6 ms·

It's because when companies get that big and famous they no longer need that many creative individual thinkers, they need obedient drones. With disproportionate

It's because when companies get that big and famous they no longer need that many creative individual thinkers, they need obedient drones. With disproportionately large numbers of applicants they get, they are able to make you jump through all the hoops they put in front of you, because if you won't there are thousands of others who will.

vsareto 6y ago
NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Plus the prestige of being able to walk into your next job and captain the ship. I've been at a few places that hired former Googlers, and they were all treated like gods.
  - SQueeeeeL 6y ago
    Yeah, the ex-Googler's I've met have always been average; but I guess if no one will say the emperor has no clothes it doesn't matter
    - data_spy 6y ago
      It used to mean something more than it does now. I noticed ex-Googlers were well above average in 2012, now they can be below avg. I have a colleague of mine at my current job that makes a point of being an ex-Googler but they only worked there for 6 months, so it is kind of meaningless.
      - vsareto 6y ago
        Global average or people-who-work-at-FAANG average? The frame of reference here is important, otherwise average is pretty meaningless since we have no objective list of what an average developer consists of.
      - jghn 6y ago
        It's always been a distribution. Some are amazing, some are normal, others are less than normal. They're all really good at the handful of things Google screens for, but otherwise it's just like any other distribution of developers. As a hiring manager I view Google on someone's resume as a non-signal. If however they are the sort of person who draws attention to having worked at Google I view that as a negative signal.
    - weRnotU 6y ago
      The ex-Googlers I’ve worked with were managers. It was clear they were hired on title and magical beliefs than capabilities as project after project fell apart. Rather like Google product portfolios
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    Is that really true? I've interviewed ex-FAANG employees at some jobs and there was never any pressure to hire them, and I didn't feel like any one of them would be treated as a god if hired. They were pretty universally above average though. They were also not "walking in to captain" anything. They were applying for standard engineering jobs. Think of an average individual-contributor software engineer from, say, Facebook. Is a smaller company really going to hire them as Director Of Engineering (a totally different job than software engineering), just because of the company name on the resume? That sounds absurd.
    - Godel_unicode 6y ago
      The amount of osmosis learning of how things should be that comes from working somewhere that things were that way is hard to explain. The density of good ideas you get exposed to has a huge effect, even if you aren't in leadership. It also doesn't necessarily come across in interviews, it's reflexes you might not realize you have. I was very skeptical about this, then I worked for one. Now I get it.
      - imtringued 6y ago
        I'm not in a leading role but I did "impactful" things like introduce CI to a company. I'm not sure that it matters what position you have, because if you are the first one doing something you actually get to do a lot of decision making.
  - SeriousM 6y ago
    This is such a glorified and Heroes statement which just tells that some faang guys has such a skewed view of the world because of faang. All I see is that faang is a term for expert code monkey.
    - cratermoon 6y ago
      And really only an expert in the things that FAANG companies do. Granted for a place like Amazon that's potentially a very broad space, but it's still a small slice of skills compared to the world where software is ubiquitous. Among other things, zero preparation for safety-critical software. An attitude like "move fast and break things" would end up being "move fast and kill people", and that's kind of a drag on your career. (Insert long discussion about trolly problem and how self-driving car researchers are justifying their crappy algorithms)
- neverminder 6y ago
  Well, there are also counter-examples to your thinking. Brian Acton was rejected by Facebook, then went on founding WhatsApp and eventually selling it to the same Facebook for $19B. "Life altering amount of money", wouldn't you agree? Probably one of the most expensive rejections in history.
  - decafninja 6y ago
    That's an extremely, extremely, extremely, unlikely edge case though. You're more likely to get simultaneous offers from all the letters in FAANG while also simultaneously becoming a 1MM+ subscriber Youtube star than you are of repeating Brian's story (or even a fraction of it).
    - dnautics 6y ago
      well there is the story of when Google acquired youtube at the all-hands meeting the CTO addressed the engineering department and asked them how many of them had been rejected by google, and half of the people there shot their hands up. Probably they had a better windfall, and "Google could have saved more than a few billion"
      - decafninja 6y ago
        On a similar vein, I recall a story that said most Googlers thought they probably wouldn't pass the technical interview if they had to go through it again. Does match with what my friends who made it into FAANG say as well - none of them are confident they'd be able to do it again with any certainty.
        neverminder 6y ago
        There's a story, mentioned many times here on HN, where Google (I think) hiring team were given their own anonymized CVs and they rejected all of them. It's a perfect example to describe the staggering level of hypocrisy at those companies.
      - 6y ago
- mrlala 6y ago
  Greed is basically all of humanities problems, isn't it.
- rhombocombus 6y ago
  Not my thing personally (at least not today). I could buy a lot more toys and BS and retire earlier if I took one of those jobs, but my already generous (not by FAANG standards) programmer salary is enough and it comes along with a sane schedule and reasonable work expectations. The value in this is I get more time outside of work to enjoy my life, which is worth more than an extra pile of lucre when I already get by pretty comfortably.
  - pb7 6y ago
    I don't know where this misguided implication comes from that FAANG doesn't have a sane schedule or reasonable work expectations. The people that work a lot do so because they're some of the most passionate in the industry and enjoy working a lot as a result. On average, I would speculate FAANG is less stressful and more reasonable than other companies. The reason you may think that is not the case is that negative stories stick to the same "brand" (i.e. "FAANG") that employees hundreds of thousands of people whereas a story about a random mom'n'pop shop doesn't register on your radar because there are many of them.
    - LolWolf 6y ago
      I would describe FAANG (in my and many friends' experiences) as "adult daycare." Not in a bad way, mind you, but very much "get your homework done and go have your free time after." (This excludes higher management and architects, etc., of course. I mean this as a middle-of-the-road SWE on a decent team.) I'm not quite sure where the GP got stressful, but it is soul-sucking if you expect your work to be interesting, impactful, and creative, which doesn't really happen apart from a few core or research teams. There is a ton of piping and rewriting of frameworks going on all the time, even when it need not be extremely useful. This is the main reason I found it thoroughly drab—even though it is likely that the lines of code I wrote there are likely to touch many orders of magnitude more people than anything else I ever work on for the rest of my life. I guess that's just how it goes, though.
      - pb7 6y ago
        I fully agree. It is soul-sucking at times, but nowhere near as soul-sucking as the life I came from and I will never stop being grateful for that. If I want more excitement from working, I can always pick up the exact work of my personal interest on the side (but I don't, because there are so many other interesting things to do outside of software). I'd rather have great security and quality of life from the work that puts a roof over my head.
SZJX 6y ago
Or, with the crazy amount of applicants they get, it’s very hard to come up with an alternative process e.g. pair programming for a day like what some small companies can afford to. They have to be able to do interviews efficiently. Interview is hard. A while ago there was a post by Jane Street that explicitly emphasized this point. They also require algorithms questions even though programmers there write a lot of OCaml. I guess if you were in the position of the interviewer it would also be hard for you to come up with alternatives that are much better for all sides involved.

vsareto 6y ago

NGL, I'd jump through hoops for 250k + other compensation Part of why this has stuck around for so long is that so many people are willing to do that because it's a life-altering amount of money

mywittyname 6y ago
Plus the prestige of being able to walk into your next job and captain the ship. I've been at a few places that hired former Googlers, and they were all treated like gods.
- SQueeeeeL 6y ago
  Yeah, the ex-Googler's I've met have always been average; but I guess if no one will say the emperor has no clothes it doesn't matter
  - data_spy 6y ago
    It used to mean something more than it does now. I noticed ex-Googlers were well above average in 2012, now they can be below avg. I have a colleague of mine at my current job that makes a point of being an ex-Googler but they only worked there for 6 months, so it is kind of meaningless.
    - vsareto 6y ago
      Global average or people-who-work-at-FAANG average? The frame of reference here is important, otherwise average is pretty meaningless since we have no objective list of what an average developer consists of.
    - jghn 6y ago
      It's always been a distribution. Some are amazing, some are normal, others are less than normal. They're all really good at the handful of things Google screens for, but otherwise it's just like any other distribution of developers. As a hiring manager I view Google on someone's resume as a non-signal. If however they are the sort of person who draws attention to having worked at Google I view that as a negative signal.
  - weRnotU 6y ago
    The ex-Googlers I’ve worked with were managers. It was clear they were hired on title and magical beliefs than capabilities as project after project fell apart. Rather like Google product portfolios
- ryandrake 6y ago
  Is that really true? I've interviewed ex-FAANG employees at some jobs and there was never any pressure to hire them, and I didn't feel like any one of them would be treated as a god if hired. They were pretty universally above average though. They were also not "walking in to captain" anything. They were applying for standard engineering jobs. Think of an average individual-contributor software engineer from, say, Facebook. Is a smaller company really going to hire them as Director Of Engineering (a totally different job than software engineering), just because of the company name on the resume? That sounds absurd.
  - Godel_unicode 6y ago
    The amount of osmosis learning of how things should be that comes from working somewhere that things were that way is hard to explain. The density of good ideas you get exposed to has a huge effect, even if you aren't in leadership. It also doesn't necessarily come across in interviews, it's reflexes you might not realize you have. I was very skeptical about this, then I worked for one. Now I get it.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      I'm not in a leading role but I did "impactful" things like introduce CI to a company. I'm not sure that it matters what position you have, because if you are the first one doing something you actually get to do a lot of decision making.
- SeriousM 6y ago
  This is such a glorified and Heroes statement which just tells that some faang guys has such a skewed view of the world because of faang. All I see is that faang is a term for expert code monkey.
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    And really only an expert in the things that FAANG companies do. Granted for a place like Amazon that's potentially a very broad space, but it's still a small slice of skills compared to the world where software is ubiquitous. Among other things, zero preparation for safety-critical software. An attitude like "move fast and break things" would end up being "move fast and kill people", and that's kind of a drag on your career. (Insert long discussion about trolly problem and how self-driving car researchers are justifying their crappy algorithms)
neverminder 6y ago
Well, there are also counter-examples to your thinking. Brian Acton was rejected by Facebook, then went on founding WhatsApp and eventually selling it to the same Facebook for $19B. "Life altering amount of money", wouldn't you agree? Probably one of the most expensive rejections in history.
- decafninja 6y ago
  That's an extremely, extremely, extremely, unlikely edge case though. You're more likely to get simultaneous offers from all the letters in FAANG while also simultaneously becoming a 1MM+ subscriber Youtube star than you are of repeating Brian's story (or even a fraction of it).
  - dnautics 6y ago
    well there is the story of when Google acquired youtube at the all-hands meeting the CTO addressed the engineering department and asked them how many of them had been rejected by google, and half of the people there shot their hands up. Probably they had a better windfall, and "Google could have saved more than a few billion"
    - decafninja 6y ago
      On a similar vein, I recall a story that said most Googlers thought they probably wouldn't pass the technical interview if they had to go through it again. Does match with what my friends who made it into FAANG say as well - none of them are confident they'd be able to do it again with any certainty.
      - neverminder 6y ago
        There's a story, mentioned many times here on HN, where Google (I think) hiring team were given their own anonymized CVs and they rejected all of them. It's a perfect example to describe the staggering level of hypocrisy at those companies.
    - 6y ago
mrlala 6y ago
Greed is basically all of humanities problems, isn't it.
rhombocombus 6y ago
Not my thing personally (at least not today). I could buy a lot more toys and BS and retire earlier if I took one of those jobs, but my already generous (not by FAANG standards) programmer salary is enough and it comes along with a sane schedule and reasonable work expectations. The value in this is I get more time outside of work to enjoy my life, which is worth more than an extra pile of lucre when I already get by pretty comfortably.
- pb7 6y ago
  I don't know where this misguided implication comes from that FAANG doesn't have a sane schedule or reasonable work expectations. The people that work a lot do so because they're some of the most passionate in the industry and enjoy working a lot as a result. On average, I would speculate FAANG is less stressful and more reasonable than other companies. The reason you may think that is not the case is that negative stories stick to the same "brand" (i.e. "FAANG") that employees hundreds of thousands of people whereas a story about a random mom'n'pop shop doesn't register on your radar because there are many of them.
  - LolWolf 6y ago
    I would describe FAANG (in my and many friends' experiences) as "adult daycare." Not in a bad way, mind you, but very much "get your homework done and go have your free time after." (This excludes higher management and architects, etc., of course. I mean this as a middle-of-the-road SWE on a decent team.) I'm not quite sure where the GP got stressful, but it is soul-sucking if you expect your work to be interesting, impactful, and creative, which doesn't really happen apart from a few core or research teams. There is a ton of piping and rewriting of frameworks going on all the time, even when it need not be extremely useful. This is the main reason I found it thoroughly drab—even though it is likely that the lines of code I wrote there are likely to touch many orders of magnitude more people than anything else I ever work on for the rest of my life. I guess that's just how it goes, though.
    - pb7 6y ago
      I fully agree. It is soul-sucking at times, but nowhere near as soul-sucking as the life I came from and I will never stop being grateful for that. If I want more excitement from working, I can always pick up the exact work of my personal interest on the side (but I don't, because there are so many other interesting things to do outside of software). I'd rather have great security and quality of life from the work that puts a roof over my head.

SZJX 6y ago

Or, with the crazy amount of applicants they get, it’s very hard to come up with an alternative process e.g. pair programming for a day like what some small companies can afford to. They have to be able to do interviews efficiently. Interview is hard. A while ago there was a post by Jane Street that explicitly emphasized this point. They also require algorithms questions even though programmers there write a lot of OCaml. I guess if you were in the position of the interviewer it would also be hard for you to come up with alternatives that are much better for all sides involved.