6 ms·

I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- someth

by kentm 4y ago

I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. Woe be unto you if you worked on a "leaf" system -- something that consumed internal services but did not expose services to other engineering teams. You would have no internal engineers willing to vouch for your promotion because they weren't using your service or codebase. I really wanted to just execute and be rewarded without having to invest excess energy in marketing myself internally in the company.

arcticbull 4y ago
Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals. You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. Just as it's the company's job to figure out what the market needs. Yeah, projects that are most valuable to a company will be competitive. If you don't want to compete, you'll have to figure something out on your own that isn't as sexy but still provides value. This becomes especially true as you become more senior at this kind of company. If you don't want to work in that environment that's fine, maybe that's not the right corporate culture for you. I hope you found somewhere that was a better fit!
- thomasahle 4y ago
  Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product? Because it sounds like OP was doing that: making something useful for the customers, just not for the other engineers. Hence the engineers couldn't vouch for the system and secure OP a promotion. That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    > Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product? Sorry, maybe I was unclear. I wasn't intending to opine on that aspect. I think product and infrastructure are both super valuable. You're goaled on impact not necessarily on whether you build infra or product per se. Infra you're rewarded based on the impact of the product teams leveraging your infra - and product teams you're goaled on moving specific metrics. I've worked at 2 FAANGs - on product teams - and my experience has been that if your product moves metrics that your org has decided are important then you will be rewarded. What I meant when I said "leaf services like that" was "leaf services whose measurable impact doesn't align with org goals." > That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not. Yeah, that's basically what I was trying to say.
    - kentm 4y ago
      > Infra you're rewarded based on the impact of the product teams leveraging your infra - and product teams you're goaled on moving specific metrics. This was not the case for me. I was told that my project had significant positive impact, and had many product teams vouch for me, but it didn't matter because "the principal engineers don't know who you are".
    - dchftcs 4y ago
      No you were perfectly clear. You just did not approach this constructively. It would have been better if you asked first about how the impact was and could have be measured. Or at least responded more directly when they tried to explain the impact better. Instead of making and sticking to an assumption that the service wasn't useful. It may well be that the person misunderstood their impact, but your arguments did not address that after the person came back with theirs. They could have been an edge case, that they are in an unfortunate situation in the human process of deciding rewards, where choosing and calculating metrics is itself subject to errors in judgment, and you tried to generalize your experiences to their corner of the world, which normally requires a stronger questioning.
- kentm 4y ago
  This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work. > You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users. I helped build a team from scratch and launch a product with high internal user satisfaction. But I was told that I needed, specifically, engineers from outside my immediate team to vouch for me. And I met with other people with the same problem and they told me "Don't work for products for business users." As an aside the internal tooling for non-technical users was atrocious. Wonder why. :)
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    > This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work. Sorry if it came across that way, that was not my intent. > No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users. If that's not what the company values, then that's not a project the company wants to incentivize you to make. If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? It sounds like the issue was as I was suggesting, that what you were trying to solve for wasn't what the org wanted and wasn't what they were goaling you on.
    - kentm 4y ago
      > If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? A healthy organization should reward developers for making internal tooling that is deemed necessary for the functioning of the org and drives value, yes. You're kinda ignoring the part here where I said that it was measurably useful to the company. If you're saying that you need to ignore necessary internal tools and get on the big visibility projects to get promoted, then thats exactly optimizing for self-promotion. Companies that ignore vital internal work that is not sexy and don't provide ways for engineers working on that vital internal work to advance their careers will end up unable to drive revenue due to low productivity.
    - btown 4y ago
      > wasn't what they were goaling you on This is the problem in a nutshell, no? A company that does not value a team that delivers measurable value to non-technical teams, and that provides no "alternate paths" for its non-technical users to vouch quantitatively for the promotability of technical team members, is creating a culture that is suboptimal for its financial goals. That quantitative bar must be high, of course, but if I heard as a C-level that people were getting advice "don't work for products for business users" I'd clear my calendar and get to the heart of why that was, because the very "routing fabric" of the company would be at stake. If they're not allowed to build i-tools, your technical teams will miss insights they need to build the right things, from the users who know more about the domain than anyone else.
- nequo 4y ago
  > You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. I have never worked at a FAANG. Wouldn’t it be the manager’s job to figure out what I should be working on? What is the manager’s job at such a company?
  - GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
    > What is the manager’s job at such a company? Figure out how to argue for more headcount, by expanding the scope of the team or by asking reports to narrow the breadth of their work to create headcount gaps.
    - arcticbull 4y ago
      Exactly, and provide mentorship, guidance - and accountability - to ICs.
- anonymoushn 4y ago
  Maybe you should try having impactful projects assigned to you instead of not-impactful ones, haha!
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    At these companies successful senior folks don't sit around waiting to get told what they're working on. It's their job to pick or start impactful projects in line with their org goals. If they're right they get rewarded but if they're not, they don't. If you're junior it won't really matter. If you're senior, and you're sitting there hoping your manager is going to give you something meaty you're not long for that company - because that is not your job. This was my experience at two FAANGs and also at one non-FAANG company over the last 10 years. Maybe it's different at the ones I didn't work at, but your snark is neither useful nor interesting. It also gives folks considering FAANGs here a false impression of what working there is actually like.
    - anonymoushn 4y ago
      As a senior SWE at Amazon I had the autonomy to do this sort of thing as soon as the several years worth of work my team had planned was done. Half the senior SWEs at a big job board that calls itself a tech company are concerned with migrating everything to per-table microservices that expose endpoints that do exactly the SQL queries other services used to do directly. Thanks for your report of your different experience in a different org. I'll try not to give people a false impression by posting about mine.
throwabayhay 4y ago
> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. I have no reason to doubt that in the particular corner of your organization that may well have been the case, but you cannot generalize this over the whole field. As stated elsewhere, I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did.
- lolinder 4y ago
  We have multiple people giving their anecdotes saying big tech positions emphasize self-promotion, and one anecdote (yours) saying they don't. So, sincere question: for those of us who haven't worked at a FAANG, why should we believe that your experience is the norm while the other people's is the "corner"?
  - throwabayhay 4y ago
    Just look in front of you. The monitor you are using right now. That's incredible technology. You think that would be possible if people did not care about engineering, having a number of peers around them across multiple levels of the organization that cared to a similar level? EDIT: What I mean is, you need multiple passionate people across many levels to achieve that. If reward culture wasn't somewhat healthy, I don't believe this could work.
    - lolinder 4y ago
      That has absolutely no bearing on the comment you replied to or my own. OP didn't say anything about engineering, OP said you had to play games to get promoted. That's not mutually exclusive with having good engineers.
      - throwabayhay 4y ago
        I am not sure it is realistic to expect that all the good engineers never get promoted and that there would still be something good coming out over time.
throwawaycrpclt 4y ago
The extra bad part about this is it's propagating into the industry as a whole. Much better to be ruthlessly egoistic and clear tickets. Demo or go bust. Collaboration? Ah well of course as lip service at best, for sure always restrained for basic survival. No wonder people are less happy than they used to be. And less creative in outcome. This is not how humans usually work in groups. Trust and camaraderie is prime. I hope at one point we will look back and say "Wow that was some silly culture we had going back then".
creato 4y ago
> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. So then don’t get promoted? I was at two large companies for many years in my career, (almost) everyone’s obsession with promotion was bewildering. A FAANG L5 salary is pretty rewarding for just executing IC work, and that’s about what is expected of that role.
- Abroszka 4y ago
  So much this. I might even panic a bit if I got promoted. Nowadays I got so used to the work and tools that I can finish work in less 8 hours on most days. It pays well, I'm having enough free time, low stress because it's the same work I have been doing for a number of years already. Not much politics at my level. I just enjoy it.

by kentm 4y ago

arcticbull 4y ago

Their counter-argument is that leaf services like that without measurable impact aren't things the company should be investing in and it is up to the individual to recognize that and re-allocate themselves onto something that's actually aligned with the company's goals. You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. Just as it's the company's job to figure out what the market needs. Yeah, projects that are most valuable to a company will be competitive. If you don't want to compete, you'll have to figure something out on your own that isn't as sexy but still provides value. This becomes especially true as you become more senior at this kind of company. If you don't want to work in that environment that's fine, maybe that's not the right corporate culture for you. I hope you found somewhere that was a better fit!

thomasahle 4y ago
Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product? Because it sounds like OP was doing that: making something useful for the customers, just not for the other engineers. Hence the engineers couldn't vouch for the system and secure OP a promotion. That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not.
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > Are you saying that people should only focus on building infrastructure for other engineers and never actually make a product? Sorry, maybe I was unclear. I wasn't intending to opine on that aspect. I think product and infrastructure are both super valuable. You're goaled on impact not necessarily on whether you build infra or product per se. Infra you're rewarded based on the impact of the product teams leveraging your infra - and product teams you're goaled on moving specific metrics. I've worked at 2 FAANGs - on product teams - and my experience has been that if your product moves metrics that your org has decided are important then you will be rewarded. What I meant when I said "leaf services like that" was "leaf services whose measurable impact doesn't align with org goals." > That being said, bad projects definitely exist within big companies, and it's not always easy for (junior in particular) people to know if they are working on something useful or not. Yeah, that's basically what I was trying to say.
  - kentm 4y ago
    > Infra you're rewarded based on the impact of the product teams leveraging your infra - and product teams you're goaled on moving specific metrics. This was not the case for me. I was told that my project had significant positive impact, and had many product teams vouch for me, but it didn't matter because "the principal engineers don't know who you are".
  - dchftcs 4y ago
    No you were perfectly clear. You just did not approach this constructively. It would have been better if you asked first about how the impact was and could have be measured. Or at least responded more directly when they tried to explain the impact better. Instead of making and sticking to an assumption that the service wasn't useful. It may well be that the person misunderstood their impact, but your arguments did not address that after the person came back with theirs. They could have been an edge case, that they are in an unfortunate situation in the human process of deciding rewards, where choosing and calculating metrics is itself subject to errors in judgment, and you tried to generalize your experiences to their corner of the world, which normally requires a stronger questioning.
kentm 4y ago
This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work. > You simply working on a project isn't useful to a company, what's useful is working on the right project. No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users. I helped build a team from scratch and launch a product with high internal user satisfaction. But I was told that I needed, specifically, engineers from outside my immediate team to vouch for me. And I met with other people with the same problem and they told me "Don't work for products for business users." As an aside the internal tooling for non-technical users was atrocious. Wonder why. :)
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > This is a pretty condescending post that assumes quite a lot about my work. Sorry if it came across that way, that was not my intent. > No, my project was measurably useful to the company. It wasn't useful for engineers, but it was useful for internal, non technical users. If that's not what the company values, then that's not a project the company wants to incentivize you to make. If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? It sounds like the issue was as I was suggesting, that what you were trying to solve for wasn't what the org wanted and wasn't what they were goaling you on.
  - kentm 4y ago
    > If you choose to make it anyways, would you really expect them to reward you for it? A healthy organization should reward developers for making internal tooling that is deemed necessary for the functioning of the org and drives value, yes. You're kinda ignoring the part here where I said that it was measurably useful to the company. If you're saying that you need to ignore necessary internal tools and get on the big visibility projects to get promoted, then thats exactly optimizing for self-promotion. Companies that ignore vital internal work that is not sexy and don't provide ways for engineers working on that vital internal work to advance their careers will end up unable to drive revenue due to low productivity.
  - btown 4y ago
    > wasn't what they were goaling you on This is the problem in a nutshell, no? A company that does not value a team that delivers measurable value to non-technical teams, and that provides no "alternate paths" for its non-technical users to vouch quantitatively for the promotability of technical team members, is creating a culture that is suboptimal for its financial goals. That quantitative bar must be high, of course, but if I heard as a C-level that people were getting advice "don't work for products for business users" I'd clear my calendar and get to the heart of why that was, because the very "routing fabric" of the company would be at stake. If they're not allowed to build i-tools, your technical teams will miss insights they need to build the right things, from the users who know more about the domain than anyone else.
nequo 4y ago
> You get promoted and compensated more if your work aligns with the company, and less (or none) if it doesn't. It's your job to figure it out. I have never worked at a FAANG. Wouldn’t it be the manager’s job to figure out what I should be working on? What is the manager’s job at such a company?
- GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
  > What is the manager’s job at such a company? Figure out how to argue for more headcount, by expanding the scope of the team or by asking reports to narrow the breadth of their work to create headcount gaps.
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    Exactly, and provide mentorship, guidance - and accountability - to ICs.
anonymoushn 4y ago
Maybe you should try having impactful projects assigned to you instead of not-impactful ones, haha!
- arcticbull 4y ago
  At these companies successful senior folks don't sit around waiting to get told what they're working on. It's their job to pick or start impactful projects in line with their org goals. If they're right they get rewarded but if they're not, they don't. If you're junior it won't really matter. If you're senior, and you're sitting there hoping your manager is going to give you something meaty you're not long for that company - because that is not your job. This was my experience at two FAANGs and also at one non-FAANG company over the last 10 years. Maybe it's different at the ones I didn't work at, but your snark is neither useful nor interesting. It also gives folks considering FAANGs here a false impression of what working there is actually like.
  - anonymoushn 4y ago
    As a senior SWE at Amazon I had the autonomy to do this sort of thing as soon as the several years worth of work my team had planned was done. Half the senior SWEs at a big job board that calls itself a tech company are concerned with migrating everything to per-table microservices that expose endpoints that do exactly the SQL queries other services used to do directly. Thanks for your report of your different experience in a different org. I'll try not to give people a false impression by posting about mine.

throwabayhay 4y ago

> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. I have no reason to doubt that in the particular corner of your organization that may well have been the case, but you cannot generalize this over the whole field. As stated elsewhere, I never played any game to be promoted, I simply never consciously sought the goal of promotion, and I was promoted anyway just because of the real, substantial job I did.

lolinder 4y ago
We have multiple people giving their anecdotes saying big tech positions emphasize self-promotion, and one anecdote (yours) saying they don't. So, sincere question: for those of us who haven't worked at a FAANG, why should we believe that your experience is the norm while the other people's is the "corner"?
- throwabayhay 4y ago
  Just look in front of you. The monitor you are using right now. That's incredible technology. You think that would be possible if people did not care about engineering, having a number of peers around them across multiple levels of the organization that cared to a similar level? EDIT: What I mean is, you need multiple passionate people across many levels to achieve that. If reward culture wasn't somewhat healthy, I don't believe this could work.
  - lolinder 4y ago
    That has absolutely no bearing on the comment you replied to or my own. OP didn't say anything about engineering, OP said you had to play games to get promoted. That's not mutually exclusive with having good engineers.
    - throwabayhay 4y ago
      I am not sure it is realistic to expect that all the good engineers never get promoted and that there would still be something good coming out over time.

throwawaycrpclt 4y ago

The extra bad part about this is it's propagating into the industry as a whole. Much better to be ruthlessly egoistic and clear tickets. Demo or go bust. Collaboration? Ah well of course as lip service at best, for sure always restrained for basic survival. No wonder people are less happy than they used to be. And less creative in outcome. This is not how humans usually work in groups. Trust and camaraderie is prime. I hope at one point we will look back and say "Wow that was some silly culture we had going back then".

creato 4y ago

> I left FAANG basically because you had to play the politics and self-promotion game to get promoted. So then don’t get promoted? I was at two large companies for many years in my career, (almost) everyone’s obsession with promotion was bewildering. A FAANG L5 salary is pretty rewarding for just executing IC work, and that’s about what is expected of that role.

Abroszka 4y ago
So much this. I might even panic a bit if I got promoted. Nowadays I got so used to the work and tools that I can finish work in less 8 hours on most days. It pays well, I'm having enough free time, low stress because it's the same work I have been doing for a number of years already. Not much politics at my level. I just enjoy it.