6 ms·

Strong disagree, going to FAANG or alternatively a larger company respected for engineering chops will open a lot of doors. It definitely did for me. Also the

Strong disagree, going to FAANG or alternatively a larger company respected for engineering chops will open a lot of doors. It definitely did for me. Also the sore reality is assholes are everywhere, and smaller companies have less rail guards to prevent them from gaining authority in an org. Whereas at larger companies you have more leeway in moving teams and finding an org with wonderful people. That doesn’t mean a startup is a bad choice for a new grad, it can be the best choice for many. But I would not count out larger companies so quickly.

rimliu 4y ago
There are people who respect F (M) for engineering chops? Interesting. To me they more look like "that's how not to do things" than the opposite.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  It sounds impossible to characterize a bigco, which is like a trillion competing and independent duchies and fiefdoms, with any sort of sweeping statement about how good their engineers are.
  - sethhochberg 4y ago
    Not to mention the entire disciplines of engineering that really only exist at the megacorps - Meta is still on the relatively bleeding edge of datacenter design, both physical plant and networking.
- linkregister 4y ago
  The amount of recruiter spam increases by an order of magnitude once a FAANG-level technology company appears on one's resume. It has a dramatic change in the amount of technical interviews that are granted to an applicant.
  - Silhouette 4y ago
    At what kind of company? Looking from outside and in particular from outside the US the whole FAANG culture seems very strange. There is - or was - a huge amount of money available in compensation that seems almost completely disconnected from the value of an individual developer's contribution to the business or the level of useful skills and experience the developer has. And it seems there's this kind of clique effect where those who have worked in a FAANG or a high-profile startup are assumed by others who have worked at FAANGs or high-profile startups to be somehow better than everyone else. But IME once you're outside that bubble a more likely assumption is that ex-FAANG people will demand more than they're worth and won't necessarily be any more competent or productive than anyone else. And ex-multiple-FAANGs with rapid job hopping at the start of a career is a huge red flag.
    - VirusNewbie 4y ago
      FAANG has a fairly high floor for engineers. You certainly find brilliant people on par with the best of FAANG at all types and kinds of companies. However many companies also have absolutely morons slip through the cracks, people who can barely code. FAANG does a pretty good job filtering those people out. So I agree that FAANG isn’t a great signal of brilliance but it is a good sign of “decently competent”.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  How did you come to believe that Meta doesn't have engineering chops? They have done so much cutting edge engineering work I don't even know where to start. Think what you want about the company itself, but they've done a shit ton of amazing engineering work.
  - nodemaker 4y ago
    I worked at a startup where everyone was ex meta! They made such a shitty architecture with GraphQL and Hasura and other meta technologies they learnt that it was laughable they were using that for a small startup.
    - gedy 4y ago
      GraphQL and Hasura is... totally reasonable for a startup? We used same at a 12 person startup, way faster and cheaper than the shitty MVP API service we were limping along with. Also Hasura is not Meta tech afaik.
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    It's not that there aren't great engineers at the FAANGs. It's that there are a lot of low quality ones. So it's a poor lake to fish in.
    - what_ever 4y ago
      Isn't that true for engineers in general and not just engineers at FAANGs?
      - renewiltord 4y ago
        Right. In some sense, it's just a population reversion to the mean. But I've had better luck with my hiring once I've excluded FAANG-only engineers from the resumes I screen. Considering we pay about $350k for a fresh grad, I think I know why this is.
01100011 4y ago
Not sure if I am reading you right but are you saying the options are either to go to a FANG or a startup? If so, I'd add startups to the set of places new grads should avoid. Assholes are everywhere, so learning to deal with them is essential, but, in my experience(which, arguably, mostly comes from another era), the valley has a lot more assholes per engineer than, say, a small to medium sized company. Not only that, but the valley has an overall social environment which is... unsupportive to many. It is, based on my experience and the general feeling I've encountered talking to coworkers and online folks, a very difficult place to find friends and support. Depending on your role, there are a lot of places that look down on FANG experience. That is going to vary a lot with which part of the SW elephant you work on. My experiences as an embedded SWE who deals a lot with HW folks won't necessarily map to someone doing games or front end web work.
- spacemadness 4y ago
  Nobody is going to look down on FAANG experience. Come on now.
  - 01100011 4y ago
    It comes up regularly on HN(i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846408). FAANG folks have high salary expectations, often do not know how to work in a less supportive environment, often possess big egos, and will leave as soon as they're offered another FAANG gig. When I've hired for non-FAANG roles, I hire folks who are going to be a good fit for the team and the company, who demonstrate a good understanding of the work they've done, and whose experience aligns with what the role requires. Coming from a FAANG was neither a benefit nor an asset to me. Now that I've done time in the valley, I think I'd be extra careful to screen toxic folks.
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      the FAANG companies are so different from each other, I don't know that stereotyping everyone who is from "one of those companies" is accurate or effective.
irrational 4y ago
Or, go to work at a large company (my company has nearly 100,000 employees) that is not a FAANG company. No bs leetcode interviews, much better work-life balance (I maybe put in 30 hours a week and have enough vacation stored up that I could potentially take off 5 months right now), I've never met an asshole engineer or manager, etc.
- ZephyrBlu 4y ago
  TC?
  - irrational 4y ago
    I don’t know what TC is.
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      Then GTFO, as Blind would say. (TC is total compensation, it's a meme on Blind to mention what one's TC is when talking about working at a company. Those that don't are told to GTFO. Interestingly enough, the salary sharing is quite beneficial to employees on Blind, since it incentivizes salaries to go up.)
      - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
        Indeed. People always give reasons why working at their company is better than working at FAANG but very rarely say what their TC is, which is telling.
        01100011 4y ago
        Before I came to the valley my TC was less than half what it became, but my LE(life enjoyment) dropped commensurate with my salary increase. If you solely value TC then you may be a great fit for the valley. If you value other things, you probably won't like working and socializing with people who put TC above all else and you should avoid the valley. Leave it for the people who need it.
nodemaker 4y ago
I have worked for large and small companies in my career (not faang but similar size) but honestly all the great people I admire have been in smaller companies. Large companies seem to full of people that chase promotions, TC and are not interested in learning new things.
kerkeslager 4y ago
I think the bigger message in the post you're responding to is that for the first few years of your career, you should switch jobs often. In the first few years of my career I was put in the situation a few times where: 1. Raises at my current company weren't offered unless requested, or unless a promotion (change in title) occurred. Sometimes both. 2. Raises associated with normal growth in your role at my current company were pretty consistently 3-4%, raises associated with a promotion were 5-8%. 3. Switching companies would get me a 10-20% raise. Early in your career, the value you're providing is improving fast, and your compensation should keep up, but for most, it doesn't, because management has an idea that some percentage is "standard". Having talked to lots of people about their salaries (which all workers should do), it doesn't seem to matter much whether you're switching between startups, between FAANG (or similar) companies, or between the two. But if the person you're responding to took a trajectory that led through a few companies to FAANG, it might create the impression that it's good to go to other companies before FAANG.
- astrange 4y ago
  I've seen the salaries people get by "switching companies often" and they don't seem to be a lot better than what you can get from good perf reviews at a FAANG. I'm sure it depends on the company, but you can also switch teams and products inside a large company if you feel there's more opportunity elsewhere. (One thing people think is that boring-but-important work might pay better - this actually isn't true, the exciting meme work also pays the most but is less stable.)
  - kerkeslager 4y ago
    > I've seen the salaries people get by "switching companies often" and they don't seem to be a lot better than what you can get from good perf reviews at a FAANG. I suppose it's possible none of the FAANG folks I have spoken to about this were getting good performance reviews, but I have never heard of someone getting a 20% raise in one year at a FAANG company unless there were some obvious extenuating circumstances. I'm sure HNers will rush in now to tell me they got X>20% raise at Y FAANG, but that definitely seems like outliers to me. And the thing is, you don't even have to be great to get a 20% raise by switching jobs early in your career. Normal, even mediocre growth as an engineer puts you at that valuation easily.

rimliu 4y ago

There are people who respect F (M) for engineering chops? Interesting. To me they more look like "that's how not to do things" than the opposite.

whatshisface 4y ago
It sounds impossible to characterize a bigco, which is like a trillion competing and independent duchies and fiefdoms, with any sort of sweeping statement about how good their engineers are.
- sethhochberg 4y ago
  Not to mention the entire disciplines of engineering that really only exist at the megacorps - Meta is still on the relatively bleeding edge of datacenter design, both physical plant and networking.
linkregister 4y ago
The amount of recruiter spam increases by an order of magnitude once a FAANG-level technology company appears on one's resume. It has a dramatic change in the amount of technical interviews that are granted to an applicant.
- Silhouette 4y ago
  At what kind of company? Looking from outside and in particular from outside the US the whole FAANG culture seems very strange. There is - or was - a huge amount of money available in compensation that seems almost completely disconnected from the value of an individual developer's contribution to the business or the level of useful skills and experience the developer has. And it seems there's this kind of clique effect where those who have worked in a FAANG or a high-profile startup are assumed by others who have worked at FAANGs or high-profile startups to be somehow better than everyone else. But IME once you're outside that bubble a more likely assumption is that ex-FAANG people will demand more than they're worth and won't necessarily be any more competent or productive than anyone else. And ex-multiple-FAANGs with rapid job hopping at the start of a career is a huge red flag.
  - VirusNewbie 4y ago
    FAANG has a fairly high floor for engineers. You certainly find brilliant people on par with the best of FAANG at all types and kinds of companies. However many companies also have absolutely morons slip through the cracks, people who can barely code. FAANG does a pretty good job filtering those people out. So I agree that FAANG isn’t a great signal of brilliance but it is a good sign of “decently competent”.
ZephyrBlu 4y ago
How did you come to believe that Meta doesn't have engineering chops? They have done so much cutting edge engineering work I don't even know where to start. Think what you want about the company itself, but they've done a shit ton of amazing engineering work.
- nodemaker 4y ago
  I worked at a startup where everyone was ex meta! They made such a shitty architecture with GraphQL and Hasura and other meta technologies they learnt that it was laughable they were using that for a small startup.
  - gedy 4y ago
    GraphQL and Hasura is... totally reasonable for a startup? We used same at a 12 person startup, way faster and cheaper than the shitty MVP API service we were limping along with. Also Hasura is not Meta tech afaik.
- renewiltord 4y ago
  It's not that there aren't great engineers at the FAANGs. It's that there are a lot of low quality ones. So it's a poor lake to fish in.
  - what_ever 4y ago
    Isn't that true for engineers in general and not just engineers at FAANGs?
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      Right. In some sense, it's just a population reversion to the mean. But I've had better luck with my hiring once I've excluded FAANG-only engineers from the resumes I screen. Considering we pay about $350k for a fresh grad, I think I know why this is.

01100011 4y ago

Not sure if I am reading you right but are you saying the options are either to go to a FANG or a startup? If so, I'd add startups to the set of places new grads should avoid. Assholes are everywhere, so learning to deal with them is essential, but, in my experience(which, arguably, mostly comes from another era), the valley has a lot more assholes per engineer than, say, a small to medium sized company. Not only that, but the valley has an overall social environment which is... unsupportive to many. It is, based on my experience and the general feeling I've encountered talking to coworkers and online folks, a very difficult place to find friends and support. Depending on your role, there are a lot of places that look down on FANG experience. That is going to vary a lot with which part of the SW elephant you work on. My experiences as an embedded SWE who deals a lot with HW folks won't necessarily map to someone doing games or front end web work.

spacemadness 4y ago
Nobody is going to look down on FAANG experience. Come on now.
- 01100011 4y ago
  It comes up regularly on HN(i.e. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20846408). FAANG folks have high salary expectations, often do not know how to work in a less supportive environment, often possess big egos, and will leave as soon as they're offered another FAANG gig. When I've hired for non-FAANG roles, I hire folks who are going to be a good fit for the team and the company, who demonstrate a good understanding of the work they've done, and whose experience aligns with what the role requires. Coming from a FAANG was neither a benefit nor an asset to me. Now that I've done time in the valley, I think I'd be extra careful to screen toxic folks.
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    the FAANG companies are so different from each other, I don't know that stereotyping everyone who is from "one of those companies" is accurate or effective.

irrational 4y ago

Or, go to work at a large company (my company has nearly 100,000 employees) that is not a FAANG company. No bs leetcode interviews, much better work-life balance (I maybe put in 30 hours a week and have enough vacation stored up that I could potentially take off 5 months right now), I've never met an asshole engineer or manager, etc.

ZephyrBlu 4y ago
TC?
- irrational 4y ago
  I don’t know what TC is.
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    Then GTFO, as Blind would say. (TC is total compensation, it's a meme on Blind to mention what one's TC is when talking about working at a company. Those that don't are told to GTFO. Interestingly enough, the salary sharing is quite beneficial to employees on Blind, since it incentivizes salaries to go up.)
    - ZephyrBlu 4y ago
      Indeed. People always give reasons why working at their company is better than working at FAANG but very rarely say what their TC is, which is telling.
      - 01100011 4y ago
        Before I came to the valley my TC was less than half what it became, but my LE(life enjoyment) dropped commensurate with my salary increase. If you solely value TC then you may be a great fit for the valley. If you value other things, you probably won't like working and socializing with people who put TC above all else and you should avoid the valley. Leave it for the people who need it.

nodemaker 4y ago

I have worked for large and small companies in my career (not faang but similar size) but honestly all the great people I admire have been in smaller companies. Large companies seem to full of people that chase promotions, TC and are not interested in learning new things.

kerkeslager 4y ago

I think the bigger message in the post you're responding to is that for the first few years of your career, you should switch jobs often. In the first few years of my career I was put in the situation a few times where: 1. Raises at my current company weren't offered unless requested, or unless a promotion (change in title) occurred. Sometimes both. 2. Raises associated with normal growth in your role at my current company were pretty consistently 3-4%, raises associated with a promotion were 5-8%. 3. Switching companies would get me a 10-20% raise. Early in your career, the value you're providing is improving fast, and your compensation should keep up, but for most, it doesn't, because management has an idea that some percentage is "standard". Having talked to lots of people about their salaries (which all workers should do), it doesn't seem to matter much whether you're switching between startups, between FAANG (or similar) companies, or between the two. But if the person you're responding to took a trajectory that led through a few companies to FAANG, it might create the impression that it's good to go to other companies before FAANG.

astrange 4y ago
I've seen the salaries people get by "switching companies often" and they don't seem to be a lot better than what you can get from good perf reviews at a FAANG. I'm sure it depends on the company, but you can also switch teams and products inside a large company if you feel there's more opportunity elsewhere. (One thing people think is that boring-but-important work might pay better - this actually isn't true, the exciting meme work also pays the most but is less stable.)
- kerkeslager 4y ago
  > I've seen the salaries people get by "switching companies often" and they don't seem to be a lot better than what you can get from good perf reviews at a FAANG. I suppose it's possible none of the FAANG folks I have spoken to about this were getting good performance reviews, but I have never heard of someone getting a 20% raise in one year at a FAANG company unless there were some obvious extenuating circumstances. I'm sure HNers will rush in now to tell me they got X>20% raise at Y FAANG, but that definitely seems like outliers to me. And the thing is, you don't even have to be great to get a 20% raise by switching jobs early in your career. Normal, even mediocre growth as an engineer puts you at that valuation easily.