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> You're making a lot of assertions about FAANGs without having been there. It's true! I'm mostly going off of what I've read online. > One might equally say

> You're making a lot of assertions about FAANGs without having been there. It's true! I'm mostly going off of what I've read online. > One might equally say that the best place to learn to run a successful business (including a startup) is to work at a place with many successful large business divisions, each with their own P&L. I don't think that's true. But even if it were, the point this piece is making is not that FAANGs are not the best place to learn how to run a business. The point the chapter is making is that FAANGs are less likely to allow remote work / other freedoms, so if that means a lot to you, you should not work at a FAANG. A quick check at levels.io can confirm this fact -- the vast majority of employees are on-site in a tech hub. > While the skill of FAANG engineers varies, being at a FAANG provides an opportunity to learn from and network with top-tier engineers as well as the processes necessary to deliver quality software on a cadence at scale. Whether or not this is an important skill depends on what you are optimizing for. I don't need to be able to deliver software at FAANG scale if I don't ever want to work at a FAANG. While it's true that knowledge does scale down and can make you a better software developer in other areas, I also make the point in the article it's possible to learn about many of these things without sacrificing the freedom that you have to sacrifice to work at a FAANG.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago
> "The point the chapter is making is that FAANGs are less likely to allow remote work / other freedoms, so if that means a lot to you, you should not work at a FAANG. A quick check at levels.io can confirm this fact -- the vast majority of employees are on-site in a tech hub." Okay, fair enough. > "Whether or not this is an important skill depends on what you are optimizing for. I don't need to be able to deliver software at FAANG scale if I don't ever want to work at a FAANG." There's not much point to enduring the hardship of launching a startup if there's no hope of growing it into at least a medium or large business though? A solid understanding of software processes and even scaling that FAANGs use can be helpful even at that size. For example, a business I was at was encountering growing pains because their seat-of-the-pants YOLO software development processes weren't working for them anymore at the size they had grown to. Gently nudging them to adopt proper documentation and other software engineering processes known to ease those pains because they'd been battle tested at larger tech companies was part of what I was able to do to help them.
- elliotbnvl 6y ago
  > There's not much point to enduring the hardship of launching a startup if there's no hope of growing it into at least a medium or large business though? If launching a successful startup is your goal, then working at a FAANG (or a startup, for that matter) is definitely a good idea. But I think the underlying assumption you're making is that launching a software startup is one's ultimate goal, which isn't a given.

ThrowawayR2 6y ago

> "The point the chapter is making is that FAANGs are less likely to allow remote work / other freedoms, so if that means a lot to you, you should not work at a FAANG. A quick check at levels.io can confirm this fact -- the vast majority of employees are on-site in a tech hub." Okay, fair enough. > "Whether or not this is an important skill depends on what you are optimizing for. I don't need to be able to deliver software at FAANG scale if I don't ever want to work at a FAANG." There's not much point to enduring the hardship of launching a startup if there's no hope of growing it into at least a medium or large business though? A solid understanding of software processes and even scaling that FAANGs use can be helpful even at that size. For example, a business I was at was encountering growing pains because their seat-of-the-pants YOLO software development processes weren't working for them anymore at the size they had grown to. Gently nudging them to adopt proper documentation and other software engineering processes known to ease those pains because they'd been battle tested at larger tech companies was part of what I was able to do to help them.

elliotbnvl 6y ago
> There's not much point to enduring the hardship of launching a startup if there's no hope of growing it into at least a medium or large business though? If launching a successful startup is your goal, then working at a FAANG (or a startup, for that matter) is definitely a good idea. But I think the underlying assumption you're making is that launching a software startup is one's ultimate goal, which isn't a given.