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Ask HN: Ex-FAANG developers, where are you now and why?
- romed 8y agoRetired after 8 years as a Staff SWE at Google. Do I really need a why for retired?
- sjg007 8y agoSure! You could've kept working! Why did you retire?
- drewg123 8y agoI'm guessing "because he could". 8 years of L6 at Google should set you up for life if you move to a moderate cost area of the country.
- tinktank 8y agoWhat's the net worth of an L6 for 8 years at Google?
- jjasghar 8y agohttps://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Staff-Software-Engineer-L6-Salaries-E9079_D_KO7,33.htm https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Google-Staff-Software-Engin...
- romed 8y agoI'm pretty sure glassdoor is a conspiracy by FAANG executives to confuse their employees. If you believe these numbers you will not be able to get what you deserve when negotiating comp at these companies.
- Zaheer 8y agoI helped make https://www.Levels.fyi https://www.Levels.fyi - a lot of folks reference our site as being the most accurate for FANG compensation. I would also check PayScale, Paysa, Blind, etc
- romed 8y agoVery nice. Your numbers are consistent with my experience, and the presentation is very useful.
- madeuptempacct 8y agoI have never had Glassdoor give a useful estimate of any job I had, including those at major companies.
- oblio 8y agoSince from what I hear a fresh grad in the Bay Area gets $100k+ just in cash, we could extrapolate. I'm guessing that's at least $150k (probably more like $200k+ in today's market) in total compensation for year. Add about $20k+ in cash and probably the close to the same in Google shares per level, that would make it easily $400k per year. So he would have gotten $3.2 million, I can't imagine his expenses being higher than half of that, so he should be worth $1.6 million after 8 years. Probably more. I'm curious how off my estimations are :)
- mywittyname 8y agoAlso, if he was in Mountain View, it's likely that he owned a home and that contributed a bit. The tech sector stock growth has been amazing/unprecedented over that time period. His first few years of stock grants have tripled or more in value. I'm betting it's something like $2.6mm. $1.5mm in saved income, $0.8 in stock appreciation on savings, and $0.3 in housing/misc.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago...are you assuming a 0% tax rate?
- rpcastagna 8y agoYou're so low it's actually kind of uncomfortable.
- oblio 8y agothausamiote thinks I’m at the other end of the spectrum because I forgot taxes :o)
- exhaze 8y agoOther estimates in the thread (and Glassdoor) for annual TC are way off. L6 at G is a big range - 350-700k. Hard to say how much the guy made, because it depends on how much stock he kept vs. sold throughout the years, so I'll do a range. Let's assume he worked from 2010-2018: Average TC: $450k - $850k Post-tax: $270k - $470k Annual expenses: $60k - $120k Savings: $1.2m - $3.3m Obviously this is a gross simplification, since it ignores other investments and makes pretty broad assumptions about their expenses, but it should give you the broad strokes.
- romed 8y agoExactly. Now some other slob with a job has to pay to feed my family just because I can afford to buy a house and he can’t. The American way. The only practical problem with this scheme is the cost of private medical insurance is astronomical for someone who retires before Medicare age. So I might get some kind of token job just to get group health plan.
- throwaway5250 8y agoDon't understand first sentence. Are you saying you bought a house and rent it out?
- thrwthrwthrwy 8y agoWhat advice do you have for junior developers trying to make it? Is there a niched area you specialized in or were you a generalist?
- romed 8y agoHow about: don't believe in yourself because luck is everything? I walked into Google with 15 years of industry experience. I lucked out being in the early days of the web, lucked out in the dot-com boom, lucked out with a referral to Google, lucked out with real estate appreciation.
- thrwthrwthrwy 8y agoThat is quite amazing. Thanks for the response!
- mtnGoat 8y agogot to appreciate the honesty! i've seen some peers whom i felt really sucked at tech rise through what appeared to be luck alone.
- jmillikin 8y agoAnother ex-Googler. I worked there as an SRE for six years, then left due to lack of career advancement opportunities[0]. Currently I work at Stripe, which is less capable on some narrow technical metrics but a far more pleasant environment. Stripe is hiring. We list open positions at https://stripe.com/jobs#openings https://stripe.com/jobs#openings. Email me at jmillikin@stripe.com if you'd like to hear more about the engineering work here. --- Good differences: * It's about 70x smaller than Google (100x smaller when I joined a year ago). My CEO knows engineers by name, knows generally what we're working on, and occasionally DMs us congratulations on especially interesting blog posts (hello Patrick!). The effects of your work (good and bad) are obvious, and people know who's doing what. I'm not sure if there's a "monkeysphere" equivalent for engineers, but in Infra at least we've not yet reached the limit. * More transparent. Private companies have fewer restrictions on what business metrics they're allowed to share with non-executive employees, and people here are enthusiastic about sharing both (1) what's going well and (2) what could be done better. * A general feeling of optimism and cheer that is absent at Google. We don't end up in the news for easily avoided own-goals that employees protested for months before they hit the public. * The business model (supporting business growth across the globe, and scraping a bit off the top) is directly coupled to the success of our customers. At Google there's always a thought in the back of your mind that the people using the product are in conflict with the people generating revenue. At Stripe we're in partnership with our customers, working against people who are not customers (i.e. fraudsters). * Much more support for remote work. I live in the Bay Area and am planning to go remote some time in the next six months. I don't think this would have been possible at Google, which is focused on offices and especially focused on "main campus" (Mountain View). --- Bad differences: * We use third-party open-source code more than Google does, and the average quality of open-source code is far lower than internal Google code[1]. I've reported critical crashing bugs upstream and gotten nothing but [tumbleweed noises]. At Google I once reported a bug in the getopt() equivalent, and it was personally fixed by Sanjay. * Fewer engineers mean non-critical bugs in internal tools sometimes don't get fixed. We just don't have time. I've seen more JS stack traces on .corp pages in the last three months then during my entire Google tenure. * Hiring engineers away from different companies (instead of entire cohorts fresh out of school) can lead to cultural conflict around dev velocity vs reliability. Obviously as an ex-Googler and an SRE I'm double-biased toward reliability, but folks with other backgrounds feel differently and there can be some difficult conversations there. --- Overall I'm very happy with the outcome of leaving Google. I attribute most of this to Stripe itself. It turns out I got lucky, and things could have gone much worse (company full of ex-startup engineers = campfire horror stories all day long). --- [0] During my last perf cycle, my manager's manager told me "senior engineers don't implement, they write design docs. Implementation is just code writing". Either he was wrong (and I was now stuck under someone who believed my chosen career was low-skill + not valuable), or correct (and I was in a comapany that believed same). Either way, the situation was clearly undesirable. [1] External Google code is also lower-quality than internal Google code, which shocked me. I've found memory errors in protobuf (https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/3752 https://github.com/protocolbuffers/protobuf/issues/3752), all sorts of wacky stuff in Bazel, and every day I wonder why go-protobuf doesn't have DynamicMessage yet.
- q3k 8y agoFreelancing and consulting. It's fun, pays decently well and is fully remote. Left Google SRE because of how mentally draining it was, how draconian the IP clauses were (everything you create belongs to Google!), and how generally I didn't see a future for myself there.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jpic 8y agoEven something you create in the weekend belongs to google when you are in contract with them ?
- q3k 8y agoYes. At least according to their contract in Ireland (and other locations, from what I've asked).
- soVeryTired 8y agoHas that ever been tested in court? Sounds a bit too draconian to me (but then IANAL).
- q3k 8y agoNot from what I researched. But then again, would you like to go to court against Google lawyers? I wouldn't.
- microtherion 8y agoSome good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2208056 Bottom line is that at least in California, employees theoretically have the right to IP developed in their own time on their own hardware, but in practice, there are numerous caveats, and litigation can be extremely risky. One of the caveats is that the invention should not overlap with a company's "existing or anticipated line of business", and with the FAANGs being such behemoths, that can cover almost any form of software development.
- a13n 8y agoRunning my own bootstrapped SaaS startup, Canny (https://canny.io https://canny.io). I've always wanted to do a startup. Last year I wrote a blog post about the biggest lessons learned during the transition. Seems pretty relevant. https://hackernoon.com/software-engineer-to-saas-founder-c16154013e12 https://hackernoon.com/software-engineer-to-saas-founder-c16... Also left SF to be a digital nomad. SF is so expensive and if you aren't fundraising you don't need to be there. There's so much of the world to see, and it's easy to be productive anywhere there's internet.
- johan_larson 8y agoI left Google after three years as an SDE because I had really really had enough of my bosses, I wasn't promoted when I figured I deserved it, and a project that meant a lot to me wasn't getting the staffing it needed to succeed. I left for a more senior position at a smaller, less prestigious software company, though I've moved again since. Right now I'm working remotely from Toronto for a Silicon Valley start-up. Ultimately, I wish I had approached working for Google a bit differently. I thought it was sort of an overgrown startup, and you were supposed to look for something that needed doing and do it. No. Google is a large highly structured company with a distinctly process-oriented culture. It's a place where you do what you are told. That famous proverb about Japanese nails absolutely applies. I eventually figured that out, but by then it was too late.
- jacquesm 8y ago> That famous proverb about Japanese nails absolutely applies. "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down."
- tw1010 8y agoI'm guessing there are some "nail dimensions" that get hammered down, and some that are encouraged. (There are some anomalous characteristics that are accepted or incentivized, and some that are penalized.) I'm curious, could you (or someone in this thread working at google) help me understand which these are? Which weird character traits are ok, and which are not?
- riazrizvi 8y agoI’m going to make a guess here, but based on my experience of this type of culture at other organizations, weird character traits that are okay = anything unusual done by the very senior, generally-accepted-company-success-story people. So if you started a successful spin-off that Google funds and makes a ton of money from, then your penchant for rollerblading around the building is cute and HR smile when describing it to interviewees. However if you are one of the other 99.9% then get those damn things off your feet, your going to hurt someone.
- scubaguy 8y agoParticipating in selection bias!
- quickthrower2 8y agoHi looks like you've been shadow banned as this comment was dead, and your previous comments look OK (nothing spammy) so not sure what happened there but thought I would let you know.
- myWindoonn 8y agoI served at Google as an SRE for 2+yrs. I burnt out and ragequit. Now I'm an SRE at a startup. I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true.
- gbustomtv5 8y agoNot a secret and it is true. https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/full-list https://www.payscale.com/data-packages/employee-loyalty/full...
- barrow-rider 8y ago> I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true. That's most places, FAANGs notwithstanding. 6 months getting up to speed, realizing what a clusterfuck it is by 12 months, dealing with it to 18 months, and then getting to the I-Want-Out point at 24+ months. Plus the whole "jump ship every 2-3 years to maximize salary" thing is possible for FAANG-level engineers.
- apohn 8y ago>I hear that the median time of service for FAANG SREs is just shy of 2yrs. Dirty open secret if it is true. I wouldn't read too much into this. I've worked at tech companies where 4 years of tenure was considered old and non-tech companies where 8 years was considered young. Anecdotal evidence or course, but IME people with strong skills in the tech industry (even if it's tech marketing or tech HR) have a lot more options to change jobs for salary or experience reasons. If you're ambitious you're going to be even more inclined to move up or move out.
- gt5050 8y agoWorking on my saas https://chartpoet.com https://chartpoet.com Worked at Amazon from 2010 - 2012. Left because I wanted to create something of my own. Have failed twice at since then, hopefully will succeed this time.
- axhue 8y agoWebsite looks nice! My 2 cents would be to maybe have a demo dashboard without signing up? I just feel like it forces people to invest without knowing what it is. Wish you success!
- gt5050 8y agoHere are some demo dashboards, will link to them on the home page soon. Presentation Mode https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/ https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/ Dashboard Mode https://demo.chartpoet.io/dashboard/frB1lGMWa_q7/ https://demo.chartpoet.io/dashboard/frB1lGMWa_q7/ Raw Data Mode https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/ https://demo.chartpoet.io/presentation/frB1lGMWa_q7/
- VoidWhisperer 8y agoNitpick: You have MySQL listed as 'My Sql' with a space in the middle
- gt5050 8y agoWill fix this. Thanks!
- acconrad 8y agoDoes Microsoft count? It's in the same market cap as Amazon and Google. I've been consulting for the past year while I build a few side-projects, hoping they'll turn into businesses. I'm making more than I ever have before and this was only year one. My hope is the next few years the time spent marketing myself through blogs, podcasts, and some books I'm working on will pay off either to make raising money easier for a business idea or to solidify higher rates for consulting.
- zabi_rauf 8y agoThats great! How did you start with finding consulting projects and building street cred? Has writing blogs bring you more business yet?
- acconrad 8y agoThe million-dollar question: how do you find clients? Honestly, the first one approached me via HackerNews. The rest have been from my network. Blogging has yet to bring me more business, because my name and brand have not reached the mind-share yet to rely solely on that. But I'm working on it! I also realize that this is a long-term play, it will likely take me 3+ years before my name is reputable enough to be the reason someone hires me from all the places they've seen my name.
- mtlynch 8y agoEx-Googler here. I was a SWE L4 and left after four years in frustration with the promotion process (https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/ https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/). Since then, I: * Moved out of my $3.3k/mo Manhattan apartment and bought a home for $200k in Western Massachusetts. Paid in cash so I no longer have to pay rent/mortgage. I feel like my time is much less "metered" now because my annual living expenses are so low, I can pursue things for fun without worrying about how much it's costing me in terms of time. * Attempted to build a startup on top of a distributed storage cryptocurrency (https://blog.spaceduck.io/ https://blog.spaceduck.io/). Didn't work because the underlying platform wasn't mature enough yet, so it was more expensive and less reliable than centralized solutions. * Attempted to build a business with a ML-powered recipe ingredient parsing service. Found out recipe apps aren't really willing to pay for it. (https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/ https://mtlynch.io/shipping-too-late/) * Currently working on toy projects to sharpen my web development skills because I've found that part of my skillset to be a bottleneck with my previous projects.
- DecayingOrganic 8y agoIt's a good idea to improve your web developer skills, but I think the problem lies within your entrepreneur skills. I'd highly recommend the book Disciplined Entrepreneurship to you. It consists of 24 steps that is focused on product conceptualization, which I think you'll pretty much appreciate it.
- mtlynch 8y agoThanks for the recommendation! I'll check it out.
- mrlinx 8y agoCould you share why you think that's a problem in his approach/method?
- ReverseCold 8y agoBoth of the things he mentioned didn't really solve problems. The storage thing is already solved, people have no reason to switch from AWS. As he mentioned his product was worse, so even if it was just for the sake of competition...
- jakevoytko 8y agoI worked on the same team at Google for 4.5 years, and left 3 years ago. I was bored; I was getting better at doing the same thing, but I wasn't expanding as an engineer. I worked on a free product. We had no market incentives to make time-boxed decisions and could declare anything we did a success whether it was or not, which drove me nuts. I was at the New York office, so when the company got bad press you could usually rationalize it as "oh, it's this Other Google in Mountain View making these really bad decisions and having this weird cultural obsession with needing everything you do to be as hard as putting a man on the moon," but it dampened my enthusiasm for looking for an internal transfer. Staring down the end of my 20s, I ended up taking almost a year off to relax, reconnect with old friends, do a little traveling, fail to start a small business, and eventually interview. I ended up at Etsy. A major criteria of mine was "find a business model I want to work for." Etsy checked all the boxes -- I was impressed by the caliber of people that I talked to when I was interviewing, I got a fair offer, I think the business model of selling local goods internationally is a good thing for the world, and I would be working directly on things that affected the bottom line. It hasn't been all sunshine and roses. There were 2 rounds of layoffs and almost everything has changed since I joined. But something that doesn't change very fast at a small established company is its business model, so I've managed to still be motivated to work there despite all the churn around me. It also helped me realize that some of the ennui I felt at Google was really a shifting of interests -- I'm not interested in technology for technology's sake anymore, but instead am motivated to solve problems that I think can be solved via technology.
- luisdfp 8y ago>"I'm not interested in technology for technology's sake anymore, but instead am motivated to solve problems that I think can be solved via technology." Words to live by. :)
- vram22 8y agoInteresting experience. >It also helped me realize that some of the ennui I felt at Google was really a shifting of interests -- I'm not interested in technology for technology's sake anymore, but instead am motivated to solve problems that I think can be solved via technology. I personally have an interest in both aspects. Still like and find technology interesting, but I guess I had somewhat of a business orientation from earlier, so appreciate that aspect too.
- ccantana 8y agoI was a SWE L3 at Google for three years. I left after having similar problems with the promotion process mentioned by others. Since then, have moved from SF to Ecuador and started a humor publication explicitly making fun of companies like FANG (https://techloaf.io https://techloaf.io). It’s very cathartic...
- stewfortier 8y agoHave been a loyal TechLoaf reader for the past few months. Thank you for making this, it's consistently one of the things I look forward to most each week.
- mtlynch 8y agoThis is my first time seeing TechLoaf. Really enjoyed it. Great work!
- ccantana 8y agoThanks! Comes out every Thursday, so keep your eyes peeled later this morning if you subscribed :)
- solarkraft 8y agoHey, uh .... why the f do I need to give you my e-mail address to read your stuff?
- ccantana 8y agoAll archives are viewable if you click on “the email” here: https://techloaf.io https://techloaf.io
- theunixbeard 8y agoYou don't have to, just click "the email" which is a hyperlink to the archives: https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf-time https://mailchi.mp/872ceee548ec/its-loaf-time https://us17.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977d9a9d93&id=e21336ec0c https://us17.campaign-archive.com/home/?u=14538d8f8591165977...
- zellyn 8y agoMoved back to Atlanta after five years at YouTube in SF to be close to family and afford a house. Discovered that Square has an office here, saving me from a descent back into Corporate IT. Haven't looked back. We're hiring :-)
- earhart 8y agoI did ten years at Microsoft; loved it, but wanted a change, and Google desperately wanted people with VM experience to build GCE. I was at Google for six years; I had a lot of fun building various parts of cloud, but then at some point realized I didn’t really care a lot about the component I was working on, and looking around, I didn’t see a lot of other projects going on that I really felt passionately about. I had some savings, and wasn’t really worried about finding •some• other software engineering job in Seattle if that ran low, so I decided to take off to think about what I really wanted to be doing in life. And then a friend reached out to me - he was founding a startup, and was I interested in joining? So I did an ML startup for a couple of years. It was tremendous fun; lots of work, but I felt very connected to what I was building, why I was building it, &c; it felt good to be really thinking about the product from an end-to-end, “How is this going to delight the customer?” point of view. I think I’d have had to be a director at Google to have the same level of involvement with the entirety of what I was building... And then, we were bought by Intel. It’s not too different, though - it’s a much bigger company, of course, but I feel pretty connected to the stuff I’m working on; I see and understand the business case, and my role in it. I don’t know that I’ll work at Intel forever, but certainly for the foreseeable future; I’m having fun, and feel pretty fortunate to be working here.
- krashidov 8y agoIt sounds like you're very happy with your career decisions. How long did you work on the startup before it was acquired?
- earhart 8y agoThe startup was vertex.ai; I worked there for a little over two years. It was very educational (in a good way), despite the uncertainty around paychecks (just from the higher odds of going under at some point down the road). For people who’re in a financial position to handle some paycheck risk, I’d definitely recommend trying a startup.
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoEx-Amazon (and ex-Vmware) here. Worked at AWS from 2008 to 2014 (Europe, then Asia, then USA), then Vmware (also USA) from 2014 to 2016. I then spent ~1 year at a startup, as CTO - the experience sucked, and I consider it to simply be a big mistake. 1.5 years ago, I left that job, worked on a new idea, and in August 2017 I founded a startup, Fabrica, with two other friends. I am still there. No salary. Bootstrapped until March, then raised some angel money. Doing ok. I will never go back to the corporate world. I'm done with it. I have some money on the side, and I firmly believe that money is to buy things that matter to you. To me, not working at a corporation matters.
- MatthewMcDonald 8y ago> I then spent ~1 year at a startup, as CTO - the experience sucked, and I consider it to simply be a big mistake. What about the experience sucked? What was the mistake?
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoIt's a long story, and part of it I am not happy to share publicly. Let's say that there were signals that I should have left earlier, and I didn't listen at first; such as: two co-founders fighting often and disagreeing; not a clear product-market fit, and my product proposals were never taken seriously; lots of arrogance; etc.
- devilmoon 8y ago>I firmly believe that money is to buy things that matter to you. To me, not working at a corporation matters. Damn dude that is a very good way of putting it
- simonebrunozzi 8y agoNot sure I interpret your comment properly, but did you mean that you particularly liked the sentence? Or was there irony instead?
- akhilcacharya 8y agoIt’s strange that there’s nobody from Amazon here, just people from G
- desdiv 8y agoTwo more Amazon comments popped up minutes after your comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193697 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193670 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18193670 The reason why ex-Googler responses dominated for the first ~2 hours is because of timezones, I think. Out of FAANG, Google had the largest headcount on the east coast. The question was asked at 5AM PDT so the west coast folks were not up yet.
- kevstev 8y agoI am in NYC, and hiring for a place that pays very well, possibly above FAANG salaries. I see a lot of resumes. A lot of those resumes are from Google, but very very few are from Facebook, and I find that to be a very curious thing. FBs office is not quite as large as Google's in NYC, but they have been around awhile and we are hiring out of both coasts and offer relocation. I am not sure if it is a quirk of our recruiting pipeline, but this seems to be an indicator that FB is a potentially better place to work.
- stuxnet79 8y agoThat's very interesting. I had a chance to possibly work at the NYC Facebook office which I didn't capitalize on, after reading this I'm having intense FOMO. Are you in Big Tech or Finance?
- kevstev 8y agoIn a general sense, both. I am working in finance at a hedge fund now, but for a more or less pure tech group. My previous job was for a large e-commerce player, but before that I spent about a decade doing various forms of algo trading and HFT.
- Throwaway2Trax 8y agoEx-Amazonian, not in a software related position. I left for the same reason a lot of the fellow commenter did, internal politics, promotion / development and shitty bosses (two levels up, but that's where it counts). For one, as great as Amazons Leadership Principles are in theory, in practice they are used more than a weapon than anything else. Once the higher ups have made up their mind about a person, no amount of feed-back will change that. In the end perf reviews resemble court-martial, except in a decent court-martial you are present to defend your self. I realized that too late. Internal "voting rings" self-promoting members at the expense of other are aggravating this even further. I would still do it again though, only with a clear exit strategy from day one. Rough guideline, if you failed to get promoted or transfer internally by year 2 - 3 you are by default dead. A transfer buys you another 2 odd years of runway. What did definitely not help was stock development. I joined in early 2014, initial RSUs have beem granted nased on 2013 expectations, the value increased by a factor of 10 by now. So AMZN had yet another incentive to reduce the number of employees in my generation of hires. And they did. Funny side note, around two years after I left they implemented tje two high level solutions I proposed back the day and got axed for. Since then I had two employers which didn't work out. Mental note: take the sabbatical immediately after leaving, failed to get start-up ofbthe ground and finished my studies.
- geekbird 8y agoI worked for an Amazon subsidiary for about 4.5 years. By the time that last review & reorg came around, I was mentally already out the door, being burned out. Having my job change to doing mostly Windows help desk (I'm a linux sysadmin) was what made me crazy. Unfortunately, that layoff came right after the "Great Recession" got going, and I was out of work for a year and a half. My nice $125/share stock RSUs had to be sold for living expenses. If the timing hadn't sucked like that I could have paid off my house by now. I still have 5 shares... I kind of had a forced sabbatical after that. At least I was not in debt going into it. Then I went to work for some big names, this time in Linux operations, some contract, some regular. Since I have the wrong age and plumbing, I constantly have title deflation and other BS to deal with. I'm currently at a university, at a pay drop and title drop, but it's more stable with more time off.
- rsweeney21 8y agoEx-Netflix here. I was a senior dev at Microsoft and Netflix (8 years of professional experience) and decided to switch to freelance for a variety of reasons. Eventually that turned into starting a company that provides a home for ex-FAANG (etc) devs that want to switch to freelancing. Facet Development is a freelancer network made up exclusively of ex-FAANG engineers. Facet does the work of finding freelancing jobs/projects and then we send them out to devs in the network. We also provide project management and billing/collections, help with taxes, etc, so freelancers get to spend a lot more of their time doing the enjoyable parts of freelancing and not trying to run a small business. We target FAANG companies and companies that wish they could hire FAANG devs when finding work for our freelancer network. When I was a dev lead at Microsoft, bringing on vendors or outsourcing was a terrible experience, because they always seemed to be below our hiring bar. So I started Facet to solve the problem I had when I was an engineering manager at a FAANG company. We have more work than we can handle, so if you are a FAANG or ex-FAANG dev that wants to switch to freelancing or already is, you should sign up! You can read more about the Facet Developer Network here: https://www.facetdev.com/blog/the-facet-developer-network-the-freelancer-network-for-former-faangetc-engineers https://www.facetdev.com/blog/the-facet-developer-network-th...
- PascLeRasc 8y agoNetflix is supposed to have a really great developer culture and work atmosphere/benefits, much more than the other big N. Do you agree with its reputation? Was there any negative aspect that made you leave, or did you just have more of an interest in freelancing?
- rsweeney21 8y agoMy experience at Netflix was amazing. It has to be one of the best places for software engineers. I left because I wanted to work on a startup and never would have had the time while working at Netflix full-time. I got lucky in that a very large project (~$500k) fell into my lap while still working full-time at Netflix, so once the contract was signed, I quit my job and started freelancing. My small freelancing business grew into a proper software development agency over a few years. Eventually, I was able to do a "real" startup - I started an analytics company (www.numetric.com), raised $16M in VC and grew that for 4 years. I did NOT like working with VCs. So we hired a replacement CEO and I left to do my next thing. I still own Facet and after leaving Numetric I had some free time to experiment with ideas on how to grow Facet. That resulted in the creation of the Facet Developer Network.
- pr0zac 8y agoI was a E5 security engineer at Facebook. Left after 4 years because I married a Canadian, was sick of living in the bay area and FB had no way for me to continue working where I wanted to live. I enjoyed the job a lot but non-career stuff (including allowing my wife to start her career after finishing her PhD) was a higher priority. I moved to Canada and spent two years working remotely as a security manager for Uber which I also enjoyed. I eventually left because of burn out and took a few months off completely. I now live in Montreal and am working on a startup with a few friends in NYC.
- kd22 8y agoCan you share some details about the startup? I am from Montreal too.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- evgen 8y agoTFW you now know a former co-worker's HN nick...
- rasikjain 8y agoHi, interested in learning more about your security career. Your contact info is not on the profile. Would like to catch up. My email is in the profile :-)
- drewg123 8y agoDoes it count if you move from one to the other? I spent 2 years as a L5 (Senior SWE) at Google in MTV. I could not negotiate a deal to work remotely under my VP or find a team under a different VP allowing remote work that I was interested in (and which was interested in me).. I left after promotion to staff (L6) and went to Netflix where I work on the Openconnect CDN. Netflix is so much smaller that I feel like I have an impact, and I'm not just a cog in the machine.
- loarabia 8y agoDid Netflix allow you to work remote? I was under the impression they are pretty strict about engineers being in Los Gatos or LA.
- romed 8y agoCongratulations on making Staff after only 2 years. You’d think it would be alarming to Google how often engineers leave immediately after being promoted.
- johannes1234321 8y agoWhat's the benefit of waiting for promotion and then leaving? Any benefits you gain from that? Naïvely I'd assume it'd make sense to collect some of the extra cash for a while.
- kansface 8y agoThe title is useful job hunting.
- mikereedell 8y agoFrom a strictly money perspective, you get the pay bump from the promotion, then another pay bump from changing jobs.
- romed 8y agoMaybe for some people it's a game? I have no idea. The pay isn't as progressive as their recruiters claim. A high-performing Senior SWE makes money pretty close to what a newly-promoted Staff SWE makes.
- cbzehner 8y agoEx-Facebook. After five years I found my pace of learning had basically plateaued. Combine with organizational politics at any large company and I started looking for something smaller. Ended up at Atrium, a legal startup in SF. Similar to mtlynch, I didn't expect how much I'd have to hone my front-end chops on leaving a FAANG. Getting the opportunity to learn what I hadn't been learning and shore up those weaknesses reenforce my decision to switch. Best parts so far: * It's 30x smaller than FB was when I joined and 300x smaller than FB was when I left. * Great people abound. I was worried that this wouldn't be the case at a smaller company but I joined partly on the basis of how intellectually curious the engineers I met were during my interview. * It's a non-traditional tech company. We work with attorneys and build domain expertise in the problems CEOs and VCs face every day. The hard legal problems of starting a business. If any of that sounds interesting, we're hiring! Reach out to username at gmail or https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-openings https://www.atrium.co/careers#current-openings
- tankdoan 8y agoEx Netflix. Joined a promising startup with 1 - Great mission 2 - Impressive engineering culture 3 - Super boring name: Farmers Business Network FBN is the only reason I haven't moved away from the Bay Area. We're hiring too, if anybody wants to shoot me an email I'll forward it along. tan@farmersbusinessnetwork.com
- stillworks 8y agoCan you expand on 2) please if possible ? How it is different from Netflix ?
- tankdoan 8y agoSure thing. I was blown away with the intelligence, experience, and humility of the people on the engineering team when interviewing. I went into the process thinking "this could be cool, I like the mission" and left the process with "These people are really sharp and down to earth, I hope this happens." Since we're a small team here (<10) I get to learn something from them every day. I don't want to make it sound like I'm bashing my old team, because they very good at the layer they work on. The depth of knowledge across the stack is probably deeper at FBN. For example: I was having an issue with Hibernate not doing what I wanted it to do. A knowledgable former team member showed me the bug ticket that had been open for some years and how to work around it. At FBN, my first project involved multiple systems + the front end, a I was annoyed by a networking issue. I raised it, was showed a workaround by using socat, and the root cause was fixed a couple days later. I had no idea socat even existed.
- pdimitar 8y agoWhat tech are you guys working with? What's your stance on remote?
- tankdoan 8y agoPython, React, R, and we're actively killing off PHP. Infrastructure is AWS and Docker. Unfortunately, the company is not pro-remote :(
- madeuptempacct 8y agoSo, this usually gets negged, but I am very curious about the salaries which people are walking away from and whether they can match them elsewhere.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ex_amazon_sde 8y agoEx-Amazon here. The "people leave bosses, not companies" proverb applies to most people I know.
- k__ 8y agoThis. And in my experience, there aren't many good bosses out there. I always envy the stories of some corporate engineers who had excellent mentors and bosses, but sadly there aren't many of them.
- rjayatilleka 8y agoThis is something I learned recently, but some people who get lucky and find a good manager will just follow them around for a while. At least at Amazon, having a great manager is the most critical external component of having a sustainable job.
- spike021 8y agoAs someone at a non-FAANG, but relatively large tech-based company in San Jose this resonates. I've basically had 3 managers in two years. Trying to leave but it's been difficult. My skills have kind of atrophied due to my current situation.
- guitarsteve 8y agoEx-Amazonian here. Aside: Despite the company's not-so-good reputation in the media and forums, I enjoyed working there. For the most part I had good managers and coworkers. And once you've been there a while, you can transfer to a team with more interesting work, less on-call support, etc. Anyway, my wife is a doctor, and she had to move for her residency. Amazon wasn't willing to consider remote work, and I'm not sure I'd want to be the one "remote guy" anyway, so I switched jobs to a 100% remote company. We're hiring, in case others would like to make a similar jump. :)
- kangax 8y agoI was E6 at Facebook for 1.5 years. Left due to a combination of not finding the right team/project and constant pressure to work on something impactful rather than fixing existing issues I cared about. This seems to be a common issue at FB with senior engineers joining and having to ramp up quickly (2 of the senior teammates left while I was there for the same reasons). Currently at WeWork where you don't have to write multi-page assessment of all the impactful things you've done during the last half. It's not perfect but the work-life balance at senior level is better than at FAANG.
- sjg007 8y ago"multi-page assessment of all the impactful things you've done" ... ? So things aren't organized along a product line?
- kangax 8y agoI was on an infra so the "product" was improving both developer experience and user experience. Thing is — as a senior engineer, you're encouraged to do work that spans across multiple teams. The self-review would include all the impactful things you've done by helping person X or team Y or product Z, etc.
- napoleonIV 8y agoHe is probably referring to performance review.
- the_clarence 8y agoI’ve heard about that pressure to have an impact (you have an impact score right?) What if you refuse to write up how impactful you were? Or what if you do it lightly? I usually don’t care much about this sort of things as long as I’m doing my job.
- anonymousFAANG 8y agoSeveral years at Google, but got bored/frustrated like every Googler, and left to do a startup. That started off great but eventually fizzled, we got acquihired into a lame-ass company that I rode out for a couple of years, and then tried to do another startup never got off the ground. Now several years later, I'm at another FAANG. Fairly certain that my savings, salary and stock, career development, and overall confidence would be an order of magnitude higher had I stayed put and used the leverage I had at Google, to find a better project instead of leaving. I don't actively regret all this -- I took the risk and did not come out on top. But the warning I'd give to others is that since 10 year ago, FAANGs probably give you the best possible deal, despite what VCs and entrepreneur bloggers want to tell you.
- raphlinus 8y agoNow working on a game after 11 years as a Staff SWE at Google. I left for a complex mix of reasons, largely because I can and because I wanted to work on my own stuff, also not least because I don't have a good feeling about the digital world the big companies are creating. I wrote just a bit about this on my blog on leaving.
- scaleout1 8y agoWhy are almost all the replies by ex Google engineers? I thought I would see an even distribution from all FAANG companies but replies are pretty heavily skewed toward ex google employees. Is this because 1) Google culture is completely different from other FAANG companies? 2) Engineers at other FAANG companies dont quit their job? 3) or they dont browse HN in their free time?
- joshuamorton 8y agoProbably mostly 3, and that Google is larger than the other faangs where you might (Netflix and Facebook).
- rjayatilleka 8y agoThat doesn't sound accurate. Anecdata, but in my current org in Amazon Retail I think about 1 in 15 engineers browse HN daily. When I was in AWS it was around 1 in 3. Why do you think people in Google/Netflix/Facebook browse HN more than Amazon/Apple?
- joshuamorton 8y agoHistorical trends on similar threads. Other "Ask FAAMNG" threads seem to have a disproportionate number of responses from Googlers.
- didip 8y agoIf I were to guess, don't kill me for this. Working for Google creates a much bigger cognitive dissonance compared to other FAANGM. Google disproportionately promotes culture as number 1 reason to work there, where as the rest of the companies are just that: companies that make money. Imagine the surprise when a person joined Google and realize it's nothing but another large company. I have heard that FB has similar issues, but those are just that: rumors or things I read online.
- Bahamut 8y agoThe companies are all of varying sizes and distribution of types of workers. Google has a heavy engineering component to it - Apple and maybe to a lesser degree Amazon does as well, but one thing about Apple is that it has a culture of generally not talking about work as much outside of work, in part due to the whole wanting to keep things secret. Netflix as a company is also just small at around 5000 employees last I heard. Facebook is somewhere around 20k I believe at HQ, although that number seems to go up every time I hear more recent numbers, Google is at ~60kish I remember reading, and Amazon is around 100k I believe? Apple is at a little over 120k employees, but Apple and Amazon both have a lot of non-engineer workers as well (retail and warehouse employees, respectively).
- Nihilartikel 8y agoEx-Google SWE L5 (Senior) - Left in 2014 after almost 9 years spanning from my late 20's to mid 30's. I really can't complain, and would easily rank it as my most fulfilling and lucrative full-time employment experience so far, though the previous and post employment were in defense and startups. In short, I left due to burnout, though I think it wasn't so much the team/work as it was my character lends itself to burnout if I'm not very careful to erect work/life barriers and not trample them in spite of myself. I also tried hard but failed to get promotion to L6 SWE, and that left me with a bad taste in my mouth. This was mostly a matter of personal immaturity at the time though. In retrospect my technical skills may have passed muster, but my ability to make things happen in the organizational and interpersonal sphere weren't really at an L6 level. My foot was already half out of the door by then, anyway. In the intervening time, I've worked on an (unsuccessful) Android game, worked at a startup (again, burnout is easy when you internalize the existential precariousness of this sort of venture), and have since moved back to my hometown, bought a nice house, started a family, and done remote contract work. I have a few projects incubating and am planning on pursuing some entrepreneurial bootstrapping once my current contracts peter out shortly. I miss the proximity to amazing engineers and casual availability of supercomputing resources, but in the end, I'm grateful to have saved enough to have a great deal of freedom in how I spend my days and to have been fully present for the first few months of my son's life. Another benefit of time outside of Google is getting acquainted with the equivalent software ecosystem outside of their walled garden. Borg -> Docker/Kubernetes, MapReduce/Millwheel -> Spark, Dremel/bigquery-> Presto, etc etc.
- the_clarence 8y agoWhat is L5?
- mdasen 8y agoL5 is one of Google's internal levels. They're putting it there to let people know where they were in Google's hierarchy and they note that it denotes Senior. From what I know, people generally start at 3 right out of school.
- hemantv 8y agoEx Amazon Ex Microsoft here. Moved to bay area, bought a cheap house in Hayward CA, paid off my mortgage early. Started my own company Goodly (www.goodlyapp.com) I am learning a lot on daily basis and enjoying it throughly. Even though I work crazy hours it doesn't feel like work at all.
- swagatkonchada 8y agohowdy :)
- ultrasounder 8y agoLooks pretty interesting. I work in Hayward too. Let me know if you would like to get away from your computer to stretch your legs and meet for coffee sometime. I work right next to a starbucks!
- draw_down 8y agoA lot of the answers are a bit underwhelming. Which is fine. But it makes me think, sure working in a bigco is lackluster, but so are many of the other options, and you might as well get paid for your trouble. “Being the one in charge” seems cold comfort to me if the thing you’re in charge of isn’t all that great itself. Working in a big company allows you to disconnect a bit, focus on getting done what you need to accomplish that day, and then going on about the rest of your life. And then eventually you can just stop altogether. It seems just fine so long as you don’t get caught up in the internal rat race, and don’t get too wrapped up in the ideas they try to sell you about being part of a community and all that stuff. Just do your piece, every day. Also, it's darkly ironic that one of the best-case scenarios after leaving is that your new venture gets picked up by... a large company.
- dhnsmakala 8y agoThat's a good attitude to have, 'just do your piece, every day.' It makes sense, and after a few years you have much more freedom bc of the savings. I'm a recent grad though, and I find my work very boring and tedious. I'm given tasks to do that may not even be useful. The lack of ownership + feeling like a cog makes it hard for me to do good work. I have been rational my whole life, but it is difficult to remain this way. Any advice? How did you like your first job?
- quickthrower2 8y agoThere is a sister dead comment saying 'selection bias' but in some ways this is the opposite. We have a sample of ex FAANG developers who went on and did quite ordinary things, they didn't become Elon Musk, or start an AirBnb. Which is fine.
- omgbear 8y agoEx-Googler, worked in ads for ~3 years. Wonderful experience, don't regret any of it, had a great manager and director, definitely focused my opinions on what leadership can and should do (Take responsibility, back you up). I really appreciated the engineering culture and learning experiences. Left to join a 4-person startup my friends founded, still there going on ~5 years. Definitely enjoy the freedom and faster pace of changes, but the stress of responsibility is much more real.
- SubuSS 8y agoI spent about 7 years at MS and 7 in amazon - mostly around databases. Now I have been with Snap for about 3 years and it has been going great. My reasons were: - Agility. Snap moves 10x faster than amazon/ms. - Small size. Our dev community is so much smaller than Fb etc. Last quarter our reported user count was around 188MM? So the amortized # of customers influenced per dev is very high. - Ownership. I am the tech lead for all of analytics in snap (an uber lead as we call it). In Dynamo I was the TL for the storage part alone, my other offers from fb/twitter/oracle et al were around running parts of their machinery. Nothing came close to the extent of ownership provided by snap. An L1 in snap owns 5x of what an L1 would own in FAANG. - Rest of the benefits remain equal / better: You are surrounded by smart people, you have hard problems to solve, perks, benefits and comp are very equivalent to / better than fang. That's pretty much what I tell people during my job sells / interviews as well! If you are looking for the above, you can't beat small companies. On the flip side - FANG do have the scale very few others can only dream of reaching (dynamo did millions of qps per region and ran in 10s of regions). I am obviously hopeful we will make snap that big :)
- fizwhiz 8y agoThat stock tho.
- parthdesai 8y agoNot much to complain if you are shorting it :P
- synaesthesisx 8y agoShorting SNAP via puts was one of the best decisions I've made this year.
- briantmaurer 8y agoEx SWE at AWS (2013-2014) – I enjoyed working with the team I was on and I learned a lot. It was a great experience, but I've always wanted to work on some ideas I'd written down. I resigned as soon as my student loans were paid off and I'd saved enough money to pursue those ideas for a couple years. One of the most memorable days of my life was the day after I resigned from Amazon. For most people, their decisions, stressors, happiness, etc. are largely defined by external forces – whether by school, work, finances, family, etc. For me, this was much more true than I realized. I had always thought of myself as someone who was highly independent. But, that following morning (and most mornings since) I woke up with a feeling of nearly complete autonomy. That feeling was much stronger than I expected. It has been incredibly freeing and has significantly affected how I approach life. Since, I moved back to Minnesota and am currently working on my second project – https://mutambo.net https://mutambo.net. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to play recreational sports. We raised a small seed round and our remaining runway is a little over 1 year. -- My first project was put on pause after teaming up a with co-founder (Ex Google) and choosing another idea. I would like to finish the first project some day.
- puglr 8y agoWorked at a few startups gobbled up by Google. Second time decided to stick around. I think Google is an overall incredible company to work for. Far from perfect (and getting worse in some important areas of employee happiness), but I'd do it again. I just need to be my own boss for a while. Working on things that you're not 100% passionate about can really wear one down.
- tango24 8y ago> (and getting worse in some important areas of employee happiness) Would you mind elaborating?
- jedberg 8y agoEx-Netflix. I left right after my first child was born (this was before the 1 year of parental leave was added) and then I started a startup with some friends. Then we exited that startup and I started another one, which I work on now from home, which lets me play with the kids during my breaks. The flexibility of working for myself at home is the main reason I do this instead of working at an office or cowering space, because it lets me do daytime events with my kids, like 10am gymnastics class and 4:30pm tap class. If it weren't for the kids I'd still be doing the startup, but I might not be doing it from home. I'd probably be digital nomading instead. I suppose if the startup thing doesn't work out, once the kids are both in school full time during the day I'll probably try to get a job at another FAANG company and build up the savings again for another startup. :)
- throwaway6119 8y agoYou won’t see a lot of ex-Apple people posting here because of the deeply-ingrained conditioning to never talk publicly about anything that goes on there, even after you leave. I’ll say I liked the company in general. The rank and file engineers were smart and nice to work with, a real pleasure. But people were meaner and egos were huger the higher up the org chart they were, and I had to interact regularly (daily) with people 2-3 away from Tim. Ultimately I made it 4 years, pretty much to the day my last stock vested. Manager said they don’t give refreshes, so I’m not going to take that big a pay drop to keep going there so reluctantly quit. I’d go back in a heartbeat if they weren’t so stingy with pay/RSUs.
- pdimitar 8y agoI am reading the end of your comment like "Apple does not pay good salaries". Is that true? I have no interest in shares / stock, just the net sum at the end of the month.
- amznthrow01 8y agoThrowaway for obvious reasons. Just to add some AMZN perspective: Amazon has big company problems just as much as any of these. In fact, from what I've heard from friends working for other FAANG and similar companies, AMZN tends to have a bigger proportion of terrible managers. This is because the Leadership Principles can be interpreted in several ways and more often than not, gets interpreted in a way that works for managers to push their agenda. The promotion process is a joke. There's a lot of politics, and you have no control over when you're getting promoted. For those that believe that they had enough leverage on when to get promoted, IMO they simply were at the right place at the right time (or as I've seen, got promoted later than they think they deserved to.) AMZN managers like to quote Jeff a lot. Two of those have worked terribly at the org I work at: "good intentions don't work" has introduced so many processes in the org that getting actual work done is getting harder by the day. Engineers don't like to do project management, but all these processes are a micromanager's wet dream. "Amazon is a great place to fail". It really is not. AMZN is a terrible place to fail because once you fail, they bring it up every single time to ensure you don't have leverage. AMZN managers don't seem to appreciate growth. Or they're intentionally blind towards it to ensure they can squeeze a few more years from you while keeping you at the same level. Title being connected to both compensation and the kind of work you get sucks, and if you joined AMZN after the boom in late 2015, compensation is definitely not a reason to stay. The only folks who are happy at AMZN are those that aren't deluding themselves by saying they are making a real impact. If you're anywhere below senior SDE you're not making any impact. Of course, exceptions exist.
- amirathi 8y agoEx-Amazon engineer here. Worked for ~4 years in the Prime Music team. Contrary to popular belief, I had incredible time at Amazon. Learned a lot, good work life balance, progressed to L5 etc. Primary reason I quit is to start something of my own and not live under a draconian H1-B visa that treats people like second class citizens (will save H1-B rant for some other time). What am I doing now? I enjoy building dev tools. I am currently building ReviewNB (https://reviewnb.com https://reviewnb.com) that helps with Jupyter Notebook diffs and commenting. I built https://nurtch.com https://nurtch.com earlier this year to help Dev/Ops teams write executable incident runbooks. How? I moved back from Seattle to New Delhi, India. Cost of living is less than $2000 per month which gives me enough time to work on my projects without being stressed financially.
- justfor1comment 8y agoSaving this comment as I might go down the same route a few years from now.
- dhnsmakala 8y ago$2k/mo seemw very high for India (I'm not too familiar), are you supporting a family/spouse as well or is New Delhi just expensive?
- anoncoward111 8y agoIt must be, because I'm living comfortably in NY on less than $2000 a month post tax 0.o
- dhnsmakala 8y agoYeah, same here in the bay area.
- anoncoward111 8y agoAnd like, I know plenty of people in the US living decently well on $1,000 a month post tax. Most college towns will have bedrooms for like $350-550 a month. If you are fortunate enough to live in a very progressive town like Chapel Hill NC, which has a completely free bus system for everyone (paid for by student tuition, state taxes, and grants), then you can get around for pretty much free. The rest could be spent on food and health insurance if one chooses
- dekhn 8y agoAfter ten years at Google, I returned to my field of interest and work for a drug discovery/machine learning startup.
- justinlilly 8y agoI left Google after 3 years to join a startup in the project management space. It was clear that I could work on a product that made lots of money (ads) or was in front of lots of people (maps), but I couldn't actually make a difference in how the company operated. So I joined as employee #2 of a startup and eventually managed some people. I now work at Amazon. I understand that I'm working for a company who will pay me very well in exchange for me to show up and write code and not think about engineering any other time without prior allowance (lol opensource). This is a bargain that I feel fine with, now that I've entered into it with eyes open. Eventually, the money won't be enough to keep me and I'll look around for a medium sized startup that sells thing to people for money and has a sustainable business model (aka not into hypergrowth).
- formalsystem 8y agoI worked at Microsoft for about 3 years as a product manager and as an applied scientist. Most of the people I worked with were passionate, worked long hours and knew their shit. What drove me to leave eventually was that I had little leverage in deciding what to work on so had little control over what I'd become an expert in. Right now I'm working solo on a strategy game inspired by the Lebanese Civil war and platforms to make running reinforcement learning algorithms in different environments much easier. TBH, I'm not sure if things will work out but I feel a lot happier and find some comfort in knowing that I'm learning many transferable skills. As others have mentioned in this thread, I think of this experience as buying out my freedom for a couple of years with a hope that I can extend it should things work out. Contract work would be ideal but I'm still figuring out how to meet good potential clients in my area (Core ML + Data science + Infra)
- oh-kumudo 8y agoEx Amazonian, left Amazon, now rejoin Amazon. Joined a startup. Had many rosy fantasies about how life could go for me. It turned out not very honky dory after all. The management could be best categorized as directionless, worst completely chaos. In terms of salary, it is less, if not much so, if your startup fails to take flight. So I quit, and rejoin my previous employer, but in a much different group on different things. Lessons learnt, your situtation won't change dramatically as you might hope by changing companies. Grass is always greener on the other side, and patience is something you only can only learn to gain it. Ultimately, I want to work on something that I believe is valuable, and useful. That is what will keep me in my position for longer term.
- pyb 8y agoAt the moment, what are some notable startups founded by ex Googlers ?
- bsimpson 8y agoOff the top of my head: - Pete Koomen left AppEngine to start Optimizely. - Kevin Gibbs left AppEngine to start Quip. - Dave Byttow left Plus to do Secret, and just became eng director at Snap. - Bret Taylor was on Maps before he started Friendfeed with Paul Buchheit (Gmail), becoming Facebook's CTO and now Salesforce's CPO.
- arcticbull 8y agoI worked at Apple straight out of college for a bit less than 2 years. I left because I worked on a small project that I had trouble connecting to the broader mission, and differences with my manager. Big company experiences will always be heavily situational. You end up on a good team, you’re having a rewarding (personally and professionally) experience. Bad team/manager/whatever, you have a bad time. FAANGS are no different. I joined a startup after, stayed for many years, they went public, I took some time off, worked at some other startups, and now I’m back at a FAANG. This time, though, I know what to do - and what I want out of working here - so I’m looking forward to a wholly different experience. I’ll likely throw my hat back into the startup ring in a few years but who knows? I will say this, I look back fondly on my time at Apple.
- Twirrim 8y agoEx-AWS. I joined when the service I was on was under a year old. It was a good team to be on inside AWS, in general. That said: 1) I ultimately felt powerless to make changes. Hiring people in to the service was (at the time) proving to be a massive uphill struggle. It just wasn't one of the "sexy" services to be working on, and the ops team didn't have a dedicated manager who could focus on that. It left about 90% of my work consisting of two things. Compliance work, and region builds. Even outside of that, a lot of the things that slowed us down were things like established tooling that had seen _zero_ proper business funding until later in my time there (I some are drastically improved), and this absolutely absurd obsession with re-inventing the wheel in every single team to do exactly the same things, even when the task required months of engineering time (I shudder at the thought of how much money got wasted paying engineers to re-do the same work, and re-discover the same bugs and problems.) I ultimately had no power to drive things forwards. 2) One manager left, and the replacement had absolutely no interest in the operational aspects of the platform. They seemingly only felt empowered to say "yes" to managers above them. Even if that meant their team was working 80 hour weeks. (the manager has since left and things have improved, so I'm told). One of the things that got to be absolutely insane was the amount of effort involved in launching a region. It needed dedicated developer time, and that particular manager just didn't give a damn. That manager's attitude and refusal to work on operational concerns were a big source of my frustration in the team. Looking around AWS, all I could see were other teams that were in a worse operational position, suffering serious levels of burn out, and I just decided I wanted nothing more to do with it. Here's a big tip: If you make operations a priority, you can land features far faster. You don't keep tying up staff doing manual stuff or fighting fires. I left AWS and joined Oracle to work on the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, for a number of reasons. Not least of which was that a former manager from the service I worked for in AWS is running the Compute platform. I knew him, knew what he was like, and trusted him when he said one of the most important things to him was keeping operational burden of the platform down. I'd learned to trust his judgement in AWS, and it's something he's continued to deliver on here. I'll be honest, this is one of the most enjoyable jobs I've ever had. Better pay, better benefits than AWS, great co-workers, senior directors with their priorities straight. Managers that politely but firmly insist you take time off if you ever have to do extra hours (and follow through with you if you don't.)
- camtarn 8y agoEx-Amazon here. I spent eight years working at Amazon in Edinburgh, on three different teams - a now-dead music encyclopedia to complement IMDb, a team doing recommendations on the Amazon homepage (we were the 'customers who bought X also bought Y' team!), and finally an ill-fated graphic storyboarding tool for Amazon Studios. I'm now working at Sequentec, a two-person contracting company providing engineering services, primarily for wave/tidal power startups in Scotland. My boss, a veteran of the industry, is a mechanical/hydraulic/electrical/control systems engineer and general jack of all trades. I write C code for B&R industrial controllers, using a proprietary Windows-based toolchain. I also write a lot of Python to get logged data off the controllers and into databases, and occasionally I'm called on to do fairly random things - reliability analysis, network/VPN engineering, wi-fi antenna selection, wiring and soldering of sensors, and a lot of interfacing to serial peripherals with custom protocols. I've programmed atop a tidal platform in the middle of a large river, and on a gantry above one of the world's most advanced wave tanks. It's great. I left Amazon for a lot of reasons: eight years is a long time for a graduate job, the culture had changed a lot since I'd joined (less of an emphasis on work-life balance, and growing from 30 to 90 devs meaning that I no longer knew everybody's name), and I needed a job with more flexibility (I now work effectively part-time). It was definitely the right choice for me, even though I took a large pay cut to do so.
- bitcoinmoney 8y agoI’m curious how much is the TC for doing stuff like this?
- camtarn 8y agoNo idea in general. My chargeable rate, which is apparently cheap for the industry, is £45 an hour. My actual pay rate is £18 an hour, and I'm contracted for 3 days of 7.5 hours a week minimum, with anything over that as overtime. But that was a very custom deal and I suspect others in the industry are paid very differently.
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- mleonhard 8y agoI was leonhard@amazon.com for 2.5 years, mike@restbackup.com (failed startup), and then leonhard@google.com for 5 years. Now I'm bootstrapping a dating app business. I'm doing this because: 1) I want to do work that aligns with my passions: technology, making the World a better place, being respected, making money, and feeling peaceful. 2) I'm burned out and this way I can give myself time to rest and recover. Some days I don't work at all. 3) I spent 15 months using the dating apps heavily. They all provide poor experience for people looking for serious relationships. I have a lot of ideas for making the experience better and I want to test them. If you want to try the app and have influence over its design, send me an email (see my profile) and I'll invite you to the alpha test.
- bernardrubble 8y agoWas at Amazon. At Microsoft now. Tired of it but I can't get another job. Feel like I've pretty well tanked my career. Pretty unhappy about it.