For everyone who doesn’t know, you’re getting shafted at that medium size startup/company. Most of these FAANG engineers are not geniuses, they just studied for the interviews
I didn't apply for google when I left college because I didn't feel like I would "meet the bar". ~4 years later, feeling like I was a much stronger candidate, I interviewed, hoping to barely scrape by and be the dumbest guy in the room to keep leveling up.
I was dumbstruck by just how totally normal everyone was. Everyone I met at google struck me as being in the 50-75th percentile of my peers in startup land. They're not some high-powered cohort of elite intellectual supermutants. They're regular people. I was ready at graduation, and sold myself short for no good reason.
Now that I work at a BigCo, I feel even more strongly that the bar is, if anything, on the low side, simply because an org that big needs a constant influx of warm bodies. We hire more people in a month than some of my past employers would hire in the lifetime of the company. It's flat out impossible to staff 5,000 people while demanding that they all be in the top 10%.
There are weird and arguably arbitrary hoops to jump through, but you can do it. Interview prep was radically simpler than EG buying a house (in terms of prep, context gathering, etc.)
I get paid 1/50th of what the company made in e-commerce sales (similar amounts through other channels).
I can’t quit and prepare for a job interview as I need to maintain visa status. And my workload averages ~60h/week.
I should be clear, I sympathize with the situation and hope that ameen's employer is not cartoonishly evil, and instead would maybe even realize they have improvements to make. But just thinking about possible outcomes of someone venting on the internet, firing doesn't seem like one that makes any sense.
If they are such a central team member to an ecommerce operation, likely the company feels equally stuck with them (e.g. how many sales would be lost if the site went down while looking for a replacement, and would the company even survive that?).
I’ve learned a great deal about how not to run a business, treating employees right, delegating tasks/responsibilities, designing for automation, etc. I do hope when I get my green card to start my own startup (lifelong goal of mine) and try to set an example of everything I see wrong with our industry.
I do doubt my abilities at getting into FAANG without preparing for interviews just because so much of them are just not part of my day to day.
The 10 year exercise window should be standard behavior by now; if you're not given 10 years, your employer sadly doesn't want to be competitive. https://triplebyte.com/blog/fixing-the-inequity-of-startup-e...
Because even when the start-up has a successful exit, and even if you were an early employee, you'll still have a very small chance of out-earning your buddy who joined big tech.
This has been especially true in the past 10 years: look at the stock prices of Google, Facebook, Apple, etc. They've all gone up significantly, making those yearly RSU additions even more valuable. In a rising market, a 4 year vesting schedule works to the advantage of its owner.