Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

These kind of posts keep making me think I should go work for a FAANG so I can actually retire one day. Anyways, as someone on the other side, who has never worked for or applied to FAANG, I have a few reactions.

First, your salary is absolutely ridiculous. I know hard working people who have built their own businesses with blood and sweat, and they still don't make as much as a slacker engineer at FAANG. So I'd say try not to take it for granted - you will find it difficult to even make a fraction of your comp if you leave FAANG.

Second, in my experience working with ex-FAANG - these engineers, while they all tend to be very smart, tend to be borderline junior engineers in the real world. They simply don't know how to build or operate something without the luxury of the mature tooling that exists at FAANG. You may be in for a reality shock when you leave the FAANG bubble. On the other hand it could be a great challenge if you're bored, and will broaden your engineering experience greatly.

If I was in your position, I'd look into FIRE and then you can just relax and do whatever you want without worrying about finances.

> mature tooling that exists at FAANG

I never worked at FAANG but even after more than 10 years working in tech, it still surprises me how undervalued well working tooling is. I'm not talking about 100% automation with infinite possibilities. Just really basic stuff, like deployment or setting up a development environment. That should always be a no-brainer.

Easier said than done even if you _do_ get the time to invest into it.

it doesn't show up on the books. All companies over optimise for things they measure and under optimise for things they don't. Nobody has a reliable measure for development productivity so it oft doesn't receive the love it deserves.

I used to work at Google, and I find the tooling much better on the outside. Heroku is much better than Google's deployment tool; Github is much better than their review tool.

The only things I miss are the snacks and the searchable codebase

> and the searchable codebase

Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples, or that there was a better, searchable code snippet tool internally?

Not sure about google, but most of the big tech companies have a code browser website with a search feature that shows the most "relevant" repositories first in the search results. For example, repositories that people in your team or org have recently modified will show up near the top of the results.

> Do you mean that you'd search Google's entire codebase monorepo for code examples

As another former Googler, yes, searching the entire monorepo was a frequent occurrence. Internal code search is pretty good (it's a search company, after all) but I have to say that I don't miss it so much now that Sourcegraph exists.

I did a short contract at Amazon (not AWS) and I couldn't get away fast enough. What a rat's nest.

Pro tip: Building repeatable and distributable tooling patterns is a great way to break into client sites as a consultant

And it's totally reasonable that this isn't common place. The team I'm with now has been spending a lot of our spare time at work trying to get a suite of tools built out to make things like logging, message publishing, etc. spun up easily. It is very painful. The simple case is pretty simple, but if you add any complexity to it you're in for a world of pain.

Not sure what stack you're using, but Azure Application Insights is very nice for logging. And they have lots of tools for what you're mentioning (but you have to pay for them). If not, maybe you do have to build them (and it might be monetizable even!)

We're using Azure at my current workplace, and the amount of legwork you can get done is pretty amazing (as long as you're willing to pay for it). We have an ARM template to set up environments, deployment is painless with Azure DevOps, etc.

I've been told more than once that your average Midwestern software engineer blows your average west coast engineer out of the water, but never seen it elaborated on like this. Tooling does make a great difference - I was shocked when I had a coworker actually speak out against automating mundane git commands.

Upvoting for the boost to my Midwestern ego :)

For an average, absolutely. I can hire an engineer where I live for like $85k as an FTE who will develop into an above average one in a couple of years.

The difference is that certain talents and deep specialists only exist in the hubs. It’s similar to medicine where you want to go to NYC or Boston for certain diagnoses.

What's FIRE?

Financial Independence/Retire Early

The core idea is to define your annual expenditures (let’s say $50k), a long term investment strategy you personally feel comfortable with (say 5% ROI), and from there you can deduce the amount you need to save to be financially independent (in this case, $1M).

Most recommend using 4%, although that's also considered too risky by many. On the flip side 3% is also seen as too conservative. Not being savvy with economics myself, I've personally chosen to use a happy average of 3.5%

What do they tend to recommend in terms of generating passive income? Just investing in index funds and high dividend-yielding stocks (Ford, AT&T)?

Mr Money Mustache [1] advocates just investing in index funds. Others push things like real estate. Really depends on where you interests and talents lie.

A common thread that these people tend to find though is that once you've saved up that much money, what you have actually learned is how to efficiently grow wealth, and I have seen very few examples of people actually just stopping there and coasting. Usually they just keep on trucking, maybe shifting into a different field.

[1] https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

>" a long term investment strategy you personally feel comfortable with (say 5% ROI)"

Could you elaborate? Why would you need a level of comfort with an ROI? Or is the thing you need to be comfortable with actual the risk involved in getting that target ROI? Is that what you mean?

Also is the "million" you mention just a hypothetical? Although a million is a lot of money I don't thinks it's enough it's large enough to to qualify as being financially independent no? At least not in the US or EU. You would still need to work full time as it's not enough to retire on.

you sure as hell don't need more if all you want is retire early and live frugally.

if you'Re thinking of a McMansion with several cars which you exchange every so often and constantly buy new gadgets etc then no, its not gonna be enough.

>"you sure as hell don't need more if all you want is retire early and live frugally."

You sure as hell do need more than that if you want to retire in your early 50s and you plan on living another 30 years. At least if you want to live somewhere remotely interesting. $1 million divided by 30 would mean you need to live on 33K a year. Which is about $2,750 a month without accounting for future inflation which would erode this figure substantially over those 30 years. An average inflation rate of 2.50% would be a cumulative inflation of 109.76%. Your $2750 would trend towards half that during that time[1]

[1] https://smartasset.com/investing/inflation-calculator

You invest the $1M, this grows faster than inflation, live off of that.

Please walk me through this with some concrete numbers. How long do you suppose it takes to build up a million through investing your savings? You realize you can lose money in the market as well right? Lastly When you start pulling that money out to live on each year you aren't earning money on this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIRE_movement

Financially Independent Retire Early

Financial Independence Retire Early

Short version is organising your finances and life in such a way that you can retire as early as possible. Things like maxing out the right kind of investment (not sure in the US but in UK it's things like ISAs), controlling outgoings, being frugal, ...

I feel like I've seen the tooling problem with a couple ex-Googlers, but more and more the FAANGs have started to sell their tooling as cloud products so the difference isn't what it once was.

> these engineers, while they all tend to be very smart, tend to be borderline junior engineers in the real world

Define "real world"?

Companies that operate without a firehose of money from advertising or shiny hardware to fund everything.

I came from a series of real world companies struggling to turn a profit to a FAANG, and the difference in, well, everything is pretty vast.

Small-medium sized businesses without dedicated devops people. I'm working with an ex-Googler who struggles with basic dev stuff like

* How to make a Python environment for a brand new project

* Source control basics like commits and merging

* Reading documentation or using SO

* Basic command-line debugging or even using print() statements!

I've asked a few times: "How did you get anything done before?". And (S)He responds that they never had to worry about this at Google.

[Edit]: I don't think all or even many Googlers are this way. But that this person made $10k/month for a year and a half gives me pause. I don't thing FAANG's are touchy about firing people. At this rate (S)He likely won't make it through our ninety-day review.

Wtf ? This is not true. 99% of devs at Google would go above and beyond this.

Yeah, I work at another large tech company and I'm pretty sure all of my coworkers know that stuff or would be able to easily figure it out.

hmm I didn't have to do #1 in the list when I was at Google, but I did 2,3,4 pretty much everyday. I guess this really depends on which team your coworker was in.

> I don't thing FAANG's are touchy about firing people.

Google basically doesn't fire people unless they are grossly incompetent or if you broke some rules. It is very likely it took a year and a half to fire the person and they joined your company thanks to their credentials at Google and not their skills.

Does Google have a time limit for new grads to reach L4? Seems like this person may have hit that wall.

$10k/month gives you pause? that’s intern wages. so that you hired a low skilled person gives you pause? it should.

Outside the tech bubbles, that is an obscene amount of money.

The fact that that amount of money is regarded basically as chump change is something that is very strange to certainly myself and I'd guess most people outside those regions.

We're specifically talking about somebody who came from Google, so whether that's a lot to an average person is irrelevant. Somebody making that at Google would be very inexperienced, and the fact that they left to work for much less at another company probably indicates they were struggling at Google. So this person is by no means an accurate representation of a typical Google SWE.

But the thing that the OP is talking about is specifically that they think it is nuts that said person made that much money, regardless of the fact that relatively speaking that wasn't much money for the company.

I've heard a similar commentary about Microsoft millionaires founding startups and having absolutely no clue how hard logistics is.

Because if you have a guy showing up on Monday, there's an office already set up and ready for him by close of business the previous Thursday.

I like to solve problems at work with openly available tools. I will often file patches or add comments to tickets or StackOverflow so that when I am at a new place all of that information is still documented somewhere I can get at it.

In house tools are a siren's call. And the fact of the matter is that if you wrote a tool because you had a need for it before anyone else did, that eventually others will want it too, and there will absolutely come a day when their version eclipses yours. You have to have a way to run your systems without tying them that tightly to a specific tool. And you have to accept that the 4 years of utility you got out of that tool was money well spent and you can retire it now with a clean conscience.

How on earth did she pass their interview screen?

But yeah, at Amazon I encountered people who passed their tech screen but spent days trying to figure out basic bash / zsh config problems.

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