5 ms·

If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking adv

If you have time to faff around at a FAANG, you have time to be cultivating your network to include some very influential people, you have time to be taking advantage of training resources or learning from the experts there that are completely free that most ordinary developers would have to pay thousands to get access to, you have time to work on side projects either for the company or, if you dare, for your own personal benefit, you have time to be hunting around for internal transfers that will boost your career, etc. If you want to rest and vest, hey, more power to you but the smart ones are taking advantage of the gigantic cornucopia of opportunity presented to them by merely getting in the door of an obscenely wealthy FAANG to catapult their careers ahead.

mr_gibbins 4y ago
Snap. I, for my sins, am new at a WITCH company (please don't throw rotten fruit at me), and there is an obscene amount of dead time in my calendar and will be for the foreseeable. I'm rinsing their training and development resources and should have the full suite of certs I want within 6 months completely free. Certs that would literally cost thousands to acquire privately. If they want me to do some actual work I'd be delighted but I've worked at multinationals before and I'm not holding my breath. What I won't do is sit around doing nothing.
- biztos 4y ago
  TIL: "W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707
borroka 4y ago
This is fair in theory, and I imagine that some smart, high-agency people take advantage of the situation, but as is often the case, “down time" leads to more down time rather than more time to devote to career advancement, networking, and so on. In fact, one might think that one day, when free of obligations and with plenty of gas in the tank that is currently used for work, one will pick up the barbell, take long bike rides, and build the body one has always dreamed of showing to their partner. But they are much more likely, instead, to spend more time watching the latest horrible Netflix TV series or eating burritos. The right analogy for mental and physical energy is not the tank, but the flywheel.
- robbintt 4y ago
  Can you expand on the flywheel analogy?
  - morty16 4y ago
    what I took from that is that inertia is more significant than total energy. if you've got a tank of gas you can go a long way slowly, a short way quickly. a flywheel takes a lot of effort to spin up or spin down. once it's going at a certain speed it tends to stay there. so if you tend to get home, eat burritos, and watch netflix, you'll keep doing that.
  - borroka 4y ago
    It is imperfect like all analogies, but let's take a toy example to clarify what I think. Let's say you are going to start something in 3 months, a new job or maybe you want to finally get in shape. If you think that your energy, will, and desire are like fuel in a slowly refilling tank, you might want to stop what you are doing now to save the energy that will have to be spent in 3 months. I remember years ago, when I was a serious sportsman, we had a few days off at Easter. And I rested. I came back flat, dead, without energy. Now the flywheel accumulates energy when the motor to which it is connected is working. The flywheel stores energy during the expansion phases (the combustion phase in an ICE) of the engine to return it during the passive phases. Which, going back to the dilemma "when you have long-term down time, you have energy available to do other work, for networking, etc.," if the flywheel analogy is the right one, it means that you store energy to spend when there is down time by doing work, not by turning the engine off for days or weeks. If no work is done for a certain period of time (the motor is off), the flywheel does not accumulate energy to spend, it is dead, needs time to accumulate energy again. If you don't go to the gym one or two days after a period of serious training, which may be a week or a month, the training session is likely to go well. If the rest period, "I'm so tired, I need a break," is longer, say two weeks, you are likely to come back not invigorated, but flat, without desire, you may think about putting it off for another two weeks because you still feel tired, the tank has not been filled with fuel, you may think. But it is because energy, will and desire work like a flywheel.
BeetleB 4y ago
Not at a FAANG but at a large company that has its fair share of world experts in various technical disciplines. At least in my company, the path you suggest will make you miserable (it did me). You are not seen to be at their level, and you will more likely become a pawn and someone to offload grunt labor to. Yes, you will learn, but you have less than a 10% chance they'll let you use that knowledge to do work at their level: They need grunt laborers, and you are more valuable to them as one because you've gained that knowledge. Oh, and they always had more pathological behavior amongst them. Very poor at teamwork, etc. There are exceptions, which is why I said "10% chance" instead of "0%" :-) The good news is whenever I went through this and switched to a less sexy team, I was seen as "the really smart guy who worked with the smart people" and the new team would value more than they should.
biztos 4y ago
I posit there is another category: people who don't accept or can't deal with being idle, but are not careerists and so instead of following your advice or resting-vesting, they find ways to spend their time helping solve actual problems in the company. My theory is that these people keep many companies afloat, because they go proactively solve the problems the resters are not solving because work, and the job-optimizers won't touch because not promotion-track.
- ThrowawayR2 4y ago
  I don't think there's anything on the list I mentioned, other than the "working on personal projects" one, that conflicts with that. Augmenting their own capabilities increases their effectiveness at "solving actual problems in the company" in addition to benefiting themselves. It's their own choice as to whether they do that.
periphrasis 4y ago
> to catapult their careers ahead. What is the value of one’s career? To make more money? Why is it smart to devote so much effort to moving up when you’ll be dead and your work completely forgotten much sooner than anyone cares to admit? If you’re seeking lasting glory then the well trod path there is politics, war, or art: technologists generally are not remembered outside their time (with maybe literally a half dozen exceptions since antiquity). I ask this honestly, because at this point in my own career the only answer I can come up with is the personal satisfaction of getting better and more knowledgeable about something I at one time enjoyed.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

Snap. I, for my sins, am new at a WITCH company (please don't throw rotten fruit at me), and there is an obscene amount of dead time in my calendar and will be for the foreseeable. I'm rinsing their training and development resources and should have the full suite of certs I want within 6 months completely free. Certs that would literally cost thousands to acquire privately. If they want me to do some actual work I'd be delighted but I've worked at multinationals before and I'm not holding my breath. What I won't do is sit around doing nothing.

biztos 4y ago
TIL: "W- Wipro I- Infosys T- TCS C- Cognizant H- HCL A- Accenture India." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27571707

borroka 4y ago

This is fair in theory, and I imagine that some smart, high-agency people take advantage of the situation, but as is often the case, “down time" leads to more down time rather than more time to devote to career advancement, networking, and so on. In fact, one might think that one day, when free of obligations and with plenty of gas in the tank that is currently used for work, one will pick up the barbell, take long bike rides, and build the body one has always dreamed of showing to their partner. But they are much more likely, instead, to spend more time watching the latest horrible Netflix TV series or eating burritos. The right analogy for mental and physical energy is not the tank, but the flywheel.

robbintt 4y ago
Can you expand on the flywheel analogy?
- morty16 4y ago
  what I took from that is that inertia is more significant than total energy. if you've got a tank of gas you can go a long way slowly, a short way quickly. a flywheel takes a lot of effort to spin up or spin down. once it's going at a certain speed it tends to stay there. so if you tend to get home, eat burritos, and watch netflix, you'll keep doing that.
- borroka 4y ago
  It is imperfect like all analogies, but let's take a toy example to clarify what I think. Let's say you are going to start something in 3 months, a new job or maybe you want to finally get in shape. If you think that your energy, will, and desire are like fuel in a slowly refilling tank, you might want to stop what you are doing now to save the energy that will have to be spent in 3 months. I remember years ago, when I was a serious sportsman, we had a few days off at Easter. And I rested. I came back flat, dead, without energy. Now the flywheel accumulates energy when the motor to which it is connected is working. The flywheel stores energy during the expansion phases (the combustion phase in an ICE) of the engine to return it during the passive phases. Which, going back to the dilemma "when you have long-term down time, you have energy available to do other work, for networking, etc.," if the flywheel analogy is the right one, it means that you store energy to spend when there is down time by doing work, not by turning the engine off for days or weeks. If no work is done for a certain period of time (the motor is off), the flywheel does not accumulate energy to spend, it is dead, needs time to accumulate energy again. If you don't go to the gym one or two days after a period of serious training, which may be a week or a month, the training session is likely to go well. If the rest period, "I'm so tired, I need a break," is longer, say two weeks, you are likely to come back not invigorated, but flat, without desire, you may think about putting it off for another two weeks because you still feel tired, the tank has not been filled with fuel, you may think. But it is because energy, will and desire work like a flywheel.

BeetleB 4y ago

Not at a FAANG but at a large company that has its fair share of world experts in various technical disciplines. At least in my company, the path you suggest will make you miserable (it did me). You are not seen to be at their level, and you will more likely become a pawn and someone to offload grunt labor to. Yes, you will learn, but you have less than a 10% chance they'll let you use that knowledge to do work at their level: They need grunt laborers, and you are more valuable to them as one because you've gained that knowledge. Oh, and they always had more pathological behavior amongst them. Very poor at teamwork, etc. There are exceptions, which is why I said "10% chance" instead of "0%" :-) The good news is whenever I went through this and switched to a less sexy team, I was seen as "the really smart guy who worked with the smart people" and the new team would value more than they should.

biztos 4y ago

I posit there is another category: people who don't accept or can't deal with being idle, but are not careerists and so instead of following your advice or resting-vesting, they find ways to spend their time helping solve actual problems in the company. My theory is that these people keep many companies afloat, because they go proactively solve the problems the resters are not solving because work, and the job-optimizers won't touch because not promotion-track.

ThrowawayR2 4y ago
I don't think there's anything on the list I mentioned, other than the "working on personal projects" one, that conflicts with that. Augmenting their own capabilities increases their effectiveness at "solving actual problems in the company" in addition to benefiting themselves. It's their own choice as to whether they do that.

periphrasis 4y ago

> to catapult their careers ahead. What is the value of one’s career? To make more money? Why is it smart to devote so much effort to moving up when you’ll be dead and your work completely forgotten much sooner than anyone cares to admit? If you’re seeking lasting glory then the well trod path there is politics, war, or art: technologists generally are not remembered outside their time (with maybe literally a half dozen exceptions since antiquity). I ask this honestly, because at this point in my own career the only answer I can come up with is the personal satisfaction of getting better and more knowledgeable about something I at one time enjoyed.