9 ms·

I can't find another job even with a FAANG background. The market is brutal. Maybe my only choice is to start a startup.

thaufeki 4y ago
Could also be why you can't find a job. You may be too expensive, and they're looking for engineers in the sweet spot of cheap/can keep the machine running.
- rcarmo 4y ago
  There is always an element of "let's see how low we can get" in mainstream IT, since people outside tech view tech as a cost center and not a profit center, which devalues candidates.
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    There is IT and there is Dev, and much of the latter drives profits. Most of IT is there to support business ops, and is basically there to do what a secretary pool did 60 years ago.
- dathinab 4y ago
  FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other, especially smaller companies, so it's not that uncommon for small companies to hesitate to hire someone directly coming from FANG. Then for lower paying jobs a lot of people are hesitant to hire "overqualified" people as they expect them to jump ship the moment they find something better, i.e. no FANG people. Then team leads no matter which job/industry often avoid hiring someone perceived more qualified then them, like e.g. from FANG. Or in other words in an economy where you might need to be happy with a less well paying job which you also might be perceived to be overqualified for having a long term FANG employment without an employment afterwards isn't necessary a good thing...
  - jghn 4y ago
    > FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other, As a hiring manager, this is a factor that weighs heavily in my mental math. My experience with ex-BigTech engineers has been that they tend towards wanting to make everything to match their BigTech experience. But they often don't have the pragmatism to understand that X is a good pattern at BigTech because *of the size of BigTech*. Have had way too many conversations of the form, "Yes, that is objectively better. But at our scale, the value add does not warrant the effort involved". Or "there's no need for these 15 layers of indirection because there's 5 of us, not 5000". Obviously this is a stereotype and doesn't apply to everyone. But that's no different than how people have a positive stereotype of ex-BigTech employees being sharp.
    - inconceivable 4y ago
      i got into an argument with a bigtech employee (outside of work, in a social setting) that senior engineers should spend 25% of their time mentoring junior hires. he literally could not understand that a small company can't afford to do this. not only that, he also could not understand that small companies doesn't even make junior hires. there's nobody to mentor! and i would guess this guy has like a top 1% iq, whatever that is.
      - dathinab 4y ago
        IMHO the whole Software Enginer training pipeline is fully broken for a lot of overlapping reasons and I have no idea how to fix it.
      - granshaw 4y ago
        High IQ, low EQ
      - tayo42 4y ago
        that makes no sense, big tech companies are expected to be training small company employees? who is supposed to hire juniors?
- Beaver117 4y ago
  It's funny because for 10 years people were saying "get this big company on your resume and you can just walk into any job!" Clearly not the case anymore
  - lesuorac 4y ago
    I mean severance was basically a year's wage. I doubt any of them are in a rush to be re-hired.
    - varjag 4y ago
      Well we're now half a year in to the first rounds of layoffs. Time flies.
  - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
    You can, just not jobs at the price level you're expecting. I'm sure there are plenty of jobs in your field you can get with your resume, assuming you're willing to face reality.
    - granshaw 4y ago
      Not true if you’re reading many of these comments - managers view these hires as risky even if they agree to the lower salaries
      - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
        I know people on HN seem to think it is, but the people here are a tiny subset of the people in the real world, even in the tech area of California. I really doubt it's a representitive view.
esskay 4y ago
Are you expecting a salary similar to the one you were getting at a FAANG though? Because that seems to be the main issue - FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they actually are.
- em500 4y ago
  “Moving down” can be more difficult than it looks. Anecdotally, employers can be reluctant to hire “overqualified” people (indicated by a high previous salary), because they believe these people will jump ship at the earliest higher paying opportunity elsewhere.
  - hgsgm 4y ago
    New employer has no reason to know previous pay.
    - maxilevi 4y ago
      They can infer it from the employer name or just buy salary market data
    - red-iron-pine 4y ago
      Unless they're small they have HR, and HR has the time to do the research. Which is logging into Glassdoor or levels.fyi and checking. Shit you can do that right now and get some rough ballparks.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      If you were a Senior SWE at Google for 5 years, how do you imagine that a new employer won't realize that you were making a lot more than the $150K/yr they're proposing to stretch their budget to offer you?
  - pklausler 4y ago
    Wouldn't anybody jump ship for a better job, though?
Eumenes 4y ago
The biggest reason I've seen FAANG candidates (mostly Google, FB, and Amazon) get rejected is too much experience with proprietary technology, esp. if they've been there a long time, like 5+ years. I've even spoke to some FAANG candidates who think their internal proprietary tech is widely known or commercial products.
- dathinab 4y ago
  It's more complicated then that. For example the right decisions in a small company vs. FANG is often quite different, potentially outright the opposite. Not just because of differences in people, time and money resources but also due to scale. Like you spending a day or even week to optimize something to be a bit faster can save millions in just a year if used on the scale of google. But in a startup the pure salary cost of spending a day on it can easily be more then it saves in 5 years. And due to the small number of time and human resources the actual cost can easily be much higher. You can see this in some of the design decisions around open source tooling from FANG companies. They are often designed for a context of: "Many highly qualified people working at the same time at the same project. And micro optimizations being important." But what smaller companies have is: "A small group of very mixed qualified people working one it. Rarely more then very small number at the same time on the same component. Most micro optimizations being clearly out of scope. Constantly chasing a schedule where a single larger delay can be a catastrophe for the company." For example for a FANK company breaking changes on internal APIs are often a no go, but for small companies they can often be a no brainier especially if it doesn't involve any migration complications. Or for example for Google a single service stopping is often worse then it running amok and creating a mess, for a small company which might only provide one or two services such a mess can mean insolvency, but an outage might not. Or for example in a small company having a repo where you define all the (internal & external) APIs and use it to generate glue code to bind all your services together in a "type safe" manner can be a grate thing to have (if you have the right tooling). For a FANG company where not just many people but many teams might work on code interacting with the same overlapping APIs this isn't a viable approach at all.
- taude 4y ago
  Yeup. I had a similar comment above. I tried phone screening someone, and they had no working knowledge of the commercial apps that we integrate with, the databases we use, etc. And I can hire literally for half the price someone with working knowlege AND know they won't be resentful about the job....
sh4rks 4y ago
Are you failing at the CV screen?
joenot443 4y ago
I hope you don't mind me poking into your history, but didn't you make a post a few months ago saying that you quit your job and wanted out of tech? Full support if that's the case, I just think your current job hunt might be a little different from those of the recently laid off FAANG engineers, which is why some other commenters are wondering what's up.
- Beaver117 4y ago
  Yes, I quit, wasn't laid off. But now I'm in the same pool as the tens of thousands of other very qualified people. How do you think that affects my job hunt?
steponlego 4y ago
You can pretend to check ESG check boxes. I know several people who do this.
jeffrallen 4y ago
You FAANG background doesn't impress me. I need colleagues I can count on, who make themselves an expert in what's needed in the moment. If you can demonstrate that from your projects, wherever you did them, I look forward to working with you.

thaufeki 4y ago

Could also be why you can't find a job. You may be too expensive, and they're looking for engineers in the sweet spot of cheap/can keep the machine running.

rcarmo 4y ago
There is always an element of "let's see how low we can get" in mainstream IT, since people outside tech view tech as a cost center and not a profit center, which devalues candidates.
- red-iron-pine 4y ago
  There is IT and there is Dev, and much of the latter drives profits. Most of IT is there to support business ops, and is basically there to do what a secretary pool did 60 years ago.
dathinab 4y ago
FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other, especially smaller companies, so it's not that uncommon for small companies to hesitate to hire someone directly coming from FANG. Then for lower paying jobs a lot of people are hesitant to hire "overqualified" people as they expect them to jump ship the moment they find something better, i.e. no FANG people. Then team leads no matter which job/industry often avoid hiring someone perceived more qualified then them, like e.g. from FANG. Or in other words in an economy where you might need to be happy with a less well paying job which you also might be perceived to be overqualified for having a long term FANG employment without an employment afterwards isn't necessary a good thing...
- jghn 4y ago
  > FANG like companies also do a lot of things different then most other, As a hiring manager, this is a factor that weighs heavily in my mental math. My experience with ex-BigTech engineers has been that they tend towards wanting to make everything to match their BigTech experience. But they often don't have the pragmatism to understand that X is a good pattern at BigTech because *of the size of BigTech*. Have had way too many conversations of the form, "Yes, that is objectively better. But at our scale, the value add does not warrant the effort involved". Or "there's no need for these 15 layers of indirection because there's 5 of us, not 5000". Obviously this is a stereotype and doesn't apply to everyone. But that's no different than how people have a positive stereotype of ex-BigTech employees being sharp.
  - inconceivable 4y ago
    i got into an argument with a bigtech employee (outside of work, in a social setting) that senior engineers should spend 25% of their time mentoring junior hires. he literally could not understand that a small company can't afford to do this. not only that, he also could not understand that small companies doesn't even make junior hires. there's nobody to mentor! and i would guess this guy has like a top 1% iq, whatever that is.
    - dathinab 4y ago
      IMHO the whole Software Enginer training pipeline is fully broken for a lot of overlapping reasons and I have no idea how to fix it.
    - granshaw 4y ago
      High IQ, low EQ
    - tayo42 4y ago
      that makes no sense, big tech companies are expected to be training small company employees? who is supposed to hire juniors?
Beaver117 4y ago
It's funny because for 10 years people were saying "get this big company on your resume and you can just walk into any job!" Clearly not the case anymore
- lesuorac 4y ago
  I mean severance was basically a year's wage. I doubt any of them are in a rush to be re-hired.
  - varjag 4y ago
    Well we're now half a year in to the first rounds of layoffs. Time flies.
- TheHappyOddish 4y ago
  You can, just not jobs at the price level you're expecting. I'm sure there are plenty of jobs in your field you can get with your resume, assuming you're willing to face reality.
  - granshaw 4y ago
    Not true if you’re reading many of these comments - managers view these hires as risky even if they agree to the lower salaries
    - TheHappyOddish 4y ago
      I know people on HN seem to think it is, but the people here are a tiny subset of the people in the real world, even in the tech area of California. I really doubt it's a representitive view.

esskay 4y ago

Are you expecting a salary similar to the one you were getting at a FAANG though? Because that seems to be the main issue - FAANG people thinking they're worth way more than they actually are.

em500 4y ago
“Moving down” can be more difficult than it looks. Anecdotally, employers can be reluctant to hire “overqualified” people (indicated by a high previous salary), because they believe these people will jump ship at the earliest higher paying opportunity elsewhere.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  New employer has no reason to know previous pay.
  - maxilevi 4y ago
    They can infer it from the employer name or just buy salary market data
  - red-iron-pine 4y ago
    Unless they're small they have HR, and HR has the time to do the research. Which is logging into Glassdoor or levels.fyi and checking. Shit you can do that right now and get some rough ballparks.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    If you were a Senior SWE at Google for 5 years, how do you imagine that a new employer won't realize that you were making a lot more than the $150K/yr they're proposing to stretch their budget to offer you?
- pklausler 4y ago
  Wouldn't anybody jump ship for a better job, though?

Eumenes 4y ago

The biggest reason I've seen FAANG candidates (mostly Google, FB, and Amazon) get rejected is too much experience with proprietary technology, esp. if they've been there a long time, like 5+ years. I've even spoke to some FAANG candidates who think their internal proprietary tech is widely known or commercial products.

dathinab 4y ago
It's more complicated then that. For example the right decisions in a small company vs. FANG is often quite different, potentially outright the opposite. Not just because of differences in people, time and money resources but also due to scale. Like you spending a day or even week to optimize something to be a bit faster can save millions in just a year if used on the scale of google. But in a startup the pure salary cost of spending a day on it can easily be more then it saves in 5 years. And due to the small number of time and human resources the actual cost can easily be much higher. You can see this in some of the design decisions around open source tooling from FANG companies. They are often designed for a context of: "Many highly qualified people working at the same time at the same project. And micro optimizations being important." But what smaller companies have is: "A small group of very mixed qualified people working one it. Rarely more then very small number at the same time on the same component. Most micro optimizations being clearly out of scope. Constantly chasing a schedule where a single larger delay can be a catastrophe for the company." For example for a FANK company breaking changes on internal APIs are often a no go, but for small companies they can often be a no brainier especially if it doesn't involve any migration complications. Or for example for Google a single service stopping is often worse then it running amok and creating a mess, for a small company which might only provide one or two services such a mess can mean insolvency, but an outage might not. Or for example in a small company having a repo where you define all the (internal & external) APIs and use it to generate glue code to bind all your services together in a "type safe" manner can be a grate thing to have (if you have the right tooling). For a FANG company where not just many people but many teams might work on code interacting with the same overlapping APIs this isn't a viable approach at all.
taude 4y ago
Yeup. I had a similar comment above. I tried phone screening someone, and they had no working knowledge of the commercial apps that we integrate with, the databases we use, etc. And I can hire literally for half the price someone with working knowlege AND know they won't be resentful about the job....

sh4rks 4y ago

Are you failing at the CV screen?

joenot443 4y ago

I hope you don't mind me poking into your history, but didn't you make a post a few months ago saying that you quit your job and wanted out of tech? Full support if that's the case, I just think your current job hunt might be a little different from those of the recently laid off FAANG engineers, which is why some other commenters are wondering what's up.

Beaver117 4y ago
Yes, I quit, wasn't laid off. But now I'm in the same pool as the tens of thousands of other very qualified people. How do you think that affects my job hunt?

steponlego 4y ago

You can pretend to check ESG check boxes. I know several people who do this.

jeffrallen 4y ago

You FAANG background doesn't impress me. I need colleagues I can count on, who make themselves an expert in what's needed in the moment. If you can demonstrate that from your projects, wherever you did them, I look forward to working with you.