12 ms·

It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” The people I know who joined FAANG in the last five years are some of the hardest

It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” The people I know who joined FAANG in the last five years are some of the hardest working people you’ll meet. There are some who get lucky and manage to coast but overall - the quality and tenacity of the IC folks is generally quite high. I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity.

imdsm 4y ago
> grinded the fuck out of leetcode What is leetcode?
- zoover2020 4y ago
  If not bait: a website to test competitive programming skills by algorithmic and data structure design questions. The difficulty levels vary and FAANG is well-known to ask such questions (in the harder difficulty spectrum) intech interviews
  - imdsm 4y ago
    Ah, thanks. Wasn't bait, I'm just a bit too old in the tooth to be involved in modern-day interview culture. (The interviews I conduct are far more relaxed, personal, and practical.)
- harveywi 4y ago
  It's a scheme that (1) provides a busywork/proof-of-work barrier to entry to FAANG companies, and (2) fools engineers into believing that they are Robert Tarjan when in fact they can't wipe their own asses.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  Canned programming interview questions that teach aspiring young people to memorize and recite a function line-for-line rather than actually be able to discuss implementations with the interviewer like a human being. (I blame lazy, clueless hiring managers and hiring practices for enabling this)
  - brandall10 4y ago
    They are canned in a way, but they did first originate from these companies. Leetcode is essentially a compendium of all that. But you'll be nicked hard if you don't communicate a ton. It's actually bad form to not verbally discuss the approach, big O space/time tradeoffs, testing approach, etc, before starting to code. For a medium type problem that could be a full 5-10 minutes of talking before doing 10-20 minutes of coding. Also the general advice is to not memorize the answers. There's literally thousands of them. It's to do many in different classes of problems to get a feel for the algorithms and to see the patterns on when to apply what, and to esp. dig deep into alternate solutions provided in the discussion sections because it's not uncommon for an interview to switch it up and ask to optimize space instead of time. It's really just becoming a mid-level competitive programmer, which takes some grit, but is somewhat removed from being a great engineer.
codekansas 4y ago
My impression is that most people who start at a FAANG company are pretty hard-working but over time become less so, as they realize that it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work and as they get too comfortable with the various benefits that working at a large company provides. Personally that's what I find kind of depressing, seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff.
- xwdv 4y ago
  Potential for what? Working very hard for even less pay?
  - nicoburns 4y ago
    Potential to contribute meaningful improvements to society. It's easy to lose track of in the modern world, but our work is supposed to actually produce value in the real non-monetary sense of the word.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      I mean, it isn't like the common alternative to the megacorps are all society-improving companies. Trading firms, various financial software companies, gig economy apps, crypto companies, and developer tools companies tend to be the things that recruit me most frequently. Not exactly companies that I feel are providing a lot of benefit to people. Just more efficient ways of being extractive or helping other companies be extractive.
      - indigochill 4y ago
        I wonder what would happen if more software engineers viewed themselves like landscapers/plumbers/electricians. That is, you have a skill, people in your community need it, now you just need to find those people. A friend of mine used to work in the bizdev side of a non-profit, managing donations and tracking groups to thank and follow-up with and so on. Incidentally she started complaining about how bad the user experience of the software she was using was, which got my ears tingling. What if people in her position at other non-profits had the same experience to the extent that I could distribute the cost of developing something this group of users found value in (increased efficiency/productivity) that their organizations would be willing to switch to? I ended up not following through for personal reasons and there are some of the normal "cost of switching" stuff one would have to get past to make this work, but little things like this wouldn't generate hockey-stick revenue but could bring value to the world. If the Thibault can make a decent living making a good free open source chess website or Tarn can make a decent living making the most in-depth fantasy world simulator the world's ever seen, surely there are other modest opportunities out there to be the change we want to see in the world (interestingly both examples here live on donations rather than selling a service/product).
zinxq 4y ago
>I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity. Not sure you meant it, but this is an inadvertent attestation for "leetcode". As in, it's not about the leetcode, it's about the type of person that masters the leetcode.
- bradlys 4y ago
  I think everyone agrees on that. It’s an arbitrary hoop at this point. We’re just trying to find those who are willing to go the distance on the hoops.
footlose_3815 4y ago
[dead]
hnbad 4y ago
In my experience talking to FB devs of varying report at conferences, they are often highly motivated and may thus quickly gain a deep understanding of the technology they get to work on, but their overall knowledge tends to be fairly shallow. Most skills are likely transferrable but a kid joining Facebook fresh from college to move on to another job three years later is still a rookie due to their lack of experience.
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
> It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” I’ve participated in some mentorship programs for college grads. There are a lot of students who think that the FAANG career path is basically “Study LeetCode for a few months, get FAANG job, then rest and vest”. Of those who make it into FAANG, it’s common for them to be surprised by how demanding and competitive their jobs are. I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that the highest paid jobs in our industry also happen to be some of the easiest, but it doesn’t even make logical sense. I suspect a lot of it stems from sour grapes: People inherently get jealous of high earners in prestigious jobs, and tend to reach for excuses to bring them down a notch.
- scarface74 4y ago
  High earning: yes Prestigious: no It’s just a job.
  - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
    Having a high-paying job at a well-known tech company that average people recognize is the definition of a prestigious job in society. If you don’t think FAANG jobs are socially prestigious, you’re probably thinking too narrowly within the HN comment section bubble. Talk to first-generation college graduates looking to make it big in the engineering world and FAANG jobs are the definition of prestigious to them and their families.
    - jjulius 4y ago
      Given the negative views that a lot of average people have towards some of those FAANGs (more specifically, Facebook and Google), I would disagree that they're viewed as "prestigious" jobs. Years ago, sure, but whatever air of prestige they had going for themselves is quickly disappearing.
      - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
        You’re misconstruing the company’s reputation with the career’s reputation. A lot of people have negative sentiment toward “lawyers” as a group, but getting a big lawyer job is still considered prestigious for the individual. Also, the average person actually really likes Google search, their Microsoft Xbox, their Instagram friends, and so on. If the average person actually disliked these products, they wouldn’t be the biggest brands in the world.
michaelt 4y ago
> It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” People who think this look at a product made by 83,000 people and to them, it looks pretty similar to a product made by 83 people. Some of those workers are working on a large-scale product that scales imperfectly. Sysadmins to rack new servers, human moderators to respond to users' reports, whatever. 1 per 20,000 users and a few billion users is a lot of workers. On the other hand, none of these companies are famous for their high-touch, responsive customer support. Some of those workers are working very intensely on things that are completely invisible to end users. Applying security patches to backend servers. Training their workers to recognise the signs of modern slavery. Building their own in-house Linux distribution. Products that get cancelled before launch. Getting that newly acquired company onto your corporate platform. And some of those workers are working on things that are marginally invisible to end users. Ad sales, feed ranking algorithms, spam detection. Some of those workers are working on new, customer-facing but peripheral things, that have escaped notice because they're at a small scale, or unpopular. Shorts on youtube, for example. To a critic, these manual scaling support, invisible and almost-invisible efforts don't count - and if you only count customer-facing features, that seems like a lot of developers and not much development.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  The big disconnect is that the overwhelming majority of value is never presented to users. It would be trivial to make a viable alternative to the Facebook that users experience; just too difficult to get enough users to move to whatever new platform you make, and you won't be making money to support it.
- wan23 4y ago
  When you have six figure employee numbers, the internal tools have more users than many startups do. You start to find that off the shelf tools don't work any more and you need to have people customizing them. Then you start seeing things that are specific to the company - people walking too far to get to conference rooms, and someone staffs up a tool to optimize meeting room allocations. You end up with tons of people working on things that are invisible to end users just to keep the machine running.
renewiltord 4y ago
Well, then you have a hiring advantage against many companies since you won't apply this judgment. I'd say LinkedIn is probably the least productive engineers, but most Googlers are right up there with the least productive. Facebook is bimodal. But that's how I've found it in hiring.
time_to_smile 4y ago
> they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in While I definitely agree with your assessment regarding laziness (I don't think I know or have worked with anyone at or from a FAANG that I would describe as "lazy") my experience is that grinding leetcode and systems design is entirely independent from "can actually write complex code and design real world systems". In the dotcom shadow actually knowing how to get your hands dirty and solve real world problems that might not be sexy or at "Google scale" was the essential differentiator for candidates. That change won't happen over night though, and I do also suspect you are correct that many of these people will have no trouble finding new jobs. They will have trouble finding the same TC.
bee_rider 4y ago
IMO Google and Facebook are very different in this sense. At least from a user point of view, Google's sites seem to typically be well implemented (the annoying thing about the company is more that they are wasting lots of good brains on a mismanaged projects that only get half-released and ad tech). The best thing I'll say about Facebook is that their site doesn't give the impression that a ton of talent has been wasted on it.
- ipaddr 4y ago
  Google's sites are always half baked and unfinished. It gives the impression no one thought about the frontend. Facebook one could say is too polished. Too many people are involved adding too much, tracking each movement. Tons of talent has been wasted on Facebooks site.
mbrodersen 4y ago
I have worked with a few people who later joined Google. They were OK but not the best people I have ever worked with. So don’t believe that “the best people work for FAANG’s”. It’s BS hype.

imdsm 4y ago

> grinded the fuck out of leetcode What is leetcode?

zoover2020 4y ago
If not bait: a website to test competitive programming skills by algorithmic and data structure design questions. The difficulty levels vary and FAANG is well-known to ask such questions (in the harder difficulty spectrum) intech interviews
- imdsm 4y ago
  Ah, thanks. Wasn't bait, I'm just a bit too old in the tooth to be involved in modern-day interview culture. (The interviews I conduct are far more relaxed, personal, and practical.)
harveywi 4y ago
It's a scheme that (1) provides a busywork/proof-of-work barrier to entry to FAANG companies, and (2) fools engineers into believing that they are Robert Tarjan when in fact they can't wipe their own asses.
wildrhythms 4y ago
Canned programming interview questions that teach aspiring young people to memorize and recite a function line-for-line rather than actually be able to discuss implementations with the interviewer like a human being. (I blame lazy, clueless hiring managers and hiring practices for enabling this)
- brandall10 4y ago
  They are canned in a way, but they did first originate from these companies. Leetcode is essentially a compendium of all that. But you'll be nicked hard if you don't communicate a ton. It's actually bad form to not verbally discuss the approach, big O space/time tradeoffs, testing approach, etc, before starting to code. For a medium type problem that could be a full 5-10 minutes of talking before doing 10-20 minutes of coding. Also the general advice is to not memorize the answers. There's literally thousands of them. It's to do many in different classes of problems to get a feel for the algorithms and to see the patterns on when to apply what, and to esp. dig deep into alternate solutions provided in the discussion sections because it's not uncommon for an interview to switch it up and ask to optimize space instead of time. It's really just becoming a mid-level competitive programmer, which takes some grit, but is somewhat removed from being a great engineer.

codekansas 4y ago

My impression is that most people who start at a FAANG company are pretty hard-working but over time become less so, as they realize that it doesn't make much of a difference how hard they work and as they get too comfortable with the various benefits that working at a large company provides. Personally that's what I find kind of depressing, seeing highly-motivated people having their potential sapped by working on contrived pillars instead of using their talents to make cool and useful stuff.

xwdv 4y ago
Potential for what? Working very hard for even less pay?
- nicoburns 4y ago
  Potential to contribute meaningful improvements to society. It's easy to lose track of in the modern world, but our work is supposed to actually produce value in the real non-monetary sense of the word.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    I mean, it isn't like the common alternative to the megacorps are all society-improving companies. Trading firms, various financial software companies, gig economy apps, crypto companies, and developer tools companies tend to be the things that recruit me most frequently. Not exactly companies that I feel are providing a lot of benefit to people. Just more efficient ways of being extractive or helping other companies be extractive.
    - indigochill 4y ago
      I wonder what would happen if more software engineers viewed themselves like landscapers/plumbers/electricians. That is, you have a skill, people in your community need it, now you just need to find those people. A friend of mine used to work in the bizdev side of a non-profit, managing donations and tracking groups to thank and follow-up with and so on. Incidentally she started complaining about how bad the user experience of the software she was using was, which got my ears tingling. What if people in her position at other non-profits had the same experience to the extent that I could distribute the cost of developing something this group of users found value in (increased efficiency/productivity) that their organizations would be willing to switch to? I ended up not following through for personal reasons and there are some of the normal "cost of switching" stuff one would have to get past to make this work, but little things like this wouldn't generate hockey-stick revenue but could bring value to the world. If the Thibault can make a decent living making a good free open source chess website or Tarn can make a decent living making the most in-depth fantasy world simulator the world's ever seen, surely there are other modest opportunities out there to be the change we want to see in the world (interestingly both examples here live on donations rather than selling a service/product).

zinxq 4y ago

>I don’t think many of these people will have trouble finding a job. After all - they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in. That type of persona to do hundreds of problems doesn’t easily waver in the face of minor adversity. Not sure you meant it, but this is an inadvertent attestation for "leetcode". As in, it's not about the leetcode, it's about the type of person that masters the leetcode.

bradlys 4y ago
I think everyone agrees on that. It’s an arbitrary hoop at this point. We’re just trying to find those who are willing to go the distance on the hoops.

footlose_3815 4y ago

[dead]

hnbad 4y ago

In my experience talking to FB devs of varying report at conferences, they are often highly motivated and may thus quickly gain a deep understanding of the technology they get to work on, but their overall knowledge tends to be fairly shallow. Most skills are likely transferrable but a kid joining Facebook fresh from college to move on to another job three years later is still a rookie due to their lack of experience.

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

> It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” I’ve participated in some mentorship programs for college grads. There are a lot of students who think that the FAANG career path is basically “Study LeetCode for a few months, get FAANG job, then rest and vest”. Of those who make it into FAANG, it’s common for them to be surprised by how demanding and competitive their jobs are. I’m not sure where people are getting the idea that the highest paid jobs in our industry also happen to be some of the easiest, but it doesn’t even make logical sense. I suspect a lot of it stems from sour grapes: People inherently get jealous of high earners in prestigious jobs, and tend to reach for excuses to bring them down a notch.

scarface74 4y ago
High earning: yes Prestigious: no It’s just a job.
- PragmaticPulp 4y ago
  Having a high-paying job at a well-known tech company that average people recognize is the definition of a prestigious job in society. If you don’t think FAANG jobs are socially prestigious, you’re probably thinking too narrowly within the HN comment section bubble. Talk to first-generation college graduates looking to make it big in the engineering world and FAANG jobs are the definition of prestigious to them and their families.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    Given the negative views that a lot of average people have towards some of those FAANGs (more specifically, Facebook and Google), I would disagree that they're viewed as "prestigious" jobs. Years ago, sure, but whatever air of prestige they had going for themselves is quickly disappearing.
    - PragmaticPulp 4y ago
      You’re misconstruing the company’s reputation with the career’s reputation. A lot of people have negative sentiment toward “lawyers” as a group, but getting a big lawyer job is still considered prestigious for the individual. Also, the average person actually really likes Google search, their Microsoft Xbox, their Instagram friends, and so on. If the average person actually disliked these products, they wouldn’t be the biggest brands in the world.

michaelt 4y ago

> It’s weird to me how many folks attest to “being at FAANG means you’re lazy.” People who think this look at a product made by 83,000 people and to them, it looks pretty similar to a product made by 83 people. Some of those workers are working on a large-scale product that scales imperfectly. Sysadmins to rack new servers, human moderators to respond to users' reports, whatever. 1 per 20,000 users and a few billion users is a lot of workers. On the other hand, none of these companies are famous for their high-touch, responsive customer support. Some of those workers are working very intensely on things that are completely invisible to end users. Applying security patches to backend servers. Training their workers to recognise the signs of modern slavery. Building their own in-house Linux distribution. Products that get cancelled before launch. Getting that newly acquired company onto your corporate platform. And some of those workers are working on things that are marginally invisible to end users. Ad sales, feed ranking algorithms, spam detection. Some of those workers are working on new, customer-facing but peripheral things, that have escaped notice because they're at a small scale, or unpopular. Shorts on youtube, for example. To a critic, these manual scaling support, invisible and almost-invisible efforts don't count - and if you only count customer-facing features, that seems like a lot of developers and not much development.

thomastjeffery 4y ago
The big disconnect is that the overwhelming majority of value is never presented to users. It would be trivial to make a viable alternative to the Facebook that users experience; just too difficult to get enough users to move to whatever new platform you make, and you won't be making money to support it.
wan23 4y ago
When you have six figure employee numbers, the internal tools have more users than many startups do. You start to find that off the shelf tools don't work any more and you need to have people customizing them. Then you start seeing things that are specific to the company - people walking too far to get to conference rooms, and someone staffs up a tool to optimize meeting room allocations. You end up with tons of people working on things that are invisible to end users just to keep the machine running.

renewiltord 4y ago

Well, then you have a hiring advantage against many companies since you won't apply this judgment. I'd say LinkedIn is probably the least productive engineers, but most Googlers are right up there with the least productive. Facebook is bimodal. But that's how I've found it in hiring.

time_to_smile 4y ago

> they most likely grinded the fuck out of leetcode and system design to get in While I definitely agree with your assessment regarding laziness (I don't think I know or have worked with anyone at or from a FAANG that I would describe as "lazy") my experience is that grinding leetcode and systems design is entirely independent from "can actually write complex code and design real world systems". In the dotcom shadow actually knowing how to get your hands dirty and solve real world problems that might not be sexy or at "Google scale" was the essential differentiator for candidates. That change won't happen over night though, and I do also suspect you are correct that many of these people will have no trouble finding new jobs. They will have trouble finding the same TC.

bee_rider 4y ago

IMO Google and Facebook are very different in this sense. At least from a user point of view, Google's sites seem to typically be well implemented (the annoying thing about the company is more that they are wasting lots of good brains on a mismanaged projects that only get half-released and ad tech). The best thing I'll say about Facebook is that their site doesn't give the impression that a ton of talent has been wasted on it.

ipaddr 4y ago
Google's sites are always half baked and unfinished. It gives the impression no one thought about the frontend. Facebook one could say is too polished. Too many people are involved adding too much, tracking each movement. Tons of talent has been wasted on Facebooks site.

mbrodersen 4y ago

I have worked with a few people who later joined Google. They were OK but not the best people I have ever worked with. So don’t believe that “the best people work for FAANG’s”. It’s BS hype.