7 ms·
(throwaway account for the obvious reason) I've been at Meta for 3+ years. I'm also interviewing. I have somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now (not a humb
by throwaway3137 5y ago
(throwaway account for the obvious reason)
I've been at Meta for 3+ years. I'm also interviewing. I have somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now (not a humblebrag, just the facts). Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?"
The plural of anecdote is not "fact", but that's my experience: for engineers, it's still seen as a positive, or at worst, neutral.
- mercutio2 5y agoWell of course we won’t say that to your face! But it’s certainly a factor when I’m reviewing resumes.
- code_biologist 5y agoI'll match your anecdote with mine. I'm an engineering leader at a small company that has worked at FAANG. I have personal mixed feelings about working at FB, but it's a very strong positive signal about someone's engineering ability (and comp expectations lol). Send any good coders you toss out because they worked at FB my way!!
- zionic 5y agoI’ll match your anecdote with mine. I’ve been everything from CTO to lead engineer. I’ve made sure we always pay well above average for every role because I’d rather have one exceptional engineer than 10 regular ones. FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification.
- novok 5y agoCTO and lead engineer of what size companies? How big was the tree of reports under you? What is the band of your total compensation recently? $100-200k? $500-1000k? Honestly sounds like a bit of cope, especially if you've tried hiring in the past 10 years.
- zionic 5y agoI’m not going to dox myself so you’re going to get some fuzz. Largest? 400-1500. Smallest? 30-70. Compensation was highly variable. FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in leadership positions knows it.
- novok 5y agoYou're not going to dox yourself with compensation bands or something more specific than 400-1500. There are way too many people like that, and comp is not very public info. Are you working in Europe as part of an old tech / non-tech company and the most you've ever made is $300k/yr or are you actually competing on the same level as big tech companies compensation wise where director+ who manages 300-500 makes $+1m/yr? There are highly paid small places that are not FANG that still pay FANG or better, but they have really high standards. I want to know if your one of those, or one of those who as part of an ego protection cope say FANG is bad. Now if you were a startup manager, yeah I can get why you might want to avoid FANG because you don't want people with big company habits in your small company that is trying to go fast, but usually those people say that out right, and they also tend to explicitly hire FANG types to scale their engineering org after a certain scale, because startup style stops working after your engineering org gets to a certain size.
- tmule 5y ago“ FAANG employees are liabilities best avoided, everyone in leadership positions knows it.” I literally know a couple of unicorn founders in my personal life. They don’t think that. You’re full of shit and are probably a shit leader (if you’re not bluffing) if you make categorically false statements with such conviction (much like the former president).
- poopypoopington 5y agoThis is a monumentally stupid take. I would never want to work for you if your judgement is this poor and politically reactionary.
- summerlight 5y agoDoes your company explicitly state this criteria in the job description?
- unmole 5y agoCan you please name your company? I haven't worked at FAANG but I most definitely would not want to work for a company like yours.
- Godel_unicode 5y agoI would like to know this as well. Anyone willing to write off literally millions of engineers because they happened to work at some huge companies is someone worth avoiding.
- zionic 5y ago> literally millions of engineers It’s tens of thousands, tops. And let’s be honest, most of them are highly overrated. > because they happened to work at some huge companies Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations. Give them some credit, they didn’t sleepwalk into their roles. They did it for that fat cash, and they sold their morals out to do so. Jokes on them, I have the “fat cash” now and get to choose who I hire. Turns out I’m not a fan of the people who sold out.
- honkdaddy 5y agoSo what's the company?
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Because they made the choice to work at some incredibly evil corporations FAANG are not incredibly evil corporations. They are average evil, and incredibly successful. If you are CTO at another company and you think your company is less evil, it's probably just less successful and you’re blinded to its evil by your vested interest in changing the “less successful” part.
- ipaddr 5y agoSounds like raises would be a life and death struggle at your company.
- 5y ago
- skinnymuch 5y agoWith your remarks of you’re in control now with all the power and such. Like the other commenter said, this sounds like Coping and grand standing.
- zionic 5y agoYou do you brother, I’m not here to prove myself to you. Just another non existent terminal.
- skinnymuch 5y agoWhat? I don’t know what you wrote. However all of your attention seeking and grand standing does appear you are seeking something from others and are coping hard to have yourself believe you are not a sell out like every one else. Why you have to frame things so negatively is beyond me. I would not do so myself. in which case it isn’t selling out. It is living life as an average person getting through life
- Shikadi 5y agoIf you're going to judge people for working at faang, you better never shop at Walmart or Amazon, never buy any foreign electronics because they're made with child labor, work for a non profit that doesn't shovel money away from those who produce it into the hands of shareholders that control the public policy allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in it, take the bus instead of owning a car, and boycotting cable and internet companies. We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and stop judging people for being employed. The workers aren't the evil, it's the people who call the shots and make the investments. If Jeff Bezos wants to go to space, he's going to space whether you help or not, so might as well take what you can get.
- zionic 5y ago> If you're going to judge people for working at faang, you better never shop at Walmart or Amazon I do my best, but I fully admit I am not perfect in this regard. > allowing for atrocities like DuPont, never buy anything with Teflon in it, I completely agree with you here. The leadership of these corps should have faced serious jail time for C8 contamination. > We're all in the same exploitative evil system, get off your high horse and stop judging people for being employed. I get it, but look at it from my perspective. I have a lot of money. I can hire people based on X or Y. I have the luxury of selecting skilled, amazing people who did not work for the system. Why would I see that as a bad thing?
- hiq 5y ago> FAANG on your resume is an instant disqualification. Is it only FAANG, or are there others that you blacklisted? E.g. is MS on the list as well? How long is the list? Genuinely curious.
- whatever_dude 5y agoYou're doing your company a great disservice if you think no great engineer had ever joined Meta.
- pkdpic 5y agoCounterpoint appreciated. Any chance someone could expand on this? Not sure how serious the commenter was.
- duxup 5y agoGenerally you wouldn’t want to speak poorly about a candidate’s choices to their face.
- munchbunny 5y agoSome hiring managers will care about your moral compass and your motivations more than others. (This isn’t a moral judgement on my part, just stating the phenotypes of hiring managers that I’ve seen.) They might not ask you to your face to explain things like joining a company right after it got #metoo-ed, but if they care they’ll absolutely be thinking the question.
- comp_throw7 5y agoI can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in when scoring a candidate. I guess someone could lie and say a candidate performed worse than they did, but unless the candidate actually performed poorly on other rounds, that isn't an automatic rejection (sometimes we'll ask for a follow-up round). Candidate performance tends to be pretty strongly correlated across rounds (unsurprisingly), so sharp outliers are pretty rare.
- zionic 5y ago> I can't imagine a single person where I work factoring this in Then it’s entirely possible you work for an immoral mega corp and your judgment has been compromised by your paycheck. Let me put it in a more blunt way you are more likely to understand. Your team is interviewing someone who was a process engineer on the deep water horizon oil spill. You’d probably feel gross hiring someone whose incompetence poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. They did a fraction of the damage that FAANG engineers do to our society on a daily basis.
- mizzao 5y ago
- tmule 5y agoMake sure you’re not violating your company’s guidelines. If I were at a company and I knew of signals based on subjective morality being used for filtering, I’d summarily fire the offending employee.
- zionic 5y agoI’ve written all of my companies guidelines. I explicitly codify that the hiring of former surveillance capitalism mercenaries is a fireable offense. “But the equity was great” is not an excuse.
- dc-programmer 5y agoDoes your company collect information about users?
- zionic 5y agoWherever possible we treat all data as a liability, removing it as quickly as we get it.
- yongjik 5y agoClicked "favorite", because I have a feeling that a year later I'll be like "Dammit, what was that comment that made me think 'Now this is peak HN cringe'? Can't find it again..."
- typon 5y agoNot sure if you're making things up, but I really like your attitude. The world only moves forward because of people with principles, not because of people who make 'tough compromises'
- jstx1 5y agoBelieving strongly in something isn't a virtue if your belief is harmful/misguided/unfair/discriminating etc, quite the contrary.
- oh_sigh 5y agoSo if an employee determines that they have a moral problem with Facebook, you will not let them escape?
- zionic 5y agoHow old are they? Anyone sub 40 was old enough to see the problems with Facebook and steer clear. Working for them and “seeing the light” after years of collecting the blood money doesn’t give you any points with me.
- Godel_unicode 5y agoTaking you at your word that you do this, I'm very glad I don't work with you. I would never want to associate with the kind of person who holds the employees responsible for the decisions of management, and then punishes them for wanting to leave that same management. Seems pretty biblical, in the original sin sense. The whole "won't say it to your face" is the absolute cherry on top. If you don't talk about it, how do you know they didn't join the company out of an overly optimistic sense of being able to change things from within, then quit when reality struck?
- sofixa 5y ago
- kortilla 5y ago> I would never want to associate with the kind of person who holds the employees responsible for the decisions of management That excuse is maybe acceptable for someone who worked at Facebook 10 years ago, but someone who is still working there in the last couple of years? You might just be an employee but you’re willfully helping well-known behaviors. This isn’t like some revelation of fraud that employees don’t know about. Countless articles have been written about the problems with Facebook and it has been in the crosshairs of national politicians several times. At this point taking a job at Facebook is not really any different than accepting a marketing job at a cigarette company.
- pcthrowaway 5y agoI don't disagree with this, and I've never worked at MAGMA for these reasons, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't incredibly tempted. As an experienced dev (possibly not a great one though), I'm struggling to make ends meet with one dependent. Being able to eat out without having to update a spreadsheet to see what other things we're not going to be able to afford is a pretty big draw. And I'm above the median for software devs in my area, but in a high CoL city in Canada.
- asveikau 5y agoThey're probably not surprised you want to leave, however.
- zionic 5y ago> Not a single interviewer (from junior engineers to directors and VPs of engineering) asked me anything remotely like "Why are you still at an awful company like Facebook?" Sure, we disqualified you when you listed them on your resume. You never got callbacks and probably blamed it on XYZ. You don’t understand, there’s a growing group of us in Silicon Valley that will never hire you if you have FAANG on your CV.
- stickfigure 5y agoI really wish that people who let strong political opinions bleed into their professional careers would somehow flag that on their resumes, so I could likewise avoid them.
- zionic 5y ago
- sofixa 5y agoHaving a moral/ethical compass isn't "political".
- disgruntledphd2 5y agoSo there's only one true moral compass?
- sofixa 5y agoNo, but it's hard to see a person having one and seen Facebook on the "good side" of a moral compass.
- yumraj 5y agoExactly. I cannot trust folks who have spent more than 1-2 years at FB to make ethical decisions and I will not hire them. Similarly, I will not go to a company if people up the chain, including my immediate boss or the CEO are ex-FB. If the CxOs are ex-FB I cannot expect it to be an ethical company. But, that’s me.
- ensan 5y ago“somewhere between 4 and 8 offers right now” How can the number of offers be indeterminate?
- Salgat 5y agoHe's waiting on responses or is entering the final rounds for some of these companies.
- throwaway31332 5y agoBingo. Mix of "offer in hand", "offer coming Monday-ish", and "finishing interview loops" Also, who says I'm a "he"? FAANG companies have smart female engineers too (not nearly enough, but we're working on it)
- Salgat 5y agoI apologize, "he" was for most of American English's history the default pronoun when gender was not known. I'm still working on using "they" instead, but I occasionally slip up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_neutrality_in_English
- snovv_crash 5y ago> Also, who says I'm a "he"? Assuming you're saying this as a way to effectively double the pool of people your throwaway comes from, adding a bit to the entropy. Adding more writing style sample, and on another topic, probably does more to identify you than the extra bit of entropy reduced.