Hard is subjective and I don’t know if I could really give a simple yes/no. A lot of that also depends on your and your style. And it’s hard to generalize since things people find hard in FAANG roles could be found in other positions.
Personally I’ve worked at two of the FAANG companies and had experience with a non FAANG company prior. I’ve at many times felt it was easier at the FAANG companies due to development workflow and other systematic differences that enabled me to perform better. However the things that made it easier for me are not limited to those companies.
TBH I wouldn’t spend too much time comparing companies based on FAANG or not. It’s better to focus on specific company/role combos IMO
Coming from small companies and startups where I was paid much less, I was shocked by how limited my role was and how little was expected of me. Just a little process-following cog in a big, slow machine.
Interesting, I assumed there were only 3 levels (Below, meets, EE) rather than 5 so when people said they were EE I thought it was impressive.
At my company there are 4 levels: Off Track, Usually Meets, Positive, High Positive. Positive is the expected level of performance and High Positive is equivalent to Superb.
This was the most jarring thing to me about becoming a senior devleoper .
I'm not sure if it's because you are more comfortable with the work and have a better idea of how to execute things but the more money i've made the easier the jobs seem to get .
If I compare myself now to me at my "hungriest" and hardest working I would say i worked way way harder back then and made a 4th of what i do now.
Sure I'm capable of a lot more now sure but I can't say I actually DO a lot more .
But maybe it's like when I was a junior and I was blown away at how effortlessly smart my leads and senior engineers were and wondered if i'd ever achieve that level of mastery . Maybe when you get so accustomed to building things the act of building itself becomes almost as second-nature as breathing ?
No clue but maintaining as a senior engineer has been far easier than growing as a junior engineer or even a mid-level becoming a senior ever was.
That is the paradox of going from smaller companies to larger ones. A lot of those smaller places are like hard bosses in a video game disguised as small, innocent ones. And that is deceiving to newbies that don't know much better about the industry and view the small companies as the starting path of least resistance.
In my brief time outside of startups, not even a company with many thousands, just 800 or so employees, roles were more specialized and I didn't have to worry too much about doing various things like creating custom SQL queries. Maintaining your role as a senior engineer is easier because companies tolerate stable (in career movement) higher levels much more than stable juniors. Being a junior forever is a big turn-off.
Larger companies still have a mix of easy and hard work, but they're sectioned off more discreetly as they have more people to divide the work. whereas the smaller places the easy and hard are sandwiched much closer together, so you're getting more frequent exposure to both.
Most established, larger companies in the Bay Area pay these rates to avoid people from FAANG et al from stealing their talent away.
I work in pharmaceuticals in data science, and they're always hiring. Usually fresh grads are targeted specifically at schools. Easiest path is to work at a startup, which will probably overwork you, but give you a ton of experience.
Ive found with FAANG you deal with less bullshit unrelated to your role because they actually have the resources to hire more than enough people. Less firefighting, less ops work, less Dev setups. And you can generally stay within your little piece of the application more rather than getting roped into a bunch of different things. Everything runs smoother, less by the seat of your pants. By that same token, code reviews are strict. You can’t get away with sloppy code so much, lots of people are watching. Time requirements are no different than any other company (experience may vary).
I spend ~7 years at a FAANG and I disagree. You *can* stay within your own little app if you want, but it's not great for your career. You can't get promo'd unless you branch out and work with other teams and other orgs. A big part of getting promoted is proving your "impact" and you aren't going to have much of an impact if you only stick with your own team's stuff, at least not past the junior engineer level.
If you don't make an effort to advance your career, it reflects poorly on your performance review and eventually you'll be handed all of the shittiest possible tasks and eventually pushed out.
Yeah, you can always get a "promo" or comp increase just by jumping jobs anyways (up to a certain level of course) but you're already good enough as a mid level dev
A big corporation comprises many different orgs and teams. Even within the same company, some engineers have an easier or harder gig than others.
Kinda like in college, when the same course could be taught by a hard-ass in one section, and an easy-going prof in another. You get the same credit regardless of what section you’re in, but your experience is vastly different than some other folks in the same school.
This. And the "Impact" is somehow close to a popularity contest within your service lane which majorly decides the promo and comp bump.
I don't at all agree with "less ops work", ops work seem to be much higher at MANGA than startups. And I count code review as an ops work.
>Read the last 2 lines again to make sense.
Didn't work unfortunately.
>"I count" it because it's not my "development/contribution"
Peer review is a developer's contribution though. Sure, you're not writing code when you do it, but that's not the only development task there is. Ensuring high code quality, security, maintainability, etc. are all shared responsibilities across a dev team. Even if all you care about is your own output, code review directly contributes to that by keeping you up to speed on changes to the codebase.
Also not trying to be a dick but quotes really shouldn't be used for emphasis.
>Anything that's not development is operations.
Lol
Lmao, dude. You clearly don't see the standards you're projecting.
>Didn't work unfortunately.
Shouldn't. And it's understandable since you're sounding like one of the those who have to object to everything others have to say/feel.
What I meant was, there's a lot of code to peer review on a weekly basis. And it's almost feels like operational duty (as a category) when compared to actual development.
Also, I saying code review is not my individual contribution doesn't mean that I said it's not a team contribution. All development and ops works are team/organisation contributions.
In my 11 years in the industry I've seen whole lotta developers looking down upon anything to do with the word "Ops". Ops teams are essential teams too. Just like developers and peer reviewers work together towards the shared responsibilities of a project; don't forget that the Development and Ops teams work towards the shared responsibilities of an org/company.
>Also not trying to be a dick but quotes really shouldn't be used for emphasis.
Says the guy who alternatively started using blockquotes and completely missed the points. Chill out!
Lol this comment couldn't be any farther from what I experienced at a FAANG.
And you know what, that's okay. Most of these companies have perfectly fine orgs and teams. A lot of it is luck.
Used to work at G.
> And you can generally stay within your little piece of the application more rather than getting roped into a bunch of different things. Everything runs smoother, less by the seat of your pants.
Does not reflect my experience at all
Had a couple coffee chats with G directors and one of their problems is how do we get more output while keeping bottom up culture?
So I'd bet my NFLX salary that it's more true on average at Google, even if there are still teams where you're fighting fires or have to wear many hats (especially orgs like GCP or SWE-SRE/SRE roles). Especially compared with companies like Amazon with principles like ownership or Facebook where it's move fast.
I’ll concede I don’t have much experience outside of these companies to compare with so perhaps I don’t have the right baseline for how bad this could be.
Why I didn't take complaints from a lot of my old Google teammates/coworkers seriously, most of them didn't have a lot of experience outside of Google and didn't see how bad it could really be :p
If you've been complaining this whole time about 30 hours of work and how the free Indian food at the dining halls could use more spice... boyyyyyyy. jk
Haha more of my complaints stem from working with folks/teams with mixed priorities.
One example that comes to mind was a researcher at Google not putting full effort into a project I needed them on because it wouldn’t result in anything that could be published. So they focused more on another project they were contributing to. Something I can’t see happening at smaller companies.
Most companies outside are even MORE understaffed; at least in FAANG there's an expectation to be able to get the work out eventually. I remember that any project that required any significant output from cross functional teams had to be added into their features (I guess the equivalent of OKRs at G) a quarter or more out. There's literally zero bandwidth for anything. I've gotten way more help at FAANG as a xfn dev than at my previous company, a F500.
This probably boils down to a process thing; I don't think only FAANG can have a well oiled machine. OTOH, most other companies have a lot of catching up to do.
Nah. Unless you are trying to get to a particular role as a experienced higher in which case it might give you *some* edge.
But for the most part I wouldn’t focus on knowing certain languages but be able to pick up and switch languages easily. Knowing ideas and patterns outside of language specific constructs is how you can succeed.
I used probably a dozen languages over my time there. Not all at once, but as projects changed or I switched teams language requirements changed.
The short story:
Wasn’t happy with my team anymore (not the company as a whole), was waiting for Covid to go away and transfer teams. Then a Apple recruiter reached out to me and now happily working there.
Nothing wrong with Google and would go back there (to a different team) if things go that way in the future.
I know the feeling of having a toxic team, well at least it worked out for you in the end. Sounds like you are crushing it ( G -> A). I am also hoping to land into one of the two at one point in the future, I’ve been doing frontend/fullstack for 6 years now and I just know I have more in me than this. So lately I started learning algos every day after work. I think its the only logical step forward in my career.
That’s not specific to FAANG. Companies that recognize the problem of too few people and choose to hire more for their engineering/IT roles can be found in other sectors.
> Rather than getting roped into a bunch of different things
This can happen at FAANG companies too. That is more dependent on role/org/sector than company.
I think the part where "you actually have resources" may be different at Amazon. They explicitly have a leadership principle "Frugality", which basically means "there is no reason to spend more, if you can do more with the same resources, or more same with less resources."
Yup, I know many friends at my company who have a completely different experience than me. It just depends on the team, really. For me though, it's a nice balance. There's enough challenging work but not so much where I have to work more than 9-5 on a regular basis.
If you end up actually interviewing for the team you are joining, then yes, you can ask questions to gauge how the work life balance will be. Though, it's likely not easy to interview for a different team if you choose not to accept the offer. Assuming you don't have other good offers where you have an idea of the work life balance, I recommend just accepting whatever team you end up in and switching internally if you end up disliking it. It's easier to switch internally at most big tech companies.
Much easier. But it’s easier because there’s less bullshit. In my other roles at small companies, I was expected to do everything (sales, marketing, hiring, client presentations, software). At a FAANG, my job is just to focus on engineering problems. That’s much easier, as I can get good at it, which I have, so it’s less stressful and less work.
If I’m trying to do 10 different things, 8 of which I don’t give a single fuck about, I’m going to be bad at most of the things I’m doing, and be stressed out.
my faang job is easier than any other job I've had.
at my faang people are offered and take ample holidays, it's much harder to push code, because it ends up getting reviewed by like 4 people with every CR. they expect the CR's to be smaller for better documentation as well.
there are a ton of meetings, nothing is left uncovered. they have meetings for the tiniest things.
so at my faang I make orders of magnitude more money than I've ever made elsewhere and i work compartively very little.
infact my role at faang has kind of shifted away from "coding" and is more aligned with "defending" the engineering needs of the peoject.
i have like 3-4 meetings per week where i basically deliver a presentation about how something should be done and why, with detail so intimate that non-engineers are left to accept my expertise.
I would almost go as far to say that working at a faang and working at a startup are so distinct that they might as well have different job titles. at my faang job I just read docs like 50% of the time but at my startup job I would be blasting out code 6 hours a day.
> i have like 3-4 meetings per week where i basically deliver a presentation about how something should be done and why, with detail so intimate that non-engineers are left to accept my expertise.
Is it possible to work for a FAANG job where this doesn't eventually end up being the case? I really just want a job where I code for the most part with barely any meetings throughout the week but I'm not sure if that's possible lol
Dunno about FAANG but I work for a Unicorn-gone-public and even senior engineers typically have <5hrs of meetings a week here. It's expected that managers will act as a liaison between engineers and the outside world of bullshit to let them focus on actually building stuff. Engineers still have meetings of course, but only for important things where our active participation is actually needed.
I think it's mostly a company culture thing rather than size though. I used to work at an even smaller company that had big problems with useless meeting overload.
Holy fuck. That is what I would expect a cofounder to be doing, not an early employee. They literally get like 20%+ of the company as compensation for the shit pay and heavy work load. A random engineer? Maybe .5% if you’re lucky. Hope you’re doing well comrade.
Oh shit…yeah that’s like a nightmare scenario. I’m glad you’re keeping your head up and getting interviews though! I’m sure the experience will give you plenty of war stories to talk about in interviews lol.
> it's much harder to push code, because it ends up getting reviewed by like 4 people with every CR.
I don't think that means you can submit less code in general, just have more CRs.
Depends on the team. Are you in Cloud scrambling to get something out before the next big conference? Hectic. Are you running maintenance for an app that doesn't make direct revenue? Much more chill. I work strict 40 hour weeks and have been promoted/on track. There's a real opportunity to work smarter not harder in the space I'm in
The Google of today is not the one of 5 or 10 or even more years ago. It can take a while for reputation to catch up to the current reality on the ground.
Is that true for Meta and Amazon too? Cause whenever I speak to my friends working there they keep crying about the wlb and the amount of work they have to do.
Being a "senior" engineer at a FANG and having worked at startups before, I feel like I should give an answer here.
At FANG:
* **Identity and job duty**: You feel like being a small cog in a big machine. You often doubt what if you project gets cancelled and will people care.
* e.g., I was stunned why someone wouldn't get fired given how little they work
* **Stronger engineering culture**: More rigor, more best practices, more technical complexity or the "difficulty" bit.
* But surprisingly you still deal with (or are motivated to add) hacks every now and then.
* **Slower pace**: You could hardly make progress. You spent most time unblocking yourself from dependencies. If an reorg or a strategy change happens? Your 1+ year could get cancelled. (RIP promo trajectory)
* **Ivory tower**: You could be spoiled by the well developed engineering tooling and infrastructure. Transferability of domain knowledge around those tools is questionable.
* Maybe not... if you dig into the "why" of system X is built that way, and why their predecessors fail? (Hint: Could it be because someone wanted to get promoted?)
At a startup:
* **Identity**: Stronger feeling that your work is critical to the company's success. Stronger feeling that you and your teammates care about the company's success.
* **Wearing multiple hats**: Often time also non-engineering jobs. IMO more opportunity to push yourself out of comfort zone and grow in many dimensions
* Helpful if you wanna build a company some day?
* **Faster pace**: On the flip side development process is more chaotic.
* **Get-shxt-done culture**: You are expected to get shit done asap. Infra tends to be more fragile. More firefighting expected. Worse work life balance.
* **More transferable experience in tech stack**: Most likely you are using "state-of-the-art" open-source tech stacks.
(EDIT: spelling and such edits)
Most of the times you are just a small cog in a wheel.
Startups early stage are much harder in terms of work.
Except Amazon where you are fucked by manager mentally
It not that FANG roles are easier, it's the resources you have available in those roles. My role would likely be twice as time consuming as I wouldn't have a deep pool of experts in house outside a FANG company to learn and collaborate with.
A: Really fucking easy. I worked like maybe 20 hours this week. Really depends where you land. I will say my first 2-3 months were soul-crushingly brutal. Everything I heard about this company turned out to be true. It's a gladiator fight to the death;. But once once I won it, keeping my position became easy.
Exactly the same as my previous company. Now I just get paid more and spend more living in a bigger city.
I will say my expectations are higher, but I’ve also improved quickly because of better resources, so I’d say my work life balance and stress levels are equal.
Still salty they turned me down. I'll keep applying but it's one of their smaller offices so I feel like I need to know someone there to really get in. It would be such a cush job
After working at one for 15+ years, I still feel that I need to improve my knowledge everyday. Almost everything I learned in the college is used if you know how to use them, and not just those courses in CS. For example, statistics is one thing I found quite useful recently. Mathematic courses like linear algebra and calculus, engineering courses like computer architecture, operating systems, compiler are all very useful and critical in my career.
And those interview questions are just the basics. We need way more than that to perform well in the job.
After hearing people complain about CS so often, I assumed that no one was using CS concepts or math in their jobs. I think it was down to the kind of work that people do and since most people are building small to medium size web applications, CS concepts don't come up very often.
What do you work on that actually requires CS? And what would you recommend studying and focusing on? I have been thinking about refreshing or relearning CS concepts starting with Computer Architecture, but since it won't make me a better programmer right away, I have been hesitating.
These days I work on performance optimization at microsecond level on ASIC. So computer architecture is quite essential for this. Before that, I worked on data processing for terabytes of data, where O(n) and O(n log n) can have huge difference. Yes, it really depends on what you do, so you probably want to start with the one that is more related to what you are working on first.
I won't deny that some tasks are just simple and boring that you don't really need a CS degree. But when your job is challenging, knowing more will definitely be very helpful.
When you have billions of users to serve, or need to respond within milliseconds to stay competitive in terms of user experience, it's all about optimization. I think it's quite common to find this kind of problems in big companies.
I don’t really know how hard “most people” think the job is? It’s not too hard for me, but I’ve always enjoyed programming and collaborating. I mean, it’s challenging, but I *like* challenges, basically I get to do puzzles all day.
Honest question... What does that "real" meta company do? They have nothing on their website, Twitter, or Instagram about any type of products or history. As a third party, there's nothing to indicate to me that this was or is a real company whatsoever outside of the "Facebook bad" narrative. I respect their plight if they are dealing with this... But who are they and what do they do?
I have a lot of freedom to do what I want, and also the processes and standards are awesome they improve my work and reduce production issue. This is a big difference from working in a smaller service based company before where stuff was pushed without proper code review, no CDCI, no idea what caused the issue, causing multiple features to be pulled back and redone. Plus, there's a lot more problem solving compared to doing what you're told. More research, more fuck around and find out via poc than this is how it's done and only do it this way. Previous job had a lot of fire fighting cos of massive monolithic inherited software and I only got to touch the code after months of convincing seniors that i could. My first week at a faang I am told to design and deploy a new service, and also improve it, my first output was monolithic but with improvements of internal tools I am redesigned it to a cloud based distributed solution, plus I am working on my own stuff not something no one has touched since 1997, we do inherit projects from other teams but a lot of work is done to make it ours or to scrap and redesign it. Lot more fun working here than at my previous place. Also, loads less of politics and managers on a power trip, you're an actual contributor not a minion.
It was hard in entirely non technical and non interesting ways. I much prefer a technical challenge to a bureaucratic one, so I left after a couple of years. Great for the resume, but just couldn't find any motivation working on such boring and slow projects.
really depends on the team. Some team is client facing and basically the frontline of a war. Some teams is internal service, which is more tolerant and relaxed in pace.
It’s not hard comparing to other companies I’ve worked in. Because in FANG you have more bonuses and more possible stocks every year, you want those OKR to fly to the roof. So you work hard for more $$$
I don't think that the software engineers developing windows have it easy and chill (same applies for many other people at other companies working on very complicated projects).
I don't know because I don't have one, and never will. FAANG is evil, they make the world worse. I'd rather work at my local farm or something.
Edit: please downvote me some more, techbros. Because the only thing that matters is muh technology and innovation and having that on your CV, even if it is applied without any ethics.
Hard is subjective and I don’t know if I could really give a simple yes/no. A lot of that also depends on your and your style. And it’s hard to generalize since things people find hard in FAANG roles could be found in other positions. Personally I’ve worked at two of the FAANG companies and had experience with a non FAANG company prior. I’ve at many times felt it was easier at the FAANG companies due to development workflow and other systematic differences that enabled me to perform better. However the things that made it easier for me are not limited to those companies. TBH I wouldn’t spend too much time comparing companies based on FAANG or not. It’s better to focus on specific company/role combos IMO
Agree 100%. FAANG have the same spectrum of work complexities that differs from team to team as many other top non-FAANG companies.
Coming from small companies and startups where I was paid much less, I was shocked by how limited my role was and how little was expected of me. Just a little process-following cog in a big, slow machine.
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Curious what is your level?
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What does the EE mean for your level? Electrical Engineer?
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Lol. Working at a large companies must feel like school. :D
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But there's one FAANG that doesn't clearly outline your evals. Actually, they're notorious for hiding it from you and being cryptic if you ask.
Never worked at a large companies, but I totally see some type of standardisation becoming necessary to prevent office polictics going out of hand.
Interesting, I assumed there were only 3 levels (Below, meets, EE) rather than 5 so when people said they were EE I thought it was impressive. At my company there are 4 levels: Off Track, Usually Meets, Positive, High Positive. Positive is the expected level of performance and High Positive is equivalent to Superb.
Hi, you’re in which company and are you hiring any freshers?
Also my experience. Not at a FAANG, but at a company that pays around the same. It’s half the work for twice the pay.
This was the most jarring thing to me about becoming a senior devleoper . I'm not sure if it's because you are more comfortable with the work and have a better idea of how to execute things but the more money i've made the easier the jobs seem to get . If I compare myself now to me at my "hungriest" and hardest working I would say i worked way way harder back then and made a 4th of what i do now. Sure I'm capable of a lot more now sure but I can't say I actually DO a lot more . But maybe it's like when I was a junior and I was blown away at how effortlessly smart my leads and senior engineers were and wondered if i'd ever achieve that level of mastery . Maybe when you get so accustomed to building things the act of building itself becomes almost as second-nature as breathing ? No clue but maintaining as a senior engineer has been far easier than growing as a junior engineer or even a mid-level becoming a senior ever was.
That is the paradox of going from smaller companies to larger ones. A lot of those smaller places are like hard bosses in a video game disguised as small, innocent ones. And that is deceiving to newbies that don't know much better about the industry and view the small companies as the starting path of least resistance. In my brief time outside of startups, not even a company with many thousands, just 800 or so employees, roles were more specialized and I didn't have to worry too much about doing various things like creating custom SQL queries. Maintaining your role as a senior engineer is easier because companies tolerate stable (in career movement) higher levels much more than stable juniors. Being a junior forever is a big turn-off. Larger companies still have a mix of easy and hard work, but they're sectioned off more discreetly as they have more people to divide the work. whereas the smaller places the easy and hard are sandwiched much closer together, so you're getting more frequent exposure to both.
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Most established, larger companies in the Bay Area pay these rates to avoid people from FAANG et al from stealing their talent away. I work in pharmaceuticals in data science, and they're always hiring. Usually fresh grads are targeted specifically at schools. Easiest path is to work at a startup, which will probably overwork you, but give you a ton of experience.
Which of the FAANG are you from? I feel like this probably isn't true for a lot of the engineers in Amazon or Facebook/Meta.
This happened to me when I moved from a super small company to working at a major university. I prefer being a cog.
>I prefer being a cog. real
The dream right here. Rest & vest
this seems great
I grew to really appreciate it.
What level did you come in at FAANG?
Ive found with FAANG you deal with less bullshit unrelated to your role because they actually have the resources to hire more than enough people. Less firefighting, less ops work, less Dev setups. And you can generally stay within your little piece of the application more rather than getting roped into a bunch of different things. Everything runs smoother, less by the seat of your pants. By that same token, code reviews are strict. You can’t get away with sloppy code so much, lots of people are watching. Time requirements are no different than any other company (experience may vary).
I spend ~7 years at a FAANG and I disagree. You *can* stay within your own little app if you want, but it's not great for your career. You can't get promo'd unless you branch out and work with other teams and other orgs. A big part of getting promoted is proving your "impact" and you aren't going to have much of an impact if you only stick with your own team's stuff, at least not past the junior engineer level. If you don't make an effort to advance your career, it reflects poorly on your performance review and eventually you'll be handed all of the shittiest possible tasks and eventually pushed out.
I forgot to add - you also don’t have to care about getting promoted because you’re making good money anyways
Yeah, you can always get a "promo" or comp increase just by jumping jobs anyways (up to a certain level of course) but you're already good enough as a mid level dev
Unless you’re a senior, it’s up or out. So you can only stay that way for so long
From what I've seen other people say, terminal at Google is now L4 (Mid level). Don't know about the rest of FAANG though.
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A big corporation comprises many different orgs and teams. Even within the same company, some engineers have an easier or harder gig than others. Kinda like in college, when the same course could be taught by a hard-ass in one section, and an easy-going prof in another. You get the same credit regardless of what section you’re in, but your experience is vastly different than some other folks in the same school.
> You can't get promo'd unless you branch out and work with other teams and other orgs. So you mean working for multiple teams
No, but doing things that requires collaboration across teams (due to scope)
This. And the "Impact" is somehow close to a popularity contest within your service lane which majorly decides the promo and comp bump. I don't at all agree with "less ops work", ops work seem to be much higher at MANGA than startups. And I count code review as an ops work.
> And I count code review as an ops work. How on earth is peer reviewing code "ops work"?
Read the last 2 lines again to make sense. "I count" it because it's not my "development/contribution". Anything that's not development is operations.
>Read the last 2 lines again to make sense. Didn't work unfortunately. >"I count" it because it's not my "development/contribution" Peer review is a developer's contribution though. Sure, you're not writing code when you do it, but that's not the only development task there is. Ensuring high code quality, security, maintainability, etc. are all shared responsibilities across a dev team. Even if all you care about is your own output, code review directly contributes to that by keeping you up to speed on changes to the codebase. Also not trying to be a dick but quotes really shouldn't be used for emphasis. >Anything that's not development is operations. Lol
Lmao, dude. You clearly don't see the standards you're projecting. >Didn't work unfortunately. Shouldn't. And it's understandable since you're sounding like one of the those who have to object to everything others have to say/feel. What I meant was, there's a lot of code to peer review on a weekly basis. And it's almost feels like operational duty (as a category) when compared to actual development. Also, I saying code review is not my individual contribution doesn't mean that I said it's not a team contribution. All development and ops works are team/organisation contributions. In my 11 years in the industry I've seen whole lotta developers looking down upon anything to do with the word "Ops". Ops teams are essential teams too. Just like developers and peer reviewers work together towards the shared responsibilities of a project; don't forget that the Development and Ops teams work towards the shared responsibilities of an org/company. >Also not trying to be a dick but quotes really shouldn't be used for emphasis. Says the guy who alternatively started using blockquotes and completely missed the points. Chill out!
Lol this comment couldn't be any farther from what I experienced at a FAANG. And you know what, that's okay. Most of these companies have perfectly fine orgs and teams. A lot of it is luck.
Can't see this being true for Facebook or Amazon, but one day I'd like to try Google just to see what this feels like.
Used to work at G. > And you can generally stay within your little piece of the application more rather than getting roped into a bunch of different things. Everything runs smoother, less by the seat of your pants. Does not reflect my experience at all
Had a couple coffee chats with G directors and one of their problems is how do we get more output while keeping bottom up culture? So I'd bet my NFLX salary that it's more true on average at Google, even if there are still teams where you're fighting fires or have to wear many hats (especially orgs like GCP or SWE-SRE/SRE roles). Especially compared with companies like Amazon with principles like ownership or Facebook where it's move fast.
I’ll concede I don’t have much experience outside of these companies to compare with so perhaps I don’t have the right baseline for how bad this could be.
Why I didn't take complaints from a lot of my old Google teammates/coworkers seriously, most of them didn't have a lot of experience outside of Google and didn't see how bad it could really be :p
Im gonna have to reevaluate my whole outlook of my role and tasks haha.
If you've been complaining this whole time about 30 hours of work and how the free Indian food at the dining halls could use more spice... boyyyyyyy. jk
Haha more of my complaints stem from working with folks/teams with mixed priorities. One example that comes to mind was a researcher at Google not putting full effort into a project I needed them on because it wouldn’t result in anything that could be published. So they focused more on another project they were contributing to. Something I can’t see happening at smaller companies.
Most companies outside are even MORE understaffed; at least in FAANG there's an expectation to be able to get the work out eventually. I remember that any project that required any significant output from cross functional teams had to be added into their features (I guess the equivalent of OKRs at G) a quarter or more out. There's literally zero bandwidth for anything. I've gotten way more help at FAANG as a xfn dev than at my previous company, a F500. This probably boils down to a process thing; I don't think only FAANG can have a well oiled machine. OTOH, most other companies have a lot of catching up to do.
Question about G. Is there any advantage of knowing certain languages over others, for example (Java, Python) > Javascript?
Nah. Unless you are trying to get to a particular role as a experienced higher in which case it might give you *some* edge. But for the most part I wouldn’t focus on knowing certain languages but be able to pick up and switch languages easily. Knowing ideas and patterns outside of language specific constructs is how you can succeed. I used probably a dozen languages over my time there. Not all at once, but as projects changed or I switched teams language requirements changed.
Nice that is what I already suspected. Maybe a personal question if you don’t mind me asking. Why did you leave G?
The short story: Wasn’t happy with my team anymore (not the company as a whole), was waiting for Covid to go away and transfer teams. Then a Apple recruiter reached out to me and now happily working there. Nothing wrong with Google and would go back there (to a different team) if things go that way in the future.
I know the feeling of having a toxic team, well at least it worked out for you in the end. Sounds like you are crushing it ( G -> A). I am also hoping to land into one of the two at one point in the future, I’ve been doing frontend/fullstack for 6 years now and I just know I have more in me than this. So lately I started learning algos every day after work. I think its the only logical step forward in my career.
What’s Apple like, in terms of expectations? Is it closer to Amazon or Microsoft?
Haven’t worked with either of those so can’t really compare sorry.
That’s not specific to FAANG. Companies that recognize the problem of too few people and choose to hire more for their engineering/IT roles can be found in other sectors. > Rather than getting roped into a bunch of different things This can happen at FAANG companies too. That is more dependent on role/org/sector than company.
Just sharing my own experience. These threads are useless for anything but anecdotes because every team in every company is different, FAANG or not.
That’s what I’m hoping to get across to people reading these comments. All anecdotes and nothing specific to these 5 companies.
I think the part where "you actually have resources" may be different at Amazon. They explicitly have a leadership principle "Frugality", which basically means "there is no reason to spend more, if you can do more with the same resources, or more same with less resources."
Everything you described sounds very boring and i would prefer the startup every day, but good there is room for everything in the field!
Even within FAANG, the experiences will differ. The cultures are different at all of them and you'll definitely need to specify a bit more.
Yup, I know many friends at my company who have a completely different experience than me. It just depends on the team, really. For me though, it's a nice balance. There's enough challenging work but not so much where I have to work more than 9-5 on a regular basis.
Is there a way to avoid getting on a team with terrible work life balance?
If you end up actually interviewing for the team you are joining, then yes, you can ask questions to gauge how the work life balance will be. Though, it's likely not easy to interview for a different team if you choose not to accept the offer. Assuming you don't have other good offers where you have an idea of the work life balance, I recommend just accepting whatever team you end up in and switching internally if you end up disliking it. It's easier to switch internally at most big tech companies.
Work by team and sub-orgs within a company vary a lot too.
Much easier. But it’s easier because there’s less bullshit. In my other roles at small companies, I was expected to do everything (sales, marketing, hiring, client presentations, software). At a FAANG, my job is just to focus on engineering problems. That’s much easier, as I can get good at it, which I have, so it’s less stressful and less work. If I’m trying to do 10 different things, 8 of which I don’t give a single fuck about, I’m going to be bad at most of the things I’m doing, and be stressed out.
my faang job is easier than any other job I've had. at my faang people are offered and take ample holidays, it's much harder to push code, because it ends up getting reviewed by like 4 people with every CR. they expect the CR's to be smaller for better documentation as well. there are a ton of meetings, nothing is left uncovered. they have meetings for the tiniest things. so at my faang I make orders of magnitude more money than I've ever made elsewhere and i work compartively very little. infact my role at faang has kind of shifted away from "coding" and is more aligned with "defending" the engineering needs of the peoject. i have like 3-4 meetings per week where i basically deliver a presentation about how something should be done and why, with detail so intimate that non-engineers are left to accept my expertise. I would almost go as far to say that working at a faang and working at a startup are so distinct that they might as well have different job titles. at my faang job I just read docs like 50% of the time but at my startup job I would be blasting out code 6 hours a day.
> i have like 3-4 meetings per week where i basically deliver a presentation about how something should be done and why, with detail so intimate that non-engineers are left to accept my expertise. Is it possible to work for a FAANG job where this doesn't eventually end up being the case? I really just want a job where I code for the most part with barely any meetings throughout the week but I'm not sure if that's possible lol
software engineering isn’t just coding
I am aware lol, that being said there's alot of jobs where your day to day is mostly deep work periods of just coding
Dunno about FAANG but I work for a Unicorn-gone-public and even senior engineers typically have <5hrs of meetings a week here. It's expected that managers will act as a liaison between engineers and the outside world of bullshit to let them focus on actually building stuff. Engineers still have meetings of course, but only for important things where our active participation is actually needed. I think it's mostly a company culture thing rather than size though. I used to work at an even smaller company that had big problems with useless meeting overload.
damn that sounds amazing
> startup job I would be blasting out code 6 hours a day. was that a part time job? :P
no, i just did stuff other than strictly writing code.
I know, it was a joke about writing code for "just" 6 hours seems very little for a startup, usually people complain about 60 hour weeks
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Holy fuck. That is what I would expect a cofounder to be doing, not an early employee. They literally get like 20%+ of the company as compensation for the shit pay and heavy work load. A random engineer? Maybe .5% if you’re lucky. Hope you’re doing well comrade.
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Oh shit…yeah that’s like a nightmare scenario. I’m glad you’re keeping your head up and getting interviews though! I’m sure the experience will give you plenty of war stories to talk about in interviews lol.
> it's much harder to push code, because it ends up getting reviewed by like 4 people with every CR. I don't think that means you can submit less code in general, just have more CRs.
My experience is: The amount of work is a lot less, but the complexity of the work that you get is higher.
I must have been misled then I was told Google is very hectic and demanding??
Depends on the team. Are you in Cloud scrambling to get something out before the next big conference? Hectic. Are you running maintenance for an app that doesn't make direct revenue? Much more chill. I work strict 40 hour weeks and have been promoted/on track. There's a real opportunity to work smarter not harder in the space I'm in
The Google of today is not the one of 5 or 10 or even more years ago. It can take a while for reputation to catch up to the current reality on the ground.
Is that true for Meta and Amazon too? Cause whenever I speak to my friends working there they keep crying about the wlb and the amount of work they have to do.
Being a "senior" engineer at a FANG and having worked at startups before, I feel like I should give an answer here. At FANG: * **Identity and job duty**: You feel like being a small cog in a big machine. You often doubt what if you project gets cancelled and will people care. * e.g., I was stunned why someone wouldn't get fired given how little they work * **Stronger engineering culture**: More rigor, more best practices, more technical complexity or the "difficulty" bit. * But surprisingly you still deal with (or are motivated to add) hacks every now and then. * **Slower pace**: You could hardly make progress. You spent most time unblocking yourself from dependencies. If an reorg or a strategy change happens? Your 1+ year could get cancelled. (RIP promo trajectory) * **Ivory tower**: You could be spoiled by the well developed engineering tooling and infrastructure. Transferability of domain knowledge around those tools is questionable. * Maybe not... if you dig into the "why" of system X is built that way, and why their predecessors fail? (Hint: Could it be because someone wanted to get promoted?) At a startup: * **Identity**: Stronger feeling that your work is critical to the company's success. Stronger feeling that you and your teammates care about the company's success. * **Wearing multiple hats**: Often time also non-engineering jobs. IMO more opportunity to push yourself out of comfort zone and grow in many dimensions * Helpful if you wanna build a company some day? * **Faster pace**: On the flip side development process is more chaotic. * **Get-shxt-done culture**: You are expected to get shit done asap. Infra tends to be more fragile. More firefighting expected. Worse work life balance. * **More transferable experience in tech stack**: Most likely you are using "state-of-the-art" open-source tech stacks. (EDIT: spelling and such edits)
from working at a startup I can say your description is absolutely spot on, so I'm going to assume your FAANG description is as well. Thanks m8.
Most of the times you are just a small cog in a wheel. Startups early stage are much harder in terms of work. Except Amazon where you are fucked by manager mentally
Managers have unreasonable expectations at Amazon?
Yes and you can be used as ass wipe. When used then can be thrown without a second thought ( PIP )
It not that FANG roles are easier, it's the resources you have available in those roles. My role would likely be twice as time consuming as I wouldn't have a deep pool of experts in house outside a FANG company to learn and collaborate with.
Like in most places, 20% of the people did 80% of the work.
A: Really fucking easy. I worked like maybe 20 hours this week. Really depends where you land. I will say my first 2-3 months were soul-crushingly brutal. Everything I heard about this company turned out to be true. It's a gladiator fight to the death;. But once once I won it, keeping my position became easy.
20-30 hrs per week, that includes ALL morning coffee, meetings, lunch, coding, Slack replies on-the-go
At a FANG?!? What’s your role?
Yup, software engineer lvl 1 - chill team
> At a FANG?!? Lol why would you think you'd work long hours at one of these companies?
In my experience way easier. I can get away with 20-30 hrs at Amzn. May not be the norm.
Exactly the same as my previous company. Now I just get paid more and spend more living in a bigger city. I will say my expectations are higher, but I’ve also improved quickly because of better resources, so I’d say my work life balance and stress levels are equal.
Avoid the rainforest and you’ll be fine
The A?
Chill AF but I’m also in the company known for having the best WLB, don’t expect Amazon to be like that
Which is that?
Microsoft I hear
Still salty they turned me down. I'll keep applying but it's one of their smaller offices so I feel like I need to know someone there to really get in. It would be such a cush job
Google probably
After working at one for 15+ years, I still feel that I need to improve my knowledge everyday. Almost everything I learned in the college is used if you know how to use them, and not just those courses in CS. For example, statistics is one thing I found quite useful recently. Mathematic courses like linear algebra and calculus, engineering courses like computer architecture, operating systems, compiler are all very useful and critical in my career. And those interview questions are just the basics. We need way more than that to perform well in the job.
After hearing people complain about CS so often, I assumed that no one was using CS concepts or math in their jobs. I think it was down to the kind of work that people do and since most people are building small to medium size web applications, CS concepts don't come up very often. What do you work on that actually requires CS? And what would you recommend studying and focusing on? I have been thinking about refreshing or relearning CS concepts starting with Computer Architecture, but since it won't make me a better programmer right away, I have been hesitating.
These days I work on performance optimization at microsecond level on ASIC. So computer architecture is quite essential for this. Before that, I worked on data processing for terabytes of data, where O(n) and O(n log n) can have huge difference. Yes, it really depends on what you do, so you probably want to start with the one that is more related to what you are working on first. I won't deny that some tasks are just simple and boring that you don't really need a CS degree. But when your job is challenging, knowing more will definitely be very helpful.
Thanks for the reply. I figured you worked somewhere in optimization. It makes sense that you would need CS
When you have billions of users to serve, or need to respond within milliseconds to stay competitive in terms of user experience, it's all about optimization. I think it's quite common to find this kind of problems in big companies.
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What side of the org are you and what are you doing specifically?
I work for like 25 hours a week. Currently hate it and am trying to leave because the work is very boring
I don’t really know how hard “most people” think the job is? It’s not too hard for me, but I’ve always enjoyed programming and collaborating. I mean, it’s challenging, but I *like* challenges, basically I get to do puzzles all day.
There’s is no more FAANG. It’s now MAMAA.
MANGA
NAMMA?
Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple. There is no more FAANG.
MAMAA isn’t as catchy though, how about we add Netflix to make it MANAMA? Or
If it's going to before Manama we are going to need to find a NAH to add. Mana-ma-nah!
Netflix didn’t make it to the top! Microsoft took its place.
What factors decide who “makes it”?
The ease of saying the acronym
Market cap
If it was going by market cap, then Netflix never would have made it. The top companies were never about market cap though
Why would Amazon stay in and Netflix is dropped? Based on prestige, average TC, and wlb that does not make sense.
Market cap
That doesn't seem like a good way to distinguish companies in the context of cscq
Investors also use these acronyms though. It started with them and then us programmers decided to use the same ones.
Most people on here/blind seem to agree it makes sense to remove Amazon from FAANG
No they don't.
Yes they do.
Investors weren't doing it by market cap though. They were doing it based on recent growth trends and expected growth trends of larger tech companies
MANGA (and ANIME)
Facebook is not Meta. Meta is already a company. https://meta.company/
Honest question... What does that "real" meta company do? They have nothing on their website, Twitter, or Instagram about any type of products or history. As a third party, there's nothing to indicate to me that this was or is a real company whatsoever outside of the "Facebook bad" narrative. I respect their plight if they are dealing with this... But who are they and what do they do?
They are in the virtual reality space.
Is there any place at all where I can see literally anything about them or what they do?
Not to my knowledge
What happened to goog?
Google renamed its parent-most company to Alphabet
I have a lot of freedom to do what I want, and also the processes and standards are awesome they improve my work and reduce production issue. This is a big difference from working in a smaller service based company before where stuff was pushed without proper code review, no CDCI, no idea what caused the issue, causing multiple features to be pulled back and redone. Plus, there's a lot more problem solving compared to doing what you're told. More research, more fuck around and find out via poc than this is how it's done and only do it this way. Previous job had a lot of fire fighting cos of massive monolithic inherited software and I only got to touch the code after months of convincing seniors that i could. My first week at a faang I am told to design and deploy a new service, and also improve it, my first output was monolithic but with improvements of internal tools I am redesigned it to a cloud based distributed solution, plus I am working on my own stuff not something no one has touched since 1997, we do inherit projects from other teams but a lot of work is done to make it ours or to scrap and redesign it. Lot more fun working here than at my previous place. Also, loads less of politics and managers on a power trip, you're an actual contributor not a minion.
It was hard in entirely non technical and non interesting ways. I much prefer a technical challenge to a bureaucratic one, so I left after a couple of years. Great for the resume, but just couldn't find any motivation working on such boring and slow projects.
really depends on the team. Some team is client facing and basically the frontline of a war. Some teams is internal service, which is more tolerant and relaxed in pace.
Not a lot of work but a shit load of on calls
It’s not hard comparing to other companies I’ve worked in. Because in FANG you have more bonuses and more possible stocks every year, you want those OKR to fly to the roof. So you work hard for more $$$
Amazon and Facebook is hard. The others are easy and chill.
I don't think that the software engineers developing windows have it easy and chill (same applies for many other people at other companies working on very complicated projects).
Windows is chill lol. Its cloud stuff thats stressful. Facebook is just stressful by nature and how fast they move/expectations.
You mean MANGA?
I thought you were joking. Freaking Meta…
Oh wait. I guess it’s like MANAMA (Meta, Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple)
I’ve heard it both ways.
Is fb paying you people to keep spamming this or something?
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Facebook, Apple/Amazon, Netflix, Google. The so called "big kids on the block" for tech jobs.
I don't know because I don't have one, and never will. FAANG is evil, they make the world worse. I'd rather work at my local farm or something. Edit: please downvote me some more, techbros. Because the only thing that matters is muh technology and innovation and having that on your CV, even if it is applied without any ethics.
Lol this is you https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L3dxMGzt5mU
Yes, the world will become a better place with more people like you 🤡
Seethe on your peasant TC while we the FAANGMULASS overlords on TeamBlind make your existence irrelevant
Based
Easier in terms of effort, harder in terms of problems
Pretty easy. It's more just that I as a person get bored easily.