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FANG is undisputably the best risk-adjusted compensation return for a programmer, and they're up there in terms of working with super smart colleagues, and ther
by dasil003 8y ago
FANG is undisputably the best risk-adjusted compensation return for a programmer, and they're up there in terms of working with super smart colleagues, and therefore they have a high floor, compared to say a startup that goes nowhere with the blind leading the blind, but the ceiling is also constrained by what projects you're working on. In terms of raw software engineering development there's probably no substitute for joining early in a hypergrowth scenario, because you'll have to solve way more problems in an efficient way, and understand the direct impact on the business in a way that is totally obscured when you come into a massive corporation with thousands of engineers. It's likely company growth will outpace your personal growth (hence the outside hires), but even so you will get challenged in ways that just don't exist in large, stable companies.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoThough at F and G there is the cost of having to rationalize working for an organization that is evil.
- dnautics 8y agoNobody ever said that about the As!!
- jessaustin 8y agoI'm pretty certain I've heard Amazon described as "evil". Apple are less objectionable, but I'm sure there are some things that somebody wouldn't like.
- pnw_hazor 8y agoIt seems Amazon's evilness mostly stems from their reputation for how they treat their employees - not how they treat their customers. My weak sauce rationalization re Amazon is that I wouldn't work there (I love hearing the big sigh from recruiters when I ask if the client they are hiring for is Amazon.) Others who choose to work there do so voluntarily. They haven choosen their own pain. In my mind this is different than using your PhDs to build dark patterns to trick consumers, survelience tech to monetize people, using that surveillance information and neuroscience to manipulate people, and so on. edit: to add -- I forgot about Apple, since I stopped buying their stuff a few years ago. At least they see that privacy protection may have some value in the marketplace.
- rrdharan 8y agoMaybe you missed it but Amazon entered the advertising space in a big way, somewhat recently: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-advertising-explained-2019-4 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-advertising-explained...
- 666lumberjack 8y agoMost plausibly their: - Attitude to third party repair - Puritanical content restrictions - Apparent disdain, in many cases, for their 'power users'
- dsfyu404ed 8y agoWhich seemed like a big deal in 2009 but here in 2019 with the misdeeds of Facebook, Google and Amazon they look like a shining beacon of corporate ethics. Funny how things change.
- kayoone 8y agonot really on the same level of "evil" as people perceive FB, GOOG, Amazon etc
- pradn 8y agoLabor conditions for workers at their factories and at supply-chair partners are not the best. Closed software ecosystem. etc
- jammygit 8y agoAmazon warehouse employees had to pee in bottles because they were worked so hard, and there is that business about selling large scale facial recognition services to governments (possibly in emulation of what China is doing)
- m0zg 8y agoThey don't look "evil" from the inside. And even from the outside, one needs to considerably stretch the definition of "evil" to call them that.
- praptak 8y agoWhat are the chances of the startup becoming successful and not turning evil?
- djakjxnanjak 8y agoIf you put a lot of mental energy into organizing your ideology to think of them as evil, sure.
- fj39dkf 8y agoCan you elaborate?
- djakjxnanjak 8y agoThe world is at peril, and full of people who are suffering. I can easily call an oil company evil, because they are burning the earth. I can call a food manufacturer that knowingly puts poison in their products to save a few bucks evil. I cannot bring myself to call Facebook or Google evil because they are configuring computers to display ads that introduce people to products they might want to buy. It’s really a triumph of human progress that they have managed to amass such wealth while causing so little harm.
- jammygit 8y agoThe harm these companies might cause is primarily in the future. This is still the sunny phase where they have not been incorporated into some Orwellian system (pardon me, google tried really hard in China but got stopped for now)
- wwweston 8y agoUpvoted, but at the same time it's worth considering that right now, we have little idea how to account for the harm of the concentrations of personal data that both companies (among others) currently have. Even in the context of marketing, but more pressingly, once it becomes accessible to actors whose intentions may be either more malevolent, or simply up for sale to malevolent actors (e.g., Cambridge Analytica). You're speaking of poisoned products; what happens when data-intensive psych profiling is used to taint or outright poison discourse?
- deadmik3 8y agoand for me that cost is easily covered by the salaries they hand out
- sytelus 8y agoAll compensations are risk + skills adjusted (a technical term is expected return). With lower risk you must sacrifice possibility of higher reward and vice versa. This universal law is not broken by FANG or anyone else. FANG is not better risk adjusted and there is nothing special about their compensation. If you are young and blessed with no dependencies, you should attempt exploiting higher risk domains. As you get older with more dependencies, you need to lower your risk tolerance. The technical term for this is exploration vs exploitation. The maximum payouts in many complex system requires some balance between two and sticking with just exploitation is often not the optimal policy when you look at life span as a whole.