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Comment by spaceribs | Hacker News Reader

As an engineer, I revel in avoiding these monolithic supercorps. I don't know why anyone would want to work in centralizing innovation and creativity into the hands of a few greedy people.

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The greed as well? Normal jobs aren't paying anything close to 200-300k+ that you'd be pulling at FAANG/HFT.

$200k-$300k is now the 1-3 years out of new grad pay scale for those companies for what it’s worth.

There is no greed in demanding to get paid market rates. Please stop peddling that as a negative trait.

>There is no greed in demanding to get paid market rates

That's not what he's talking about. He's talking about doing so despite negative ethical ramifications.

This is (arguably) greedy behavior.

Money, "Impact", resources.

This is a very HN comment, but I'm not sure how you can't see why someone would want to work for bigcorp...

Money: Theres plenty of it elsewhere in our business, especially acting as a third party to these behemoths.

Impact: The company seems more interested in restricting our landscape rather than innovating on top of it, what makes you think it's a company that accepts disruption anymore?

Resources: All the resources in the world doesn't mean squat if you can't disrupt the existing system.

There is a lot of money out there. And, if you don't have to live near a FAANG the money you do make can go much farther.

Does the rank and file really have much impact at one of the FAANG companies? I've talked to some ex-Google employees who left so they could have an impact somewhere.

The FAANGs do have effectively infinite resources, but compute has been for the most part democratized. Resources are very inexpensive now.

> if you don't have to live near a FAANG the money you do make can go much farther

I have a friend who moved to the Utah/Idaho region, giving up a FAANG job, in order to escape the spiraling cost of living where the FAANG jobs are. I respect that.

I'm at my third FAANG living in one of the high-cost-of-living areas of the U.S. In the meantime I'm planning my escape. So long as income vastly outstrips my cost of living, I'm going to keep my FAANG and save like there's no tomorrow, and as soon as the math works out that I can maintain my current quality of life with a combination of a lower-paying job combined with interest on my savings (the proverbial 4% withdrawal rate) in a lower-cost-of-living area of the U.S., I'm out.

Er, yeah, less effective application of that figure of speech. You know what I mean.

Because they want a nice paycheck and to go home at 5:00PM.

You have no idea how hard people work here. Some of the smartest and diligent people work here. It's a big company so your friends maybe doing 9 to 5. But HN will never mention all the people who put in the hard yards at Google.

People work hard at all companies, including mine. Google isn’t special, except the people there seem to work less on average from the people I know.

> Some of the smartest and diligent people work here.

Yikes. Y’all are not as special as you think you are.

"From the people I know " Cherry pick the 5 people you know.

99% of people will join Google on HN. So will most of Amazon. Don't kid yourself.

You can’t possibly know that to a high degree of certainty, especially since you haven’t explained why you think so. I sure hope this isn’t what happens inside of Google - doesn’t sound like an inclusive atmosphere to look down on others!

The average Google offer is way higher than Amazon. There are stats to prove this. Even without the offer the benefits are way better. The hiring bar is higher. Look around you...very few people make the opposite move. You will probably retort with some hyperbole. But everyone knows that this is the truth.

> The hiring bar is higher.

I don't really understand what your point here is. Do you have any evidence that it's higher? I thought interviewing was supposed to be "random".

> Look around you...very few people make the opposite move.

I work with a handful of people that did, actually

> But everyone knows that this is the truth.

You're, uh..really not helping the brand here dude..

> Handful of people that did...

I know at least 20 that made the opposite move. All vow to never go back to Amazon.

I can't hurt the brand any more than it is on HN :) Thankfully, the Google name is respected way more in the real world.

Just go to r/cscareerquestions and grep for "Amazon vs Google" and see what most new grads and senior engineers say.

I feel like you're desperately trying to convince me of my inferiority without actually saying it. It's honestly really strange to see.

Vowing to never go back to Amazon is a pretty low bar tho.

Op is from Amazon, hence the comparison.

Over the last 40 years of working in the bay area I've noted that a lot of people don't understand how shitty big tech companies are to work for.

Is Google not big too? Google and Amazon have approximately the same number of software engineers.

Your post also exaggerated and extrapolated everyone working there as "slackers". Not too mention the combative attitude HN has toward Googlers anyway. "How can they work their morally" etc .

Anyway I won't engage further. And I won't get personal. I still think it's a great company to grow as an engineer. You should definitely explore if you ever want to move on.

I said Google “isn’t special” in this regard. That can only mean “slackers” if you think literally every company in the world is composed of slackers, something that is contradicted by the fact that capitalism indeed still exists.

> Not too mention the combative attitude HN has toward Googlers anyway.

This feels like projection of some sort

> I still think it's a great company to grow as an engineer.

I don’t even know which company you’re talking about anymore

The scale and complexity of the problems is appealing to some people. There are very few companies where you get to work on problems with the same scale problems as Google.

I admit, this is the one reason I can definitely see as appealing, but don't these big issues exist to an even more extreme extent with systems like Medicare, Veterans Affairs and Social Security?

It pays really well.

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