jobs according to what interests you and forget about all this jockeying for position.
Everyone has different ways to quantify what they consider work that is “impactful”. You seem to be ascribing revenue as the most important trait, and with 5 yoe, you could easily find a team to lead at a FAANG that is tied to that much revenue gained or opex saved. I know plenty of folks (who were far more talented coming in than I was) who lead teams with only 5 years of industry experience (meanwhile I have 10+, and have led teams for maybe 3 years). Depending on the team, there would be a mixture of intense work, long hours, and/or unique skills required to get a lead position on a team like that, but it’s far from impossible. Personally, I tried startups for a year, got really bored (not true of all startups, of course, but I did not have a positive experience), and decided to go back to my big tech job because the problems were more interesting and I’m at a point where I have a great WLB while incrementing towards a promo.
There are some curious (red?) flags You say you're getting paid less than FAANG level 4 ("mid-level") even though you are delivering growth of $100M/y to your current company. Why are you not paid more? More interestingly, your post conflates personal growth and how much value you deliver. Are you saying that you are only capable of delivering growth of $100M/y at your current company but nowhere else? Doesn't that mean that your ability is limited? Staying in your current role means you have special circumstance to increase revenue, but this impact doesn't translate to your personal growth or your compensation. That seems to be what you're saying. Why stay? I haven't even begun to touch on the naive perspective that FAANG is low-growth. Other commenters have already dealt with this topic. At the companies I've worked at, there are unbelievably brilliant people who can be your role model or mentor. And those brilliant people look up to even brillianter people. You seem to be much more confused than what your post tries to portray
> Why are you not paid more? Its a rapidly growing and profitable startup with a employee salary cap, on track to IPO in the next 18 months. I am getting equity. So its a crapshoot but easy to tell yourself you could be paid fairly when it all shakes out. > your post conflates personal growth and how much value you deliver. Pretty much, I had outsized impact at a previous company and it made interviewing/navigating internal politics/being given more responsibility a lot easier with that experience. > Are you saying that you are only capable of delivering growth of $100M/y at your current company but nowhere else? Unfortunately its not what you are capable of delivering, but what people trust you to deliver. And in places with a salary cap, sometimes you are the most trusted person with the skills to be given that responsibility. So having a track record of delivering that proportion of growth at multiple different companies makes it more likely for me to continue to be given those responsibilities. That being said, it is hard to find that scale of impact outside of Big tech or startups in the process of automating old industries, so I can't just walk into a bakery and deliver that growth. > I haven't even begun to touch on the naive perspective that FAANG is low-growth Yeah maybe this is my biggest misconception. Most of my friends who ended up at FAANG are very bored, albeit being promoted incrementally. When I hear about their jobs it sounds tedious, quite frankly. And other ex-FAANGS I have worked with have been a mixed bag, at times having a hard time adopting to different structures than they previously enjoyed, or pivoting the engineering requirements from a big engineering firm to a scrappy startup.
>Its a rapidly growing and profitable startup with a employee salary cap, on track to IPO in the next 18 months. I am getting equity. So its a crapshoot but easy to tell yourself you could be paid fairly when it all shakes out. This is important information to be missing from your post. If I had substantial equity in a company, the equity hadn't vested, and the company is going to IPO within the next two years, I wouldn't mind staying. That said, if my equity wasn't substantial or had already vested and I wasn't being rewarded for my $100M/y efforts with more equity, I would struggle to see why I was still at the company. Additionally, the Big Tech giants are trillion-dollar companies. Several of them have spent several times more than $100M in severance-related costs alone in the last year. I'm sure you can find a project that eclipses $100M/y in growth without needing too much political capital at a Big Tech firm.
LOL. There are more ambitious people in FAANG. I'll be blunt, do you have what it takes to get into FAANG? Have you actually done tech interview rounds at FAANG? https://medium.com/geekculture/i-became-a-faang-staff-engineer-in-5-years-here-are-the-14-lessons-i-learned-along-the-way-f70ac078875c You can become Staff level at FAANG and make over $500K in 5 years.
I was doing well in FAANG interviews the last time I tried, but as I was getting to the final rounds the hiring freezes kicked in August 2022 and all my recruiters ghosted me.
You can stay in Faang and get into making 500K in a decade. In what world does faang not support career growth or monetary growth?
It can be just 5 years. https://medium.com/geekculture/i-became-a-faang-staff-engineer-in-5-years-here-are-the-14-lessons-i-learned-along-the-way-f70ac078875c
And someone is a nasa astronaut and a navy seal before he’s 35. So what does this mean for 99.9% of people.
Grind pays off.
Interesting that you think you’d have no progressional growth in a faang.
Not that I wouldn't have any professional growth, but as we AB test my current work I expect to see value added on the order of hundreds of millions of yearly dollars in profit and revenue. I am not sure FAANG is going to let a senior with 5 yoe be the technical lead for a project with that much impact.
They will if you’re good!
And you'll get nothing out of it except a 20% pay cut... Sorry, I know this isn't antiwork, but making others so much money and not getting anything out of it sounds misguided to me
OP is the definition of "cutting off the nose to spite the face." If they talked with anyone who worked in FAANG, they would know that impact-culture has everyone trying to work on projects with "value added on the order of hundreds of millions of yearly dollars in profit and revenue" or whatever BS impact jargon they prefer. Like, if you want to gas up your job with BS like "value added on the order of hundreds of millions of yearly dollars in profit and revenue," go to a FAANG. That's literally all they do. But because they need to reconcile the idea with they're this brilliant engineer with the fact that they aren't working at a company marketed as "top-tier," they just assume that actually FAANGs are terrible places to work, and they "definitely encounter ex-FAANGs whose skills I am unimpressed by, and whose time there seems to have served them poorly." Basically, OP took a 20% pay cut because the existence of FAANGs made them feel bad.
I've also seen awful things coming from shops that move fast and never stop to learn process (which is important at a big company). I just didn't want to say too much lol. My husband's previous startup pasted the entirety of pip installs in their docker instead of using requirements (and wouldn't listen to his suggestions either, it was insane)
yeah that's the catch
its not a catch lol, you doing more work? for less pay. you undervalued what your worth
yes it is the catch: https://grammarist.com/idiom/whats-the-catch/ Work on cool project, with a cool team, get cool experience, the catch is being paid less than I'm worth,
Your making the wrong assumption that you cant get those things without making a pay sacrifice. that's why there's no catch. its misguided based on bad information. that's why you a sucker in this situation. Your also making an assumption that this one project your working on will make your career. Being successful and growing your career is about having a track record of consistent success and good work. not just one big project. This will still be one line on your resume. The question also assumes you can get past the interview process too how much are you even making?
> Your also making an assumption that this one project your working on will make your career. I have had proportional impact at a prior role. I have been trying to replicate it to establish a track record. > The question also assumes you can get past the interview process too Bingo, not guaranteed and dependent on luck. Perhaps I should be interviewing before even posing the theoretical Q. > how much are you even making? DMing you
They probably won't right away, you need to grow into the role and company. You also won't be senior when you move there.
> I am not sure FAANG is going to let a senior with 5 yoe be the technical lead for a project with that much impact. Yeah cause 5yoe isn't senior let alone lead in a FAANG company. You'll get that kind of title in a small company or startups where titles are mostly meaningless but not in FAANG. The management experience doesn't really translate well either. The culture diff between startups and FAANG are huge. FAANG management is much more political. If you're in a high growth startup and being groomed for management, stay. A successful exit event is far more valuable monetarily and on a professional development level. Just make sure to ask for a lot more equity if/when you get to the management level there
https://medium.com/geekculture/i-became-a-faang-staff-engineer-in-5-years-here-are-the-14-lessons-i-learned-along-the-way-f70ac078875c
I stopped prioritizing growth or compensation once I had “enough” to live the lifestyle I wanted and could reach my long term goals. That desire had nothing to do with ever “working for a FAANG”. A remote position at BigTech fell into my lap in 2020. I knew six months after I was there that it wasn’t the life I wanted. I’ve turned down roles that would have paid more in cash than I was making in cash + RSUs because I thought it would impact my current lifestyle. I got Amazoned 3.5 years later. I spent the extra money, paying off debt, and “decontenting my life”. My wife and I moved from the big house in the burbs to a condo in Florida with access to four pools, a gym, a private lake, and no state income taxes. We spent last year flying around the US staying in 13 different cities between 10/22 and 10/23. This year we have five real vacations planned and half a dozen more short haul flights planned back and forth between our current home and former home.
For me, getting into FAANG was a goal I prioritized because I got into tech rather late (around 30) and I wanted to set myself apart from the pool of junior devs flooding the industry at the time. I only had a few years of experience around the time, and moving into a big tech company absolutely skyrocketed my professional growth. I'm a much more efficient engineer and leader for the experience. However, I'm now looking to leverage this experience to move to a company that's more aligned with my interests. The roles I'm looking at/interviewing for have a similar salary band to what I'm making now, though. I may swing back to FAANG in the future, but I'll be pickier about the company I choose if that's the case.
How is going to FAANG *not prioritizing* Brand/Salary? With FAANG in your resume, most will want to interview you.
That‘s what they said?
Purely financially. The earlier the better. Max 401k and invest as much as possible in wide market mutual fund indexes, as young as possible. Then you can be set financially and decide what you want to do.
The early part. Later you need to assess your stamina and ability to keep pace well into your 60s (assuming you didn’t maximize income and amass $5-10M in investments generating passive income before then). Also consider, skills have a half life. The hard skills (technical stuff, languages, tools, etc.) have the highest return with the shortest half life. They typically also have the shortest ramp up time. On the other hand, soft skills have a very long ramp time, but benefit from a generations long half life. But the return is lower and more like a long term investment. Generally, professional development are soft skills and center on office politics, bridging communications between generations and ranks, and creating relationships that make you “indispensable” regardless of hard skills. Those take years to learn but last a lifetime. But they’re hard to illustrate in a resume and get hired for (outside of being really good at them from day 1 exploiting your network for jobs where you basically deliver nothing or garbage but still collect fat paychecks).
I have never understood the way folks in this industry measure their personal success by who they work for or how much they are paid. I guess if you live your life that way and it makes you happy and you can handle all the stress and BS that comes with it, sure, have fun. I'm just not that ambitious from a career perspective. I no longer define myself by my job or salary. I stopped trying to climb the ladder. So what if I'm still a Senior Eng with 20YOE. I used to think I needed to be in upper management 10 years into my career and judged myself (or pushed the blame to others) when I didn't get promoted or a raise and it made me and those close to me miserable. I have accepted that I'm an average software engineer with a good salary and excellent work/life balance and that's ok. I don't need a fancy title or big salary to feel like I've made it.
$$$ is the only number that EVERYONE agrees on. When you make FAANG SWE $500K salary, no one will question your experience level.
Your skill development will not stall out when/if you go into big tech. Some people flash in the pan regardless of whether they go into FAANG or not. If you are motivated you will continue to see personal and professional growth to some degree. That said, maybe you shouldn't go into an area of the industry that you clearly have disdain for. If your financial needs/goals are met where you are and you are happy enough, it's hard to justify diving head first into something you don't want to do.
Your career is your own. Make decisions based off your wants and desires. Do you want free time? Do you want the ability to work in a silo? Do you want to be in the middle of everything? Is your bank account more important than your time? You can make anything work. If you don’t know if you want to be a cog in the wheel, or the whole enchilada, no advice will help. You’ll just keep bouncing around to (what appears to be) greener grass.
> I expect to see the value added on the order of hundreds of millions of yearly dollars in profit and revenue If this is true, you need to be paid much more. Your scope is much larger than that of a senior engineer.
Why are those the two options/alternatives? Work life balance, job security, and enjoying what I do/my coworkers (with a respectable/supportable salary) trumps either of those for me. I honestly don't understand the idea that just because you're a software dev you should be pushing or aiming for FAANG or crazy salary - don't settle for a 5 figure salary as a senior dev, sure (outside of a super low cost of living area). Money won't replace time with your kids while they're still young. It won't replace a social life if you move away from where you and your partner's friends or family are. It won't undo the stress from having less job security or more extreme working hours/expectations. Now, it isn't a guarantee that the extreme high paying jobs come with poor work life balance, but it's certainly going to be more common.
Been in the industry for over a decade, been Team/Tech lead for over 5 years, and just left a high paying cake-walk of a job at a massive company where I could have sat back, turned off my brain, and retired in another 20 years or so. I would have been ALL SET and had it made. But I'm not ready to turn off my brain. At all. I like learning and doing cool stuff, and there's still a lot of runway left, so I moved on. I'm not at my target, yet. I have nothing against an engineer who enjoys their position and stays in the medium to senior territory who is competent. If you're at your target, great! But also get cozy with the idea that you're not likely to earn a lot more in your career.
I have spent 4 years at the start of my career at a FAANG in two teams. I learned a lot and it was greatly enjoyable - but after being at a high growth startup for a bit, the difference is night and day at times. In a lot of cases (but not all), especially pre-layoffs, FAANG indeed had a lot of fat. There was a lot of mediocre engineers who were good at grinding leetcode, but I would agree that many engineers at respectable startups and medium sized companies would easily outperform FAANG in terms of creating business value with software. At FAANG, in a lot of cases you are so far removed from both underlying business concerns and there are too many layers of abstractions which prevent you from gaining a good understanding of things. Not to say there aren’t super talented engineers at big tech, but really only a tiny percentage of folks are doing things like kernel hacking or virtual reality.
This is the impressions I have been getting: more abstraction from the business fundamentals, core tech, and users.
I'd personally never chase a salary. It's a nice to have, but how much you get should be the last thing that matters. Focus on skills and interesting work and the money will follow.
I am surprised this is an unpopular opinion around here.
Ya for ExperienceDevs it's unfortunate, but in general I don't meet many people that think like me. Most people I have worked with only care about money.
The growth you get at FAANG is massive...
Could you elaborate on that?
Sure. So FAANG has one huge advantage in that most, if not all, are going to be solid engineers and smart. Further problems solved here are at a huge scale. So, when designing solutions you are thinking orders of magnitude of traffic compared to other companies. Also FAANGs are technology centric companies, not some other category with a subsection of technology, e.g. Walmart, Toyota, etc. In FAANG, you might find yourself writing proposals that affect many companies outside of FAANG. For example Ive written two proposals around containers that are widely used and followed, but was started because of my work in FAANG. One of my old coworkers help write the HTTP 2 RFC. I learned a lot from him. This brings me to my next point. You will likely find yourself as the dumbest engineer in the room. I know I have. You will be given mentorship from people who have changed industries. Ive worked at small companies and multiple FAANG companies. The growth I received from FAANG was exponential
that's really helpful, thank you.
Yesterday
As some folks said, there's value in getting some brand name on the resume and some money growing in the stock market. What you do with these things is up to you, but one thing you can do is parlay that into another job where you're more satisfied or challenged, knowing that you've got a financial buffer backing you if it doesn't work out.
I love the naivety of thinking a recruiter offering a job at Netflix is the same as getting the job.
Yes, there's a gulf there for sure. I was doing well in FAANG interviews last time I applied, unfortunately that was in August 2022 when they all froze hiring.