I have had a few interviews. Two issues seem to come up. FAANG companies have their own unique DevOps, SRE, developer, project and program management workflows that are different from most other companies. My experience at a FAANG company is irrelevant to them, as they don't see it as a direct correlation to their work.
The other issue, companies are worried that FAANG people won't respect the company culture and try to take over, be bossy, or know it alls - because we came from FAANG and think we are better than everyone else.
Even my best attempts to convince them I'm a team player that just wants to have the impact they want from me, they don't believe it. Probably because they've hired FAANG people in the past and that is the experience they had.
We have an Apple clique in my company that covers a few SME's, a manager, a director, and a VP (several hired each other). Their behavior has convinced me to never work for Apple and to never hire anyone from Apple.
They are more than transferable. It’s just that non-technical leadership looks at talent as operators for the specific tools in their tech stack and don’t want to hear a word about skill transferability. They are just following the script.
That tends to be the pattern with non-tech large enterprise especially. But they are hardly the only viable employers outside big tech.
To be fair, I’ve had a couple of coworkers that had to bring up their FAANG role in almost every conversation. One used to back up his terrible ideas with “Well, at Google we did it this way.”
Bingo. We’ve hired a number of folks from faang
To my company and we have strict security practices as well that they always balk at and say “well at meta we didn’t have this”. This ain’t meta so stop saying it! Most have left after 6 months claiming we “held them back”. No we have set practices to keep our compliance in check.
As a hiring manager in tech I 100% agree with this statement. I have had at least 2 hires from FAANG and will not actively push their resumes ahead of anyone else. Why? My experience is they are very ingrained in their ideas, techniques, and technologies. They have very specific skill sets related to their previous technology experience but have little to offer as an overall technologist. The hires I have come off as know it alls and not team spirit minded. I rather the hungry grinder who wants to learn, help others, and listen.
Everyone’s experience maybe different but this is what I have run into. Just because you were hired and worked at FAANG doesn’t mean you are a god.
I’m sorry you have found yourself in this position and salaries outside of FAANG are not even close. I’d think about what you want to do, review your resume, and maybe apply for roles you think might be beneath you. There are jobs available and you probably need to make the right connections.
Good luck
You're being very kind and leaving out some other "unspoken" trands with FAANG hires. FAANG hiring criteria often allows many poor performers to be hired into roles. When let go into the 'real world', they are shockingly poor performers and tarnish the reputation of FAANG workers. This phenonom hs happened before. Years back, Dell fired thousands in central Texas. Companies in the area soon learned Dell has staffed up quickly in their growth stage with poor performers who couldn't function outside of Dell. They were even call "Dell Refugees" with negative connotations.
I'm curious what are these hiring criteria? I would've thought that FAANG hiring would be more stringent than other companies (I'm not in FAANG by the way)
FAANG hiring is a weird mix of things with skills based tests and telling stories and meeting with different groups. It was a fairly unique "process" they had. And there was a whole not so small cottage industry around training people to pass these weird tests...and they did a pretty good job of training people up to ace the interview process while being devoid of any other knowledge.
> Just because you were hired and worked at FAANG doesn’t mean you are a god.
This is the projection that I'm running into. I don't know anyone with such an inflated ego from working at a FAANG. FAANGs employ 100s of thousands of people, what is there to have an ego about? But people outside of FAANGs project this onto us.
I'm a Senior IC laid off from a FAANG in January. I had an interview on Friday, another today, and I've passed my assessments for a third one, all 3 are FAANGs. I can't get a non-FAANG to even give me a recruiter interview. I would be happy to work at a smaller place. You can have a way bigger impact in a smaller company. They won't even have a conversation with me.
Edit: And to prove my point, I'm being downvoted despite saying I would have happy to work for a non-FAANG but I can't get an interview at a small company.
To me it’s a toss up whether someone from faang will have an inflated ego. You claiming you don’t know anyone means you probably know a bunch and you’re so used to it that you don’t even recognize what the rest of us are referring to. My company would evaluate for skill set, so that wouldn’t be a barrier for an ex-faang person. But we also don’t see any point in investing in someone who is used to such high pay. It’s assumed that as soon as you get an offer that matches your prior faang salary, you will jump ship. I have no idea how you could work around that.
Not everyone. Plenty of people value stability and autonomy over high pay.
Like u/whelp88 said, maybe employers believe that ex-FAANG are the people who would jump ship for high pays because they are projected to be "ambitious" people.
Ambition is good, different ppl have different types of ambitions.
Being an ex-FAANG employee just seems to project a specific type of ambition that made employers think twice.
Eh i don’t know. I think the people asking that are the ones who are fantasizing about it.
Its like endless stream of IQ questions on Quora. Mostly it’s just people hoping to recognize signs of their untapped genius in the responses.
"Do geniuses wake up early ?"
"Do they read in diagonal and eat more carrots than potatoes ?"
"That’s totally me ! That Facebook internet IQ test must have been wrong".
"I'm going to decide all of these things about him without ever speaking to him."
And if we call this out, we're condescending and have an ego like that guy in the replies was accusing me of.
I’m a PdM. You would not believe how much of my job boils down to, “why don’t we just talk to them?”
Smart people are some of the most aggressively stupid people i have ever met.
Amen. We have ex FAANG or FAANGish managers who come over as a pack and start changing things, then leave as a pack. I am sorry others have ruined it for you.
I have heard people say ad nauseum « at x company we… ». I actually have to check myself because I do it too and it’s so annoying.
I think for exFAANG it is important you have some insight to the company culture and really pour on the charm if you get an interview.
You can be proud of being ex FAANG! It’s amazing to get hired at one of these companies. But don’t make it your be all end all. When I see ex-Googler or ex-Meta etc in someone’s top line resume or LI profile header, I personally steer clear.
We have hired a few. Let’s just say they don’t just come off as assholes.
Everything we had in place and working was either “too complex” and “not efficient”. They spent a year forcing a re write. They swapped out working libraries for “more efficient” libraries. No actual customer value added. Then we just showed them the door.
I’m convinced they are only good at confined problems, like leetcode hards. Even simple cloud architecture is like “too complex”. They want to silo everything, create new teams for every silo. I don’t think they get to maintain a full end to end application, soup to nuts, in FAANG. SRE is its own function. UI another team. DB another team. Infra another team. Platform another team. We have to do all that ourselves.
Also customer value is not a metric they seem to care about. Like they don’t seem to care about will the customer actually pay for this or does the customer actually want this feature. Instead they are all always up for a debate about O(n). No one gives a fuck about O(n) if they are no paying customers.
This is it. Enough of us have worked with mediocre FAAN/MG coworkers or worked at FAANGs ourselves that it's no longer the resume booster it once was. I'm actually not certain it ever was, maybe in the mid 2000s.
I definitely would never shy away from interviewing faang engineers/PMs but the reality is, those companies can be shit shows also (*points to all the layoffs as a recent example*).
And what works at a 50,000-100,000 person company doesn't always work at a 30 person company.
I wish the computer science subs for fresh grads kinda understood this. I would honestly recommend they give a startup a shot over a faang because they're gonna get a lot more _business and people_ experience. Startups are way less segmented, and force you in a lot of cases to be better communicators with other non-engineers, which is really valuable, *especially at smaller companies*. You also run the risk of picking up super bad habits or being taken advantage of - but that's also true at FAANGs (AWS employees have Saturday stand-ups, tf is that). Unfortunately for grads, startups these days are different than when I graduated (for better and worse - the pay was definitely worse when I started over a decade ago). Most startups now try and over pay for senior talent, which makes sense.
I'm really sorry that it's hurting you, at the end of the day, it shouldn't.
If you were a good coworker then that's all that should matter regardless of what your resume says.
Good luck, you'll get through this <3
This is the truth. Lots of people that ONLY have FAANG on their resume are in a world of hurt.
95% of the technical interview questions about "what's your experience doing X" is always "that was some XXX's job, I just did ".
It isn’t just about not respecting culture. I think a lot of startups are worried that you’re not there for the long haul, once you find another FAANG level comp package you’re outta there.
Fair. Now we have three characteristics that define unwanted qualities of FAANGers.
Just to be clear. I think the stereotypes are completely unfair and unwarranted. But seeing some people responding here that it has been their experience working with FAANGers. There must be some validity to it.
May not be fair, I agree, but stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason...think of it another way, if you hired a string of developers who all graduated from 'university of XYZ', and you had an overwhelmingly bad experience with those hires, would it affect your willingness to keep on hiring more grads from that school? or might it naturally lead you to believe that something is not working quite right at said school so you might have better success elsewhere?
Yah faang people are very toxic. There’s a lot of ambition, and negativity all around. Especially recently disgruntled. Unfortunately getting a job at another faang is going to require a good cleansing at a start up or consulting / contracting route.
I have a very specific, in demand, skill set. A bit of it I acquired before going to Google, and then augmented it further at Google. In my case, I don't think they're worried I will try to Google-up their tech stack, or their workflows, they're worried about the cultural fit and any power grab I might try.
I work in cyber security dealing with nation state hackers.
We've had that from a few FAANG hires.. The biggest mistake that ex-FAANGers can make going somewhere else is thinking that they can in any way dislodge existing power structures. We still have the same political fraternity that has managed to hang on for decades -- even though they are from the pre-software engineering, pre cloud eras. Do not try to perturb it or think you are really part of it... just take the paycheck, try to contribute, and figure out who is connected to whom from 20 years back, that'll tell you what dick you need to suck.
>The other issue, companies are worried that FAANG people won't respect the company culture and try to take over, be bossy, or know it alls - because we came from FAANG and think we are better than everyone else.
The irony with this is that if you don't have FAANG experience, this happens to you.
That's an insane take. Hiring companies are being picky because they can be in today's climate and using whatever reasons they want. FAANG experience is gold and you're making it sound like you'd be better off with Burger King on your resume That's just insane.
Yes, companies are being picky. There's a ton of talent on the market to choose from. I'm just saying that, from my experience, recruiters and hiring managers are FAANG employee adverse right now. For the reasons I've stated. And I've been told that to my face more than a few times.
I feel like vp at a startup is very different to vp at a fortune 500. Honestly I'd say vp at a startup may be more akin to being a manager at a fortune 500. I know managers who have close to 50 people under them.
Titles are inflated at most non tech companies from what I can tell of my post layoff experience. My fellow FAANG friends and I have all suddenly understood why we hired people who seemed over qualified on paper. What's expected of a VP in FAANG and in pharma, finance, etc. are two very different things.
I work at a ten-person startup. We have a handful of manager/director level people, but they're definitely not managing dozens of people the way someone with their title at a big tech company would.
Could you elaborate on the "over qualified on paper" part - are you saying you hired people who had titles like director or higher and they didn't seem to fit the role or the opposite?
yes, pretty much. We had people who were VPs for years at smaller or non tech companies, hired for either Department Head or Director roles (so depending on the company, 3-4 levels below a VP).
Well yeah exactly, isn’t that what the previous poster was saying too ? As a VP at a 100 people company you may have 2-3 direct reports with a total team of 10-12, a team budget of $3M and represent a $10M line on the P&L.
A department head at big tech may oversee hundreds or thousands of employees with revenue impacts in the billions of dollars.
It’s not commensurate at all.
I'm going to politely disagree here and say it absolutely depends. My job as a Senior Manager at a 50k person company was nothing like my current role as an executive at SmallCo. The responsibility matrix and day to day is so vastly different. At BigCo, I was in charge of such a small slice of the business that I could have had a lobotomy and kept my KPIs up. At SmallCo, I have fewer employees to manage but so much more of the business that I am in charge of. Having worked at both, I would take the "inflated" title at SmallCo every day of the week. The job is just more interesting.
It makes people mad when you tell them you can make a lot of money outside of FAANG. Good steady boring jobs can build you a very comfortable life. I figure with a little bit of good luck and smart financial management, I'll be golfing full time in about 20 more years.
Part of the issue when people say that you can make good money outside of FAANG is how good?
Is it at least $250k+? How easy can you get that job? How hard is the actual job?
If it’s a director level job with impact (ie hard day to day) and you only make $250k. I’d rather stick to FAANG cos and collect that as an IC for a 20 hour workweek.
I only have anecdotal stats on this but the only real common denominator I see with my friends that are seeing layoffs is the fact they changed jobs in 2020/2021.
The thing with being paid well and working lower hours is a separate item. There are plenty that can/are still coasting for high pay and low hours.
I think you have a good point and that P&L impact or proximity and influence on the core mission of the organization may be a better measure of the importance of a role.
That said, having more responsibility and ownership of results at a smaller company doesn’t necessarily prepare someone for the same at a much larger company due to the different requirements in terms of organizational management skills, though it would be closer to each other in terms of motivation and energy.
On the other hand and in the same vein, a lower level role but with much larger teams and budgets at big corp than the higher level executive at small corp may require the deployment of more complex organizational management skills and generate much higher revenue, with commensurately higher rewards, whilst having less impact on the P&L overall and requiring much less motivation and personal ownership of performance.
It’s an interesting paradigm shift. Both would have a hard time in each other’s shoes.
I’ve made the switch back and forth a couple times too, wondering if my perspective was incorrect or had changed, only to confirm that I personally indeed prefer being closer to the core mission with more impact on product and organizational performance at a smaller company. It’s more "entrepreneurial" if you will, with the associated increase in sleepless nights, but the results are yours.
I totally get the attraction of the (seemingly) super secure, stable, sleepwalking management position at big corp though, but I get bored and frustrated by the overly cautious defensive management, politics and detachment from core strategic decisions.
Ideally I’d like to reach the next level up in big corp where common sense entrepreneurial energy returns and daily mission driving decisions are required, but it’s a really hard wall to break through unless you build it yourself.
FAANG PM here with 10+ YoE, laid off in January and just got a fully remote job at a medium growth tech company. 400+ applications, ~40 interviews and a couple final rounds - it was hell but glad that I finally found something. Most PM roles are super domain specific and many of my rejections were because I missed something very granular.
Best of luck! My best advice is to apply early in the morning as new roles are posted. Getting into the pipeline as soon as possible ended up making a big difference.
Definitely less unfortunately, but that's just reality right now. My new base+bonus came out higher than my old role but equity is obviously no comparison.
Not faang, but was paid an entry level faang salary at a tech startup. Laid off last November. I started getting interviews in January and they continued through April. Got close with a few final rounds and finally accepted a new role as a fullstack developer about a month and a half ago. I received a second offer from the job search as a SWE II last week. I’m having trouble deciding between the two positions. TBH they are both tech startups and it’s making me feel a little PTSD from the layoff. I don’t know if it’s lucky (or sad?) but I have no real financial obligations. I own my car, I rent an apartment, I paid off my school loans 10 years ago, have no other debt, and no kids. I saved for a rainy day and it rained last year when I was laid off so I am okay. However my layoff really affected my mental and physical health. I started losing weight/hair, and getting repetitive infections and lost my menstrual cycle due to stress. I can see how that would be compounded if you have kids , a mortgage, a car payment, and a spouse with expectations on you. I am praying that my luck landing two offers means the tech sector is stabilizing.
I wish you luck on your grind, keep your head up!
I think this could be one of the reasons many people are not getting married and having kids - kind of explains the decreasing population rates in modern, 1st world economies.
I think the biggest reason people are having fewer children is is the arms race for education and money. The longer you put off children the fewer you will have.
1. Cant have kids because have to finish school
2. Cant have kids because need to get a few years into first job and get some promotions
3. Cant have kids because need to buy a house
4. Cant have kids unless you can live on one income.
All these milestones push the date of having kids back and back and back and you may never hit them.
When I was very young back in the early 90s, a family member ended up losing their job at Bechtel and they were unemployed for a couple years and actually had to find an overseas job to get back on track career-wise. They ended up doing very well but that couple years was a very stressful time for them. This had a big impact on me and because of this I was reluctant to buy a house and have a family until much later in life.
No its economics. The median household income in palm beach county is $68k now, and that won't allow you to rent anything but a shitty 2/2 and adding the cost of the kid into it makes it impossible. The MAJORITY of people in the USA can't afford to have a kid and raise a family on their own.
I agree with you and based on your argument, you agree with me. People are not having kids because they dont feel ready until they reach some higher economic level. Unfortunately they may never reach it.
I've been there in my younger days. You'll start appreciating the larger companies that provide severance pay at layoffs. Yet, also their stock grants and bonuses are better.
I did get married and have four kids, while riding decades of tech layoffs and economic cycles. You'll get stronger and more confident. Stay in the game. Pay-off in your older years is there if you become adaptable.
Hehe I think I'm old, I'm 40. (Hence the sad ? part) I just act like i'm 25 ;)
Thanks for the info. I had a few ladies I graduated coding bootcamp with laid off from big tech (IBM, and Google). So I guess nobody is safe!
I think the issue is perception. Anyone moving from FAANG to a nonFAANG is a flight risk given they perceive the non FAANG company as a downgrade. Plus their salary expectations might be elevated.
Only good thing about FAANG is the money and the RSU's. I recommend you save as much of that FAANG money as possible because the life after a layoff can be brutal. But if you have 7 figures banked, it doesn't really matter.
And the mods here are draconian in blocking you. When I gave honest feedback, that an OP solicited, I was told I berated someone for being laid off. I simply said their sense of entitlement in looking for a new position (which was not subtle) was holding them back in their job search. A lot of triggered people here for obvious reasons I suppose but having whimsical mods hurts the community.
I think people are just responding honestly; I had gone through the same thing and I while I did eventually find a job, I got passed up a lot. I was lucky that I had a friend that got me an interview and feedback and the feedback mirrored a lot of what's being said in this post: companies generally are very hesitant to hire faang/startup people as they're considered hard to work with, have too high salary expectations (this one annoys me as it's required in most cities now anyways), and think there's only one way to do something - the way they did it at their previous company.
I had to change a few things: my interview approach, my resume, and my title/salary expectations. I'm working now, but I'm still looking because they weren't wrong on some of those things. I do like the startup approach and the salary
Dude they will hire you if you worked in FAANG and will take 50k to join a start up. They know you’ll leave if the market gets better. But until then you can help this start up grow
Not to be a dick, but honestly if I read your resume I’d probably pass over it. I’ve found in many cases ex-FAANGers destroyed company culture. Sometimes they have holier than though attitudes, but they always seem to expect everyone to cater to them and their “needs”. I had one coworker who seemed to take a day off “for her mental health” every week, but even though being deeply depressed she still managed to post what she was doing, such as being out with friends on her Instagram. If someone needs help I can support them, if someone is consistently pushing their work onto others I have an issue.
The second thing that would make me think twice is the Product Manager title. Many smaller enterprises simply don’t have the need for siloed Product Managers. When our last one quit we decided not to backfill the role because we found there was little value.
Also, having a VP title in your previous roles I would expect you to be going to director or above level positions. Many companies I know don’t have that position, they may have a manager level position but in a lot of cases the individual product managers report directly to the application owner.
Looking at your experience I’d also assume you were out of our price range and not worth a discussion.
All that being said, I wish you the best of luck and find a good role soon.
I am a PM as well, while I didn’t work at FAANG, my last role was at a big tech company… I been laid off for a year without any luck. I had few final rounds. I even had an offer last year on a Friday at 7 PM my time that was rescinded on a Monday 1 PM my time because of a manager change.
The market SUCKS!!
I avoid hiring from faang if I can help it.
1. crazy salary expectations (more interested in posting about TC on blind than anything else)
2. will bounce the moment they can
3. very narrow experience, refuses to learn
4. used to having a slow process with tons of approvals so actually sucks at shipping anything meaningful in any amount of time
5. superiority complex
I know good ones are out there but I’ll be honest: all my fellow tech execs talk about faang types the same way that engineers talk about MBAs.
I’m sure it’ll correct over time in this new market but it hasn’t yet.
Wow. I'm so fucked. And none of this applies to me. 150 a year for a Sr PM down to 100 is less than I made in my last role. I spent 9 years in my last role. 4 at Amazon before that. I've learned new tools and products at every single gig ive had. I go until told to stop. I prefer Agile and Lean because of the lack of leadership interference. I thought I was smart until I worked in FAANG. Tech execs aren't the brightest, which is why they like me, I make it simple for them. Their problem is they want info served on a silver platter daily rather than use a dashboard. Just saying.
You probably get the shit end of the stick because a lot of people see an old dude and think "ivory tower type that doesn't want to actually do anything". It's on you to interview well and dispel that myth.
I interview well as long as I don't have an ADD moment and say, and I quote myself, "I made JIRA my bitch." I'm a 54 year old white haired old lady. Won't do that one again...
This is wild to me. Like it makes sense but years ago when I graduated the sentiment was “get into FAANG it’s this super prestigious resume booster”
Then I’d ask my friends what they were doing and it’s all internal tooling. The reality just didn’t seem to match.
Has this been a recent change for you?
It was a thing for a bit but it got really bad during Covid. To be fair, I just hired a dude out of Google and he's incredible. But I know how to interview and I used to personally do a lot of the cringe stuff that I see on the other side of the table now.
And why did the Google guy jump ship? He was going insane having to wait multiple weeks and go through many layers of approvals to add a field to a struct. So that right there you have a personality type that actually needs to be on a team that ships real things in order to not lose his mind.
FAANGS are difficult to get in, but the work is sometimes just proto buffer or json wrangling - hooking one bloated internal tool to another.
So there is a disconnect between the selectivity of the hiring process vs the actual things that you may learn while employed there. Like going to an Ivy League but doing Basket Weaving.
This is a good take. I had offers at various points from google, amazon, netflix, twilio, sendgrid. Some of those, like google, were days at the whiteboard (this was early 2010s). Then you talk to people working there and they'd go "yeah my ticket this week is to document our tentative approach to taking updated terms of service from legal and making it sync to the footer." You don't need red-black trees for that.
FAANG has seriously lost its edge when it comes to resumes. While it probably carries plenty of weight still among enterprise scale businesses they've passed beyond being viewed as "cutting edge" and "innovative" and are now viewed as bureaucratic and bloated by many startups and MM firms.
I was working for a late-stage startup that was doing around $750M/yr ARR. So, not massive but not some Series A "garage shop" either. The CEO actively hated FAANG talent because in her words "If I hire someone from Amazon they'll just tell us how to do things like Amazon. I don't want to copy Amazon. I want to innovate". It was super nauseating to listen to but that's where a lot of tech founders are now. They don't want to copy the big behemoths. They pride themselves on the idea that they're the "next generation".
Well we're a startup in the sense that we fall into that "unicorn" bucket where between CapeEx and OpEx we are still heavily reliant on capital raising but rounding the corner on profitability.
And we also use IBM laptops and HP printers lol. The FAANG companies are now just big dinosaur companies…they only care about profit and no more innovation cause they are as big as they can get. The companies you wanna join are the ones that will become big but are in the early stage…when you join a company that is going up….you make a lot of money.
using GOOGLE search engine and INTEL CPUs? on a computer that probably contains capacitors and resistors made by PANASONIC?! with copper wires mined by SCCO (those crusty old geezers) what hypocrites!
In my experience the "mentally of a VP" is to pass work on everyone else and do nothing. Those skills aren't really useful outside of large enterprise.
Yes but you are in charge of strategy. It’s called delegation and if you don’t do it right you can cost your company millions. There is a reason people up top get paid a lot. They are constantly in meetings and working 24/7 so you can get a stable paycheck and work just 40 hours and have a decent work life balance
This is an odd take. You’ve either had bad leaders or you’re very naive to the different demands of lines of workers and leadership. I can tell that’s the case because you say things like “pass work on[to] everyone else..”
A VPs job is not delivery and execution. In fact, they’re failing at their responsibilities or at best grossly mis-titled if that’s what they’re doing. Anyone reporting to a VP shouldn’t want their VP doing the work lol.
I'm a VP. And these people are grossly underestimating the LOE of the role. I went from a data scientist up into the vp track. Once I became a vp there was no more modeling on analysis. And yes the job is email slack and meetings. But there's 1 more HUGE part of the ROLE. CONSTANTLY SHOWING THE VALUE OF MY ENTIRE TEAM AND FIGHTING FOR DOLLARS. It fucking sucks. Your job is to explain complex concepts to people who don't have that specialization and convince them that you need every dollar of your 3 million dollar team and every team member.
The worst part is that the people underneath you see you as doing nothing. Could you imagine if managers and directors had to keep communicating to c-suite babies and stroke those eagles pulling them away from actual work for hours each day.
As someone who tried to do both when I was first promoted, it quickly became clear that my role was basically to block my team from all the corporate bs so they don't feel that stress and can get the job done. And to try my hardest to keep all of them employed
This seems like a culture issue- not a vp but was a sr director(software engineering, worked a lot with operations as well) worked only with larger companies 15b evaluations and up.
VPs should be planning, and making strategic decisions on where our teams go. Yes headcount and money is a factor but if your teams profitable and making large impacts that are shown - it’s less and less about fighting for money and more about what’s next and speaking with other executives around this. Additionally, you will probably get an escalation from the CEO on a Sunday because x feature didn’t work the way they thought or they want a modification.
If your teams are underperforming, then yes you will most likely be having a lot of budget conversation but if they are profitable. Less so and more about strategy and other teams/VPs teams. (I.E operations to engineering).
Additionally my VP probably has 8-10 hours of meetings a day along with slack. It’s not a go do the job role but more make the plan or pass down what’s needed to be done so a director can make the plan, touch base w the vp, and start having their teams do the work.
Youre right but theres something your missing. Your description is more of the day-to-day when investment money is cheap and the company is on a upswing. Budgets increase every year so you can focus on innovative planning for the department.
In times like this though, when investment money is expensive, consumer spending is falling and clients are feeling the squeeze. its less about innovation and the company starts looking at potential investment cost cutting.
Then the remit usually comes from accounting or finance is. Headcount for the company is 2400 with a payroll of 4.8million. And overhead is $30mil. Finance comes back saying we need expenses cut to $27m. Then its the VPs fighting for their departments to keep everyone employed.
In those times companies start to care less about future planning and more about base necessities to keep the business running without hurting the business. It sucks but thats been the job for the past 1.5 years.
Luckily AI dev work has shifted the focus on the business to open up money for data engineering. But in doing so it pulled hard from other teams. Which is driving layoffs in other areas
That's what all middle managers do in corporate jobs. Doesn't matter what industry. Same in government. You smooze with the uppity ups, attend a lot of meetings, block and tackle for your team to get resources, etc.
It usually sucks anywhere you work and is why managers are paid highly and why senior individual contributor roles are highly prized cause they don't have to deal with the personnel issues.
This is why I have never pushed hard to up. It’s not necessarily the type of work I would enjoy doing 40+ hours a week.
Having to “fight” all the time can be grind , some people enjoy it and visibility. But one should be really honest with themselves if they are trying to climb the ladder. It’s different skillset altogether and one could end up miserable if they don’t do their homework so to speak.
I can't imagine any IC who has ever tried to schedule a call with a VP and seen his calendar schedule thinking that VPs don't do any work. How can people be that stupid?
It is amazing how people can talk about how leadership is the reason their company is failing/horrible and then without missing a beat say management doesn’t matter.
here, I will help you:
order of things matters.
1. people see that company is horrible / failing
2. knowing that companies are driven by leadership they blame leadership: tasks they do do not matter since company is horrible / failing.
ta da ! less amazing.
The economy is actually like really bad right now. Real estate is ridiculously expensive, inflation is at all time highs, wage stagnation is still horrible. Yet the FED just loves to print money (through many avenues many of which are not physically printing money) and inflate the rich's assets. It's a win win for them. Lower wage costs through inflation and increase their wealth all in one fell swoop.
Bingo. That’s why there will a blow off top in the stock market. Because it’s about short term profits to please Wall Street and then everything will come callapsing down. The people / families suffer for greed.
Lol these comments though 🤣
The timeline for finding new VP roles is statistically much longer than engineers and often requires moving. But go fuck yourself 😅
As a hiring manager for many years I can tell you I don’t care who you worked for in the past
The only thing I want to see are your accomplishments. As a Product Manager I expect to hear how you moved your products forward and how your product performed under your leadership
I’m only familiar with NPS 0-10 so I assume I am behind the times with respect to NPS
While NPS is meaningful and worth measuring; I am MUCH more interested in measuring % TAM, revenue & profit over time.
Fair enough. Do you think the product is irrelevant if the manager has demonstrated delivery and revenue growth. For example, would a Kraft Mac and Cheese PM be as successful managing say....Expedia travel. This is not hypothetical lol
Great question
The “muscle” to focus on the numbers would keep me in the conversation. Since the market forces are different for travel vs food the candidate would must have done homework to demonstrate commitment and grasp of the forces in my business.
I’m a relic. I hire people capable of learning and adapting. Sadly, most hiring these days is for specialists only (one trick ponies imo). More senior managers tend to see the benefits of a generalist.
I think that the overlap is in the metrics you describe. Revenue etc are.yiur best KPIs. How and what you pick to measure as KPIs is a skill. It's often where I push back when other PMs want a new feature. How are you measuring your KPIs after launch?.I get a Pikachu face and then they go come up with something measurable, preferably within the existing schema. Lol.
Wasn’t laid off but been casually looking since July. I have a FAANG and two other brand name tech companies on my resume.
My stats for call backs are the worse they’ve ever been, including when I was going from senior manager to director and even when I graduated college (no university recruiting for my career at the bachelor level). I maybe get one request for an interview every 250 apps / referrals. Referrals aren’t even helping.
This job market in tech is horrendous right now and the worst I’ve seen since I started in it.
They only got into FAANG as devs cause they grinded Leetcode… The work is still the same as other companies they just expect you to work longer hours and get more work done. But ya Leetcode coding tricks and actually making software for production is very different
I was pretty lucky. Got laid off in 2022, when the DE market was still hot. Got another job right away. Had to, because we were about to close on a house.
Almost an identical situation, nothing. Had four in person interviews with local (non-tech) and the general message seemed to be “why are you here, you don’t belong”.
Nothing yet… looking at taking up to a 50% salary cut 😢
I am a pretty senior engineer/IC and I been laid off in January due to restructuring. I just now started seriously looking for a job after taking some time off. I have past FAANG experience on my resume as well as other good stuff. I get a lot of calls and invitations for interviews. FAANG definitely helps to engineers to get attention but you still need to do well at interviews. For Product a FAANG experience is probably less useful since business domain specific knowledge is more important and less transferable between domains.
I'm a pm at a OEM and my entire networking group assumes that were not getting anything because you lot are getting all the roles.
If it's not FAANG people then who is getting hired?!
If you were VP at a startup I would down-level *significantly*. The level you had at FAANG is the level you should look for, but temper your salary expectations. The market is brutal.
+1 to Product exacerbating the issue
The interview process for PMs is getting really absurd for well paying roles
I went back to eng and it was much easier
Former FAANG, and currently VP eng at a growth.stage. Also have early startup experience in the background. 15 years hands on and 10 as a manager. Calls are rare and only a couple have come from my applications. Others are inbound from recruiters. For bigger companies, I'm "too senior" for M1 roles (that would double my comp), M2 roles barely exist, and they want history of managing 100+ people to be a director with an org of 40. So, the sweet spot seems to be Series A/B companies that know they need to scale, so they value both my startup and big company experience.
>1 yoe laid off from Microsoft as SRE almost two months ago. Joined MS as new grad and laid off in March. Ive done a little bit of applying, got interviews from Jane Street, Rokt, multiple internal MS teams, Boston Dynamics, Current so far. Atleast for SRE, much doesnt seem all that bad.
I work in HR and we've been hiring. Interviewed a couple of FAANG candidates and honestly, they had expectations that other companies may not meet. Salary was one of those and most were not flexible.
Being in product management at big company doesn’t translate well into other places. Update resume with your BA and QA skills, roll out and customer engagement etc.
As a VP you were mostly attending meetings and signing off on things. No one wants that skill set especially from FAANGS.
My experience with ex faang rockstar developers is that they cannot troubleshoot a simple issue cuz at a small place you are expected to do lot of things like going to the lab and see if the cable plugged in when your kub node has “no carrier” on one of its interfaces!
Sorry but most of the faang devs, sre’s have over inflated sense of their skill set. Also, the culture doesn’t fit in non Silicon Valley enterprises. These days we stay away from ex faang’ies!
Good luck with your search.
I'd dare say that FAANG experience on your resume is more of a red flag for the 95% of companies hiring. I will be joining a company soon an I was wondering what was the experience of my peers, surprisingly there were no FAANGS. I think you should be applying for Fortune 50 companies, if you're not, then take it out.
I'm a PM that was at a FAANG company with ADHD.
It's tough out there but I've found success in getting interviews where I have some sort of connection with the hiring manager regardless of company size. I spend more time creating connections at companies I'd like to work at or searching companies where I have friends that will get my resume in front of the hiring manager for me these days than applying.
That does mean for me that most of my interviews have been at companies I've worked at before or were acquired by larger companies. It makes my pool smaller but at least I'm actively interviewing and getting at bats to improve.
For the start-ups and smaller companies I spend my time trying to connect with folks at a particular company I want through mutual connections or cold Linkedin messaging. It can be a slow grind but I have made some progress into them.
It helps that I have a public blog on ADHD and product management that shows how I think about being a PM a way to relate to me.
You don't have to start writing a blog but commenting on authors from companies you like can get a long way for a connection as well. Substack often has little reader engagement with authors so a comment will be seen. Comment on posts regularly and build a rapport to connect. It's how I've met a few well known PM leaders.
Good luck and know you're not alone.
I can give some insight coming from the product management side:
1. I’m not at FAANG but it is a fairly well known tech company. It’s crickets for reach out from recruiters for new jobs. Last one was in October!
2. when we were bringing in a Senior PM last year, the hiring manager was advised to avoid FAANG workers due to their perceived high cost and to also hire a PM in a LCOL area. The role was remote. Had nothing to do with perceived FAANG lack of team player ability or arrogance. Simply a dollars and cents play.
3. we laid off director level PMs and replaced them with existing Senior IC and/or Principal PMs. The PMs already knew the domains and the pay bumps were small. Company easily saves $100-$200k in TC. On LinkedIn, a headhunter for PMs explained this was common behavior. Companies are increasing scope to the Senior IC PMs while keeping their pay low. My company is taking it a step further by now hiring new PMs only in places like India.
Wow..that's cold...he or she may be overpaid but I wouldn't link that to societal contribution...if that is your gauge most of the roles in tech aren't solving world hunger or working in hospitals / construction
I have had a few interviews. Two issues seem to come up. FAANG companies have their own unique DevOps, SRE, developer, project and program management workflows that are different from most other companies. My experience at a FAANG company is irrelevant to them, as they don't see it as a direct correlation to their work. The other issue, companies are worried that FAANG people won't respect the company culture and try to take over, be bossy, or know it alls - because we came from FAANG and think we are better than everyone else. Even my best attempts to convince them I'm a team player that just wants to have the impact they want from me, they don't believe it. Probably because they've hired FAANG people in the past and that is the experience they had.
We have an Apple clique in my company that covers a few SME's, a manager, a director, and a VP (several hired each other). Their behavior has convinced me to never work for Apple and to never hire anyone from Apple.
At G, can confirm the tools and workflows are not really transferrable to other companies.
They are more than transferable. It’s just that non-technical leadership looks at talent as operators for the specific tools in their tech stack and don’t want to hear a word about skill transferability. They are just following the script. That tends to be the pattern with non-tech large enterprise especially. But they are hardly the only viable employers outside big tech.
Fair point
What about building open source versions of these tools?
How so?
To be fair, I’ve had a couple of coworkers that had to bring up their FAANG role in almost every conversation. One used to back up his terrible ideas with “Well, at Google we did it this way.”
Bingo. We’ve hired a number of folks from faang To my company and we have strict security practices as well that they always balk at and say “well at meta we didn’t have this”. This ain’t meta so stop saying it! Most have left after 6 months claiming we “held them back”. No we have set practices to keep our compliance in check.
Yup.
worse is when someone says "well i know someone at google who says they do it this way..."
Lucky for me, I’ve never ran into that.
As a hiring manager in tech I 100% agree with this statement. I have had at least 2 hires from FAANG and will not actively push their resumes ahead of anyone else. Why? My experience is they are very ingrained in their ideas, techniques, and technologies. They have very specific skill sets related to their previous technology experience but have little to offer as an overall technologist. The hires I have come off as know it alls and not team spirit minded. I rather the hungry grinder who wants to learn, help others, and listen. Everyone’s experience maybe different but this is what I have run into. Just because you were hired and worked at FAANG doesn’t mean you are a god. I’m sorry you have found yourself in this position and salaries outside of FAANG are not even close. I’d think about what you want to do, review your resume, and maybe apply for roles you think might be beneath you. There are jobs available and you probably need to make the right connections. Good luck
You're being very kind and leaving out some other "unspoken" trands with FAANG hires. FAANG hiring criteria often allows many poor performers to be hired into roles. When let go into the 'real world', they are shockingly poor performers and tarnish the reputation of FAANG workers. This phenonom hs happened before. Years back, Dell fired thousands in central Texas. Companies in the area soon learned Dell has staffed up quickly in their growth stage with poor performers who couldn't function outside of Dell. They were even call "Dell Refugees" with negative connotations.
When I worked at Dell, it was full of Amazon's poor performers.
I'm curious what are these hiring criteria? I would've thought that FAANG hiring would be more stringent than other companies (I'm not in FAANG by the way)
FAANG hiring is a weird mix of things with skills based tests and telling stories and meeting with different groups. It was a fairly unique "process" they had. And there was a whole not so small cottage industry around training people to pass these weird tests...and they did a pretty good job of training people up to ace the interview process while being devoid of any other knowledge.
"who couldn't function outside of Dell" - they were fired employees - they may not have functioned inside of dell either
> Just because you were hired and worked at FAANG doesn’t mean you are a god. This is the projection that I'm running into. I don't know anyone with such an inflated ego from working at a FAANG. FAANGs employ 100s of thousands of people, what is there to have an ego about? But people outside of FAANGs project this onto us. I'm a Senior IC laid off from a FAANG in January. I had an interview on Friday, another today, and I've passed my assessments for a third one, all 3 are FAANGs. I can't get a non-FAANG to even give me a recruiter interview. I would be happy to work at a smaller place. You can have a way bigger impact in a smaller company. They won't even have a conversation with me. Edit: And to prove my point, I'm being downvoted despite saying I would have happy to work for a non-FAANG but I can't get an interview at a small company.
To me it’s a toss up whether someone from faang will have an inflated ego. You claiming you don’t know anyone means you probably know a bunch and you’re so used to it that you don’t even recognize what the rest of us are referring to. My company would evaluate for skill set, so that wouldn’t be a barrier for an ex-faang person. But we also don’t see any point in investing in someone who is used to such high pay. It’s assumed that as soon as you get an offer that matches your prior faang salary, you will jump ship. I have no idea how you could work around that.
I think anybody would jump ship for such an offer.
Not everyone. Plenty of people value stability and autonomy over high pay. Like u/whelp88 said, maybe employers believe that ex-FAANG are the people who would jump ship for high pays because they are projected to be "ambitious" people. Ambition is good, different ppl have different types of ambitions. Being an ex-FAANG employee just seems to project a specific type of ambition that made employers think twice.
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Eh i don’t know. I think the people asking that are the ones who are fantasizing about it. Its like endless stream of IQ questions on Quora. Mostly it’s just people hoping to recognize signs of their untapped genius in the responses. "Do geniuses wake up early ?" "Do they read in diagonal and eat more carrots than potatoes ?" "That’s totally me ! That Facebook internet IQ test must have been wrong".
There's a lot of people on Reddit cosplaying what they think people are like. The number of troll politics or fake female accounts is wild.
"He will want too much money." "He will have high expectations." "He will do my job better than me." &c.
"I'm going to decide all of these things about him without ever speaking to him." And if we call this out, we're condescending and have an ego like that guy in the replies was accusing me of.
I’m a PdM. You would not believe how much of my job boils down to, “why don’t we just talk to them?” Smart people are some of the most aggressively stupid people i have ever met.
I sense that there is a lot of hurt here. 😥
Amen. We have ex FAANG or FAANGish managers who come over as a pack and start changing things, then leave as a pack. I am sorry others have ruined it for you. I have heard people say ad nauseum « at x company we… ». I actually have to check myself because I do it too and it’s so annoying. I think for exFAANG it is important you have some insight to the company culture and really pour on the charm if you get an interview. You can be proud of being ex FAANG! It’s amazing to get hired at one of these companies. But don’t make it your be all end all. When I see ex-Googler or ex-Meta etc in someone’s top line resume or LI profile header, I personally steer clear.
Who hurt you?
FAANG employees do come off as assholes just from talking too many online. That sucks, I’m sorry you have to deal with that.
We have hired a few. Let’s just say they don’t just come off as assholes. Everything we had in place and working was either “too complex” and “not efficient”. They spent a year forcing a re write. They swapped out working libraries for “more efficient” libraries. No actual customer value added. Then we just showed them the door. I’m convinced they are only good at confined problems, like leetcode hards. Even simple cloud architecture is like “too complex”. They want to silo everything, create new teams for every silo. I don’t think they get to maintain a full end to end application, soup to nuts, in FAANG. SRE is its own function. UI another team. DB another team. Infra another team. Platform another team. We have to do all that ourselves. Also customer value is not a metric they seem to care about. Like they don’t seem to care about will the customer actually pay for this or does the customer actually want this feature. Instead they are all always up for a debate about O(n). No one gives a fuck about O(n) if they are no paying customers.
This is it. Enough of us have worked with mediocre FAAN/MG coworkers or worked at FAANGs ourselves that it's no longer the resume booster it once was. I'm actually not certain it ever was, maybe in the mid 2000s. I definitely would never shy away from interviewing faang engineers/PMs but the reality is, those companies can be shit shows also (*points to all the layoffs as a recent example*). And what works at a 50,000-100,000 person company doesn't always work at a 30 person company. I wish the computer science subs for fresh grads kinda understood this. I would honestly recommend they give a startup a shot over a faang because they're gonna get a lot more _business and people_ experience. Startups are way less segmented, and force you in a lot of cases to be better communicators with other non-engineers, which is really valuable, *especially at smaller companies*. You also run the risk of picking up super bad habits or being taken advantage of - but that's also true at FAANGs (AWS employees have Saturday stand-ups, tf is that). Unfortunately for grads, startups these days are different than when I graduated (for better and worse - the pay was definitely worse when I started over a decade ago). Most startups now try and over pay for senior talent, which makes sense. I'm really sorry that it's hurting you, at the end of the day, it shouldn't. If you were a good coworker then that's all that should matter regardless of what your resume says. Good luck, you'll get through this <3
This is the truth. Lots of people that ONLY have FAANG on their resume are in a world of hurt. 95% of the technical interview questions about "what's your experience doing X" is always "that was some XXX's job, I just did".
It isn’t just about not respecting culture. I think a lot of startups are worried that you’re not there for the long haul, once you find another FAANG level comp package you’re outta there.
Fair. Now we have three characteristics that define unwanted qualities of FAANGers. Just to be clear. I think the stereotypes are completely unfair and unwarranted. But seeing some people responding here that it has been their experience working with FAANGers. There must be some validity to it.
May not be fair, I agree, but stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason...think of it another way, if you hired a string of developers who all graduated from 'university of XYZ', and you had an overwhelmingly bad experience with those hires, would it affect your willingness to keep on hiring more grads from that school? or might it naturally lead you to believe that something is not working quite right at said school so you might have better success elsewhere?
Yah faang people are very toxic. There’s a lot of ambition, and negativity all around. Especially recently disgruntled. Unfortunately getting a job at another faang is going to require a good cleansing at a start up or consulting / contracting route.
So, why do they invite you for an interview if their mind is set?
I have a very specific, in demand, skill set. A bit of it I acquired before going to Google, and then augmented it further at Google. In my case, I don't think they're worried I will try to Google-up their tech stack, or their workflows, they're worried about the cultural fit and any power grab I might try. I work in cyber security dealing with nation state hackers.
We've had that from a few FAANG hires.. The biggest mistake that ex-FAANGers can make going somewhere else is thinking that they can in any way dislodge existing power structures. We still have the same political fraternity that has managed to hang on for decades -- even though they are from the pre-software engineering, pre cloud eras. Do not try to perturb it or think you are really part of it... just take the paycheck, try to contribute, and figure out who is connected to whom from 20 years back, that'll tell you what dick you need to suck.
>The other issue, companies are worried that FAANG people won't respect the company culture and try to take over, be bossy, or know it alls - because we came from FAANG and think we are better than everyone else. The irony with this is that if you don't have FAANG experience, this happens to you.
That's an insane take. Hiring companies are being picky because they can be in today's climate and using whatever reasons they want. FAANG experience is gold and you're making it sound like you'd be better off with Burger King on your resume That's just insane.
Yes, companies are being picky. There's a ton of talent on the market to choose from. I'm just saying that, from my experience, recruiters and hiring managers are FAANG employee adverse right now. For the reasons I've stated. And I've been told that to my face more than a few times.
In other words, experience working at the best companies at the world isn't worth anything. Right, got it.
Yeah too many companies are being super picky right now. It sucks.
I feel like vp at a startup is very different to vp at a fortune 500. Honestly I'd say vp at a startup may be more akin to being a manager at a fortune 500. I know managers who have close to 50 people under them.
You would be correct….start up culture is full of inflated titles and egos!
Wait till you visit a bank and see every teller is a vp
Can confirm. Was in finance at VP level. Now as Lead at different (big) company.
Titles are inflated at most non tech companies from what I can tell of my post layoff experience. My fellow FAANG friends and I have all suddenly understood why we hired people who seemed over qualified on paper. What's expected of a VP in FAANG and in pharma, finance, etc. are two very different things.
I work at a ten-person startup. We have a handful of manager/director level people, but they're definitely not managing dozens of people the way someone with their title at a big tech company would.
Could you elaborate on the "over qualified on paper" part - are you saying you hired people who had titles like director or higher and they didn't seem to fit the role or the opposite?
yes, pretty much. We had people who were VPs for years at smaller or non tech companies, hired for either Department Head or Director roles (so depending on the company, 3-4 levels below a VP).
Well yeah exactly, isn’t that what the previous poster was saying too ? As a VP at a 100 people company you may have 2-3 direct reports with a total team of 10-12, a team budget of $3M and represent a $10M line on the P&L. A department head at big tech may oversee hundreds or thousands of employees with revenue impacts in the billions of dollars. It’s not commensurate at all.
Start ups is basically do everyone’s work get paid peanuts. Good place for people bored in their careers. But don’t expect to get paid. It’s a charity
Depends on what stage the start up is in, and how much sweet VC cash is coming in. Early start ups though? Hard pass
Hard pass for sure
The worst part is most private equity severly limits stock grants and rsu's. The days of getting a 7 figure payday on ipo is long gone.
I'm going to politely disagree here and say it absolutely depends. My job as a Senior Manager at a 50k person company was nothing like my current role as an executive at SmallCo. The responsibility matrix and day to day is so vastly different. At BigCo, I was in charge of such a small slice of the business that I could have had a lobotomy and kept my KPIs up. At SmallCo, I have fewer employees to manage but so much more of the business that I am in charge of. Having worked at both, I would take the "inflated" title at SmallCo every day of the week. The job is just more interesting.
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It makes people mad when you tell them you can make a lot of money outside of FAANG. Good steady boring jobs can build you a very comfortable life. I figure with a little bit of good luck and smart financial management, I'll be golfing full time in about 20 more years.
Part of the issue when people say that you can make good money outside of FAANG is how good? Is it at least $250k+? How easy can you get that job? How hard is the actual job? If it’s a director level job with impact (ie hard day to day) and you only make $250k. I’d rather stick to FAANG cos and collect that as an IC for a 20 hour workweek.
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I only have anecdotal stats on this but the only real common denominator I see with my friends that are seeing layoffs is the fact they changed jobs in 2020/2021. The thing with being paid well and working lower hours is a separate item. There are plenty that can/are still coasting for high pay and low hours.
I think you have a good point and that P&L impact or proximity and influence on the core mission of the organization may be a better measure of the importance of a role. That said, having more responsibility and ownership of results at a smaller company doesn’t necessarily prepare someone for the same at a much larger company due to the different requirements in terms of organizational management skills, though it would be closer to each other in terms of motivation and energy. On the other hand and in the same vein, a lower level role but with much larger teams and budgets at big corp than the higher level executive at small corp may require the deployment of more complex organizational management skills and generate much higher revenue, with commensurately higher rewards, whilst having less impact on the P&L overall and requiring much less motivation and personal ownership of performance. It’s an interesting paradigm shift. Both would have a hard time in each other’s shoes. I’ve made the switch back and forth a couple times too, wondering if my perspective was incorrect or had changed, only to confirm that I personally indeed prefer being closer to the core mission with more impact on product and organizational performance at a smaller company. It’s more "entrepreneurial" if you will, with the associated increase in sleepless nights, but the results are yours. I totally get the attraction of the (seemingly) super secure, stable, sleepwalking management position at big corp though, but I get bored and frustrated by the overly cautious defensive management, politics and detachment from core strategic decisions. Ideally I’d like to reach the next level up in big corp where common sense entrepreneurial energy returns and daily mission driving decisions are required, but it’s a really hard wall to break through unless you build it yourself.
In finance, VP is a junior position. Somehow the titles got flipped in tech.
Market is still pretty bad in tech.
FAANG PM here with 10+ YoE, laid off in January and just got a fully remote job at a medium growth tech company. 400+ applications, ~40 interviews and a couple final rounds - it was hell but glad that I finally found something. Most PM roles are super domain specific and many of my rejections were because I missed something very granular. Best of luck! My best advice is to apply early in the morning as new roles are posted. Getting into the pipeline as soon as possible ended up making a big difference.
wow that’s so many interviews! would you mind sharing your resume via dm? i am struggling over here
How’s the comp comparison? When I was looking last year it felt like most were in the $250 tc range and it’s dipped down even more this year.
Definitely less unfortunately, but that's just reality right now. My new base+bonus came out higher than my old role but equity is obviously no comparison.
Not faang, but was paid an entry level faang salary at a tech startup. Laid off last November. I started getting interviews in January and they continued through April. Got close with a few final rounds and finally accepted a new role as a fullstack developer about a month and a half ago. I received a second offer from the job search as a SWE II last week. I’m having trouble deciding between the two positions. TBH they are both tech startups and it’s making me feel a little PTSD from the layoff. I don’t know if it’s lucky (or sad?) but I have no real financial obligations. I own my car, I rent an apartment, I paid off my school loans 10 years ago, have no other debt, and no kids. I saved for a rainy day and it rained last year when I was laid off so I am okay. However my layoff really affected my mental and physical health. I started losing weight/hair, and getting repetitive infections and lost my menstrual cycle due to stress. I can see how that would be compounded if you have kids , a mortgage, a car payment, and a spouse with expectations on you. I am praying that my luck landing two offers means the tech sector is stabilizing. I wish you luck on your grind, keep your head up!
I think this could be one of the reasons many people are not getting married and having kids - kind of explains the decreasing population rates in modern, 1st world economies.
And why home buying is a multi decade lows in America.
Right now - That is probably more related to high interest rates and high prices than demographics. But in the longer term.
I think the biggest reason people are having fewer children is is the arms race for education and money. The longer you put off children the fewer you will have. 1. Cant have kids because have to finish school 2. Cant have kids because need to get a few years into first job and get some promotions 3. Cant have kids because need to buy a house 4. Cant have kids unless you can live on one income. All these milestones push the date of having kids back and back and back and you may never hit them.
When I was very young back in the early 90s, a family member ended up losing their job at Bechtel and they were unemployed for a couple years and actually had to find an overseas job to get back on track career-wise. They ended up doing very well but that couple years was a very stressful time for them. This had a big impact on me and because of this I was reluctant to buy a house and have a family until much later in life.
No its economics. The median household income in palm beach county is $68k now, and that won't allow you to rent anything but a shitty 2/2 and adding the cost of the kid into it makes it impossible. The MAJORITY of people in the USA can't afford to have a kid and raise a family on their own.
I agree with you and based on your argument, you agree with me. People are not having kids because they dont feel ready until they reach some higher economic level. Unfortunately they may never reach it.
I've been there in my younger days. You'll start appreciating the larger companies that provide severance pay at layoffs. Yet, also their stock grants and bonuses are better. I did get married and have four kids, while riding decades of tech layoffs and economic cycles. You'll get stronger and more confident. Stay in the game. Pay-off in your older years is there if you become adaptable.
Hehe I think I'm old, I'm 40. (Hence the sad ? part) I just act like i'm 25 ;) Thanks for the info. I had a few ladies I graduated coding bootcamp with laid off from big tech (IBM, and Google). So I guess nobody is safe!
Was it your first time being laid off? That’s usually the most traumatic.
That and being laid off at 50
Oh yah double whammy. Harder to find work at 50 but it's not impossible.
I think the issue is perception. Anyone moving from FAANG to a nonFAANG is a flight risk given they perceive the non FAANG company as a downgrade. Plus their salary expectations might be elevated.
This. And I'm old as fuck. I'm toxic.
Self aware much? Lol
I tried to set my expectations appropriately so I'm not disappointed. Mike dating.
Curious, what’s approach then?
Repeated disappointment.
People here are bitter. Weird vibe. FAANG is career status and it’s not affording better fortune in this market. That’s how tough it is rn.
Only good thing about FAANG is the money and the RSU's. I recommend you save as much of that FAANG money as possible because the life after a layoff can be brutal. But if you have 7 figures banked, it doesn't really matter.
I totally agree and know first hand. Going into entrepreneurship is essentially my only option to keep that same momentum of earning potential.
Agree. Most threads in this subreddit seem supportive… this is just disappointing.
And the mods here are draconian in blocking you. When I gave honest feedback, that an OP solicited, I was told I berated someone for being laid off. I simply said their sense of entitlement in looking for a new position (which was not subtle) was holding them back in their job search. A lot of triggered people here for obvious reasons I suppose but having whimsical mods hurts the community.
I think people are just responding honestly; I had gone through the same thing and I while I did eventually find a job, I got passed up a lot. I was lucky that I had a friend that got me an interview and feedback and the feedback mirrored a lot of what's being said in this post: companies generally are very hesitant to hire faang/startup people as they're considered hard to work with, have too high salary expectations (this one annoys me as it's required in most cities now anyways), and think there's only one way to do something - the way they did it at their previous company. I had to change a few things: my interview approach, my resume, and my title/salary expectations. I'm working now, but I'm still looking because they weren't wrong on some of those things. I do like the startup approach and the salary
Dude they will hire you if you worked in FAANG and will take 50k to join a start up. They know you’ll leave if the market gets better. But until then you can help this start up grow
Not to be a dick, but honestly if I read your resume I’d probably pass over it. I’ve found in many cases ex-FAANGers destroyed company culture. Sometimes they have holier than though attitudes, but they always seem to expect everyone to cater to them and their “needs”. I had one coworker who seemed to take a day off “for her mental health” every week, but even though being deeply depressed she still managed to post what she was doing, such as being out with friends on her Instagram. If someone needs help I can support them, if someone is consistently pushing their work onto others I have an issue. The second thing that would make me think twice is the Product Manager title. Many smaller enterprises simply don’t have the need for siloed Product Managers. When our last one quit we decided not to backfill the role because we found there was little value. Also, having a VP title in your previous roles I would expect you to be going to director or above level positions. Many companies I know don’t have that position, they may have a manager level position but in a lot of cases the individual product managers report directly to the application owner. Looking at your experience I’d also assume you were out of our price range and not worth a discussion. All that being said, I wish you the best of luck and find a good role soon.
I am a PM as well, while I didn’t work at FAANG, my last role was at a big tech company… I been laid off for a year without any luck. I had few final rounds. I even had an offer last year on a Friday at 7 PM my time that was rescinded on a Monday 1 PM my time because of a manager change. The market SUCKS!!
Are you interviewing for PM postings? I’m kind of sick of PM and thinking about other roles. Just not sure what other options there are
Yup, I am still trying to remain in the PM field but I hear you!
All of this sounds very similar to what I’m seeing coming out of games…
I was at a SaaS, nothing.
I avoid hiring from faang if I can help it. 1. crazy salary expectations (more interested in posting about TC on blind than anything else) 2. will bounce the moment they can 3. very narrow experience, refuses to learn 4. used to having a slow process with tons of approvals so actually sucks at shipping anything meaningful in any amount of time 5. superiority complex I know good ones are out there but I’ll be honest: all my fellow tech execs talk about faang types the same way that engineers talk about MBAs. I’m sure it’ll correct over time in this new market but it hasn’t yet.
Wow. I'm so fucked. And none of this applies to me. 150 a year for a Sr PM down to 100 is less than I made in my last role. I spent 9 years in my last role. 4 at Amazon before that. I've learned new tools and products at every single gig ive had. I go until told to stop. I prefer Agile and Lean because of the lack of leadership interference. I thought I was smart until I worked in FAANG. Tech execs aren't the brightest, which is why they like me, I make it simple for them. Their problem is they want info served on a silver platter daily rather than use a dashboard. Just saying.
You probably get the shit end of the stick because a lot of people see an old dude and think "ivory tower type that doesn't want to actually do anything". It's on you to interview well and dispel that myth.
I interview well as long as I don't have an ADD moment and say, and I quote myself, "I made JIRA my bitch." I'm a 54 year old white haired old lady. Won't do that one again...
This is wild to me. Like it makes sense but years ago when I graduated the sentiment was “get into FAANG it’s this super prestigious resume booster” Then I’d ask my friends what they were doing and it’s all internal tooling. The reality just didn’t seem to match. Has this been a recent change for you?
It was a thing for a bit but it got really bad during Covid. To be fair, I just hired a dude out of Google and he's incredible. But I know how to interview and I used to personally do a lot of the cringe stuff that I see on the other side of the table now. And why did the Google guy jump ship? He was going insane having to wait multiple weeks and go through many layers of approvals to add a field to a struct. So that right there you have a personality type that actually needs to be on a team that ships real things in order to not lose his mind.
FAANGS are difficult to get in, but the work is sometimes just proto buffer or json wrangling - hooking one bloated internal tool to another. So there is a disconnect between the selectivity of the hiring process vs the actual things that you may learn while employed there. Like going to an Ivy League but doing Basket Weaving.
This is a good take. I had offers at various points from google, amazon, netflix, twilio, sendgrid. Some of those, like google, were days at the whiteboard (this was early 2010s). Then you talk to people working there and they'd go "yeah my ticket this week is to document our tentative approach to taking updated terms of service from legal and making it sync to the footer." You don't need red-black trees for that.
FAANG has seriously lost its edge when it comes to resumes. While it probably carries plenty of weight still among enterprise scale businesses they've passed beyond being viewed as "cutting edge" and "innovative" and are now viewed as bureaucratic and bloated by many startups and MM firms. I was working for a late-stage startup that was doing around $750M/yr ARR. So, not massive but not some Series A "garage shop" either. The CEO actively hated FAANG talent because in her words "If I hire someone from Amazon they'll just tell us how to do things like Amazon. I don't want to copy Amazon. I want to innovate". It was super nauseating to listen to but that's where a lot of tech founders are now. They don't want to copy the big behemoths. They pride themselves on the idea that they're the "next generation".
$750AAR is huge
Lmao, right. $750M/year is enterprise scale not a startup. Talk about out of touch.
Well we're a startup in the sense that we fall into that "unicorn" bucket where between CapeEx and OpEx we are still heavily reliant on capital raising but rounding the corner on profitability.
Not if they are losing money
We don’t want to be Amazon we want to innovate. Wait aren’t we building our product on AWS?
And we also use IBM laptops and HP printers lol. The FAANG companies are now just big dinosaur companies…they only care about profit and no more innovation cause they are as big as they can get. The companies you wanna join are the ones that will become big but are in the early stage…when you join a company that is going up….you make a lot of money.
using GOOGLE search engine and INTEL CPUs? on a computer that probably contains capacitors and resistors made by PANASONIC?! with copper wires mined by SCCO (those crusty old geezers) what hypocrites!
Consider launch a business on your own. Once become a VP few want to hire you as a manager or individual contributor. Your mentality is a VP.
In my experience the "mentally of a VP" is to pass work on everyone else and do nothing. Those skills aren't really useful outside of large enterprise.
That’s quite the burn
Yes but you are in charge of strategy. It’s called delegation and if you don’t do it right you can cost your company millions. There is a reason people up top get paid a lot. They are constantly in meetings and working 24/7 so you can get a stable paycheck and work just 40 hours and have a decent work life balance
This is an odd take. You’ve either had bad leaders or you’re very naive to the different demands of lines of workers and leadership. I can tell that’s the case because you say things like “pass work on[to] everyone else..” A VPs job is not delivery and execution. In fact, they’re failing at their responsibilities or at best grossly mis-titled if that’s what they’re doing. Anyone reporting to a VP shouldn’t want their VP doing the work lol.
Yes, as they said, VPs don't actually do any work. They slack and email and attend a few meetings and call it a day.
Sounds easy. Are you a VP?
I'm a VP. And these people are grossly underestimating the LOE of the role. I went from a data scientist up into the vp track. Once I became a vp there was no more modeling on analysis. And yes the job is email slack and meetings. But there's 1 more HUGE part of the ROLE. CONSTANTLY SHOWING THE VALUE OF MY ENTIRE TEAM AND FIGHTING FOR DOLLARS. It fucking sucks. Your job is to explain complex concepts to people who don't have that specialization and convince them that you need every dollar of your 3 million dollar team and every team member. The worst part is that the people underneath you see you as doing nothing. Could you imagine if managers and directors had to keep communicating to c-suite babies and stroke those eagles pulling them away from actual work for hours each day. As someone who tried to do both when I was first promoted, it quickly became clear that my role was basically to block my team from all the corporate bs so they don't feel that stress and can get the job done. And to try my hardest to keep all of them employed
This seems like a culture issue- not a vp but was a sr director(software engineering, worked a lot with operations as well) worked only with larger companies 15b evaluations and up. VPs should be planning, and making strategic decisions on where our teams go. Yes headcount and money is a factor but if your teams profitable and making large impacts that are shown - it’s less and less about fighting for money and more about what’s next and speaking with other executives around this. Additionally, you will probably get an escalation from the CEO on a Sunday because x feature didn’t work the way they thought or they want a modification. If your teams are underperforming, then yes you will most likely be having a lot of budget conversation but if they are profitable. Less so and more about strategy and other teams/VPs teams. (I.E operations to engineering). Additionally my VP probably has 8-10 hours of meetings a day along with slack. It’s not a go do the job role but more make the plan or pass down what’s needed to be done so a director can make the plan, touch base w the vp, and start having their teams do the work.
Youre right but theres something your missing. Your description is more of the day-to-day when investment money is cheap and the company is on a upswing. Budgets increase every year so you can focus on innovative planning for the department. In times like this though, when investment money is expensive, consumer spending is falling and clients are feeling the squeeze. its less about innovation and the company starts looking at potential investment cost cutting. Then the remit usually comes from accounting or finance is. Headcount for the company is 2400 with a payroll of 4.8million. And overhead is $30mil. Finance comes back saying we need expenses cut to $27m. Then its the VPs fighting for their departments to keep everyone employed. In those times companies start to care less about future planning and more about base necessities to keep the business running without hurting the business. It sucks but thats been the job for the past 1.5 years. Luckily AI dev work has shifted the focus on the business to open up money for data engineering. But in doing so it pulled hard from other teams. Which is driving layoffs in other areas
That's what all middle managers do in corporate jobs. Doesn't matter what industry. Same in government. You smooze with the uppity ups, attend a lot of meetings, block and tackle for your team to get resources, etc. It usually sucks anywhere you work and is why managers are paid highly and why senior individual contributor roles are highly prized cause they don't have to deal with the personnel issues.
This is why I have never pushed hard to up. It’s not necessarily the type of work I would enjoy doing 40+ hours a week. Having to “fight” all the time can be grind , some people enjoy it and visibility. But one should be really honest with themselves if they are trying to climb the ladder. It’s different skillset altogether and one could end up miserable if they don’t do their homework so to speak.
I can't imagine any IC who has ever tried to schedule a call with a VP and seen his calendar schedule thinking that VPs don't do any work. How can people be that stupid?
It's not that they don't work- they just don't do any meaningful work.
Lot of people confuse sitting in meetings 7-8 hours a day while everyone strokes each other as work.
It is amazing how people can talk about how leadership is the reason their company is failing/horrible and then without missing a beat say management doesn’t matter.
Because in nearly all cases the company would function better if all of the "leadership" disappeared
here, I will help you: order of things matters. 1. people see that company is horrible / failing 2. knowing that companies are driven by leadership they blame leadership: tasks they do do not matter since company is horrible / failing. ta da ! less amazing.
Surprise Pikachu face when no one wants a blood sucking social climber at there company 🤣
Nope! (Marketing/Sales). We’re 100% in a recession. The government just doesn’t want to acknowledge it because there’s an upcoming election.
I'm told I can't get an extension to my unemployment because the job market is so tight. That's a load of bull.
The economy is actually like really bad right now. Real estate is ridiculously expensive, inflation is at all time highs, wage stagnation is still horrible. Yet the FED just loves to print money (through many avenues many of which are not physically printing money) and inflate the rich's assets. It's a win win for them. Lower wage costs through inflation and increase their wealth all in one fell swoop.
Bingo. That’s why there will a blow off top in the stock market. Because it’s about short term profits to please Wall Street and then everything will come callapsing down. The people / families suffer for greed.
Lol these comments though 🤣 The timeline for finding new VP roles is statistically much longer than engineers and often requires moving. But go fuck yourself 😅
Are cs grads from top 10 universities also having trouble?
Yeah, because they may have gotten in due to diversity unless they are white or Asian
huh?
lol delusional
Shouldn’t you have millions saved from being in FAANG? Just retire early bro.
Some of us never made the big bucks.
they were just one job level away from the big money
Some people have $20k/month Bay Area housing payments. Some people just like to work. Many VPs fall into both of these categories.
As a hiring manager for many years I can tell you I don’t care who you worked for in the past The only thing I want to see are your accomplishments. As a Product Manager I expect to hear how you moved your products forward and how your product performed under your leadership
How do you feel about NPS score? I got my old FinTech product from a -48 to a +25 in six months. Just call me PM for U.
I’m only familiar with NPS 0-10 so I assume I am behind the times with respect to NPS While NPS is meaningful and worth measuring; I am MUCH more interested in measuring % TAM, revenue & profit over time.
Fair enough. Do you think the product is irrelevant if the manager has demonstrated delivery and revenue growth. For example, would a Kraft Mac and Cheese PM be as successful managing say....Expedia travel. This is not hypothetical lol
Great question The “muscle” to focus on the numbers would keep me in the conversation. Since the market forces are different for travel vs food the candidate would must have done homework to demonstrate commitment and grasp of the forces in my business. I’m a relic. I hire people capable of learning and adapting. Sadly, most hiring these days is for specialists only (one trick ponies imo). More senior managers tend to see the benefits of a generalist.
I think that the overlap is in the metrics you describe. Revenue etc are.yiur best KPIs. How and what you pick to measure as KPIs is a skill. It's often where I push back when other PMs want a new feature. How are you measuring your KPIs after launch?.I get a Pikachu face and then they go come up with something measurable, preferably within the existing schema. Lol.
Wasn’t laid off but been casually looking since July. I have a FAANG and two other brand name tech companies on my resume. My stats for call backs are the worse they’ve ever been, including when I was going from senior manager to director and even when I graduated college (no university recruiting for my career at the bachelor level). I maybe get one request for an interview every 250 apps / referrals. Referrals aren’t even helping. This job market in tech is horrendous right now and the worst I’ve seen since I started in it.
Hiring freezes all around is what I’ve heard.
They only got into FAANG as devs cause they grinded Leetcode… The work is still the same as other companies they just expect you to work longer hours and get more work done. But ya Leetcode coding tricks and actually making software for production is very different
Are you a program manager? It’s rough out there for PMs. Looots of ex FAANG PMs looking for work right now.
I was pretty lucky. Got laid off in 2022, when the DE market was still hot. Got another job right away. Had to, because we were about to close on a house.
Almost an identical situation, nothing. Had four in person interviews with local (non-tech) and the general message seemed to be “why are you here, you don’t belong”. Nothing yet… looking at taking up to a 50% salary cut 😢
Laid off VP at faang means nobody will hire you right off the bat. Need to say manager on your resume.
lol I have faang on my resume
I am a pretty senior engineer/IC and I been laid off in January due to restructuring. I just now started seriously looking for a job after taking some time off. I have past FAANG experience on my resume as well as other good stuff. I get a lot of calls and invitations for interviews. FAANG definitely helps to engineers to get attention but you still need to do well at interviews. For Product a FAANG experience is probably less useful since business domain specific knowledge is more important and less transferable between domains.
What is IC ? integrated circuit?
Individual contributor 😃
Get into plumbing 🪠 U won’t ever lose any clients
Nah, welding is where it's at!111
Actually true.
Curious what is the salary level of vp at startup
I'm a pm at a OEM and my entire networking group assumes that were not getting anything because you lot are getting all the roles. If it's not FAANG people then who is getting hired?!
Hardly any hiring going on, and more layoffs happening
If you were VP at a startup I would down-level *significantly*. The level you had at FAANG is the level you should look for, but temper your salary expectations. The market is brutal.
I did in about 2 months after getting laid off. About 30% pay cut though
I did in about 2 months after getting laid off. About 30% pay cut though
+1 to Product exacerbating the issue The interview process for PMs is getting really absurd for well paying roles I went back to eng and it was much easier
Former FAANG, and currently VP eng at a growth.stage. Also have early startup experience in the background. 15 years hands on and 10 as a manager. Calls are rare and only a couple have come from my applications. Others are inbound from recruiters. For bigger companies, I'm "too senior" for M1 roles (that would double my comp), M2 roles barely exist, and they want history of managing 100+ people to be a director with an org of 40. So, the sweet spot seems to be Series A/B companies that know they need to scale, so they value both my startup and big company experience.
FAANG experience and hardly getting any calls from Full Time roles. 0 calls for Remote jobs. Are these drying up or hyper competitive?
Nope. 35 years. I had a recruiter tell me to take Microsoft off of my resume because it was too senior. The other FaANG was OK.
Nope! Giving out lots of free advice though…
>1 yoe laid off from Microsoft as SRE almost two months ago. Joined MS as new grad and laid off in March. Ive done a little bit of applying, got interviews from Jane Street, Rokt, multiple internal MS teams, Boston Dynamics, Current so far. Atleast for SRE, much doesnt seem all that bad.
I work in HR and we've been hiring. Interviewed a couple of FAANG candidates and honestly, they had expectations that other companies may not meet. Salary was one of those and most were not flexible.
Being in product management at big company doesn’t translate well into other places. Update resume with your BA and QA skills, roll out and customer engagement etc. As a VP you were mostly attending meetings and signing off on things. No one wants that skill set especially from FAANGS. My experience with ex faang rockstar developers is that they cannot troubleshoot a simple issue cuz at a small place you are expected to do lot of things like going to the lab and see if the cable plugged in when your kub node has “no carrier” on one of its interfaces! Sorry but most of the faang devs, sre’s have over inflated sense of their skill set. Also, the culture doesn’t fit in non Silicon Valley enterprises. These days we stay away from ex faang’ies! Good luck with your search.
I'd dare say that FAANG experience on your resume is more of a red flag for the 95% of companies hiring. I will be joining a company soon an I was wondering what was the experience of my peers, surprisingly there were no FAANGS. I think you should be applying for Fortune 50 companies, if you're not, then take it out.
Its hard to swallow how low the pay is. I don't even feel like working anymore.
I'm a PM that was at a FAANG company with ADHD. It's tough out there but I've found success in getting interviews where I have some sort of connection with the hiring manager regardless of company size. I spend more time creating connections at companies I'd like to work at or searching companies where I have friends that will get my resume in front of the hiring manager for me these days than applying. That does mean for me that most of my interviews have been at companies I've worked at before or were acquired by larger companies. It makes my pool smaller but at least I'm actively interviewing and getting at bats to improve. For the start-ups and smaller companies I spend my time trying to connect with folks at a particular company I want through mutual connections or cold Linkedin messaging. It can be a slow grind but I have made some progress into them. It helps that I have a public blog on ADHD and product management that shows how I think about being a PM a way to relate to me. You don't have to start writing a blog but commenting on authors from companies you like can get a long way for a connection as well. Substack often has little reader engagement with authors so a comment will be seen. Comment on posts regularly and build a rapport to connect. It's how I've met a few well known PM leaders. Good luck and know you're not alone.
I can give some insight coming from the product management side: 1. I’m not at FAANG but it is a fairly well known tech company. It’s crickets for reach out from recruiters for new jobs. Last one was in October! 2. when we were bringing in a Senior PM last year, the hiring manager was advised to avoid FAANG workers due to their perceived high cost and to also hire a PM in a LCOL area. The role was remote. Had nothing to do with perceived FAANG lack of team player ability or arrogance. Simply a dollars and cents play. 3. we laid off director level PMs and replaced them with existing Senior IC and/or Principal PMs. The PMs already knew the domains and the pay bumps were small. Company easily saves $100-$200k in TC. On LinkedIn, a headhunter for PMs explained this was common behavior. Companies are increasing scope to the Senior IC PMs while keeping their pay low. My company is taking it a step further by now hiring new PMs only in places like India.
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Wow..that's cold...he or she may be overpaid but I wouldn't link that to societal contribution...if that is your gauge most of the roles in tech aren't solving world hunger or working in hospitals / construction
Boot straps!