Ask HN: What surprised you after you started working at FAANG? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What surprised you after you started working at FAANG?

46 pointsent10121 comments

I was surprised at how political people were at the bottom of the org chart.

I expected the front-line ICs to be united against middle-manager politics, but I found the opposite. Middle management was generally professional and transparent, while the toxic politics came from younger ICs looking to claw their way up the ladder.

I think it's a side effect of selectively hiring people who have been high achievers all of their lives. Drop them into a company where their intelligence is just average and many people resort to politics to get a leg up. Not everyone was like this, of course, but I've never worked with so many people rushing to throw their coworkers under the bus if they thought it might help get them closer to their next promotion.

One of the patterns I noticed in MMO games is that there's always a hardworking, gritty, tight-knit group that rises to the top against all odds. Then they suddenly attract 20x more recruits, most of whom are low quality, and then collapse after too many of these people fill their ranks.

There are people out there who simply optimize for getting as far as possible doing as little work as possible. These people are attracted to "winners". They'll do anything it takes to succeed, and anything it takes to avoid failure. It's the fear of failure that makes them especially unpleasant.

I think the education system does a really good job incentivizing doing what ... the education system wants you to do and making you feel good about that. The rules to "getting an A" are clear and achievable.

The world of work is far different and doing X,Y,Z is no guarantee of "getting an A" and some folks struggle with that for a while.

Never worked at a FAANG, but this is pretty surprising to me. I was expecting the exact opposite!

It's also the consequence of hiring tons of very young engineers.

I'm far from FAANG land, but they used to sit the new young employees sat next to me for about 6 months.

We often would have conversations about "picking your battles" and how just pointing out about how something is "wrong" is not the way to go about changing it.

Some Google speaker at a conference rendered this as "Don't jump in front of every train.".

(I learned this way too late, myself.)

And even just learning that stupid things come about for reasons, sometimes equally stupid, sometimes for good reasons that aren't what you might assume.

What does IC stand for?

Individual Contributor. In the SWE context, someone whose primary job is writing code rather than managing people.

Politics. I found that getting promoted within FAANG depends largely on your ability to navigate politics, not on how good you are at your job. You will move up much faster if you optimize for "Find the right people and get them, through whatever means, to say great things about you at performance reviews" - I've seen many brilliant people at the company who never moved up because they were bad at navigating or manipulating human relationships. And I've also seen people who were, let's say, not the brightest, but extremely good at manipulating people and make themselves look good - they moved up very quickly.

It has also given me a new appreciation of why startups can be so efficient. The joke that every gmail redesign made the product worse but had to be done because someone needed to get promoted is no joke. When politics falls away and everyone's incentive is to become profitable or to build a good product the result can be magical.

Reminds me of the old movie "The Pentagon Wars" which I would highly recommend. Its about the absurdity of said politics, but in the army, where lives of people are on the line. The sad part is: The Story is true.

In my experience, this can be generalised to any large organisation.

The more people there are operating under any particular banner, the thicker the politics.

Not a FAANG, but a couple of "world-class" employers that pay similarly.

Probably most surprising was that there were a substantial number of people that (though very sharp) had pretty severe personality problems. The challenges and politics of dealing with these people seemed to dominate the merely technical challenges.

As a corollary, though their hiring filters were quite tight, these shops seemed to be only somewhat more productive than what you might see in a random US corporation. I would have thought it would be a day and night difference, but it wasn't.

A third minor surprise: Sometimes these companies spend huge on salaries but don't provide very good working conditions (office, desk size, quiet, decent bathrooms, etc.).

> a substantial number of people that (though very sharp) had pretty severe personality problems

This has been my experience with engineers from Ivy League or similar schools. Really smart in a bubble, but with tons of weird neuroses that keep them from being fully-productive members of any team. That, and they never tend to stick around very long. It only takes a few bumps before I-could-do-better syndrome kicks in and they bounce.

I was surprised by how much I hated it. It caused an existential crisis for me to have reached the "pinnacle" job and to feel so alienated and pointless.

What was so alienating and pointless about it?

Not OP, but I saw people wasting their lives on "big projects" that actually had little impact. (And that's if you're lucky enough to have it ship and not be cancelled.)

Imagine you are designing the McDonald's hamburger wrapper. "Oh, your work will be shown to millions of people!" And nobody really cares. I'd rather design something smaller that is truly appreciated.

it's absolutely this, and also, to go along with the analogy, feeling like "is McDonalds really a positive thing for the world? and why does it seem so verboten to express doubt about the absolute positivity of our mission?"

Haven’t worked at a FAANG but a similarly large well known trendy company. The access I had to their users’ data simply as an employee

One thing that really surprised me was the massive scale of it all. These companies are sooo huge and have so many resources to play with. They can afford to expirement and have huge teams work on things that may not pay off in the end.

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